Brain Change

2011-07-21T10:21:00.002-04:00

Outa My Way!

Your attitude about driving down neighborhood streets, I’m beginning to think, says a lot about your character. It might even peg your political affiliation.

Streets go through residential and commercial areas. People live on both sides or shop on both sides. Cars on the streets, people on the sidewalks. Trouble is, people have to cross the streets.

It’s their neighborhood, they spend a lot of time there. Some of the cars on their streets carry them home and to work, but many are just passing through. Either way, how they drive tells a tale.

Do they drive slowly with an eye out for residents, young or old, walking or biking? Or do they plow through with a mind that says, "I’ve got the right of way. People need to watch out for me."

We’ve arm wrestled with this fundamental issue from the dawn of time and the birth of our nation. Should my individual rights yield or even tolerate moderation in the interest of the common good?

As I write, the House has dim-wittedly favored energy-wasting incandescent light bulbs over way-more-efficient fluorescents. In Dim and Dimmer, Robert B. Semple Jr. reports the national savings for flipping the switch the other way would be “equivalent to 30 large power plants; household savings of up to $200 a year; and 100 million fewer tons of carbon dioxide pollution yearly, roughly the amount from 17 million cars.”

So when I see a neatly dressed macho man plunging his two-ton SUV with a war-like model name down a residential street, I know his vote—dimmer.

2011-02-21T11:04:00.006-05:00

Health Care: Will It Take a Catastrophe?

Recipe for Disaster: Start with an annual flu epidemic. Add a good portion of the workforce without paid sick days. Mix in about 47 million Americans without health care coverage.

The Result: Catastrophe!

First, workers who deal with the public—waiters, teachers, school bus drivers, child care givers, store cashiers—get the new flu bug. Then they come to work sick because they don’t get paid when they miss work. When their kids get sick, they have no option but to send them off to school or day care. You can’t afford to stay home, when working every day of the week brings in just enough to feed and shelter your family.

And since you can’t afford health care, you don’t see a doctor and don’t get the advice to stay home. Even if you hear the advice, how can you afford to follow it? Some companies not only dock pay for missed days, they let workers go if they miss a certain number of days. So some people have no choice but to work while contagious.

But wait, don’t forget the whack jobs on hate-radio and websites telling the least informed and least educated not to vaccinate: It’s a government plot!

Why all this talk about disaster? Because even though the companies we work for provide great pay, plenty of sick days, and Cadillac health care coverage, we don’t want ourselves or our children meeting the public workers who don’t get these kinds of perks.

Unfortunately it might take a catastrophe to remedy this situation.

It took 9/11 to put a lot of necessary security procedures in place. Who would have tolerated all the hoops we have to jump through at airports and public places, had they been imposed before the attack?

Some time ago on “60 Minutes,” Steve Croft presented “Sabotaging the System,” which warned that essential parts of America’s and the world’s infrastructure—our military arsenals, power grids, water works—have been attacked and are susceptible to more devastating attacks.

Toward the end of the report, Retired Admiral Mike McConnell, once the nation’s top spy, lamented that we probably won’t address this threat, “until we have some catastrophic event.”

In the blog attached to the “60 Minutes” report, one information technology professional warned that our current efforts may be “too little too late.” Another commented on the danger of outsourcing tech jobs.

I don’t want to walk through the sneeze cloud of an infected public worker. For me, it’s a no-brainer. What about you?

When will the rest of the country wise up enough to understand that the better we treat everybody, the better we treat ourselves? Let’s hope it’s not after a catastrophe.

2010-08-03T09:54:00.006-04:00

Peter Lloyd, Native American

Holding my annual X-ray in his hand, my dentist recently asked me, “Do you have any American Indian ancestors?”

I was born in the United States of America, sometimes presumptuously called America. Canadians, Mexicans, and other people in the Western Hemisphere rightly consider themselves born in America as well.

Since I was born in the USA, I can justify calling myself a Native American. So can just about anyone native to this hemisphere. Which makes the politically correct designation Native American rather innocuous for the descendants of the people who were here before various European tribes began their ethnic cleansing. The name distinguishes their descendants as nothing different from the rest of us.

Indigenous Americans might serve as a more descriptive collective name for the progeny of the Cherokee, Miami, Dakota, Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, Ojibwa, Winnebego, Shawnee, Montauk, Apache, Chippewa, Blackfoot.... But in some strict definitions or to an ET happening upon our hemisphere, all of us could be considered indigenous to the Americas.

“It’s funny you should ask,” I answered my dentist. “My mother used to joke about us being part Indian, because her people came through Quebec in the frontier days. And I’ve always thought that her mother and one of her sisters had American Indian facial features. Why do you ask?”

“Every time I see multiple canals in a lower bicuspid, the owner claims to have some sort of American Indian heritage.”

So, you see, I just may carry Native Indigenous American Indian blood. Or more precisely, DNA. I’ve scanned the literature on bicuspid canal morphology but found no conclusive evidence of multiple roots as a trait specific to American Indians. But if my French Canadian ancestors did mix chromosomes with the indigenous people they encountered, I want to be called American Indian, until I find out whether I’m Cree, Huron, Kahnawake, Odanak, Timiskaming, Weymontachie....

2010-04-22T19:18:00.014-04:00

Banned by Facebook

What an honor! Someone found my previous blog post, Conservative Thumbs, offensive enough to ask Facebook to shut off access to it. Maybe even more than one person. Maybe a whole stupid of Conservatives!
And they did. Just like that.

I suppose it's easy enough to be banned for linking to a porn site or some racist rant or a terrorist site. No brainer. But my mini-screed, meant to cause a chuckle by illustrating the slow-to-learn nature of Conservative knuckle-draggers and to tie that propensity to a recent science news story? Somebody or bodies just couldn't take it, I guess.

Of course, I quickly commented on my own Facebook post and provided a new link to the blog post. Let's see how long it takes for the company that gives you "What Decade Fits Your Personality Best?" to ban a comment on a ban of a political opinion.

2010-04-21T16:39:00.016-04:00

Conservative Thumbs

News: Evidence that Neanderthals may have mated with humans at more than one point in evolutionary history. Of course! That explains the Conservative strain that runs through our otherwise noble race.

I know it's bad form and not conducive to dialog to call Conservatives names, but as far as I'm concerned the time for dialog is over. It ended somewhere between Reagan's shell game of trickle down, voodoo economics and Shrub's "Mission Accomplished" fiasco.

Argue with morons and you end up in the loony bin. I'm headed in the other direction.

The fact is that everything we cherish here in America comes from Liberal thinking and action. Starting with our Revolution, through Abolition, to Civil Rights. It's not my job to coax Teabaggers down from their trees and hate-radio demagogues off the air.

Patience: Neanderthal Conservatives eventually discard their caveman causes. Most no longer support slavery, Prohibition, segregation, separate but equal, the Dred Scott Decision, and the like. We had to drag them kicking and screaming, but they came around.

Eventually they'll drop their opposition to universal health care, stem cell research, gays in the military, and bans on gay marriage. Then when they get used to their political prehensile thumbs, they'll stop denying global warming, the Holocaust, Evolution—the kind of progressive stuff we Liberals have embraced since the Enlightenment.

But for now, I'm tuning them out!

2010-03-24T13:01:00.006-04:00

Black and White

Nothing is black and white. Not even Manhattan, the 1979 Woody Allen film. Like its vintage, black-and-white predecessors, Manhattan resonates in shades of gray. Frank Rich called it "a prismatic portrait of a time and place."

Slower, lazier, meaner minds fail to appreciate the multifaceted complexity of art and life. Simpler people demand simpler explanations. Does this demand betray the weakness of their brains or the nastiness of their heats? Both traits are to be shunned, I think.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, a Sheridan Middle School seventh-grader was asked to take off or turn inside-out his T-shirt that read, "Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white." The boy refused, the school sent him home, a legal battle ensued, and a federal judge ruled that the boy could continue to display the hateful stupidity "as long as it does not disrupt classes."

All of this could have been avoided if somewhere along the line someone had taught the boy, whoever raised him, and the knuckleheaded judge that things are never black and white. Instead, all of them ended up with the numskull notions that sexual orientation is a choice, centuries of religious heritage can be summarized in a word, and that a legal medical procedure is a capital crime.

But the final, stupid simplification of the T-shirt diatribe goes to the root of the problem. Contrary to the typical, ill-informed Christian-conservative conclusion, all issues have more than two tentacles.

No act is always right or wrong. No idea is always good or bad. Not even the act of cutting someone with a knife. Consider the cutter being a surgeon with a scalpel performing a life-enhancing operation or a jealous husband springing from the bushes to decapitate his wife.

To think in black and white, dulls the mind and cheats the thinker of so much color. That's why a film like Casablanca still resonates with new generations and why Manhattan will do the same—without anyone telling them that the author or director is an infallible god or that not appreciating the film guarantees eternal damnation.

2010-01-30T12:12:00.022-05:00

Billion-Dollar Bingo

When I was a spindly, five-foot, tree-climbing lad, I deduced that if I could tie four strings from the waist of a plastic army man to the four corners of a handkerchief, toss them out of a tree, and watch them descend slowly like a real parachuting soldier, I certainly could do something similar to myself. So I gathered the material: a bed sheet and four lengths of rope.

I'm here today, because my mother stopped me.

She interfered in my behalf on other occasions as well, including the time I planned to run a numbers racket. I didn't know that's what it was called or that it was illegal, it just made sense. And it seemed so simple. Why wasn't everyone doing it? That should have been my first clue.

As Catholics we were exposed to bingo. Our parish church, like just about every enterprising Catholic parish in those days, staged evening bingos, raffles, and festivals littered with carny-like games of chance.

Even though I did not do well in math as a grade-school student, it wasn't difficult to understand that the parish made out well in these enterprises. Especially raffles. When I asked myself, how can the parish afford to give away a new car? the numbers gave me the answer.

No surprise then that I would deduce with my soldier-parachute logic, that I could run a raffle in my neighborhood among my friends.

I'm here today, because my mother stopped me.

Okay, I don't suppose I would have been destroyed or even arrested for running numbers at my age, had I been caught. And it doesn't matter. But the lesson does.

My mother explained that raffles and lotteries are illegal, because they take money from a lot of people and give it to a few people without providing any other benefit. In short, many lose, a few win. And that's not nice.

On the other hand, a church bingo supports the generally beneficial work of the church. Fund-raisers for non-profits support good work that would not otherwise get done. When run by a state and the proceeds funneled into schools or infrastructure, a lottery amounts to a kind of fun-to-pay tax.

Capitalism rewards profit. It's counter-capitalistic to give money to a church, a public school, a teacher, a police department, a homeless shelter, a food bank, or any other non-profit entity. Unless you brag about it on your corporate website. While non-profit enterprises benefit us and even make more comfortable the environment in which we practice capitalism, they cost without generating profit.

Like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, capitalism gives us an awe-inspiring show, but it demands blood and to be fed more and more and more. We need some sort of force motivated by something other than profit, not only to build roads and feed the poor, but to regulate the most un-beneficial kinds of capitalistic enterprises such as private lotteries.

And yet that's exactly what free-market extremists have allowed to happen. While you and I worked and built our economy in return for modest rewards, others sat on the sidelines and gorged themselves on profits earned by simply betting on how we would do. They ran raffles on the profits they hauled in by the truckload. And that's not nice.

Had Doris Lloyd been in charge, she would have rapped the knuckles of Wall Street speculators and hedge fund gamblers with her wooden cooking spoon. Rapped them darn hard for playing billion-dollar-bingo with the life blood of our economy. Unfortunately she died in 1990, just as the greedy spirit of de-regulation was getting up to speed.

We're in the mess we are today, because my mother's wisdom could not stop the madness.

2010-01-26T10:06:00.017-05:00

Shame on you, Massachusetts!

When the USA Titanic, steered by indomitable Capt. Dubya, finally hit the iceberg around the end of 2008, the first to reach the lifeboats, as expected, were the mean and greedy. Now as we watch our big-bellied bankers and fat-bottomed hedge-fund gamblers row to safety, their minions in the Republican party get the dirty job of laying back and whacking down the rest of us with their thick oars as we paddle desperately toward anything that floats.

Then just when it seems the water can't get any colder, the once trusty people of Massachusetts vote for the promise of no health care reform. "Sorry, we need your life jackets, too." What happened to Teddy's constituents? Aren't these the same people who were taught as children that we're all in this together? Have they really bit the bait of the big lie?

How many of them, I wonder count themselves among our nations foaming-at-the-mouth tea-baggers? Many of these mental midgets will willingly fork out $550 dollars to hear their esteemed Sarah Palin speak at their convention next month in Music City. That's more than half-a-grand to hear the woman to whom McCain's handlers had to explain why Korea comes in North and South flavors. Maybe because she can't see either Korea from Wasilla.

I wonder how many tea-baggers understand the Korean division. I mean, if you don't buy global warming or evolution and swallow only what your hate-radio jock blathers, all you need to know is that the North is evil, like Sadam, socialism, welfare moms. And I guess if you think your Hummer H3 is a great set of wheels, then Sarah Palin is a great speaker.

2009-08-11T16:24:00.005-04:00

Rubbing Bad Music in the Wound

Since I spend so much time on hold these days, I end up listening to a lot of bad music.

Dell's hold music is abominable. Since my Inspiron 4100 malfunctions so often, I spend a lot of time working with my cell on speakerphone. I wait for help while some sort of insipid cool jazz drools out of it. The people in Manila are wonderful, though. It's the product that needs help.

After my latest hard drive crash, Dell sent me a new drive, but it's pins didn't reach their contact points. I'm no tech but I could tell why. The tech had to keep insisting that the new drive qualified as a proper replacement, even though it was almost a quarter of an inch shorter with different kinds of contacts.

"They're supposed to reach," she had to insist, because that's what her screen kept telling her.

My local internet connection used to go down so often, usually with it rained, that I've heard a good deal of Cincinnati Bell's on-hold music. Bell's beats Dell's, but that's not much of a recommendation. I spent so much time with them, that I had an assistant to the president assigned to me. After about five visits, we figured out the problem. It was the solution that needed fixing.

Suppliers of the world: If you can't make products and systems that work, could you please at least feed your holds with good music? Okay, tolerable music? Please?

2009-04-20T09:11:00.009-04:00

I'm Not From Around Here

I'm not from around here, so I hope you take this the right way, but even though you seem to be neurologically complex enough, you flesh-bearing bipeds make an incredibly contradiction-riddled species, as if you're all bent on comic self-destruction. Of course, you could be vastly superior in some inscrutable way. So allow me to share some of my recent observations and perhaps you might be able to help me understand your kind.

I saw one of your kind walking with a quadruped progeny substitute. The poor thing was tethered to a territorial freedom constraint. Still it managed to defecate on a chlorophyll-covered status exhibit, when someone ran out of a privacy protection unit and yelled, "Get that mongrel out of my yard. Why don't you dump its shit on your own damn lawn!" The other pretended like she didn't hear and muttered underneath her breath, "Animal hater."

I ventured into one of your culturally vacant expanses of sameness and found myself in the middle of one of those mass consumption pits. They were running some sort of consumer feeding frenzy, when I overheard a verbal exchange between two discretionary income disposers. "John's out of town," one said, "I've been shopping now for two whole days. This is really gonna cost him."

The other just chuckled and replied as she winked her eye, "Serves him right."

I headed out to the surrounding asphalt field neatly divided into grid-lined stalls packed side-to-side with air-polluting transportation pods as your sun was shining through your withering ultra-violet buffer. I passed some bipeds operating carcinogen intake units. One said
"I don't know why people complain about smoking indoors. I mean like I don't complain about other people's perfume."

Just then a passer-by remarked, "Perfume doesn't consume other people's lungs."

Then I looked up and noticed a huge artificially lit persuasion display. It kept flashing arrangements of symbols, which when decoded, promoted tricks like internet banking, certificates of deposit, and a way to easily obtain large quantities of paper wealth units. Claimed you could even pick your own interest rate and then it displayed arbitrary measurements of thermal activity and temporal calibration. But before it began to repeat these messages all over again, it flashed, "John 3:15."

Well, did some digging and found your "John 3:15" resembles a concept long ago discarded in ridicule and shame back where I come from. Seems we were killing so many of our own kind over our version of institutionalized schizophrenia, we had to give it up in order to survive. So I visited a known purveyor of your brand of high-flying hocus pocus, and I described the great liberation we enjoyed when we gave it up. Although he seemed to understand, he just gave me a condescending look and said, "Go to hell."

Hear this entire post put to music and sung.

2009-04-16T16:55:00.006-04:00

The Easiest Way to Write a Song

My latest song was a gift.

Some songs play hide-and-seek with me. Others tease and flirt. The words come but the melody won't surrender. Or a melody haunts me while its words never show.

Every once in a great while a song just jumps up says, "Here I am!"

I scramble to get it all down and enjoy every second of the game. That's exactly how "All My Friends" showed up. I heard it on my morning walk, went inside and started, scribbling down the words. Found the chords for the ready-made melody and recorded this scratch track.

All My Friends

I looked around for the sound effects, but the free-sound-effects website I found made it too difficult to download what I wanted, so I picked up my pocket recorded and did it myself.

It's only a scratch. Somebody else can make it sound better.

2009-04-13T13:34:00.011-04:00

A Most Extraordinary Shock

A woman named Susan Boyle sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables on Britain's version of "American Idol," a program called "Britain's Got Talent."

Toward the end of this video, after Susan stunned the audience with her performance, one of the show's panelists mumbles to one of his peers that what he had just witnessed was the "most extraordinary shock" of the show's history.

Why was he shocked? Because Susan stepped forward to sing dressed in an ordinary house dress, her hair arranged in a conventional style, her 47-year-old frame far from svelte. In short, a very conservatively dressed, average-looking, middle-aged woman.

Watch and you'll see, before Susan sings, the panel's leading judge rolls his eyes, expecting a flop. A disgusting display of prejudice, in the sense that the word prejudice comes to us. Susan Boyle, the no-frills singer, was pre-judged. She's going to fall on her face, the panel clearly assumed. The audience, in lock step, smirked and all but gagged when Susan announced that she hoped to be as successful as Elaine Paige someday.

During Susan's stunning performance, no one could argue with her talent. From what I could hear over the din of the screaming morons in the audience, she sings very well. Afterwards one judge, reeling from shock, called Boyle's performance, "the biggest surprise I have had in three years."

And as the audience heard the judges fall over themselves with praise, the auditorium of sheep could not contain their expressions of conversion.

Why was anyone surprised? Because Boyle was not decked out like a pre-teen prostitute? I'm afraid that their shock betrays the shameful shallowness of the public eye. What have we become that an average-looking woman shocks people with her voice? Have we become such slaves to appearance?

Susan's performance was outstanding. The audience's performance was appalling!

2009-04-07T08:00:00.014-04:00

Abominations

Can you think of a creature that flies and has only four legs?

Neither can I. Maybe the flying squirrel, but it doesn't actually fly? If you ever run across one, though, don't eat it.

Flying creatures with four feet make the list of Biblical abominations. Along with aquatic life without fins or scales, blemished sacrificial animals, artwork made of silver or gold, prostitutes and dogs procured in church, the thoughts of fools, lying lips, tilted scales, sleeping with your wife's mother, and of course, homosexuals. Especially the effeminate kind. You'll find most of these and more listed in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Despite their prophetic scope, none of the scriptures of our major religions warns us about many of the abominations we encounter today. So I suppose it's incumbent upon us to identify and warn each other about modern abominations.

I'll start with those that have come to my attention and hope you will make me aware of those I've missed. Wherever possible, I'll post your comments as well.

SUVs, especially the Hummer H2
Westboro Baptist Church
Advertising, Spam, Popups, Phone Spam, Billboards and all kinds of in-your-face product hustling
Leaf Blowers
Jet Skis
Not recycling
Restaurant comment cards and “How Am I Driving?” bumper stickers
PBS and NPR Pledge Drives, "the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding"—Charles McGrath

2009-03-01T13:06:00.011-05:00

Oh, No! Not Socialism!

After bringing the economy to its knees, America's conservatives are squealing like pre-teen princesses with no date for the prom. They're not hissy-fitting for those of us who have lost the wealth we have earned. They're wailing because an emergency plan to prevent economic catastrophe will take away more of their funny money.

Lately they're comparing the plan socialism. And I love it!

We know socialism. It's the principle that has everybody pay for the street in front of their house rather than making every property owner construct their own section of road. We remember Ben Franklin's socialist notion, born a hundred years before socialism, that gives us the public library down the street.

The full extend of American socialism boils down to this: we all pay for something, so that it's there for anybody who needs it. This all-for-one-and-one-for-all system leaves no one out of the picture. That's why our fire departments don't let houses burn down if the homeowner can't pay what it would cost to put out the fire.

Conservative crackpots want us to believe that the plan our President, Democrats, and some Republicans want to put in place, to clean up after the economic devastation they've brought down with their greed and corruption, is not just socialism but Marxism. And so they scream, "USSA!"

It's neither the Marxism of Marx and Lenin nor the socialism of John Stuart Mill, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, G. B. Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and others. It's necessary.

When regulation for the common good is relaxed, capitalism, that great engine of creativity, begins to devour everything within its reach. First, the livelihoods of those without wealth. Next, those who depend on their purchasing power.

When the party in power sides with and gives free reign to those who own and control the tools of work and production, they can and usually do siphon wealth produced by you and me into their own pockets. As has happened before, in a cycle that can't do anything but end in collapse, the economy collapses.

Why would it surprise anyone, then, that the correction for imminent collapse would involve a bit of redistribution?

Yet, what has been proposed is nowhere near that Christian concept rephrased by Communists, "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability." We're so far from public ownership and government administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. We're nowhere near equal opportunities for all or egalitarian compensation.

So why are they weeping?

Our most strident demagogues are squealing "USSA," because they know that the numbest skulls among us will bob brainlessly in accord.

To most of us, though, the overused socialism bugaboo betrays thinking in want of substance. Fortunately, volume won't make up for the vapidness of their complaint this time. We know that the our social institutions and those of many of the world's nations make good use of controls for the common good to keep capitalism in its place.

The Constitution of the United States, our nation's mission statement, if you will, lists as its ultimate aim, "to provide for the general welfare." That's why we're organized as a society rather than hunting and gathering in tribes at war with each other. Conservatives, abusing the word freedom, would pull us back to the tribalism Karl Marx predicted would follow the failure of capitalism.

Let's hope we can liberate enough of what belongs to all of us from the greedy grip of the few before they wrest power from the rest of us again.

That's why I hope they continue to cry, "The sky is falling!" It shows them for the spoiled brats they are.

2009-02-13T09:42:00.013-05:00

The Party of Lincoln

Yes, technically, the Republican Party is the American political party that has descended from Abe Lincoln. There, I said it. But that's sort of like saying Jefferson was a Republican, which he was. So I guess it's more like saying Clarence Thomas is black. Well, maybe it's like Hitler was a Catholic. Okay, W is a Yale graduate.

No, think Ruth Westheimer and Laura Schlessinger. Now there's a paradox!

It can be confusing. Lincoln was perhaps our greatest President. Everybody's gushing all over him as we celebrate his 200th birthday. So how could the advancement of our civilization be in any way associated with what we know today as the Republican Party?

In order not to be befuddled by the specious Republican claim on Linclon, I have to remind myself that when I'm facing north, east is to my right. But when I'm facing south, it's to my left. American political parties re-orient themselves left and right as well.

Under Lincoln, the Republican Party was the left-wing, Liberal, anti-slavery party. Even though Lincoln acted more like a conservative henchman at times, suspending habeus corpus, for example, he was, like Jefferson, a irreligious, forward-thinking, bleeding-heart, Liberal. He would have driven a Volvo.

Lincoln's Democrat opponents, as well as his assassin, were cold-hearted, capitalistic, right-wing, Bible-citing supporters of slavery and the aristocratic feudalism that depended upon it.

Here's Lincoln at his visionary best:

Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Does that sound like a Republican?

Conservatives have given us slavery, the Dred Scott Decision, Prohibition, the Great Depression, Plessy v. Ferguson, Senator Joseph McCarthy, racial segregation, Watergate, Reaganomics, creationism, and the most corrupt and incompetent Administration in American history—our eight-year nightmare.

So for a tax-slashing, anti-science, Bible-thumping conservative to claim any affinity with Lincoln is just plain nonsense. Those who do so either mean to deceive or don't know what they're talking about. I really don't know which is worse.

I take solace from the birthday boy, who said famously, "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

2009-01-20T07:22:00.013-05:00

Day One, Year One

Many have come to our nation's capital to protest wars and injustice. Today the largest number of people ever to gather in Washington DC comes to welcome, toast, and support Barack Obama and all that he and his new Administration stand for.

Today's assembly braces against sub-freezing temperatures that match the absence of warmth, generosity, and American goodness left by the outgoing regime. Ironically its chief henchman, no friend of people with disabilities, will appear in a wheelchair. It's as if the oncoming good spirit of the gathering has served up some sort of poetic justice for his unabashed legacy of disability.

The in-pouring of hope we see in the faces of the American people today expresses their determination to bring the American spirit back to America. That wholesome determination is washing like a tsunami over the stench and stain the former regime—built on greed and pettiness, led by a profoundly stupid man, a puppet of evilly greedy men.

People from every corner of the world recognize our eight-year failure. Yet once again they are about to forgive us. They are with us now, just as they were immediately after 9/11. Their good faith will not be squandered this time. We are starting over.

When thinking of starting over, it occurs to me how purely arbitrarily we number our years. We still count from the purported birth of a Messiah of one, dominant religion among our thousand faiths. Somewhat less arbitrarily we divide our numbers by tens and come up with centuries.

So to accept that the current millennium began with the Supreme Court appointment of our nation's most corrupt and un-American regime—one bent on bullying its way around the world—is not only ill-founded, it's discouraging and counter-productive. We don't have to accept it.

Why not start over, not just with our efforts but with our calendar? Why not mark this new beginning with an appropriately fresh way to number our days? Well, because that would be arrogantly self-congratulatory. We're over that. More to the point, we have yet to prove we can create an America worth calling new. That's for history to decide.

Besides, we and our new Administration have many and much more pressing issues to address. All of us have to pitch in and make things better before we deserve such a distinction. But there's nothing wrong with setting a new calendar as one of the ways we might measure our success.

Can we make this point forward so worthy of note that one day it will be called Day One of the Year One?

2009-01-15T17:31:00.008-05:00

It's Not a Frickin' Miracle

US Air Flight 1549 from Laguardia to Charlotte, North Carolina, went down a little while ago, immediately after take off. The pilots had to ditch in the Hudson. Probable cause—engines clobbered by a flock of geese.

Reports say everyone is off the plane, safe, and accounted for. What great news!

Unfortunately commentators and interviewee experts are letting fly with the word miracle.

What an insult to all the peole who made the water landing and courageous rescue possible!

It's not a frickin' miracle! It's a human triumph! The practical result of lots of cool-headed, steady-handed piloting. Witnesses call the landing a smooth descent.

Pilots were backed, no doubt, by the right response of well-trained flight attendants. The passengers must have behaved admirably as well. An image shows some standing calmly on a wings as rescue boats gather to take them on board.

Behind all today's professionalism and even heroism is years of disciplined design, thorough planning, and creativity on the part of dedicated people.

The Coast Gurard, NYPD and fire, commercial craft, Circle Line... they all pitched in. And after the follow-up investigation, we'll learn more from this incident and make even more safety improvements.

In short, so many people worked so hard to make the emergency end well, that the thick and flimsy word miracle and numskull phrases like truly a miracle are an insult to all who made the success happen.

Now if all the luggage is returned to their owners, that would be a miracle.

2009-01-12T08:06:00.010-05:00

An Atheist Who Prays

I'm an atheist who prays, not to a god or to some loosely defined spiritual entity—I don't believe in any of that—and certainly not to myself. I was raised Catholic and studied to be a priest, so I'm familiar with prayer and other meditative processes. And you know what? They work—just not the way some religious people claim they work.

John Tierney, who calls himself a heathen in his New York Times, Science Times, article "For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It," quotes psychologist Michael McCullough, whose work has uncovered evidence that devoutly religious people, not pious show-offs, demonstrate greater self-control.

Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion. The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.

Is anyone surprised? Anytime you take time out, cast off your pressing concerns, and open yourself to your mind's infinite variety of options, you start breathing more slowly and deeply. Your heart rate and blood pressure settle down. You feel better. Best of all, you set yourself up for taking a more optimistic outlook and for making decisions that align with your purest intentions and most heartfelt hopes. It doesn't matter what you call the object of your attention in this condition, it's the condition that improves your condition.

Sigmund Freud writes in Moses and Monotheism that faith in God just might help the believer enjoy a richly introspective life. He argues further that the Jewish religion gave its people the advantage of intellectual abstraction. The fact that Freud, an unrepentant atheist, accomplished a whole lot of abstract thinking makes me think that introspection with or without God or gods might just do the same thing.

My most tolerant, believer friends have told me they believe that all religious people actually address the same god by different names. I simply take it one step further. My most intolerant atheist friends have balked at attending atheist meetings in church basements. I refuse to limit myself that way.

So even though I agree with Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great, I have no problem returning to the practices that once deluded me into quietude, purposefulness, and peace. I've just dropped the delusion part.

It's no surprise to me that prayer still works, when it works, no matter how it works.

2009-01-08T12:12:00.012-05:00

Please Don't Vote for More TV Terrorism

"In fall 2006 the creators of "24" received a visit from the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point and other experts in military interrogation, who told them that West Point cadets and soldiers in Iraq were being influenced by the uninhibited — and unrepentant — use of torture on the series."

So says Edward Wyatt in his New York Times story "New Era in Politics, New Focus for '24'."

I wondered about that as I watched the revolting, one and only episode I endured. Talk about torture! The puerile characters and their hollow dialog made watching almost unbearable. Forget water-boarding, this is what I call pain! Yet the outrageous waves of gratuitous violence made it difficult to ignore. Not out of interest, mind you, but out of disgust.

Apparently in response to the Obama victory and the wholesale disgrace and insignificance of Shrub, the ever led-by-the-nose Fox network has decided to do something like repent for its sins by beating this dead-horse show into another season.

Thanks, but it's too late, you sniveling whores. Even if Bauer were to develop opposable thumbs and disavow all that he has stood for, once was enough for me.

I sampled. I spewed. And I won't be back for more abuse.

Peter Liguori, chairman of Fox Entertainment, is said to be confident that he can win back his audience. Is Jack going to see the light? If so, end of show. Is Jack going to continue on as the same reprehensible ass? Probably so.

That's where you and the plea in my title of this post come in. Will you come back for more? Or will you vote this disgusting series off the air with your absence?

If the military has voiced concern over the show's horrible effects on its soldiers, what good could continuing this disgrace ever do?

Just say no. Nielsen will do the rest.

2008-12-11T18:46:00.022-05:00

Midwestern Knuckle-Draggers

I live in an intellectual backwater. It's called Kentucky. I love the people and the beautifully rolling hills. It's a wonderful place. But lately my state has become the laughingstock of the world.

We have been cursed with a monument to stupidity in the guise of a museum--the Creation Museum.

As of December 2008, however, I can laugh back at my knuckle-dragging neighbors in Ohio. The Cincinnati Zoo tried to team up with Kentucky's mockery of a museum in a absurd co-promotion called hyped as "Two Great Attractions, One Great Deal." Embarrassed by the backlash, the Zoo cancelled the promotion before it brought in any purchases to refund.

Here's what the the Creation Museum's founder, Ken Hamm, had to say about the bum's rush his museum received:

"It's a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith. Some of their comments... reveal great intolerance for anything having to do with Christianity."

Here's what really goes down:

People who respect science raised a fuss, not because of your Christian faith, Hamm. They object to your calling Creationism science and the chapel you've dedicated to your creation myth a museum. You've tried to elevate your belief system behind a mask of science. That's what's objectionable.

I tolerate Christianity. However, I find Christianity dressed up in cheap and flashy costume meant to look like science absurdly objectionable.

2008-09-17T09:24:00.008-04:00

The Passive Aggressive Voice

Some companies insist on writing their formal reports in the passive voice. Instead of "we recommend," some reports read "it is recommended."

"It is recommended? Really? By whom?"

"By us, of course."

"So, we are doing the recommending?"

"Yes. Who else?"

"So, we recommend?"

"That's right."

"So why don't we just come out and say, 'We recommend'?"

A consultant should bond with the reader, make readers feel comfortable with the way the words flow, even if the words deliver an uncomfortable message.

Speaking we-to-you sets up a conversational tone. The passive voice does just the opposite. It sounds aloof, distant, stand-offish, indifferent, and at worst, condescending. "We're not going to talk with you. Rather, you shall be addressed."

Passive voice has the tone of indifference. It bespeaks lack of commitment, half-heartedness, and academic calculation. It gives the writer and the writing an attitude of cool superiority.

In short, if I were to describe the personality or voice of such writing and the writer, I'd call it passive aggressive. It comes off defensive in its avoidance of straight talk.

The active voice and the second person plural are straightfoward, honest, and committed. In a business report, they say, "This is what we know, here's what we find, therefore, this is what we recommend." Without words, it promises that we the writers stand by what we say and care enough about your success to say so.

2008-09-10T09:27:00.007-04:00

Parenting Beyond Belief

I was talking to a client a few years ago, who told me he was an atheist.

"So am I," I happily admitted, pleased to discover our new affinity.

"But I raise my kids Catholic, just to give them some kind of moral footing," he added.

I just about lost it, but kept a cool head as I explained that Judy and I had raised, or were rasing at that time, two children without religion.

"So far they haven't killed anyone," I encouraged him.

Maybe he went on to loosen the Catholic noose from his children's necks. I don't know. But more than nine million parents in the U.S. are raising children without religion. That's according to the promoters of The Parenting Beyond Belief Seminar a half-day workshop on parenting without religion led by educator Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers.

I'm finished parenting or I'd be there, but if you're like my atheist client and would like to consider the ethical, non-religions way of parenting, look for this seminar near you.

You'll learn:
• How does moral development really work?
• My mother-in-law wants our kids baptized. How can I respond without causing a rift?
• How can I ease my son’s fears about death without pretending there’s an afterlife?
• How can kids learn about religion without being indoctrinated into religion?

If you're anywhere near Cincinnati, Ohio, I'm sorry about that, but you can attend on Saturday, September 20, at the Vernon Manor Hotel, from 9 AM to 1 PM.

Visit the Parenting Beyond Belief website for details.

2008-09-06T12:19:00.007-04:00

Hoodwinked

Here's proof that the majority of conservatives are not critical thinkers:

1. Nobody's Fine with Me

McCain pulls out of practically nowhere a nobody of a governor and they all jump up on cue and affirm her.

Now in 60 day's, we're supposed to get to know Sarah Palin? A woman who, should McCain croak, could be President of the United States!

2. Whatever You Say, McCain

Senator More-of-the-Same, who voted more than 90% of the time right down the Bush party line, says all of a sudden, "Change is coming!"

Again, his ditto-headed drones jump up an cheer in unison.

We thinking people, on the other hand, know our candidates. Both of them. Joe Biden has been around long enough to understand not only what he stands for but how he works. We've run Barack Obama through the gauntlet. When they say change, they mean it. They've been fighting for change as long as we've known them.

Who isn't insulted by McCain's fake epiphany and the nerve of foisting on us an untested unknown?

2006-01-22T13:51:00.004-05:00

Consumed

In his weekly New York Times Magazine feature "Consumed," Rob Walker reports that Sharper Image continues to enjoy robust sales of various products used to clean indoor air despite reports by Consumer Reports that they ineffective. According to Walker, SI sued CR for defamation and the case was dismissed. SI even paid CR's legal costs. Later CR published claims that SI's latest cleaners may even do users some harm.

This shows two things:
1. The power of belief over evidence

Walker concludes that amid the confusion of competing claims "maybe you go with the recommendation that seems most hopeful." How clearly this is born out in the way humans cling to every kind of optomistic promise, no matter how suspect the claim.

2. The falacy of the Invisible Hand

Adam Smith coinded the term Invisible Hand to describe an inherent focrce which would guide and free enterprise and capitalism with "enlightened self interest." Cleary free enterprise regulates itself in terms of self interest, but not in the interests of the people. Conservative politicians use the Invisible Hand to argue against the need for regulation of industry. Don't you believe it!

Getting Through the Filter
New York Times Magazine: Consumed, January 22, 2006

Pledge

2006-01-01T15:02:00.000-05:00

The United States in 1892 adopted a Pledge of Allegiance. In 1952 the words "under God" were added to the original pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Some years ago my son asked me, "Why do we say, 'four witches stand invisible?'" That's when it hit me--we shouldn't make promises we don't understand. Especially in public. If we're going to go through the motions of standing together and pledging, we should say what we mean and mean what we say.

Do we all mean to say, "under God"? Not all of us. And what about "indivisible"? Today the word suggests support for those who claim that speaking anything but English will divide us into separate nations. In the present-day pledge we promise allegiance to a nation. Meanwhile, we're becoming more and more allied with a world of nations. We also pledge allegiance to a flag. Another burning issue we don't need to fan in a ritual that really ought to bring us closer together.

I bet if we put our right brains together, we can find words that declare what we all believe based on what we all have in common. And from there, stand up and make promises we all intend to keep.

Here's my attempt:

I proudly stand for the right of all people to govern themselves, pursue their dreams, and live in harmony with all life on Earth. And I pledge to help make our world a better place to live and love, today and for the rest of time.

I'd like to see your personal pledge. Please comment.