Naked Reflections

Prolonged Labor and Innate Resistance to Change?

2012-01-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

My wife asked me recently what time of the day I was born. I told her I didn't know and asked her why she wanted to. She didn't answer, but I'm guessing it was for some kind of Thai astrological purpose. She told me to ask my mom when I was born, and so I did.

My mom told me the time and said she went to the hospital that day to have labor induced because I was "too lazy to emerge" on my own since she had probably made it too cozy for me "on the inside." I wasn't born until twelve hours later. This got me to thinking.

I've been late to do a lot of things that most people do much earlier in their lives, and I suppose this could be construed as laziness. But I think it's probably more attributable to fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change.

I've always been afraid--unusually afraid, I think--to step outside the comfort zone of my routines. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that I feel inadequate, and rightfully so, for meeting the adaptive challenges of change. I've learned over the decades that I don't handle change well, because it takes me longer than most, if not forever, to figure out my new circumstances and develop a way to deal with them effectively.

But I'm thinking my fear of change might not be only a learned tendency but also an innate one, one that was programmed into my genes or into my basic biology in some other way and that began expressing itself when it was time for me to face one of the biggest changes one ever faces in life--the change of being born, and I somehow resisted.

I can't help but wonder if any research has been done or might be done that investigates what if any relationship there might be between the length of a woman's labor and the resistance of her offspring to changes throughout life.

Enthralled With Hiromi Uehara

2012-01-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

Don't tell my wife, but I'm in love with another woman. Well, actually, I'm exaggerating a little. I'm not in love with the woman (you know I have to say that), but I am in love with her musical brilliance.

I'm talking about Hiromi Uehara, a 32-year-old Japanese pianist who is called a jazz pianist but actually blends and transcends musical categories to deliver phenomenal keyboard virtuosity and passion in solo and group performances all over the world.

I had never even heard of Hiromi until today, but now that I've watched some of her videos on YouTube and listened to one of her albums, I will certainly never forget her and will do my best to attend one or more of her concerts if she ever comes to my neck of the California woods.

Rarely has a musician bowled me over from the very beginning the way she has. In fact, I can think of only one other who has had this kind of earth-shaking immediate impact on me. No doubt, Hiromi's looks and joyful exhuberance on stage have something to do with it, but her music is also extraordinary. That's what the great jazz pianist Chick Corea must have thought when he discovered her in Tokyo years ago and had her play with him the next evening. And that's what jazz bassist extraordinaire Stanley Clarke must have thought when she toured and recorded with him sometime back.

You can read her Wikipedia bio here, check out her website here, read a 2003 interview with her here, and sample some of her amazing musical artistry below. But be sure to watch and not just listen:

Stop the Debate and Start the Dialogue

2011-12-11T06:46:00.000-08:00

I'm participating in a discussion group on Facebook that just changed its name from "Christian Debate" to plain ole "Christianity." I like the change. For as much as part of me relishes the galvanizing heat of intellectual battle, I want to believe that the whole me cherishes dialogue more. This is what I posted there this morning about it:

What I'd like to see us left with is DIALOGUE about Christianity. Dialogue isn't debate. That is, it's not about people defending their preconceptions and attacking opposing ones in a forensic battle of intellect, biting wit, and clever gotchas. It's people of every participating persuasion respectfully, even reverently opening themselves to one another intellectually, emotionally, and, for want of a better word, spiritually in deep sharing and examination of each others' perspectives in an effort to apprehend and clarify truth or, at the very least, to arrive at a greater degree of mutual empathy.

Is this possible in a "place" such as this with the vast diversity of people participating? Not on your life! Is it an "impossible dream" worth approximating as closely as possible by those of us who share it? I think so, and I hope I'm not the only one who does.

To Carry or Not to Carry?

2011-11-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine recently informed me that it's relatively easy for law abiding citizens in my neck of the woods to obtain a permit that will allow them to carry concealed firearms throughout the state. All one has to do is apply for the permit, pass a background check, be interviewed by a law enforcement officer, pass a sixteen hour course on gun safety, and qualify with whatever firearm(s) one intends to carry.

I'm giving serious thought to applying for one of these permits. But should I do it? These seem like fairly dangerous times, and I don't live in the best of neighborhoods or the safest of cities. Not only that, but local and statewide budget cuts have led to mass layoffs of cops, making communities even less safe than they were before. There's something to be said for taking one's safety and the safety of one's loved ones into one's own hands, since, even under the best of circumstances, cops function more to arrest perpetrators after they've already victimized people than to prevent them from victimizing us in the first place.

Yet, it would cost me a lot of money to obtain and periodically renew the permit, buy a relatively concealable firearm or two, and purchase the ammunition and pay the range fees to practice enough to get and stay sharp and safe with my weapon(s). And even if I did all of that, how much safer would I be than without a weapon?

I have a firearm in the house now, and I admit that I feel a lot safer with it than I would without it, whether I actually am or not. If someone tries to break into my house or actually does so, I'd far rather have my formidable weapon in hand than not. But what are the chances of anyone actually doing this while I'm home? And what are the chances of my facing a situation outside the home where I'm carrying a weapon, will need to use it to defend myself or another innocent person, and will be able to do so effectively? Is it worth the trouble to get and keep the permit and the weapon(s), and would it be worth the possible risk that I and the public would incur by my doing it and carrying a loaded firearm around with me?

Cops undergo far more intensive and regular training to safely handle their firearms than most private citizens with permits, myself included, ever will, and even they still make mistakes. Is it really a good idea for private citizens to be walking around literally loaded? Well, all I know is that if I obtain my permit and end up carrying a firearm with me, I'll handle it with extreme respect and conscientiously follow all the rules to the letter.

Bad Fortune

2011-10-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

My wife is Thai, and she, like apparently most Thais, believes in paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and fortune telling. She says two reputable Thai fortune tellers independently told her Thai friend that her husband would die this December. Her friend believes this and is understandably distressed over the prospect.

Her husband is around 70 years old, had angioplasty a few years ago, and has been diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm on which his doctors are keeping a close watch. Nevertheless, he looks good, takes excellent care of himself, and says he feels fine. I would be very surprised and sad if the fortune tellers' predictions came true.

But what if they do? Will this lessen or even dispel my skepticism toward fortune telling? Should it? I will post here about what happens either way.

Precious Life

2011-08-26T08:36:00.001-07:00

My wife called after she drove to work this morning to tell me that a car almost hit her on the freeway as its driver heedlessly began to steer into her lane. Fortunately, she caught this out the corner of her eye and honked her horn just in time, and the driver swerved back fully into his lane.

Let this make me mindful of how I could lose my wife any day, any moment she is behind the wheel, or in any one of countless other ways. Let it also remind me that I could die any moment from one cause or another.

Life is uncertain and insecure. Yet, let me respond not with anxiety and by clinging to life so hard that I strangle it, but by opening my mind and heart to life just as it is and living and loving it to the fullest. And may I let my wife know every moment we have left together, in ways both subtle and overt, that I love and cherish her.

Another Missed Reunion

2011-08-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

My 40th high school reunion is today. I won’t be attending. I also didn’t attend my 10th, 20th, or 30th reunion. I wanted to go to all of them. I want to go to this one. But if you’ve been reading this blog from the outset, I hardly need to explain why I didn’t and won’t go. If you haven’t been reading it, aside from this hint, I’ll just say that I would feel too uncomfortable among people I didn’t give myself the chance to get to know in high school and who have lived profoundly different lives than I have ever since.

I’ve been fortunate to re-establish contact via Facebook with some people I knew as far back as elementary school but haven’t seen since elementary, junior, or senior high school. And I’ve even become Facebook “friends” with people from back then that I never had anything to do with in those days because we ran in completely different social circles, or I was just too darn awkward and shy to approach them.

One guy in particular used to be a pretty good athlete in high school. He was one of the “jocks,” and I decidedly wasn’t, despite my brief and painful flirtation with basketball. I don’t know if there’s a word for what I was. I wasn’t exactly a geek or a nerd. I wasn’t smart enough or adept enough at anything to qualify for either distinction. I was just weird. A bumbling outcast largely of my own making.

Anyway, the guy I mentioned in the previous paragraph is Christian, and he has tried a couple of times to convert me since we became Facebook friends. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, I don’t need to tell you what the outcome of his attempts were, and if you haven’t been reading this blog, suffice it to say that I’m still vociferously agnostic bordering perilously on downright atheistic. Yesterday, he asked me if I was coming to the reunion today. I told him I wasn’t and briefly explained why. He seemed genuinely moved by my reply, and I was moved by his subsequent response. We connected in a way I wish I could have connected with him and others in high school. But it really IS true that late is better than never, and over the Internet is better than not at all.

No, I won’t be attending my 40th high school reunion tonight, and even if I’m still around by the time of my 50th, I almost certainly won’t be going then either. But I don’t think I will be around by then, so tonight is almost certainly my last chance to connect in a very personal way with a past that didn’t amount to much but was still a whole lot better than it could have been.

Yet I can still connect with my past and with people from it in other ways, as I’ve been doing recently, and I plan to continue doing that. And after tonight’s reunion, I’ll be looking at the photos and reading comments by the attendees and vicariously enjoying some of what I missed in person tonight. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

Try...Try Again

2011-08-18T10:18:00.001-07:00

Still working at fulfilling my pledge, and, clearly, judging from some of my Facebook comments this morning regarding "bag-dangling, Bible-thumping Republicons" bent on turning this nation into a "homophobic, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, plutarchic, money-grubbing, environment-destroying, militaristic, imperialistic, Christian fundamentalistic theocracy" I still have a herculean amount of work to do.

Of course, my characterization is correct. But I need to find a less hyperbolic and more respectful way to express it. ;-)

If At First I Don't Succeed...

2011-08-11T16:26:00.000-07:00

I've discovered or, rather, re-discovered that I'm much better at making pledges than I am at keeping them. But that's all the more reason to keep on trying.

Renewing My Pledge

2011-07-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

Six months ago, in the wake of Jared Loughner's shooting rampage in Tuscon, AZ, I posted an entry in which I pledged to stop vilifying and heatedly arguing with people who disagreed with me about politics or other matters and to start dialoguing with them with civility, respect, and even lovingkindness.

But when I look at comments I've written on Facebook and elsewhere since that time, I see that I've failed miserably to live up to my pledge. This has been especially true here of late as my anger over the so-called deficit crisis in Washington DC swells, and I've felt mounting hatred toward the Republicans and others with whom I disagree on all kinds of issues.

Well, I renew my pledge today. I can still disagree with people very strongly, but I don't have to demean or insult them. That won't advance my cause, and, even if it did, I doubt that the end would justify the means. There has to be a better way to speak my mind and heart. And part of it entails listening more openly to people who disagree with me and regarding them not as stupid, selfish, or greedy assholes, but as human beings who believe and do what they do because of the nature they've acquired from their genes and experiences.

My heart has filled with so much anger and hatred recently. Time to fill it with respect and love.

Once Again

2011-03-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

Today's my birthday. This evening I'll dine at my favorite Asian buffet, and tonight I'll bowl in my travel league. Beyond that, I have nothing more to say worth saying except that I hope to still be here one year from today to have more and better things to say about the year that was and my well-formed plans and realistic hopes for times to come.

Obama's Arizona Memorial Speech: A Personal Distillation

2011-01-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

"To rate this address on any political meter would be to demean it. The president wrested free of politics tonight and spoke of greater things. I pledge myself to try and follow his advice and debate with vigor and spirit and candor and bluntness, but with more civility, more empathy, and, yes, more love."

--Andrew Sullivan

I watched President Obama's memorial speech last night. At first I felt a little uncomfortable with the exuberance of the crowd. Many smiled, clapped, and cheered more like they were at a political pep rally than gathered to pay their sober respects to last Saturday's fallen and to the heroes who came to their aid, and it almost seemed to me that President Obama himself was initially a little uncertain as how to pace and voice his oratory in that milieu of ambivalent emotions and mixed expectations.

But as he continued, he gradually seemed to find his stride, and I, in turn, became so focused on the meaning of the message that the aesthetics of its delivery, the style of the messenger, and the response of the crowd ceased to hold any great importance for me.

Beyond his poignant recounting of Gabrielle Giffords opening her eyes for the first time, his moving tributes to the slain and wounded, and his glowing praise for the heroes who risked life and limb to save the fallen and subdue a murderous madman, what was President Obama's message when distilled to its essence?

What I distilled from it was that we honor the fallen by doing our level best to rise above partisan bickering, blaming, hating, and vilifying to find the human and spiritual ties that bind us and work together to make ourselves, each other, and our great nation better than they were before. Yes, we can speculate on and even debate what led to the shootings and how to prevent such tragedies in the future, and we can disagree on the answers, but we can and should do it with empathy and love in our hearts and with respect and civility in our demeanors.

After the speech, I read Andrew Sullivan's words above and resolved to make his pledge my own as well. Following through is not an easy thing to do though. Last night, in the immediate wake of President Obama's soul- stirring words, it seemed easy enough. But by now, after seeing business return to quarrelsome normality on TV, talk radio, and the blogosphere, it's tempting to let myself follow suit and regress back to snide remarks, finger pointing, angry denunciations, and other derogations of those, especially on the political right, who don't believe as I do. Yet, I am determined to resist these regressive urges and at the very least, as I wrote yesterday, not contribute to the divisiveness that plagues our country when we can ill afford to let it rage on.

Below is my selection of the most substantive passages from the president's speech followed by an embedded video of the entire speech.

What, beyond the prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we've seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems. Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.

So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

After all, that's what most of us do when we lose someone in our family - especially if the loss is unexpected. We're shaken from our routines, and forced to look inward. We reflect on the past. Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder. Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in awhile but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward - but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we've shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order. We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame - but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others...

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let's make sure it's worthy of those we have lost. Let's make sure it's not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives - to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud. It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here - they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

Jared Loughner, Free Speech, Guns, and Me

2011-01-12T15:12:00.000-08:00

Ever since the horrible shootings in a shopping mall in Tucson, AZ last Saturday, I've been reading all kinds of articles about the incident itself and the people involved as well as commentary about the contributory role violent political rhetoric did, didn't, may have, or may not have played in this terrible tragedy. And when I think about all I've read in light of my own life experience and understandings, I come to the conclusion that it's all too complicated for me to be as simple and conclusive in my opinions as many people across the entire political spectrum appear to be in theirs.

For one thing, although I hate what Jared Loughner did, I don't know what "we the people" should do to him in legal response. I think he acted crazy before, during, and after the shootings, and I don't think this was just an "act."

But even though I'm philosophically opposed to punishing people for committing crimes their apparent mental disorderdness caused them to commit, I emotionally want Jared Loughner to pay for his crimes in a manner that goes beyond mere lifetime incarceration in a mental ward or prison. I want him to suffer to the point where he genuinely regrets the harm and devastation he caused, even if it's only regret for the way it destroyed his own life and prospects for happiness, and to where other potential mass murderers are deterred by his well-publicized suffering from acting out their own murderous proclivities and fantasies. But what kind and degree of suffering would this entail in order to be effective without being grossly unjust? I don't know.

For another thing, I hear people blaming Loughner's parents for raising him to be crazy or, at least, for not getting him the help he needed to overcome his craziness or, at least, not act it out in a murderous frenzy last Saturday morning. But what do these critics know that I don't about Loughner's parents? I certainly don't know enough to pass scathing judgement on them or to pass any judgement on them whatsoever, and so I won't.

Finally, people on the left are accusing people on the right of spurring Loughner to violence with their violent political rhetoric and of enabling him to be so destructive with it by their legal blocking of attempts to keep people like him from getting their deranged hands on semi-automatic firearms and extended ammo clips meant for SWAT teams and soldiers at war, while there are those on the right who excoriate the left for, as one of the right's more brilliantly intellectual albeit obscure spokespersons calls it, its "vicious" and "exploitative" attacks on the right.

Well, I consider myself strongly inclined toward the left end of the political spectrum, but I don't flatly accuse right-wing rhetoric of causing the shootings in question or seek to have such rhetoric outlawed, nor do I wish to pry firearms from the patriotic hands of the American public. But I do think it would be a good idea to seize the moment to discuss and reflect upon the corrosive and provocative effects the prevailingly bitter political partisanship and violent rhetoric coming from people of all political persuasions may be having on this great nation, and I also think that no private citizen, at least not without special and well-considered dispensation, needs to be legally entitled to carry around unlicensed, concealed, autoloading firearms with 30+ round clips in public.

What's more, I don't think that one needs to be a "vicious" liberal exploiting a tragedy in order to sock it to conservatives to believe as I do and express it in this or any forum.

Beyond what I do and don't think about all of this, I don't know what to do about any of it except continue to discuss it with people who seem receptive to dialogue, but discuss it and all subjects and issues of political or other significance with civility and respect for the people with whom I'm discussing them. For whether angry rhetoric and debate played or didn't play a significant role in Loughner's actions, I think it's a real problem in this country, and I don't want to be part of the problem.

Maybe I can or can't help bring the country together, but I can darn sure stop doing anything to drive it further apart.

Autism's Paradox

2011-01-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

"You've never been in my body. I wish for one day you could be in my body."

--Autistic girl Carly's typed message to her father

A little boy in my family is autistic. I knew this before his parents, grandparents, and even doctors knew it or, at least, were willing to concede it. Perhaps this is because "it takes one to know one." That is, when I was a little boy myself, my mother thought I was autistic because of the weird ways I would withdraw from the world outside and immerse myself in an inner world of my own. And I think it's fair to say that I haven't completely outgrown this condition even to this late day. I have never been "normal," and, at almost 58 years of age, I think it's more than reasonable to say that I never will be.

Yet, at least I was always able to express myself well, perhaps uncommonly so, with spoken and, later, written language. If I've been endowed with any cognitive gifts whatsoever, however modest they may be, it's the gift of my linguistic ability. At least this is true of my English. I don't speak any other languages and have a devil of a time whenever I try to learn them. My greatest fear, at least for this life, is what would happen to me if I lost this gift to some brain-crippling condition and became cognitively impaired in every way instead of in every way but verbally the way I am now.

But what would it be like if I had never grown enough out of my autistic or autistic-like immersion in myself to be able to express myself to others or manage the other demands of everyday life well enough to be able to live with any independence at all? What would my life be like? How happy could I be locked inside myself, and how would I experience the world?

This remarkable video may provide some inkling of how an autistic person experiences the world in that she is able, with stunning eloquence, to communicate that experience, by typing on a computer, in a way that she could never convey by any other means. To look at her hand-flapping, incessant fidgeting, paroxysmic shouting, and other stereotypically autistic behaviors, you'd think there was nothing beyond the most rudimentary, animalistic consciousness going on between her ears.

But when you read her typed words on a computer monitor, you are overwhelmed with the realization that autistic people can be extremely intelligent and incredibly aware of what's going on around and inside them, and they know full well how strangely they're acting, but they just can't stop themselves. As the girl in the video explains, she does the strange things she does "to drown out all the sensory input that overloads us all at once. We create output to block out input."

Isn't it ironic that autistic people sometimes look as though they're almost unaware of the outside world precisely because, in a sense, they're TOO aware of it?

Henry Bemis and Me: Time Enough For What?

2011-01-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I caught an episode of SyFy's Twilight Zone marathon. It happened to be the most famous if not beloved episode of the iconic original version of the series.

Time Enough at Last features the great Burgess Meredith as henpecked bibliophile and bank clerk Henry Bemis who emerges one afternoon from the bank vault in which he takes his daily lunch and reading break to discover that he's the lone survivor of a nuclear holocaust. In his desperate wanderings through the decimated city, he becomes so despondent that he's ready to commit suicide until he discovers the public library nearby with its gazillions of intact books waiting for him.

Between all these books and his access to all the unspoiled food he can eat for the rest of his life, he has almost everything he's ever truly wanted, and his despondency turns to elation as he realizes that he'll no longer be barred by duties at the bank and at home from reading to his joyful heart's content. Yet, when he bends down to read one of the books he's selected, his very thick glasses fall off his nose and shatter on the pavement, he's rendered all but blind, and he's left sobbing, "It's not fair...that's not fair."

This episode resonates with me partly because I consider myself to be a little like Henry Bemis. I've always been more at home in the world of words and ideas than in the one of people and things, and, even though my wife doesn't treat my reading with the contempt that Mr. Bemis meets from his wife and his boss, I never feel as though I have enough time to do all the reading I'd like to do. I think I would be uncommonly happy to be able to spend most of the rest of my life just reading and writing, and if I were to end up in Mr. Bemis's shoes as the only survivor of some kind of catastrophe, I think I'd spend a good deal of my time, if possible, reading books and writing.

Yet, if there were no one around with whom to discuss what I read or to read what I wrote, and if I weren't faced with the normal challenges of life and people to which I could apply the insights I gleaned from my readings and ponderings, what would be the point of them? When one comes right down to it, it seems that the purpose of reading, learning, and pondering is not simply to do and enjoy them in a vacuum but to share them and use them in other ways with other people.

Even if I weren't the lone survivor of a holocaust but simply living, reading, and writing, like Thoreau, in a cabin in the wilderness, I would ultimately be doing all of this to bring something back to civilization when I finally returned to it. If I knew that I'd have to spend the rest of my life in that isolated cabin with no one else around, I might read and write simply for diversion's sake, but much of my enthusiasm for it would probably be gone and, even surrounded by books and food enough to last me for years, I'd probably soon fall into implacable despair. And I'm guessing that even Henry Bemis would too.

For even when we want to escape the world by plunging ourselves into books or television or whatever, we often do it to become wiser and happier in the real world and with real people outside the artificial realms of books, television, and ideas. We escape to reemerge wiser and better than before.

Impact vs Fame

2010-12-23T11:41:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered a delightful blog by a young man named Jason Summers. Jason creates software, majors in physics at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and spends a lot of his leisure time philosophizing and studying “visual spatial cognition.” He says, “My goal in life is to understand what space and time really are, and how the virtual reality within our brains differs from the real world we live in.”

But in a recent blogpost, Jason says he doesn’t pursue his interests for “honors and fame,” and he laments the facts that too many people these days want to reap the fortune or at least the fame of being “the next guru or sage” and that the brightest young people going into science don’t want to do “observations and grunt work which needs to be done,” but desire, instead, “to be the next Einstein.” Jason concludes by saying, “I believe that the men and women who have the greatest impact on the world for the better are unknown and do good deeds without asking for any recognition.”

Here is the comment (slightly modified here) I posted to his blog in response:

Jason, while I agree that doing good deeds without expectation of rewarding recognition is laudable, I question your assertion that those who've had the greatest impact on the world are unknown. For instance, Jesus, for better or worse, has arguably had the greatest impact ever, and there's probably no one more famous.

It stands to reason that those who've had the greatest impact in religion, science, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, technology, and other fields of endeavor are precisely those who have garnered the most fame for their accomplishments, whether or not they sought it.

Also, I can't say that I blame the brightest people for eschewing the laboratory for the chalkboard, figuratively or literally speaking. It seems to me that it would be an awful waste for a "monster mind" like Ed Witten to spend a great deal of time running mundane experiments designed to confirm other people's results. His singular talents are much better deployed, at least most of the time, in Einsteins' old office.

This was Jason’s thoughtful reply:

Hi Steve. You bring up some good points. While I for the most part agree with you, in some respects I also disagree. Though the pursuit of truth is admirable, I feel it’s just as important to work on projects and inventions which relieve human suffering. I suppose you never know what abstract research may eventually lead to, but even so, it’s very important that scientific research efforts work on the mundane aspects of life, improving the everyday lives of people on this planet. Einstein’s work is certainly valuable, but I think other unknown scientists in various fields are the ones responsible for the majority of my own happiness. Scientists at Intel designed my computer. Scientists from Sony designed this computer monitor. Scientists designed my stereo system, the navigation system in my car, my home’s heating and air conditioning systems, and the list goes on. None of these people are known yet they are responsible for most of what I value in life. I don’t feel it’s beneath a genius to work for a company and design a city’s plumbing and sewage systems. I think this is what my professor was trying to tell me.

What do you think. Do you think unsung heroes have had the greatest impact on our lives, or has it been famous people? And do you think the brightest of us should toil away at mundane labors in laboratories and “drafting boards,” or should they be applying their prodigious intellectual gifts to a “higher” or at least more intellectual calling?

Martin Luther King to President Obama

2010-12-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

"Cowardice asks the question- Is it safe? Expediency asks the question- Is it politic? Vanity asks the question- Is it popular? But conscience asks the question- Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.”

--Martin Luther King Jr.

Health Care For All is Not an Entitlement, It's a Necessity

2010-12-14T08:28:00.001-08:00

Here is most of a comment I posted yesterday to a Facebook discussion of the recent federal court decision ruling that some parts of the new health care coverage bill are unconstitutional:

You're absolutely right. Health care coverage for all should NOT be viewed as a "handout" or "entitlement" for those unable to acquire it otherwise but as every bit as much if not more of a necessity for the "pursuit of happiness" as is police protection, military defense, and public education, to name just a few of the public services we legitimately look to government to provide.

We don't require people to have jobs providing coverage for these public services at reduced cost or to pay exorbitant fees out of their own pockets for privately obtained coverage for these public services, so why should we require this for health care coverage?

We don't deny coverage to people with "pre-existing" vulnerabilities to having to use these public services or to those who have reached a utilization "ceiling" for these public services, so why should we do this for health care coverage?

And if those opposed to so-called "Obamacare" don't like the fact that it requires everyone to purchase health insurance from private insurers, then let's just tax everyone and provide "Medicare for all" via the "public option," which is what we should have been doing all along anyway, with those who want something more and "better" and who can afford it paying extra to get it.

What I find so disturbing in this debate is that people who oppose the new health care law seem so callous to the suffering of the ill and injured and their families and to the concerns of growing multitudes unable to obtain adequate health care coverage or who are afraid of losing it if they lose their jobs or become sick enough or injured badly enough to exhaust their "caps."

These uncaring individuals talk as though this is unimportant and that we either don't need to do anything about it or we'll solve the problem simply by allowing more "competition" between the insurers and paltry tax breaks to consumers. Clearly more than this needs to be done, but I don't see any viable solutions from those opposed to "Obamacare." I just see a sneering dismissal of those who are trying to do something effective to provide everyone with coverage, and I find this disgusting.

Why Shouldn't There be Something Rather Than Nothing?

2010-12-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

"This model is different, because the universe never collapses." (Roger Penrose)

This morning, I read this brief article outlining a theory advanced by the genius mathematician-cosmologist Roger Penrose that the universe existed BEFORE the Big Bang. I don't pretend to understand the sketchy explanation offered by the article or even the somewhat more expansive, if less detailed, one Penrose himself serves up in the interview below, but I'm intrigued by the notion of a cyclical universe that may have had no beginning and may have no end. This inspired me to post the following "note" to my Facebook page this morning:

I used to buy into the popular belief that nothingness is necessarily the "default position" of reality and that we need to explain the appearance of the universe out of original nothingness, which, of course, theists do by insisting that only God, by whatever name, could be responsible. But lately I've come to question this prevailing assumption. I've begun to think that, given the presence of something rather than nothing, which seems awfully difficult to explain in terms of something originating from nothing, perhaps the real default position of reality is somethingness. In other words, perhaps the universe has always existed and has, as Penrose might be taken to imply, cycled through an eternity of eons.

Sci-Fi Justice

2010-12-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

“Take away a man’s life, memory, payment for his crimes...it’s still not enough. Where does revenge end and justice begin?” --Captain Sheridan, Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is one of the finest sci-fi shows to ever grace television. It originally aired in the mid-to-late 90’s. It takes place 250 years in the future mostly on a giant space station named Babylon 5 that began as a kind of galactic UN but later became the base of operations for the good guys versus the malevolent Shadows and their alien allies in the great war to end all great wars.

Spoiler alert

I’ve been re-watching this wonderful series from the beginning on Instant Netflix for over a month and have worked my way into the early part of Season 3. Last night, I watched one of the most provocative and poignant episodes of the entire series. Titled Passing Through Gethsemane, it focuses on a remarkably devoted and endearing Catholic monk (played by the always mesmerizing Brad Dourif) named Brother Edward who painfully discovers that he isn’t who he thought he was.

For “Br. Edward” had previously been a psychopathic serial killer of women who was caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to “death of personality” for his crimes. That is, his memories were wiped clean by a telepathic process, and he was given false memories of his past and turned into a very different person bent on selflessly serving others for the rest of his life as a Christian monk. He did this beautifully for eight years until his past caught up with him when family members of some of his victims found him on Babylon 5 and enacted their revenge after restoring his memories of his previous crimes.

Early in the episode, before Br. Edward made his shattering discovery, he was asked what he regarded as the emotional core of his Christian faith and he replied that it was when Jesus stood in the Garden of Gethsemane contemplating his fate and fearfully wondering, in a moment of human weakness, whether he could and should go through with it as planned. Br. Edward confided that he too wondered whether he, if he ever found himself in his own Gethsemane moment, would have the courage to do what needed to be done. And, as you might suspect, he learned the answer to that nagging question.

This episode raises the vexing issue of the nature of justice. As I’ve written many times in this blog, I don’t believe in free will, so I’m not sure what justice entails. That is, if a person’s nature--shaped by an almost infinitely complex set of interconnected physical, biological, psychological, and social factors--at the time he commits a crime causes him to commit that crime, what is the just response to his crime. Should justice consist of punishment even if the person to be punished is blameless? Should it consist of retribution? Reparation? Rehabilitation?

“Death of personality” seems, on the surface, like an ideal form of justice. Out with the old criminal personality or nature and in with a new and benevolent one. The person isn’t punished for crimes his previous nature made him commit; he’s rehabilitated or given a new nature that causes him to behave in a very different manner that enables him to at least begin to make reparations to the community he harmed before.

But one problem is that the survivors of the people he harmed didn’t feel in their hearts that justice was served, and I think there’s something to be said, unfortunate as it may be, for the human need to see a person suffer for his crimes whether he could help committing those crimes or not.

Another, perhaps more theological, problem is that suppose Br. Edward is right when he says, “How can I confess my sins to God if I don’t even know what they are. The mind forgets, but the stain remains with the soul.” In other words, if the soul and sin are not Christian fabrications, what would happen to a soul that can’t confess because the mind that overlays it doesn’t remember what it needs to confess?

"Passing Through Gethsemane" is a fascinating and powerful episode well worth watching, which you can do by clicking on here.

Fiddle or Fight While America Burns?

2010-11-15T11:22:00.001-08:00

I hang out on Facebook a lot. More than I should, actually, although I've decided to back off on it over the coming days. But I read a post today from one of my Facebook friends in which she says she's tried of all the doom and gloom that people are spreading about America's alleged decline, and she's going to stop listening to them and get on with her business.

She thinks that we certainly have problems, but bright minds and natural cycles will solve them unless and until we allow ourselves to become so obsessed with the dire and unflaggingly repetitious pronouncements of such pompous prophets of doom as Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, and Tom Friedman that we become too demoralized and debilitated.

I disagree with her. I think our problems are very serious and that we have no chance whatsoever of solving them unless we begin by acknowledging and understanding them. This, with some minor modifications, is what I wrote to her:

I don't believe we are "functioning well" at all. Wall Street continues to grow richer while Main Street continues to grow poorer and our infrastructure continues to crumble and collapse before our eyes. Our educational system is in shambles at a time when it desperately needs to get its act together. Our political system is so polarized that very little can be accomplished. Health care is becoming more expensive and so-called Obamacare, a piss-poor patchwork substitute for single-payer but still better than what we've had before, is on its way out as Republicans continue to attack it and Democrats continue to cave to their demands. Our national debt continues to rise with no viable prospects for reversal. Soon China will be the world's dominant technological, economic and geopolitical power if it isn't already, and India and other rising countries such as Brazil may also relegate us soon enough to second tier, has-been status while our only preeminence, at least for a time, will be as militarily musclebound freaks.

These and a million other serious, serious problems eat away at our nation, and whether you want to collectively characterize them as "brokenness" or to use some other, more euphemistic term for them, they are real, and they are destroying us from the inside out while other countries chip away at us from the outside in.

If we acknowledge and understand our problems, there's always the risk that we'll succumb to debilitating and paralyzing despair and not only sink into the morass of mediocrity or worse but be miserable the whole way down. But if we don't acknowledge and understand our problems and just "fiddle while Rome burns" (pardon my mixed metaphors), expecting everything to right itself as part of some natural and inexorable cycle, we have no chance whatsoever.

The choice is ours. Fiddle or fight.

Your Bet

2010-11-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

"So here’s the math: 98 climate scientists out of 100 will tell you that man’s continued carbon emissions pose the risk of disruptive climate change this century. Two out of 100 will tell you it doesn’t. And “conservatives” today tell you to bet on the two."

--Tom Friedman

First Webcam Video

2010-10-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

I just bought a new webcam, installed it, and posted my first video with it to Facebook earlier today. And then I figured that if I'm using this blog to nakedly reflect the "real me," this would be a good place to post the video as well. Actually, I plan to post more videos of myself here over time, if I can think of anything to talk about, but this is my first foray into such Internet visibility.

To Chew or Not to Chew?

2010-10-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

A local news channel posted on its Facebook page the following question: A congressman has asked the Giants and the Rangers not to chew tobacco on the field in this year's World Series. What do you think about that?

Almost everyone has responded by excoriating the congressman for not attending to more important things and by defending the right of baseball players to do what baseball players have always done. Yet, as you might suspect, I posted a rather different response that, despite its deliberate rhetorical excess, makes what I consider to be some valid points:

Why do any of you care if a congressman merely ASKS the players not to chew tobacco during the World Series? He's not trying to legislate against tobacco chewing. Apparently nobody else had the testicular fortitude to do it, so he stepped up to the plate to try to spare our nation's impressionable youth from being exposed to that vile habit during American baseball's most visible and iconic event. You should be applauding him for what he did instead of condemning him for it! How is it that you've allowed your exaggerated, reflexive hatred of government to override your concern for the health and well-being of your children?

The only problem I have with the good congressman is his naivety in thinking that major league baseball players are smart enough to heed his intelligent advice or that they give a damn about our children or anyone else but their overpaid and overly famous and pampered selves.

My Comment to Roger Ebert About Life and Death

2010-10-25T13:32:00.001-07:00

Roger Ebert has an outstanding blog that uses the films he reviews as a taking off point for more extended reflections on the themes and issues raised by those films. In a recent entry about Clint Eastwood's new film "Hereafter," he makes the following comments about death:

"When I write that I expect to experience no more after death than I experienced before birth, I receive comments from people who pity me. They wonder how I can possibly live with such a bleak prospect. I find it more cheerful than most of the other possibilities that have been floated. I don't want to come back as an insect, haunt unquiet places as a ghost, or gaze down benevolently on my loved ones below as they, and all their generations to the end of time, die from mayhem or disease. I am also offered the possibility that I will be absorbed in God's love for all eternity, which is a better offer, but lacking in definition. If that means what it seems to mean, and if God is infinite (as he must be), then the role played by "me" can hardly be aware or conscious in any meaningful way. But I will become part of the universal, you say? I already am. You, too...We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born."

I just replied with a comment that awaits Ebert's approval before it appears. Here is what I wrote:

Roger, I agree with you that there's nothing "bleak" about the prospect of dying and returning to the same state of non-consciousness that presumably characterized us before we existed. But I disagree with you that there would be anything "tragic" about never being born in the first place. For whom would it be tragic? If one never existed, there would be nothing to regret missing out on the experience it never existed to have.

In fact, I'd go further and agree with philosopher David Benetar's premise in "Better Never to Have Been" that if our lives are simply, as Alan Watts characterized the prevailing non-religious view, "a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium," and, as Benatar argues, fraught with more pain and suffering than pleasure and happiness, the REAL "tragedy" for most if not all of us is that we WERE born. We'd have been better off had we never been at all.

Road Rage

2010-10-08T14:42:00.001-07:00

Last week my wife and I were driving somewhere when I almost got into a violent altercation with someone. I was driving to an unfamiliar location and realized that I was in the wrong lane with a left turn coming up, and when I signaled and tried to move into the left turn lane, the big SUV behind me sped up to make sure I couldn't move over, as a woman in the passenger seat glared down at me as they raced by like she was thinking, "Screw you."

Well, I did manage to get over behind the SUV, and as we both sat at a red light, I made an angry gesture to the driver of the SUV. No, I didn't flip him the bird. I shook my fist at him. He saw me and opened the driver side door part way as though he was going to jump out and confront me right there, but it appeared as though the woman passenger stopped him from following through on his folly. He slammed his door shut and jerked around in his seat like he was completely beside himself with fury.

I don't know what I would have done if he had gotten out of his vehicle and moved toward me. I know I would have stayed in the car, but what if he started pounding on it or kicking it? What if he had a gun? He certainly seemed angry enough that if he had a gun, he wouldn't have thought twice about using it, especially if he hadn't had a female passenger to talk him out of it.

If he had had a gun and started walking toward me with it, I think I'd have tried to run him over. If he'd damaged the car with punches or kicks, I or my wife would have tried to get his license number and report him.

But what about the gesture I made to him? Should I have done it? Did he deserve to see my displeasure over the way he conducted himself when I tried to move into the left turn lane just before the stoplight? I think he deserved it. But what people deserve and what we should give them if it puts ourselves and our loved ones in danger are, perhaps, separate issues with the latter overriding the former.

In retrospect, I wish I had made no gesture, although a perverse part of me is glad I did. But if I had it to do over, should I have made the gesture I did or some other one? If another one, what should it have been? I kind of think that showing him the back of my open hand would have been better. It wouldn't have been overtly vulgar like flipping him the bird, or confrontational like showing him my fist. He would have probably thought I was flipping him the bird or challenging him to a fight anyway, but at least I'd have the satisfaction of knowing that I did neither, assuming he didn't shoot me and I was able to feel anything afterward.

What kind of society do we live in with people like the jerk in the SUV with his stereotypical Harley sticker on the back and, perhaps, a gun or crowbar under his seat driving on our public roads? Or am I the villain in this story?

Quote for the Day--Commemorate 9/11 With Compassion

2010-09-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

"In the United States, we have witnessed an upsurge of anti-Muslim feeling that violates the core values of that nation...And now we have the prospect of the Quran burning proposed by a Christian pastor, who seems to have forgotten that Jesus taught his followers to love those they regard as enemies, to respond to evil with good, and to turn the other cheek when attacked, and who died forgiving his executioners...If we want to preserve our humanity, we must make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a vibrant and dynamic force in our polarised world. We can no longer afford the barbarism of hatred, contempt and disgust...In an age when, increasingly, small groups will have powers of destruction that were previously the preserve only of the nation-state, respect and compassion are now crucial for our very survival...Instead of looking at one another with hostility, let us look at the suffering that we are seeing in so many parts of the world...On September 11, let us all try to find something practical to do that can, in however small a way, bring help and relief to all those in pain, even -- and perhaps especially -- those we may regard as enemies...Imam Feisal Rauf is a Sufi. Over the centuries, Sufis, the mystics of Islam, have developed an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions. It is quite common for a Sufi poet to cry in ecstasy that he is no longer a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew and that he is at home equally in a synagogue, mosque, temple or church, because once you have glimpsed the immensity of the divine, these limited, human distinctions fall away into insignificance. We need that spirit today -- perhaps especially near Ground Zero."

--Karen Armstrong

Quote for the Day--Obamanomics is Not Keynesian

2010-09-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

"The way the right wants to tell the story — and, I’m afraid, the way it will play in November — is that the Obama team went all out for Keynesian policies, and they failed. So back to supply-side economics!

The point, of course, is that that is not at all what happened. A straight Keynesian analysis implied the need for a much bigger program, more oriented toward spending, than the administration proposed."

--Paul Krugman

Quote for the Day--The Joy of Infinite Love

2010-08-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

"As Kierkegaard said, if at every moment both present and future I were certain that nothing has happened or can ever happen that would separate us from the infinite love of the Infinite, that would be the reason for joy."

-- Huston Smith

The Japanese Aesthetic Defined

2010-08-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to a marvelous The Teaching Company course by Professor Grant L. Voth on the History of World Literature. I listen to it on my iPod Touch while taking my daily morning walk along a lovely creek trail. Today, I heard a lecture on Japanese poetry.

The Japanese aesthetic has always held an especially strong appeal for me, from the time I used to listen as a little boy to the tinkling of an ancient Japanese tune on my mother's music box to my introduction by Alan Watts to Zen and Japanese culture to today when a part of me still yearns to model the traditional Japanese aesthetic in the exterior and interior design of my home and my whole way of life.

But what exactly is that aesthetic? Well, today, Dr. Voth listed four of its key principles, qualities, or elements: (1) Subtle suggestion rather than explicit statement; (2) Asymmetry is always preferable to symmetry; (3) Simplicity is superior to complexity or clutter; and (4) Perishability is preferable to permanence.

I guess what this all boils down to is that the traditional Japanese aesthetic seems to possess a subtlety and depth missing from the traditional Western one where things tend to be much more boldly and, oftentimes, clumsily "in your face."

The paradox of this for me is that while I'm attracted to the subtlety and depth of the traditional Japanese aesthetic, I seem to have the kind of mind that finds it difficult to penetrate beneath the surfaces of things and ideas to plumb the depths beneath. Maybe it's partly a case of being drawn to the mystery of what is, for me, the forever impenetrable and unfathomable.

Quote for the Day--Leave the Sandbox

2010-07-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

"In the perspective of mysticism, most of us are still playing in the world as if we were children in a giant sandbox. We have our rattles, we hold on tightly to our Popsicles; for the vast majority of us, most of life is spent with toys. Figures like Sri Krishna, Christ, and the Buddha come to the edge of the sandbox and remind us gently, “Look, your hair is turning gray. Do you want to play here forever? There are vast worlds to be discovered.” But often we reply, in effect, “Right, Lord. Just let me finish this one sand castle"...If we keep playing with pleasures and possessions for decades, before we realize it the sandbox becomes our universe. Then we have no thought for what we really are, who is within us, what is our destiny, whether life has any goal.”

-- Eknath Easwaran

Quote for the Day--Double Dip Recession

2010-07-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

"No one in their right mind would have wished for another Great Depression, of course. But we seem to have got the worst of all worlds. The bank bailout, the stimulus, and the Fed brought us back from the brink just enough to dampen zeal for anything more. As a result, we are now slouching toward a tepid recovery that could just as well fall into a double dip recession, while a large portion of our population suffers immensely."

--Robert Reich

Quote of the Day--Eyes on the Path

2010-06-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

“I know some people say “Keep your eyes on the prize,” but I disagree. When your eyes are stuck on the prize, you’re going to keep stumbling and crashing into things. If you really want to get ahead, you’ve got to keep your eyes focused on the path.”

--Russell Simmons

Was There a Ghost in Our Hotel Room?

2010-06-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

My wife and I stayed at a hotel in Southern California last weekend. I won't say which hotel it was because I wouldn't want to get them or myself in any trouble. But I do want to report what we saw in our room.

We were lying in bed talking Sunday morning when I caught a fleeting glimpse of what appeared to be a moving shadow on the ceiling in front of the open bathroom door. My wife kept the bathroom light on and the door open a crack so she could find her way to the bathroom in the dark if she needed to. What I saw looked like the shadow someone might cast on the ceiling if they were in the lighted bathroom. But no one was in there.

I didn't think much of it or say anything about it. First of all, I don't believe in supernatural phenomena like spirits or ghosts, although I don't rule them out completely, and I just figured that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I never saw anything else like that the two nights we were there, and my wife didn't mention anything about it at the time.

Yet, this morning my wife called from work and asked if I'd seen anything "strange" in that room. I said, "Like what?" and she replied that she had seen the moving shadow. But she saw it four or five times. She also said she'd had a peculiar dream or two about a little boy in that room. I felt a few chills along my spine. I'm feeling them now too.

I told her that I didn't have any peculiar dreams, but I did see what she saw. I also asked why she didn't say anything to me while we were in the room. She answered that she didn't want me to stay awake looking for anything out of the ordinary and, besides, she didn't feel threatened by whatever it was that she saw.

I should explain that my wife is Thai. As a Thai, she believes in ghosts and takes them rather matter-of-factly. In fact, she and her whole family believe that a benevolent ghost protects their property in Bangkok. The opening fight scene from Rambo III was filmed there and they've called it the "Rambo House" ever since. You can read my blogpost about the filming here. The reputed ghost appears as an old lady sweeping the grounds of the property. She doesn't appear to family members but only to guests staying overnight. Everybody calls her "the caretaker" in Thai.

Back to our hotel room. I don't know what we saw. I'm inclined to believe that there's a natural explanation for it even if I don't know what it is. But who knows what it REALLY was?

I guess only The Shadow knows.

Quote of the Day--Existence Is Harm

2010-06-08T11:18:00.001-07:00

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm was not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad--and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.

--David Benatar from Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

Quote of the Day--'24's' Degradation of the Presidency

2010-05-27T17:37:00.000-07:00

"Whether Jack Bauer lives, dies, or falls off the grid is ultimately of little consequence, but how people view their president has a colossal effect on how we feel about our country and our place in it. If viewers found themselves relating to 24's final notes for its portrayal of a government bent on destruction, it's a disappointing, sullying end for one of television's most innovative shows."
--Joshua Alston

Quote of the Day--America's Spare Tire

2010-05-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

"America used its spare tire to prevent a collapse of the banking system and to stimulate the economy after the subprime market crash. The European Union used its spare tire on its own economic stimulus and then to prevent a run on European banks triggered by the meltdown in Greece. This all better work, because we’re not only living in a world without any more spares but also in a world without distance. Nations are more tightly integrated than ever before. We’re driving bumper to bumper with every other major economy today, so misbehavior or mistakes anywhere can cause a global pileup."
--Thomas L. Friedman

Quote of the Day--The Purpose of Life

2010-05-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”
--Robin Sharma from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Hallelujah

2010-05-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

I used to make fun of the idea that heaven is angels circling God saying "Hallelujah" for all eternity. "How boring!" I would exclaim and think that hell could scarcely be worse.

But if heaven were angels singing "Hallelujah" like K.D. Lang in this stupendously stunning version of the great Leonard Cohen song that she performed during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics this year in Toronto, heaven might be pretty blissful indeed.

My Friend's Final Months

2010-05-02T12:24:00.001-07:00

My former girlfriend recently learned that she has terminal liver cancer. First she was told that she probably had six months to live. But after more tests were run, her oncologist told her yesterday that it's closer to two months. She's 54 years young.

She said to me, "Why me? I'm a good person. I don't deserve this."

Of course she doesn't. Nobody "deserves" to die such a miserable death. Yes, someone could argue that she did things over the course of her life that likely helped bring this on. Yet, this doesn't mean she "deserves" to die so relatively young of such an awful disease.

But who cares, besides the handful of us who do? Does nature care? Does "God," by whatever name or formless form, care? I don't see how.

I don't know what to say to her at a time like this. Any comforting words that I contemplate offering her over the phone seem too shallowly if not insultingly platitudinous to utter. So, I mostly just listen with as much empathy and compassion as I can muster.

But how can one who's not in her position REALLY empathize with her? I know intellectually that I'm going to die someday, but I haven't had a doctor look me squarely in the eye and tell me I've got only two more months to live. Only if that were to happen, as perhaps it will someday, will I TRULY know what she's going through today. And by then it's likely to be of no benefit to her.

And without much empathy, there's not as much compassion as I'd like to feel and express. Because if the truth be told--and what else is this blog for if not to "nakedly" reveal the unvarnished truth within and without?--I almost envy her. For I've asked myself how I would feel if I were in her place, and the first word that came to mind was "relieved." After all, she's been living on borrowed time for eight or so years tethered to an oxygen machine and unable to do much of anything but lie in bed watching TV and sleeping. That must be awfully old by now. Soon, she'll be released from her gasping debility and suffering into pure nothingness.

But as soon as I post this, I'll call her and be as present for her as I can. And if her dying wish is granted and she's able to escape the loveless place that now imprisons her and come back to California to live out her last days with a longtime friend, I'll go see her and sit with her, and maybe, as I look into her eyes, hold her hand, and see and feel the life ebb from her body, something more will stir in me and radiate from me than I can feel or express now.

Maybe, when I witness, "up close and personal," the inescapable and implacable tragedy of her dying, I'll glow with more life and be able to meet my own eventual death or help others to meet theirs with fewer regrets than my friend undoubtedly feels over decades of wasted opportunities.

Like Wow, Man!

2010-05-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

The longer I live and the more disillusioned I become with the so-called "meaningful" and "important" pursuits of life, the more I come to think that the quest to ride the "perfect wave" or engage in some joyfully meaningless equivalent is about the best we can hope for in this pointless life. So why not do it with all the gusto, if perhaps with a little less stereotypical mental and verbal incoherence, of the surfer dude below?

Quote of the Day--Noam Chomsky on Higher Education in America

2010-05-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

"I had a startling experience a few weeks ago. I travelled to Mexico City for talks at the National University, an enormous and very impressive institution with high standards of achievement and scholarship. Entrance is selective, but the university is virtually free. I then visited an even more remarkable institution, the college in Mexico City established by former mayor Lopez Obrador. Again, the facilities and standards are quite impressive. It is not only free, but has open admissions, though sometimes that requires some delay and sometimes assistance for students lacking adequate preparation. Shortly after I went to San Francisco for talks, and learned more about the California institutions of higher education. They have been at the very peak of the international higher education system. By now tuitions are quite high, even for in-state students, and cutbacks are affecting teaching, research, and staff. It would be no great surprise if the two major state universities, UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, will soon be privatized while the remainder of the state system is reduced considerably in scale and level. Needless to say, Mexico is a poor country with a struggling economy, and California should be one of the richest places in the world, with incomparable advantages. I mention these recent experiences only to emphasize that the recent cut-backs in higher education seen in much of the world cannot simply be traced to economic problems. Rather, they reflect fundamental choices about the nature of the society in which we will live. If it is to be designed for the wealthy and privileged, mostly engaged in management and finance while production is transferred abroad and most of the population is left to fend somehow for themselves at the fringes of decent and creative life, then these are good choices. If we have different aspirations for the world of our children and grandchildren, the choices are shameful and ruinous."
--Noam Chomsky

Quote of the Day--4/21/10

2010-04-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

"I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions. Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”
--Noam Chomsky

Quote of the Day

2010-03-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

"Why do we dream? As a chronic insomniac, I like to pretend that our dreams are meaningless narratives, a series of bad B-movies invented by the mind. I find solace in the theory that all those inexplicable plot twists are just random noise from the brain stem, an arbitrary montage of images and characters and anxieties. This suggests that I'm not missing anything when I lie awake at night -- there are no insights to be wrung from our R.E.M. reveries.

While we're fast asleep, the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget.

Unfortunately for me, there's increasing evidence that our dreams are not neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance. The narratives that seem so incomprehensible why was I running through the airport in my underwear? -- are actually careful distillations of experience, a regurgitation of all the new ideas and insights we encounter during the day."

--Jonah Lehrer, from his blog The Frontal Cortex

It's That Time of Year Again

2010-03-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

Today's my birthday. I won't say how old I am. The older I get, the less inclined I am to say how old that is. Not that I'm likely to be saying it to anyone but myself here. Who else reads this blog anymore or has any reason to, if they ever did?

But whether I'm writing this only to myself or also to some anonymous reader or two "out there," I'm writing to maintain a tradition. I think I've posted an entry on my birthday ever since I started this blog God knows how long ago. Why stop now? Why stop until I can't write anymore because I'm either too debilitated or just plain dead?

Every year this time, I think it may be the last March 24 I'll ever see. One of these March 24th's will be the last one for me. Perhaps it's this one. Or maybe I'll see ten, twenty, or even more. In the cosmic scheme of things, it hardly matters. In my personal scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter as much as it should. Or should the personal and the cosmic schemes of things coincide? Should I take my continuation any more seriously than the universe takes it? "Under the aspect of eternity" is how Spinoza expressed it in equivalent Latin.

If I do have a next birthday and I'm willing and able to write about it here, I hope I have more positive things to say about the preceding year than I have now. Not that it's been really bad year, mind you. But it would have been nice had it been better than it was. Yet, the only way I think it can be better is if I make it better. And so far I haven't found an effective way to do that.

In the meantime, I've apparently lost a friend or, perhaps more accurately, discovered that he probably wasn't a true friend to begin with; I've become more skeptical about so-called "spirituality;" and I've started to follow my bliss, even if it will likely lead nowhere except, perhaps, to bliss or the closest thing to it that I'm capable of knowing at this point.

I guess you could say that I'm like a lot of people on their birthday. I wish I'd never been born but grateful to be alive. I wish I'd done better with my life but relieved that I haven't done even worse. I'm not thrilled to see another year pass but hopeful that I'll see at least several more and be able to share them with my loving and lovely wife and our two feline boys.

Happy birthday to me.

Quote of the Day

2010-03-13T08:10:00.000-08:00

"In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office."
--David Brooks

A Gold Medal Commercial

2010-02-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

I've never been a big fan of winter sports. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. It never snows there. Well, actually, it snowed enough there once, almost fifty years ago, to collect on the ground.

So, although I've always watched the summer Olympics closely, I've seldom paid much attention to the winter Olympics. But I've been watching a fair amount of them this time around. I'm not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I now live in Sacramento and have taken several trips to Lake Tahoe and Reno lately. Not when it snowed, except for one time when we ran into a few flakes driving home. But perhaps just being in closer proximity to places where winter sports are extremely popular and I hear lots of talk about skiing and snowboarding on local TV channels raised my interest level a little.

In any case, in addition to enjoying the winter Olympics, especially K.D Lang's incredibly moving version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" during the opening ceremony, I'm liking some of the commercials. The one I'm liking most is from P&G, Procter & Gamble. Maybe I'm just an old softie, but the commercial below has brought sweet tears to my eyes. I may not have any kids, only cats, but when I watch this commercial, I can just imagine how a proud but anxious parent would feel watching their son or daughter compete in the winter Olympics.

Hooray for Craigslist

2010-01-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

Those who run newspapers and other businesses supported by paid advertising may not share my feelings, but I love Craigslist. I needed to get rid of an old, wooden storage shed in my backyard, and less than a minute after my ad offering the shed for free posted, someone called about it. That person didn't end up taking the shed, but someone did the next day. That ad saved me a lot of work or money, and I paid nothing to post it.

I don't know how Craigslist survives without paid advertising, and I realize that it has hurt businesses. But, the "Craigslist killer" and other problems notwithstanding, I'm grateful that Craigslist exists for "little people" like me to very effectively advertise for free our goods and services, to find jobs, and to do other things.

Kaiser's Stolen Medical Records

2010-01-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

I praised Kaiser Permanente the other day for the openness of electronic communication between it and its members. I wrote that I loved the fact that patients could e-mail their physicians, access their lab results and other medical records, and handle other matters online.

But the downside of this and of electronic medical records in general is illustrated by a recent story of a Kaiser employee who had a hard drive with medical files of over 15,000 Northern California Kaiser members stolen from her car parked in front of her house. She was subsequently fired for her negligence, but the information she lost could well be in malicious hands.

A Kaiser spokesperson maintains that this was a "low risk" breach that did not include social security numbers, but I wouldn't want ANY of my medical or financial information ending up with unauthorized individuals, and I hope that this never happens to me, and that Kaiser and other health providers can find more foolproof ways of protecting their members' health information while still allowing them the wonderful access to it that I have with Kaiser Permanente.

Legal Travesty or Justice?

2010-01-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to make of this.

On Sunday, May 31 of last year, George Tiller was murdered while he was acting as a greeter in the foyer of the church he attended in Wichita, Kansas. Scott Roeder calmly walked up to him, pressed a .22 caliber pistol to his forehead, and pulled the trigger. Roeder was arrested shortly thereafter and charged with first-degree murder and other crimes.

His trial has just begun, and the presiding judge has already made a highly controversial and unexpected ruling. He ruled that Roeder can be allowed to argue to the jury that he committed voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder.

You see, Roeder was an anti-abortion activist and his victim, Dr. George Tiller, was one of the only late-term abortion providers in the country. Roeder has openly maintained that his act was justified because he was defending the unborn's "right to life," and he will now be able to argue before a jury that his killing of Dr. Tiller was motivated by, in the words of Kansas' law defining 'voluntary maslaughter, ' "an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force." Those "circumstances" were, of course, the imminent abortion of late-term fetuses.

Prosecutors had expected this to be an open and shut case in which Roeder would be tried for first degree murder, found guilty, and sentenced appropriately. But the judge's ruling, if not reversed in the wake of the prosecutor's challenge, means that Roeder could be found guilty of a far lesser offense and released from prison within five years for his cold-blooded killing of a physician with legal license to perform late-term abortions.

Like I said, I don't know what to make of this, because I can readily see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, I believe that abortion should be permitted, and that people who kill doctors to prevent them from performing legal abortions should have the book thrown at them. But, on the other hand, I have reservations about late term abortions, and, more importantly in this case, it seems very clear to me that Roeder's actions follow the letter of the Kansas legal definition of "voluntary manslaughter." If we're a "nation of laws," shouldn't we follow the law even in cases like Roeder's?

Actually, I'm inclined to think that the law should be changed and the distinction between first-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter eliminated. If you consciously intend to do what Roeder did and you do it, you should be put away for the rest of your life or even executed for it if there's capital punishment in your state. But that's not the way of Kansas' and, I suspect, other states' law. and I'm inclined to believe that the law should be followed.

Yet, what happens if we do follow the law in the Roeder case and he ends up serving five years or less in prison for what he did, as well as being hailed as a hero by anti-abortion activists? Who will be murdered next by one of these misguided souls in the aftermath of Roeder's relative "victory"?

Quick Review of "Love Actually"

2010-01-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

I watched a harmless piece of cinematic fluff last night with my wife. It was a 2003 British romantic comedy called Love Actually. It's one of those stories of an almost endless multitude of vaguely interlocking subplots involving interrelated characters in which, for instance, the Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) falls in love with a personal assistant whose young brother and sister are in a Christmas school play in which the Prime Minister's sister (Emma Thompson) also has children participating and another character (Liam Neeson) whose wife recently died also has a stepson in the play...well, you get the picture.

There are many big name actors in this movie, and, although it's not the kind of movie I would seek out or probably even enjoy if I went to a theater by myself to watch it or to review it as a paid movie critic, and I found the subplots too shallow and implausible to be as involving as they might have been, with the possible exception of the one about a burned out, cynical, former rock star (Bill Nighy) who forthrightly and amusingly lampoons his unexpectedly successful albeit ghastly reworking of the old Trogg's classic "Love is All Around," I actually grinned a lot, laughed a little, and felt the warm fuzzies watching it in the intimate comfort of home with my wife who enjoyed it even more than I did. And there was a special poignancy to Liam Neeson's role as a grieving widower given the fact that his real life wife, Natasha Richardson, died last year after a skiing accident.

I think you might enjoy "Love Actually" too under similarly hospitable circumstances. I give it a B-.

Genocidal Bioweapons

2010-01-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I took my car in for maintenance, and, while I sat in the waiting room, I watched a History Channel program called "Last Days on Earth" that listed what it said were the greatest threats facing the Earth and humankind. Number two on the list, just behind climate change brought on by misguided human activity, was the ominous possibility of a pandemic deadly enough to wipe out virtually all of the human race. A naturally mutated pathogen such as H5N1 could be bad enough, but suppose some nutcake with the knowhow combined something like Ebola with another pathogen as contagious as the common cold and released it. The consequences could be horrifying and catastrophic beyond imagination.

I have to think that this is the greatest single threat we face from terrorism. It seems far more doable than a nuclear bomb and even more devastating. Maybe it won't happen because even the craziest terrorist should realize that once he or she unleashes such an indiscriminately destructive bioweapon, there's no controlling it, and everyone, including the terrorists and their loved ones, will end up being terrorized and probably dead. This defeats the purpose of terrorism--to terrorize one group to benefit another. But there may be capable people who really ARE demented enough, perhaps with the ungodly help of warped religious apocalypticism, to perpetrate this genocidal act in the name of a justly wrathful Allah or God or whomever, and that will be that. Talk about Pandora's Box!

One of my big concerns with shows like "Last Days" is that they may help to bring about the horrific cataclysms they talk about by giving the right person the wrong idea at the right time to spur them to successfully act on it. Of course, the same thing could be said about this blogpost, with the major difference being that yours truly may now be about the only one reading this blog any longer. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Osama has "better" things to do with his time.

But still I wonder if and when the pandemic of all pandemics will come, and I hope to God it's no time soon.

Thriving With Kaiser

2010-01-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

My wife and I recently acquired different health coverage from what we've had for the past several years. We now have Kaiser Permanente, and I have to say that so far so good. With our previous coverage, we each had separate doctors in separate locations, and if we needed X-rays taken or lab tests or eye exams performed or prescriptions filled, we had to go to a different facility for each. Now we can do all of these things and more in the same facility. I really like that.

I also like the fact that you can go online and communicate with your doctors by e-mail, see summaries of your previous appointments including your vital signs, tests ordered, and your doctor's diagnoses and recommendations, and you can also check your lab results as soon as they come in and follow links from the results page to pages explaining what those results mean.

All of this seems to get me much more involved in my health care. It also doesn't hurt that I really, really like my new primary care doctor. He's very friendly and very seasoned without appearing to be antiquated.

I know that some people don't like Kaiser. They say it handles patients like an assembly line, that it's miserly with patient care, and that it restricts patients too much in whom they can see for diagnosis and treatment and in what treatments they can receive. And there may be something to all of these criticisms. I certainly think that if someone had a very serious disease and could benefit from seeing a leading specialist, Kaiser might not be his best choice. But for most people with most medical needs, I think Kaiser may be pretty good.

Having said that, I'll try to keep my eyes open to any weaknesses Kaiser might have or dangers it might present with mismanagement of patient care. I know that my grandparents had Kaiser coverage for many years and ended up dying in the same Kaiser facility. But they were very old and very sick when they did. The thing that distressed me before they died is that Kaiser was often very eager to discharge my grandparents before they seemed ready to come home and for me to give them the care they needed. But I'm sure that's not unique to Kaiser. No matter what kind of health coverage we have, we need to educate ourselves, stay vigilant, and to not let ourselves be railroaded through the system.

Steven Seagal's a Real "Lawman"

2009-12-03T11:50:00.000-08:00

I've long admired Steven Seaga l for his martial arts prowess and for the way he displayed it in his earlier films. He was the first I'm aware of to showcase the relatively obscure but transcendently beautiful marital art of aikido in action films, and I always wished that he would take it to a higher level with an exquisitely spiritual and intelligent film about the martial arts in which his aikido would be the focus. However, no such work appears to be in the cards judging by the deluge of low budget and largely incoherent direct-to-DVD action films that Seagal has made over the past decade or more.

But this is not to say that Seagal doesn't still have some surprises up his gi. Some may be surprised to learn that he's a singer, songwriter, and guitarist who has played with the likes of B.B. King, appeared in the venerable Guitar Player magazine, and released a couple of albums.

But what REALLY surprised me a month or so ago was learning that Seagal has been a reserve deputy sheriff in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana for the past twenty odd years and that he had a new A&E reality series coming out that shows him going on patrol with "full police powers" and also instructing fellow deputies in self-defense and shooting skills. That's right, Seagal reveals himself to be a master marksman. He always looked like he really knew what he was doing with a gun in his hand in his films, and it turns out that he did.

Well, that new show premiered last night, and I have to say that I was quite impressed by it and by Seagal. I admit to a fondness for cop and medical reality shows, and I think Steven Seagal Lawman is going to be my favorite of the bunch as he chases gun-toting criminals and brings them literally to their knees for real, and instructs fellow deputies in "Zen-shooting" techniques and ably demonstrates them by shooting the heads off matchsticks, and teaches how to safely disarm and neutralize criminals who put up a fight. I love this new show and hope it thrives.

I also wish the best for Seagal in his future film and music making, martial arts instruction, and personal life.

Below are videos of him (from top to bottom) demonstrating aikido on the Merv Griffin show years before he became a star with his first film Above the Law, teaching aikido in Japan and the U.S., teaching and patrolling on Steven Seagal Lawman, and, finally, performing as a musician and delightfully dirty old man in a gorgeous music video shot in Thailand.

Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain

2009-11-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

I've been strolling down basketball memory lane the past few days with YouTube and stumbled across this treasure of an interview with two towering titans of the game.

Justice?

2009-11-10T12:42:00.000-08:00

I just watched President Obama give a brilliant and moving speech at Ft. Hood about last week's massacre. At one point, he spoke of the "justice" the "gunman" will receive "in this world and the next." I'm wondering what justice would entail in a case such as this.

Fall in Sacramento

2009-11-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

Early fall is my favorite season of the year. The joltingly crisp morning air. The soothingly warm afternoons. The comfortably cool evening walks in the park. I love early fall in Sacramento. It's my favorite time of the year.

"Proof" of Hell's Goodness

2009-11-01T12:24:00.000-08:00

God is completely good; therefore, he does only what is good.
God everlastingly tortures most of the human race after they die.
Therefore, God's everlasting torture of most of the human race is good.

Can You Tell Me How?

2009-10-31T08:40:00.000-07:00

For all you Christians who rebuke nonbelievers like me for condemning everlasting torture and for condemning THE IDEA of a supremely good God who inflicts everlasting torture on most of the human race after they die, can you tell me how I can force myself to believe that this God exists, and can you tell me how I can force myself to see something--everlasting torture of most of the human race--as good rather than the way I've always seen it: as something hideous, horrible, and monstrously evil? You tell me I'm wrong to see it the way I have since I left the church as a boy of twelve. Can you tell me how I can force myself to grow up and see God's everlasting torture of most of the human race as a GOOD thing?

A Hellish God?

2009-10-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

Below is a comment I posted to someone else's blog this morning following a recent discussion of Christianity that, I suppose you could say, went nowhere.

Coonhound, yesterday you said that no one you know had ever criticized your Christian faith the way I have here. I don't doubt this. I don't take this subject lightly. I've given it a lot of thought, and I think my questions and criticisms are worth considering. I also think that this is not a church or private establishment where I should be expected to show deference to anyone's religion, but a public internet forum where people should be able to discuss subjects like Christianity in a straightforward manner so long as they don't personally attack or insult the people with whom they're discussing them.

I believe that I have lived up to this standard rather well over the past several days in my discussion of Christianity. I have not attacked you personally for your beliefs. I haven't called you stupid or crazy or gullible or anything of the kind, unlike your calling me evil in various ways, but I HAVE strongly questioned and criticized Christian teachings. Chiefly and most strongly, I've criticized the idea that the supremely loving, just, and merciful nature that the Christian God is alleged to have is compatible with hell. I have said that I find the idea of hell to be obscene; therefore, I find the idea of a supremely loving, just, and merciful God creating hell and then consigning souls to it obscene.

I know this is something that you haven't been able to wrap your mind around. You think that only someone under Satan's evil influence could make such an argument. But I ask you to keep something in mind.

You and I come at this discussion from two radically different perspectives. From your believer's perspective, it is a given that God exists, that scripture reveals his nature, and that this nature is one of supreme goodness unadulterated by evil; therefore, everything God does is necessarily good, whether we fully understand how it is or not.

But from my perspective, as a non-believer because i have yet to be convinced of God's existence, of scriptural truth, and of God's supreme, unadulterated goodness, I have to look at what God has allegedly done and discern whether his reported actions substantiate his alleged perfect goodness.

And one of the things I see when I do this is a God who created a horrible, horrible place where the souls of people who didn't love and obey him in this life are forced in the next to spend all eternity suffering unimaginably terrible torment. I look at this idea, and I just can't wrap my mind around the notion that this could EVER be justified. I just can't understand how a truly loving God could do such a seemingly hateful thing, how a truly just God could inflict a punishment that seems infinitely worse than anyone's sin could possibly be, and how a truly merciful God could do something that seems utterly and completely devoid of mercy.

And because I don't come at this from the perspective of a believer, I can't simply tell myself, "Even though this makes no sense to me, I must accept it because I know that God is good." As a non-believer looking to determine whether I have grounds to believe in God and his goodness, I must examine the claims made about his nature and conduct and come to the best conclusions I can about whether they are consistent with one another or inconsistent.

And when I look at the claims of God's supreme goodness and then I look at the teaching concerning hell, I see a terrible, terrible inconsistency. And so I tentatively conclude one of two things: Either God is supremely loving, just, and merciful, and hell doesn't exist, or God is not supremely loving, just and merciful, and hell does or at least could exist. But, wait, I need to take this further.

From my non-believer's perspective, there cannot possibly be anything more obscenely evil than forcing someone to suffer unimaginably horrendous agony forever and ever. There is simply nothing they could ever do during this ephemeral lifetime here on earth to justify this consequence. Therefore, any being who would subject anyone to this must also be obscenely evil, just as, in your mind, any human being who would do what Phillip Garrido has done must be obscenely evil. By Phillip Garrido's "fruits" YOU shall know him, and by God's fruits *I* shall know HIM. And hell seems to this non-believer to be the most despicably vile fruit of which I can conceive.

Could I be mistaken in this? Of course. But I do the best I know how to know truth and to distinguish it from falsehood. There are many false religious and other kinds of beliefs in this world. We all must use the tools God or nature gave us to evaluate them rather than either reject them out of hand or embrace them without question. That is what I'm doing here. No more, no less.

Why?

2009-10-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

I could never kill myself. I love my wife and my cats too much, and I'm too much of a coward to do it. But at times like this, I wonder why I'm here. It all seems so stupid and pointless. Me, most of all.

Introducing Yet Another New Blog

2009-10-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

I just kicked off a new blog today and posted my first entry to it. The blog is titled Freedom or Necessity?

I know what you're thinking: "That guy has had other blogs that fizzled out after a few posts. Why should this one be any different?"

Well, it should be different because it's about something I've been interested in since I was a teenager. It's the issue of free will vs. determinism. Are we free to will what we do or only to do as we will? That is, when we will something, were we free to will anything else at that time, or did we have to will what we did given our nature at that time?

This is one of the thorniest and most enduring and engaging issues in the history of philosophy, and it draws upon all kinds of philosophical and scientific disciplines for answers. I want to learn more about what those disciplines have to say on the matter and report and reflect on what I've learned in my blog.

I've posted several commentaries here on what I currently believe regarding the issue, but, let's face it, I'm an ignoramus when it comes to all this stuff. I've been talking off the top of my head instead of marshaling strong rational arguments and adducing persuasive empirical findings to back my airy speculations.

It's time for a change, and my new blog will usher in that change. I hope you'll check it out, like what you see, and take your shoes off and sit a spell.

Should Blackmail Be a Crime?

2009-10-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard the big story about the attempted blackmail of David Letterman. A CBS News producer threatened to release information about Letterman having had sexual relations with some of his female staff unless Letterman paid him $2,000,000. Letterman told his lawyer,
his lawyer set up meetings with the would-be blackmailer and contacted the authorities, and the end result was that the blackmailer was arrested after Letterman testified before a grand jury. Then, last night, Letterman disclosed all of this during a segment of "The Late Show."

I don't know when Letterman, who recently married a woman with whom he's been involved for over twenty years and has one child with her, had these sexual encounters with female staff members. And my purpose in bringing up this story is not to discuss the morality of his sexual
behavior. I want to discuss something else.

First off, I'm glad he reported the blackmail attempt to the authorities instead of paying the money. I despise blackmail, and, if there's going to be a law against it, then I want it socked to anyone and everyone who tries to perpetrate it. But, having said that, when I ask myself if
blackmail should be prohibited by law, I feel a little perplexed. Why? Because, if you really think
about it, even though blackmail seems morally reprehensible, does its egregiousness rise to the level of criminality?

Well, obviously it DOES rise to it in the sense that it IS a crime. But SHOULD it be a crime? After all, if the guy who tried to blackmail Letterman had simply released the information he threatened to release without demanding money not to release it, there's no law against THAT.
So, why IS there a law against the extra component of asking for money not to release the information?

Of course, blackmail is a form of extortion. But extortion can include threatening to do something ILLEGAL to someone if one isn't compensated in some way for not doing it. But, again, releasing information to the public about an adult's sexual escapades is not illegal in and of itself, so why should threatening to do something legal if one isn't paid not to be a crime?

I'm not saying that I feel convinced that there shouldn't be such a law. On an emotional level, I'm glad this guy got arrested, and I hope he spends the next few years in prison and that others are deterred from trying to do what he did. But, on an intellectual level, I'm not sure I
can justify making blackmail a crime. Can you?

What do you think?

Quote for the Day

2009-08-22T17:02:00.000-07:00

This, I learned, is what the NHS is about -- common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.
--Stephen Amidon, Salon

Quote for the Day

2009-07-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

In the late 1800s a sickly farmer's son named Frank W. Woolworth opened the first "five-and-dime"; later, foreshadowing a future that workers around the world now seem doomed to live out, he quipped, "We must have cheap labor or we cannot sell cheap goods. When a clerk gets so good she can earn better wages elsewhere, let her go." The understanding is that she'll have somewhere else to go, where her skills and talents are wanted or needed, considered something worth paying for. But increasingly in our current work climate, more skills only make a worker more expensive and possibly more demanding, not more desirable.
--Stephanie Zacharek

Reflections on the Madoff Sentence

2009-06-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison today for perpetrating an elaborate Ponzi scheme that swindled untold numbers of people out of a reputed tens of billions of dollars over a period of over twenty years.

I feel ambivalent about his sentence. On the one hand, Madoff ruined the lives of so many people that I believe he should spend the rest of his life in prison. Indeed, if we're going to have a death penalty, and the death penalty is reserved for those who commit the most destructive crimes, I believe that Madoff should receive the death penalty, even if that might be less punitive than enduring years if not decades in prison with no hope of getting out.

On the other hand, I'm a psychological determinist. That is, I believe that everything we do is the inevitable result of psychological causes that we did not cause. I don't know what caused Madoff to do what he did, but I believe that, given the interplay of his genetics, his brain structure and functioning, his environment, his life experience, and who knows what else, Bernie Madoff had to do what he did.

Yet, if that's true, how fair or just is it to punish Madoff with a life sentence for doing what he couldn't help but do? I wrestle with this question not only with respect to Bernie Madoff but also with respect to everyone convicted of any crime. I haven't arrived at any clear answers. But so far as Madoff is concerned, I believe that had he known before he began defrauding people that he could receive a life sentence for it, he might well never have done it, and others will almost certainly be deterred by his sentence from doing something similar. I also believe that "we the people" have a sense that justice has been served in the Madoff case and that this is better for our country than if we had the sense that guys like Madoff always get off relatively easy while the rest of us would have the proverbial book thrown at us for far less impactful crimes.

As I read what I've just written, I guess I'm making a utilitarian argument for Madoff's sentence. I'm arguing that its effects on potential white collar criminals and society as a whole is likely to be more good than bad. But still, to a psychological determinist like me, it hardly seems fair or just.

What's more, it would be interesting to ponder what I would think of Madoff's sentence if I could somehow know that it was unlikely to deter others from committing similar crimes or was unlikely to have a net positive effect on society. I suppose the vengeful part of me would still rejoice in Madoff's sentence. But another and presumably wiser part of me would probably feel profound misgivings.

But what I would like to see now is an effective investigation into just how Madoff was able to perpetrate fraud on such an incredible scale for such an amazingly long time despite ample cause for suspicion and even credible warnings that he was up to no good. Who wasn't on the ball, or worse, and what should our justice system do with THEM?

Quote for the Day

2009-06-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

In the end, sometimes our reactions were divorced from reason and rationale, and had nothing to do with how we felt about him. They were reactions born of the raw emotion that comes when a seam in the fabric of our culture unravels, when someone as undeniably monumental as Michael Jackson dies.
--Monica Hesse, Washington Post

Quote of the Day

2009-06-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

A new president -- even one as talented and well-motivated as Obama -- can't get a thing done in Washington unless the public is actively behind him. As FDR said in the reelection campaign of 1936 when a lady insisted that if she were to vote for him he must commit to a long list of objectives, "Maam, I want to do those things, but you must make me."
--Robert Reich

RIP King of Pop

2009-06-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

"I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out."
--Andrew Sullivan

I was never a fan of Michael Jackson. I never even owned a copy of "Thriller" or tried to moonwalk. But I am riveted to the news of his shocking death, and I feel very moved and very sad. He was the ostensive definition of "superstar" even decades after the music and videos that made him one. I guess that made him a permanent fixture of my life from the days of the Jackson 5 on.

He was prodigiously talented, he was a shrewd self-promoter, and he worked extremely hard. He was also a bizarre and tragic figure who had himself surgically mutilated to unbelievable depths of grotesqueness and was so out of place in our world that he fashioned one of his own. To paraphrase a commentator on CNN: as a child, he seemed like an adult, and as an adult, he seemed like a child.

Maybe the world would be better off without its superstars and idol worship. And maybe Michael Jackson's death is no more important than anyone else's, including Farrah Fawcett's. But it sure doesn't feel that way.

Moving to My New Blog

2009-03-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

I just created my new blog and posted my first entry to it. It's titled Reinventing Myself. That means I won't be posting here anymore. Or maybe not. My new blog is about how I'm seeking to transform myself in a positive way through positive ways of thinking, acting, and seeing the world. So, its scope may not be broad enough to embrace everything I want to write about, and I may still post things here that I can't post there. But I'll be concentrating on my new blog and on the effort to transform myself that that blog represents. So I hope you'll join me over there, and feel free to bring your friends with you.

My New Job

2009-03-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

After I lost my job as a medical records clerk, I wrote that I wouldn't post to this blog again until I found a new job. Well, I've found one. No, not THAT kind of job. My new job doesn't pay a salary. But it has the potential to pay enormous benefits. I call it the job of reinventing myself. I adapted this job title from a book I've started reading: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Reinventing Yourself. I intend to do what the book suggests and by the ways it counsels.

One of those ways is to break with the past. Do new things, or do old things in new ways. So, this is my penultimate post to this blog. My final post will simply announce my new blog. I expect to unveil my new blog this weekend. Its purpose will be to chronicle my efforts to reinvent myself using what I call the power of realistically positive thinking and acting. If this blog was about or started out being about nakedly reflecting whatever interested or concerned me at the moment, my new blog will be about what I'm thinking and doing to transform myself into the person I want to be. Everything I write there will have the positive purpose of facilitating that transformation.

And you'll be able to follow my progress and, perhaps, take inspiration from it to reinvent or transform yourself into more of the person you want to be. For I suspect that most of us want to be the best we can be but haven't gotten there yet.

Gone Fishing For A New Job

2009-02-16T10:49:00.002-08:00

I'll be out of a job come the end of this month. So, I've decided to stop blogging until I find a new one. Not only will this motivate me to find a new job sooner, but it will also clear away at least one major distraction to my doing everything necessary to succeed.

I've heard that if one wants to get really good at something, he needs to do it virtually every day. That may be true, and I would like to get better at writing and blogging. But I need to earn the money to pay my bills first. I may never be able to do this by writing or blogging, so I need to focus all of my resources right now on finding a decent job.

I look forward to my next post, because it will mean that I've found one and that I'm again able to do what I love doing most.

Being Like Jeff

2009-02-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

I long to speak and write the way Jeff Beck plays guitar. At his best, his whole being is in every note. At my best, my whole being is in every word.

Inside each of us, there is ugliness as well as beauty. Yet, when we mindfully and continuously bring what is inside out into the light of awareness, are we not transformed and transforming? Do we not shine with the radiant beauty of Jeff Beck playing Somewhere Over The Rainbow?

I'm Being Laid Off

2009-02-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

I wrote recently that I expected to be laid off from my job at the end of this month. I found out yesterday that I was right. February 27 will be my last day. I'm already preparing and looking for another job. When I find one, I hope it's better than the one I'm losing, even in today's economy.

My boss told me of a job that might open soon in another unit within the department and that he would give me his highest recommendation if I want to apply for it. I've heard bad things about that job, and I have misgivings about whether I'm up to it. But we'll see. I'm not desperate, but I am looking to rise above my doubts and to "feel the fear and do it anyway."

This may be a good time for it.

Musical Trio of Doom

2009-02-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

Two of these genius musicians, Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams, are no longer with us. But their music lives on. And John McLaughlin still lives to make more brilliant music.

Cash or Credit?

2009-02-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

Here is an imaginary transcript of the discussion Nadya Suleman had with doctors at the fertility clinic responsible for her recently giving birth to octuplets.

"So, Miss Suleman, you're 32, divorced, unemployed, attending college, living with your bankrupt parents in a three-bedroom home, you have six children between the ages of 1 and 6, your 2-year-old is autistic, and you want to have more children?"

"I sure do, Doctor!"

"No problem. We'll just implant eight embryos in your uterus and see what happens. Will that be cash or credit?"

And Eight Make Fourteen

2009-02-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard about the Southern California divorcee with six kids who recently gave birth to eight more. The first media stories about it were abuzz with excitement, but now they've become more restrained as people begin to ponder the implications of this event.

There are reports that the grandmother is so exasperated with her daughter's obsession with having children that she's threatened to leave her to her own devices. If she thinks it's bad now, just wait till the babies come home! The mother of the octuplets, Nadya Suleman, lives with her parents in a modest three bedroom house and apparently is unemployed with no source of income, and her parents themselves purportedly declared bankruptcy recently.

I feel upset about this story. Not so much about the mother herself, because I think she was almost certainly emotionally disturbed to be in her situation and still seek fertility treatment. What I find most upsetting is the doctor who agreed to help her have more children.

I don't know precisely what kind of treatment this doctor rendered, but it seems likely that it was a kind known to carry a significant risk of multiple births. I think this doctor's license to practice medicine should be revoked, or, if that's impossible under the existing laws and regulations, I think he or she should be hounded out of practice. Right now that's not possible since we don't even know who this miserable excuse for a doctor is. But if I knew who it was and I lived in Southern California, I'd want to be out picketing this doctor's clinic.

But leaving my anger and disgust aside, I worry about the children. Not only about the octuplets, but also about the other six young children, at least one of whom is reported to be autistic. How well can a single nutcase mom and her parents take care of all of them? No doubt they'll have help, monetarily and in other ways. I expect a book deal and a new cable channel series about them to compete with Jon and Kate Plus Eight. Perhaps it will be titled And Eight Make Fourteen.

But Kate has Jon to help her raise their set of twins and set of sextuplets, and even then it's a full time job for both of them, requring logistical planning and coordination that would impress the hell out of General Petraeus. How well is Nadya Suleman going to fare with fourteen kids and no Jon to help out?

And what can we as a society do to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again?

Hurdy Gurdy Joyfest

2009-01-31T20:03:00.000-08:00

'Twas then when the hurdy gurdy man
Came singing songs of love.
Then when the hurdy gurdy man
Came singing songs of love.
--Donovan

I'm in a retro, psychedelic mood tonight. And, for some reason, I was drawn to Donovan's immortal Hurdy Gurdy Man.

I've never been sure what or who the song is about. Actually, I just read tonight that it was Donovan's gift to his musician friend Mac MacLeod, bassist in a 60's Danish-English power trio called Hurdy Gurdy. I've also heard that it refers to the then superstar guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

But it doesn't really matter to me who Donovan was writing for or about. What matters is that this amazing song has always resonated with something deep inside me that yearns for ecstatic, soul-expanding release from my self-imposed semi-isolation from the wide, sometimes wonderful world that surrounds and, ultimately, IS me.

I love this song.

Donovan's original recording.

Steve Hillage's celebratory version.

Finally, Steve Hillage's Hurdy Gurdy Glissando.

Bad News = Opportunity

2009-01-31T09:22:00.000-08:00

It's official. Many of the per diem jobs, mine included, are being eliminated, and the ones that remain will be filled by those who want them and have the most seniority. This means that I, one of the most recent hires, will almost certainly be laid off come February 28.

I could feel sorry for myself, but my house is paid for and I have no kids to support. The people I really feel sorry for are those with big mortgages and kids to feed, clothe, and put through school.

I could see my situation as a catastrophe. But, instead, I choose to see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to find another job that offers a higher salary, paid vacation and sick leave, health coverage for me and my wife, and, most importantly, makes more fulfilling use of my interests and talents.

I don't hate my current job. I like and respect my supervisors and co-workers, I keep physically active, and I'm earning money that helps to pay the bills.

But surely I can find and do something better than an entry level clerical job with a low salary and no benefits. Yes, I have my share of weaknesses, but I also have strengths that my current job scarcely taps. I need to focus not on what I'm losing but on what I stand to gain, and to welcome the layoff as a jump start to a better job and a better life.

In his remarkable novel Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse wrote a poem called Stages. Here is a passage I cherish from that poem and which sums up my view of my situation:

Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.

Quote of the Day

2009-01-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

Haggard's betrayal, his lies, his compulsions, his deceits are the excruciating function of this human dead end. What we have to do as Christians is open up this always-closing door, to find a way past the abstractions and neuroses of fundamentalism to a more honest and more human acceptance of gay people as God-like. Gay people, like all people, need love. We need family. And yet we are uniquely and cruelly denied these things. And no love and no family can be genuinely based on the deceit or self-hatred that are the alternatives.
--Andrew Sullivan

The Meeting

2009-01-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

I and my co-workers have been concerned for some time about the faltering economy combined with our ever-diminishing workload in the main file room of the medical records department of a major metropolitan health care system. We primarily process paper medical charts that leave and come into our department. But as more and more of these charts are being converted into electronic form, there are fewer and fewer paper charts for us to handle. This means that our department needs fewer and fewer clerks such as myself to do the work that needs to be done, unless we can be trained to perform new tasks. Yet, even if we could be, it seems that our department won't need as many of us as it has in the past. When thousands of paper charts are moving through the department every day, many clerks are needed to pull, toss, scan, bundle, un-bundle, repair, file, and transport them. But when this daily flow of paper charts reduces to a comparative trickle of hundreds or fewer or ceases altogether and most or all patient information is processed by computer, a virtual skeleton crew can probably take care of business.

So my co-workers and I have been waiting for months for the bad news, and we just learned yesterday that it may well come tomorrow, Friday. We relatively new per diem clerks, as opposed to the "career" clerks who've been there for many years, have been asked to come in to work thirty minutes early tomorrow for a special meeting concerning "future plans" for our department. We all think this means that we're going to be told that some, if not many, of us are going to be laid off immediately or in the near future. We could be wrong about this, but I suspect that we're right and that it's time to start looking seriously for another job.

This can be a daunting task for just about anyone in today's economic free fall. For a guy like myself, it can be even more so. But a guy's got to do what a guy's got to do, and so I will.

Quotes of the Day

2009-01-25T11:08:00.000-08:00

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.
--Rumi

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. - ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quote of the Day

2009-01-24T22:32:00.000-08:00

THIS I BELIEVE: That phenomena do not have any kind of demonstrable, intrinsic existence. That anything that is the composite sum of other parts is, logically, impermanent. That suffering is a given in any form of existence where confusion and ignorance are present. That when confusion and ignorance have been definitively eliminated, and goodness, caring, and wisdom have entirely taken their place, that is true happiness.
--Pamela White

Quote of the Day

2009-01-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
--Apple Ad

The Mind as a Pair of Scissors

2009-01-22T10:34:00.000-08:00

Jonah Lehrer, author of the delightful neuroscience blog The Frontal Cortex, posted an entry today about his new book How We Decide. This entry explains that the book examines the various factors that go into producing the various kinds of decisions we make including everything from choosing which flavor of Cheerios to buy at the supermarket to whether to take out a subprime mortgage.

In a Q&A section extracted from Amazon, Lehrer likens the mind to a pair of scissors. In this metaphor borrowed from Nobel Prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon, one blade of the scissors represents the brain and the other represents the brain's environment, and, just as we can't understand the operation of the scissors without understanding the simultaneous movement of both blades, so we can't understand the choices the mind makes without understanding the interaction of brain and environment.

In the comments section, this is what I wrote:

Jonah--
I look forward to reading your book, and, judging from Publisher's Weekly's starred review, you have nothing to be nervous about.

No doubt you address the free will vs determinism issue in your book. Herbert Simon's delightful metaphor of the brain and environment as the two blades of a pair of scissors reinforces my view that brain and environment are what the philosopher Alan Watts called a "unified field" and that the choices issuing from this field are the inevitable products of the conditions within it.

In other words, there is no freedom to choose other than what the conditions within the field produce, and there is also no determinism of something outside the field causing it to choose as it does, because, ultimately, the field encompasses everything of which there is nothing outside.

I do look forward to reading this book and to reviewing it here someday.

Sacramento Loses Again

2009-01-21T12:30:00.000-08:00

Last night, I received the following e-mail from Bruce Maiman, now former host of an excellent weeknight talk radio program on KBFK, AM 1530. First, KSAC changed its format from liberal talk radio to gospel. Now Sacramento has lost its last even-handed talk radio program with a local as well as national focus, and it has lost an outstanding host. I'm saddened and frustrated by the news.

Is there anything we can do to stop this kind of thing from happening, or is it the inevitable way of things?

Please accept my apologies in advance for this mass e-mail. I hate them, but there many of you and sending something to each of you individually is a bit cumbersome, so I hope you don't mind.

Our parent company, Clear Channel, conducted extensive layoffs nationwide today, Tuesday, dispatching nine percent of its total workforce. I was one of those let go and will no longer be broadcasting on KFBK each weeknight.

Radio for me has never been about any ego stroke --I have no delusions of grandeur; it's only radio. And it has never been about ratings success, which we have enjoyed here and which I have enjoyed elsewhere.

What I enjoy most, and what I will miss most, is the daily interaction with compelling listeners who have things to say, whether they agree or disagree. If you are on this list, it is likely because we have engaged in conversation either on the air or via the web that I have found stimulating, compelling, perhaps infuriating and frustrating, and always enjoyable. For that, I thank you. Talk radio isn't talk radio with people talking to each other, so each of you has, in some way, been a part of that dynamic and helped make the program what it eventually became.

It's an odd thing, radio being the intimate medium that it is, and yet I have no idea how some of you even came to be listeners. The program started nearly three years ago with a completely different take than the previous host and, as a consequence, had to be built from scratch. It is no small task to build a program on a conservative radio station with a host who isn't an ideologue conservative table pounding the desk while bashing Democrats and liberals for all that ails society. Not that ideologue on the left are any more productive. Considering today's events, one wonders if this kind of behavior won't finally, finally fade away and the country can resume on a more reasoned discourse.

Because the larger corporate interests that operate the Clear Channel properties nationwide have little interest in local radio, let alone California or Sacramento, the corporate mandate today was to replace local radio hosts with some kind of syndicated programming. Who that is and when exactly that will happen, I do not know, but as I understand it, that's what's in the cards, and that's the real misfortune: With the exception of a single midday hour each on two other stations, there will be no place for Sacramento listeners to go to talk about their city, their state, their community. Somewhere, an apology for that is in order, but those who should give it most, care the least.

Again, deep thanks for your time and your thoughts. It was a pleasure to have your company.

Sincerely,

Bruce Maiman

Quote of the Day

2009-01-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

Dan Rather, not usually my favorite pundit, said an oddly interesting thing on the Chris Matthews Show yesterday. He said that America was ready for the kind of leader who landed that plane in the Hudson the other day. I think he was right. That weird event became somehow symbolic of what the country is hoping will happen with Barack Obama as president. In the plane crash, tragedy was averted by a steady hand on the helm, a wise and prepared professional who did everything that could be done and prevailed, saving lives and giving the whole world confidence that competence and wisdom were still alive in the U.S.
--Mary Lois Timbes

It's Time to Sink or Swim

2009-01-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
--President Barack Obama

When John McCain chose Sarah Palin to run with him on the Republican ticket, I believed that he would be our next president. A crashing economy prevented that. So, today, I watched Barack Hussein Obama be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, and I heard him give a magnificent speech that crystallized the hopes of people throughout America and the world that a politics beyond politics and a new way of seeing and living in this world can lift us from the depths to which we've fallen and to the heights of which we dream our noblest dreams.

I'm not naive enough to believe that one man alone can lift us up, even if he is the president of the United States. Nor do I believe that one man can fully inspire all of us to work together to do the lifting. No, long after the words of Obama's stirring speech and all the pomp and circumstance of his inauguration have faded into history, we must look to ourselves and each other for the determination to change the way things are and for the strength to follow through day by day and hour by hour with that determination.

As President Obama made very clear in his address, perilous and difficult times lie ahead for the world, for this nation, and for us as families and individuals. The way I see it, we stand on barren ground decimated by fear, hatred, ignorance, and selfishness, and the promised land lies on the other side of a river. We must jump into the water and swim to the other side of the river to make it to a better place. We have no guarantee that we won't drown in our attempt, but we can be sure that if we don't make the effort, we will collectively if not individually perish from physical, moral, and spiritual stagnation and starvation.

Certainly, this is how I view my own situation. I've spent most of my adult life hiding from the world and fearing to take chances and fail. But now I see that I must leap into the water and either sink in resignation or summon all my strength and skill to swim to the other side of the river. If I do not try like I have never tried before, I will surely fail, and I don't wish to fail.

So, just as Obama's presidency begins in earnest tomorrow, so does my transformation in every aspect of my life as I exercise the full power of my own "presidency" over myself and everything I say and do from that point on.

Does this sound ambitious? No more than President Obama's speech.

Quote of the Day

2009-01-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

When we begin to treat culture as an object of our awareness, we can begin to dis-identify with its power over us and become unique, post-cultural individuals.
--William Harryman

Quote of the Day

2009-01-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

[Ray Kurzweil] seems to be saying that once a computer can cycle quickly enough, it will stop being an adding machine and become a sentient being. Does Kurzweil also believe that once a knitting machine makes enough mittens, it will turn into his grandmother?
--Peter K. Sampson

Obama's Warning

2009-01-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs. More families will lose their savings. More dreams will be deferred and denied. And our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.
--Barack Obama

Quote of the Day

2009-01-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
– John Muir

When we see the world with new, spiritual eyes, we realize it is God’s beach, God’s ocean, God’s world. We see ourselves as waves in the ocean of love that is God. We are not separate from one another, we realize, but we all exist as part of the sea, as a wave of the infinite ocean. This is seeing spiritually: seeing everything joined together – the waves of the sea, the light in the sky, the birds skimming along the whitecaps, the dogs running, the children playing, the warmth of the sand – everything together.

It is impossible to put this experience into words, but all those who try to do so describe it as a deep sense of fellowship with all creatures, from the little sandpipers to the mighty leviathans of the deep.
--Eknath Easwaran

Quote of the Day

2009-01-08T10:05:00.000-08:00

Despite having access to an astounding number of great and detailed dharma books, I found that they left out lots of details that turned out to be very important. I learned the hard way that using conceptual frameworks that were too idealistic or that were not fully explained could be as bad as using none at all. Further, I found out that much of the theory about progress contained ideals and myths that simply did not hold up to reality testing, as much as I wanted them to.
--Daniel M. Ingram

Quote of the Day

2009-01-07T10:08:00.000-08:00

In his classic poem "Paradise Lost", John Milton describes the angels debating how some of them could have sinned of their own free wills given that God had made them intelligent and happy. Why would they have done it? And why were they responsible for their sins rather than God, since God had made them the way they were and had complete foreknowledge of what they would do?
--Robert Kane

Proportionality in Asymmetric Warfare?

2009-01-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

The Economist magazine has a good article on Israel's attack on Gaza. It questions whether Israel's actions meet the following three "tests" for a "justified war":

A country must first have exhausted all other means of defending itself. The attack should be proportionate to the objective. And it must stand a reasonable chance of achieving its goal. On all three of these tests Israel is on shakier ground than it cares to admit.

I'm inclined to agree with The Economist that Israel is on "shaky ground" with respect to tests 1 and 3, but I really wonder about test 2--proportionality. Chris Dierkes of Indistinct Union has posted a thoughtful entry arguing that the criterion of proportionality cannot be meaningfully applied to the Israeli-Hamas situation. He quotes Shmuel Rosner:

But such is the tricky nature of modern warfare: How do we measure proportionality without reducing the concept to an impossibly pedantic tit-for-tat? (How would it work? For every rocket launched into an Israeli town, Israel would retaliate by launching a similar rocket? And even then, how could we achieve proportionality without making sure that Palestinians in Gaza have the same alarm systems and comparably effective shelters?) How do we measure “success” in a situation where no side is likely to bring real closure to a volatile situation?

Dierkes answers as follows:

Easy answer: you don’t and can’t. The doctrine of proportionality (which has its roots in classical just war theory) was announced–as Rosner correctly points out–in the 1907 Hauge Conventions. That defined the era of Clausewitz’s Trinitarian Theory of Warfare: government, armies, and populations. The first two fight the war, the third does not. In the post-nuclear, post WWII era, of Fourth Generation Guerrilla Insurgencies, propotionality is a meaningless term because what you have is the equivalent of a swarm of bees stinging an elephant. What would be a proportional response of an elephant to the bees? It doesn’t make any sense. Proportionality only works as a guiding principle within the bounds of a nation-state with a professional army built for conventional warfare. The other side in this conflict does not have that edifice of social organization and therefore is not going to abide by those rules. Meanwhile for the side that does (Israel in this case), the technological difference is so vast, there is no way (as Rosner himself points out in the article) for there ever to be a proportionate response. All the elephant can do is step on some bees. There is no proportionate elephant equivalent to a sting.

I'm inclined to agree with Dierkes that we cannot reasonably apply the concept of proportionality to the situation at hand and to other instances of asymmetric warfare. So, what do we do instead? Use only tests 1 and 2. or add a new test to the mix?

Solving the Israeli-Palestinian Problem

2009-01-04T08:29:00.000-08:00

When I watch news reports of Israel's invasion of Gaza and listen to spokespersons from both sides justify themselves and condemn the other, I feel overwhelmed with frustration, anger, and sadness that the violence and excuses continue and that human beings in that godforsaken part of the world are suffering terrible lives and dying terrible deaths because they can't escape the awful grip of stupidity and hatred.

Israel says they're attacking Gaza to stop Hamas from bombarding Israel with rockets. Hamas says it's bombarding Israel with rockets to stop it from blockading and abusing the impoverished people of Gaza. Israel says it's blockading Gaza and killing and arresting people there to punish terrorists and stop terrorism. Hamas says it commits the kind of violence it does against Israel because this is the only way it has of opposing the oppressive tyranny of a superior military force. Israel says it wouldn't need to exercise this force if Hamas would acknowledge Israel's right to exist and leave it alone. Hamas says that Israel has no right to exist because it seized its land illegitimately. Israel says it has a right to its land and to exist and protect itself. Back and forth the two sides go, irreconcilably justifying their own actions while condemning those of the other side, and showing no empathy and compassion for the other.

Several interviewers asked these spokespersons yesterday, "What will it take to stop the violence?" Each side said that the other side must first stop doing what it's been doing. Yet, neither side is willing to take that first step without assurances that the other side won't exploit it and that there will be lasting change for the better. And no such assurances seem forthcoming.

Into the breach steps psychotherapist and rabbi Michael Lerner with a detailed plan for bringing lasting peace to the Middle East. He argues that Israel, "as the militarily superior force," should take the first steps. They should consist of a "massive Marshall Plan in Gaza and the West Bank," dismantling all Israeli settlements in these areas, allowing controlled immigration of Palestinians into Israel, formally apologizing "for its role in the 1948 expulsions of Palestinians" and working with the rest of the world to compensate Palestinians who were inordinately harmed by the Occupation, and recognizing a Palestinian state as defined by the Geneva Accord of 2003. Then, Lerner suggests, the Israelis and Palestinians can get down to the business of implementing a plan in which each makes major concessions and where both sides are scrupulously monitored by an impartial international force that rigorously enforces the agreements between them.

But all of this needs to take place within a framework of each side acknowledging the humanity and the human needs for peace, safety, and prosperity shared by both sides of the aisle. Says Lerner:

The basic condition for creating peace is to help each side feel “safe” enough to ignore those within their own community who claim that peace is impossible and that no one cares about the safety of “the Jews,” or “the Palestinians.” A first and critical step is to speak in a language that is empathic toward the suffering of each people. Rather than try to prove that the Palestinians are “nothing but” terrorists or that Zionism is nothing but an elaborate scheme for continuing and escalating Western colonialism and imperialism, we must create a climate of discourse in which both sides’ stories are genuinely heard and undertstood.

As for what the United States can do to bring all of this about, Lerner writes:

The most significant contribution the new Obama Administration could make to Middle East Peace would be to embrace an alternative strategy: that homeland security is best achieved through generosity and caring for others. If the US were to announce its embrace of a Global Marshall Plan, beginning with the Middle East and backed up with money and the conscious articulation of a Strategy of Generosity, it would do more to help Israel than all the armaments it can promise and all the shuttle diplomacy it might facilitate. If this new way of thinking could become a major part of US policy, it would have an immense impact on undermining the fearful consciousness of Israelis who still see the world more through the frame of the Holocaust than through the frame of their actual present power in the world.

Is this the "pie-in-the sky" idealizing of some radical liberal intellectual hopelessly out-of-touch with the bleak realities of today's world? Many would say that it is. But what is the alternative to listening to people like Lerner and doing our best to transform their ideals into reality?

On Fareed Zakaria's show this morning, an Israeli spokesperson explained that the ground incursion into Gaza was designed to inflict such damage on Hamas that they could not credibly claim any kind of victory and which permanently removed their capacity to rain rockets down on Israel. But it seems to me that not only will Hamas survive to make claims of victory that will be embraced by the many who want to believe them, but also that Israel, without permanently and disastrously occupying Gaza, will not be able to keep Hamas or some other radical group from acquiring more rockets and moving them into position to fire them into Israel, and that, in any case, Israel's actions in Gaza will take many lives, maim many more, and stir up even more hatred resulting in more violence against Israel and its supporters. Conversely, the Palestinians will never be able to defeat Israel and take over all its lands. Therefore, unless the madness in the Middle East is to continue indefinitely, both sides must strike out in a bold new direction together. It might be the one outlined by Lerner. It might be someone else's.

But something different must be done if a different and better result is to be achieved. And neither side can coerce the other by rockets, bombs, or troops into settling for anything less.

Quote of the Day

2009-01-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
--Thomas Friedman

A Teaching Treasure

2008-12-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

As I was driving to work yesterday, I caught part of a talk radio interview with Foothill College astronomy instructor Andrew Fraknoi. I've been listening to this guy for decades, and every time I hear him, I am bowled over by his unflagging enthusiasm for astronomy and his supreme ability to convey complex scientific concepts in strikingly clear and simple terms. He's a science teaching treasure, and I wish he had wider media exposure, the way Carl Sagan did, and that there were more teachers like him not only in the sciences, but also in other disciplines such as philosophy and integral spirituality.

I also wish there were more people like him in all walks of life, gushing with enthusiasm not only for their work but for life in general, and radiant with benevolence and a love for learning.

I think we all benefit from having role models, and Andrew Fraknoi is one of mine.

A PBS interview with Andrew Fraknoi

Quote of the Day

2008-12-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed. What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds — which Moody’s or Standard & Poors rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?
--Thomas Friedman

Searching For a Way Through It All

2008-12-27T14:55:00.000-08:00

These are scary times economically. I want to believe that things won't get too bad, but it's a struggle when knowledgeable people such as Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and Robert Reich keep telling us how apprehensive they are.

Then there are the real prophets of doom such as Gerald Celente. He ominously predicts the imminent end of the world as we know it or, at least, of the United States as economic chaos inexorably engulfs us in the worst depression any living person has ever seen and produces catastrophic unemployment, poverty, hunger, and mob violence.

When I first heard Celente speak on Coast to Coast AM, I thought he was some kind of crackpot, albeit an articulate one, gearing his message to a listening audience filled with crackpots. But then I found out that respectable people take his economic and social forecasts seriously.

Then I read articles like this in Robert Reich's blog about how the leaders of the financial institutions and the "Big Three" auto manufacturers believe that our economic woes are less the result of bad business policies than they are of inevitable economic cycles and that as soon as the current situation improves, they will return to business as usual if we let them. Reich writes:

Right now, Wall Street and Detroit are willing to say whatever they need to say to keep the taxpayer money coming. But when the economy begins turning up, my betting is that their Washington lobbyists will push back hard against any major restructurings the government wants to impose on them. New regulations of Wall Street will be watered down and circumvented; new requirements on the Big Three for green technologies will be resisted.

Yet the bailouts have been sold to the public as means toward fundamental change in finance and autos. If the bailouts are to do what they're supposed to – stop Wall Street from wild risk-taking with piles of borrowed money, and push the auto industry into making fundamentally new products that conserve energy -- Washington will not only have to set strict standards now and in the months ahead when the bailout money flows, but also hang tough when the economy begins to revive.

I read things like this, and my hopefulness suffers further decline. For even if we manage to climb out of this economic mess before too long, it sounds to me as though the policies that got us here will resume, and we'll find ourselves in another and possibly worse mess before terribly long. Either that or these economic upheavals really are cyclical and there's nothing we can do to prevent them. Neither prospect instills optimism.

Yet I try to remain optimistic that, individually and collectively, we can find our way through these trying times and learn enough to prevent or, at least, delay and soften future ones. I'm looking to find my way.