An American, a Christian, a Hero

What a wonderful story of heroism:

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20051002

Ian Fishback a soldier, writes to McCain abut torture:

"If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is 'America.'"

Holocaust

Feeling afraid.

I support the occupation of Iraq, but the leadership of Forest Gump is scary at timer like this.

El Baradei: Iran only months away from a bomb
5 Dec. 2005 Jerusalem Post

IAEA chairman Muhammad ElBaradei on Monday confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb.

If Teheran indeed resumed its uranium enrichment in other plants, as threatened, it will take it only "a few months" to produce a nuclear bomb, El-Baradei told The Independent.

On the other hand, he warned, any attempt to resolve the crisis by non-diplomatic means would "open a Pandora's box. There would be efforts to isolate Iran; Iran would retaliate; and at the end of the day you have to go back to the negotiating table to find the solution."

Bayesian Reasoning

Currently, I am trying to understand a form of reasoning called "Bayesian logic." this is important to me because I'm trying to understand the work of a scientist named Eric Schadt. Eric has developed a very important new way of correlating mRNA expression data with the genes responsible for controlling patterns of mRNA expression.

Eric's work allows one to look for patterns of gene expression and compute the site in the genome that might control specific patterns. If a specific pattern appears in a population of people, the obvious question is whether a site in the genome can explain the variations in the pattern. If the variations in pattern correlate with some disease pattern associated with a specific subset of people, the implication is very strong that a mutation is present at the indicated site in the genome.

Eric's contribution is to use Bayesian logic to connect gene expression patterns to specific sites in the genome. The concept is very simple. (How many times have you heard that before?) Nowadays we have strains of inbred mice. We also have a map all the locations all of the genes in all these mice. So if we look at several strains of mice and find that these mice all have the same pattern of gene expression for some specific group of genes, and that these mice all have the same set of genes in a specific location, it is likely that genes in that location are controlling the expression pattern! This probability can be strengthened if we know something about the rules regulating the control of expression of mRNAs by specific genes. Those rules, of course, depend on the metabolic pathways leading from a gene to its products to the interactions of those products to the influences of the gene products on each other and finally back to the effects of the gene products on the genes responsible for expressing the mRNAs seen in the expression patterns.

Of course each of these interactions between gene products is probabilistic. The mathematical models developed by Eric and his colleagues allow them to create a network of such probabilities.

I am still trying to understand the most basic concept that is the concept of a Bayesian relationship itself. So here is my first attempt based on an explanation I found on the web. The idea is that I have green and red marbles. While blindfolded I dropped three of them into a bucket. I can't see inside the bucket. So I reach in three times and each time pull ot of on marble. Each time I pull out a red marble. The question is can I quantify the probability that all three marbles are red?

Bayes' Theorem, as shown here, allows me to do this. p(AB) is the probability that all three marbles or read given that I found a red marble three times. P(B), is simply the probability that all three marbles will be read by chance without any evidential data at all. p(A+B) is the probability that all balls are red and that all the selections will be red I must admit I find this last formula less than intuitive. I think it means the total of all conditions where the selected balls will be red and all the balls are red is only 1/2 of all the events where all the selections are RED.

p(AB)= (the probability that all of the balls are RED and our experiments come out RED/ the probability that all the balls are RED).

Put another way: the probability that something is true based on the available evidence= the probability that we would expect to see it as true assuming it is true /divided by the probability that it is true.

Natural Law

This post began as a response to a discussion on an orthodox Jewish web site, Hashkafah. I had suggested that the similarity between legal systems around the world implies that there is an underlying natural law.

One objection to the idea of natural law is that laws regulating human behavior are not really the same thing as physical laws. After all, we derive physical laws from observing the physical world and can not legislate physical laws to tell the planets how to move. I would point out however, the physical law itself comes in many different kinds and we do use a variation of these laws to regulate how we manipulate the natural world. Engineers, for example, determine how to build bridges by using laws derived from Newtonian physics. Similarly, the laws of evolution, for example, while explaining the origins of diversity in living beings, can be used to formulate civil laws as to how we should behave if we wish to preserve our species.

This argument requires understanding that laws can be very different from each other because the realities underlying different sorts of law are themsleves very different. For example, the laws we call quantum mechanics are based on statistics because at the level of fundamental particles there are no certainties only probabilities for such things as to where a particle is or how fast it is moving. Engineers building electronic devices have to use laws that make the desired result very probable, but never certain. In contrast, at a level of mechanical function, engineers can rely on the absolute prediction of Newton's laws.

Skinner posited laws of behavior from watching animals respond to their environment. These laws can and have been used to design educational systems. Skinner, however, went further and suggested that we could derive laws of human behavior, that is laws as to how we should behave, from scientific observations of how humans behave.

While Skinner, along with Marx and other utopians, may hae been overly arrogant, it seems to me that succssful efforts may have already been made. Anthropologists have been studying human societies now for a number of centuries. Wouldn't it be reasonable to argue that the similarity of laws governing human behavior around reflects a collective effort of engineers to optimize human behavior. Does the similarity of these laws imply that there is some kind of underlying reality to human behavior and that we can use that reality or derive better laws about how we should behave?

Dayenu

Dayenu ... on Passover we sing a sing about all the things jews are grateful for. So, I have modified it. After each stanza, there is a word Dayenu .. it would suffice.

1. The French. The French Enlightenment inspired our founding fathers to create the world's first democratic state. The French navy and confrontations with France in Europe provided the necessary military balance for an American victory in the war for independence.

without French ideas it is hard to imagine that the new country of America would have accepted us as ordinary citizens.

Dayenu

2. The English for giving rise to religious sects that found a state church intolerable. also the English for the development of a middle-class and the creation of the industrial revolution.

the absence of the state church and the availability of industrial war were critical factors in the success of Jewish immigration into the United States.

Dayenu


3. The English for losing the American war then teaching us a lesson (poorly learned) in 1812. The same English for standing up to Hitler until we finally came to her senses.

Dayenu

4. the American natives for their generosity and tolerance of all of the newcomers.

Dayenu

5. Chinese workers and Irish workers for a building the TransAmerican Railway. the presence of large numbers of workers of other ethnic groups, was very important for Jewish immigrants ability to enter the burgeoning American middle class.

Dayenu

6. Northern liberals for opposing southern slavery. Southern intellectuals for supporting freedom from religion and freedom from monarchy.

although large-scale immigration of Jews did not begin until after the Civil War, changes wrought by that warcreated great opportunities for American Jews.

Dayenu

7. Canada for resisting American invasions and, in the part of Québec, trading at Montréal smoked beef.

Dayenu

8. Africans for giving us jazz.

Dayenu

9. Lakota, Pueblo, Seminole, and others all of the native resistance movement for giving us all a lesson in bravery. as American Jews support the bravery of the Israelis and resisting the "greater" Arab population, we should be inspired by the bravery... I'll pay it failed effort to do that of the Native American resistance.

Dayenu

10. Jews and Roman Catholics for levening the American church with something other than flat bread. somehow Jews and Catholics occupied the same ecological niche in American society. The KKK hates us both. Real estate covenants restrict us both. we both have too many seats on the Supreme Court.

Dayenu

11. Muslims for holding together the world of the intellect until Europeans progressed beyond barbarism.

Dayenu

12. The Dutch for being the first to support the American Revolution and for creating the model for quarterly government. and the Dutch for providing refuge from the Spanish Inquisition. Sephardim arriving via Holland were this nation's first Jews.

Dayenu
see more at:

www.seattlejew.blogspot.com

Gandhi's thoughts on Israel

http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/mideast.htm

Sad comments from before the Holocaust.

Origin of the Dalmatians by Intelligent Design

Moshe Dayan is a bit of an outcast, not show quality because he has a very large ring around his left eye. Otherwise Moshe is a typical Dalmatian with a lot of spots and a great smile.

Aside from the spots and the smile, Moshe is about 99.9% just a dog. Taken to a dog park, he chooses his friends without regard to race, religion, sexual preference, or breed. In fact, I have seen no evidence that Moshe is even interested in another dog's spots.

This lack of interest in one's breed seems to me to be very different from human behavior. Despite the best efforts of our most liberal citizens, integration only goes so far. For example, most students aggregate with others of their own ethnic or raciaol group. How comes it that Dalmatian's are so much more enlightened than we are? I have a theory.

Modern, rational, loquacious hominids, are 60 to 100 thousand years old. Skeletons indistinguishable from modern human, however, are considerably older than a hundred thousand years. Around 60,000 BCE something happened amongst our ancestors. They got a lot better at making tools, their religions became much more complex, and they discovered art. Paleontologists believe that some thing was the discovery of speech. This discovery probably involved a genetic event because the genetic data tell us that we modern, speaking humans are descended from a very small number of people who existed at that time
.
The paleontologists, however, tell us that dogs already existed alongside our hominid ancestors for many hundreds of thousands of years before the "masters" began talking. Early hominids and dogs were both scavengers, living off the table scraps left by more effective carnivores such as lions. I wonder if the modern image of a lion as a brave animal reaches back to some dim memory of our subservient role, cleaning the bones left after the lions' feat. The famous paleontologist Richard Leakey, says that after the canines and the hominids retired from a full day of the scavenging, canine and hominid retired to case where they slept together. It is even imaginable that protohumans and dogs somehow helped each other in the hunt. Leakey went so far as to suggest that hominids and canines are "co-species."

If Leakey is right, man and dog were shaped together by evolution. Natuarl selection may have created our affection for each other. But something happened to canine evolution about 10,000 years ago .. dogs developed into hundreds of different breeds. Despite thos diversity, Moshe simply doesn't care about breed. How did this happen?

Perhaps the answer comes from intelligent design. My theory depends on understanding the meaning of "species." Proponents of intelligent design make a great deal of the concept of "species". The claim is the "species" have not been observed to develop spontaneously or in laboratory studies of evolution. This argument may reflect a lack of understanding of the basic terminology of biology. Biologists define "species" as being sexually incompatible. Speciation, that is sexual incompatibility between otherwise similar animals, can occur on the basis of very small changes in an animals physical or even behavioral traits. For example, distinct species of crabs are found on the east versus the west coast of Australia. The only difference between the two species is in a mating dance done with the front claws. Remove the claws and love unfolds. So, a subtle change occurring because of random mutations WITH NO EFFECT ON SURVIVAL has created two species. It is easy to see how dog breeder might create two species of dogs. I suspect that Chihuahua and Great Dane are already sexually incompatible, at least without resource to artificial insemination and even then it is hard to imagine a Chihuahua dam giving birth to a Great Dane pup.

So it appears that humans, for our own amusement were able to intelligently design dog "breeds", while our own "races" arose by random changes as our Chinese, French, Aussie, and Bantu ancestors migrated away from the ancestral caves? As we migrates, our dogs went with us and we decided to create different breeds. We became the force for intelligent design. Unfortunately, human intelligence is limited and Dalmatians, in addition to spots, have inherited gout. Amazingly, the American Kennel Club Dalmatian Club will not permit breeders to eliminate the gout gene, even though the gene is now identified. The dog breeders want to keep the breed, their intelligent creation, "pure." Since breed is a human creation, dogs have no reason to recognize it.

There's a lesson in all this for contemporary concepts of race. Extremists on the liberal side argue that there is no such thing as race because all humans share a very similar genome. That assertion, while appealing to egalitarians, sidesteps the obvious issue that a very large portion of our species can be a separated even on the basis of visual inspection into the races. Thus race and breed are very similar except that one is a result of Darwin's choices one the other as a result of intelligent design. I also suggest that in humans, because we speak different languages, breeding is at least weakly coupled to a desire to identify with people who "sound and look like us." Thus, the rather limited physical differences between the races arose partly because some ancestral spin-off from the original tribe, decided that a family group would emigrate to a new home. Once that happened, the desire to breed with similar folks combined with the geographic barriers led to racial distinctions. In contrast physical differences between dogs, resulting from intelligent design, are far more stringent but dogs are all culturally alike.

Every dog pound is evidence that dogs, unlike humans, do not have any genetic tendency to racism. Does that prove the canine designer is more intelligent than the human designer?

State of the Union, 2006

Excerpts from the State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush; United States Congress, 2006

All Americans must comply with the law of the land. That is why we worked so hard to be sure that the new Justices of the Supreme Court are all fair and balanced. As you know, in the matter of freedom of religion, the Court has now decided that alternatives to evolutionary theory must be taught as long as they are based in science. This fair-minded decision challenges those who support intelligent design to provide scientific grounds supporting belief.

I am therefore proposing a budget for the coming year of $300 million to be made available for original research proposals in the area of intelligent design. I want to point out the tremendous potential benefits to our society if such research bears fruit. Research, ALL research has benefits , not just conventional research that explores old points of view. Therefore, I call on the enginuity of American scientists to rise to this challenge. I ask the research and development arms of American industry to imagine the great benefits to your country and to all Americans if the search for intelligent design leads to a source of alternative energy ... our cars may one day run on the same principles that created the Grand Canyon!

Three departments will split this modest sum:

Department of Energy:
What could be more intellignet than an inexhaustible source of energy? My experts tell me that research at a Mormon Univeristy on fuaion power has been suppressed. Others claim that research did not work. Perhaps, but the conventional thinkers we can not make a fusion reactor work because they do not understand how to keep a ball of energy together for more than gnat's blink. Couldn't the answer be a need of science to see God in the heart of the tomahawk errh Tokamik nooclear reactor?

National Science Foundation:
Since that time of the Greeks, the basis for logic itself has never been addressed. We're proposing a collaborative effort between politicians and geologists to determine the original cause of logic.

National Institutes of Health:
In collaboration with the theology departments of the Vatican, Oral Roberts university, Notre Dame university, and the Detroit Wahabi Mosque, the NIH plans to attempt to mutate HIV to a benign virus. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Photography from Iraq

Why do we see so little of this? Because all the western photographers are imbedded? Can't el Qaida afford a digital camera? Anyhow ...try this link from Slate magazine. I found the images a bit disappointing. They lack content other than the simple gore of war. Is there no feeling in this war?

On the Bushie side, surely there must be some good news? Students going back to school? Hospitals operating? Kurds running their own lives????
The lack of good news photographs frightens me even more.

Try this blog for some good photography: FiftyCrows - Social Change Photography

A Phrase

Is there some reason to be Jewish if all that being Jewish means is living for oneself? I am not worthy of such an honor.

Visiting Morehouse

I just came back from a visit to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. The purpose of my visit was to interest students at this prestigious Black college in applying to the University of Washington for graduate or medical school.

In some ways my feelings for the African-American culture approach envy. African-Americans at their best have the kind of immigrant vigor I can remember from my own parents and grandparents. This kind of thing is disappearing from the contemporary Jewish community.

Despite these feelings, something bothers me not just about Morehouse. This school and other black schools I have visited seem insular, like the walled commutes I saw in Brazil. In Sao Paulo, I stayed with a middle class family in a modest home ... part of a development surrounded by a high wall, guards and guard dogs. Designed to protect these ordinary people from the realities of the Brazilian majority.

The Black campuses don't have guard dogs and the folks inside the walls certainly don't feel a need to protect their TVs and furniture from the milling masses. Still a wall seems to exist, or at least I felt I was living in a walled community. Like the walls in Brazil, this is a wall of choice, marking Morehouse off from the larger society. Choosing to attend Morehouse is an ethnic choice. The students and faculty have chosen to declare themselves different from the surrounding society.

I think this wall is present in all Black culture .. just as it is an any ethnic culture. Its existence alone proclaims a pride in African-American identity. There are, of course the expected tokens of ethnic and Morehouse pride. African themed pictures are present in some classrooms and bulletin boards reflect distinctive African-American cultural activities. I suspect this is great for kids who may have never before felt their world was controlled by people like them.

There is another side of living behind a wall. The Brazilians I met were Jewish and had much the same Israeli art in their homes one sees in US Jewish homes. Jews in the US, however do not need walls. Similarly, the feeling of being inside a wall at Morehouse makes me worry about the need for isolation to protect something important to the Morehouse community. Is Morehouse an expression of pride and confidence of an expression of the need to be protected?

The sense of isolation if heightened because this is an all male school. Indeed, the first night I stayed on campus I witnessed the emigration of female guests at curfew time. This was truly a strange scene, hundreds of coeds milling their way through the narrow gated exit from the Morehouse campus. Most of the girls did not have far to go. Spellman College, an all-black all girls school is immediately next-door. The Spellman girls go out one gate and in the other. I did not notice in the emigration of black guys from Spellman toward Morehouse. Are there walls within walls?

I don't understand the concept of an all-male college. Somehow all-female schools makes more sense to me. Women, after all, have their own culture that is threatened by the dominant male society. Girls being girls is probably a lot easier at Wellesley that it is at Harvard. Boys being boys somehow seems less important. Or is it that I think of boy schools only n terms of military academies? Morehouse is anything but a military academy Without the marching and hazing, "boys being boys" makes me think of athletics. Morehouse, however, has at best limited athletic pretensions. The only other model I can think of might be a Catholic seminary. Are there still Catholic colleges for boys other than seminaries?

I asked some of the guys about their choice of all-male school. Their answers added to my thoughts about insularity. The answers had something to do with the special needs of the "black male." I am not entirely sure what these special needs might be, or what the students think they might be. For some students it may be simply the freedom from sexual distractions, just as students at a military academy or a seminary "need" to be free of female distractions. No one told me they went to Morehouse out on a sense of male pride.

Walls aside, I suspect it would be of great value for more Americans to learn about Morehouse. That raises a thought. Is Morehouse a tourist destination in Atlanta? I did not see any sort of commercial activity around the campus. Come to think of it there is no tourist access at Brandeis either.

Back at my purpose, the UW does poorly in recruiting American students to our grad. programs despite the pre-eminence of the University of Washington in NIH funding for research in molecular pathology or vascular biology. My hunch was that few Morehouse students know much about the Udub. I hoped was to find American students with the kind of drive needed to succeed in graduate school. The kids I met certainly qualify. Their choice of Morehouse, clearly reflects a commitment to academic success. If some of the students choose to come to the University of Washington, I will look forward to learning more about student life at all male, all-black school.

One thought, just occurred to me. There are a small number of American Jews who are also African-American. I wonder if Morehouse has any Jewish students? a Jewish chaplain?

The Chinese Aren't Jewish (anymore)

In 1954 the Chinese government ruled than no ethnic Chinese person could be Jewish. At the time only 50 Jews remained of the few thousand that had survived for the previous two millennia, so China simply saw it as inconvenient to allow so few people the privilege of having a distinct nationality. China's problem is understandable. There is no widely accepted definition of Jewishness despite the best and worst efforts by the Southern Baptists, the Nazis, the American government, the Catholic Church, the Chinese government, and the state of Israel.

The simplest definition I can imagine is: "a Jew and is someone who chooses to be a member of the Jewish people and who has fulfill the criteria of one or more bodies of claiming the authority to confer membership in the Jewish people."

This definition intentionally excludes those whose Judaism is defined by others. Many people who died as Jews in Hitler's campus would not qualify under this definition. Madeline Albright, although a Jew by Jewish law is not a Jew simply because she chooses, instead, her white-christian heritage. Similarly, Lani Guanier, the Harvard civil-rights law professor, chooses to celebrate her father;s skin color rather than her mothers Judaism. In this sense American Jews are part of an increasing community identifying themselves as multiethnic or claiming to be able to pick and choose from assorted ancestral connections. Such people, exemplified by Tiger Woods with his African-American and Thai background, may choose to emphasize one culture over another often based on their physical appearance. At the other extreme, Native American tribes in Connecticut have obvious African American physical features, but any attraction to the heritage of Dr. King and Magic Johnson was overbalanced by the financial benefits coming from their Foxwood Tribal Casino.

At this point it is obvious that we are not discussing Judaism as a religion. Presumably the census taker looks badly upon those Americans who might choose to select "African-American" despite having blond hair and pinkish flesh. There is no official body that confers blackness. Judaism is like a religion in allowing, even celebrating the convert. Akiva, the great rabbi of the bar Kochba revolt was a convert as were David's mother and Moses' wife. Jewish conversion, however, is different from conversion to a religious faith. The convert to Judaism accepts the responsibility for the genetic inheritance of Judaism. As strange as this idea may be to a Christian, the children of Jewish converts need no baptism or special ceremony to be Jewish. If your mom is a yid you is too. Thus, the great grand daughter of a convert, assuming consistency of the maternal line a Jewish, would be as eligible to enter Israel as a Jew as the child of the head Lubavitcher Rabbi who claims descent from David himself.

On most religious matters, Judaism does not have an opinion. Jesus was not the son of God. You want heaven? OK, You like angels and the devil? OK, too. Messiahs, sure .. and many different kinds of messiahs too. Lots of choices, but one matter is clear ... there is one and exactly one God. The God tolerates no other gods nor does he make incarnate, personal manifestations. It is not conceivable that this God would personify himself to impregnate a virgin or give birth to a demigod. Thus Jesus worship is inamicable to conversion to Judaism. In contrast, while Judaism rejects the triune godhead, the Jews for Jesus Christian cult includes members who claimed to be former Jews. Not surprisingly, this discovery exempts such people from acceptance by the Jewish community. Still, under Jewish law a Jesus believer or a convert to Islam remains a Jew by birth.

In contrast to acceptance of the Christian deity, rejection of all gods is generally more acceptable to the modern Jewish community. I think the ability to tolerate atheists is a result of monotheism itself. Judaism is surprisingly vague on the nature of God. A simple way for Judaism to escape the blame directed at God as the permissive force behind the Holocaust is to put God's actions on a plane that is inexplicable to man. Jews, for example, are generally proud of Einstein as a Jew and definitely do not consider the hirsute mathematician to be an atheist. Fortunately most of us will never understand Einstein's math so it is OK for his deity to be inexplicable too. It would be difficult to assign blame or seek relief from Einstein's sense of wonder in the orderliness of the universe.

All this leads up to a question:

Why don;t more people convert to Judaism?. After all isn't monotheism really common in today's world? Many Christian sects have assigned the son of God to the lesser role of wise man in a troubled time. Their Christianity seems like Judaism .. stripped only of the membership in the Jewish people. I guess for most folks there is not much to gain by such a membership.

One wonders whether Palestinians, in particular, might not undertake mass conversion?

Photography Art and Poetry

Some 60,000 years ago, deep in a cave on the coast of South Africa the first human discussion occurred. Earlier humans, anatomically identical to the discussants, had a few words, maybe they even made sentences but the discussion, the too and fro of ideas had not yet appeared until that long ago day.

How do we know this? We have no records, the discussants did not have a secretary written language would not exist for another 50,000 years. Paleontology doesn't help, bones from that era are not distinguishable from human bones a good hundred thousand years before then.. The humans in those caves created objects too complex to be the idea of only one person. We have their paintings, tools, sculptures, and jewelry. The art is most important Art, to be worth making, must somehow be appreciated by another individual. Cave paintings imply communication. Perhaps the first discussion was about the weather, but the need to make art left a more enduring record.

Speech is not necessarily verbal. Helen Keller, spoke with sign language. We all speak with the written word. The cave paintings represented another form of speech. "Look, this is a horse!" The effects of the daguerreotype, invented 600 centuries later, would be much the same. "Look, Pierre has created a picture of a horse!" The two acts, however, are very different. The painting is not quite real .. maybe Gron just imagined the horse? Maybe his "speech" is just telling us what horses look like, rather than showing us a real horse? ,A least potentially, the human brain is capable of imagination and creating things that could never have existed. Photographic objects, by definition, have an apparent relationship to real objects.

Perception that an image is "real" can be a very important part of a painting. When one looks at van Gogh's image of farm workers in the field, the harsh sun light MUST represent something van Gough saw. The quality of a painting that conveys reality is not at all clear to me. David Hockney paints in a " photographic style". Yet there is something very unreal and... to my taste... boring about Hockney's work. On the other hand Ansel Adams, a photographer managed to produce images that seem very, very unreal. It is a good idea when looking at one of Ansel's images to leave aside any necessary connection to reality. While a naive viewer may see a photograph, Ansel's images were heavily manipulated by filters, selective exposure, and chemistry of development. And yet we know there is a reality underlying every Ansel Adams print. Put another way an Ansel Adams print is made up of objects taken from reality.

The discipline of working only with the element sof photography implies that photographers work with a vocabulary of real objects, Poets, like photographers, also deal with a limited vocabulary. That vocabulary of sounds, when compared to the sounds available to musicians, is very limited. The poets challenge is to use these words provoke our thoughts. The photographer's challenge is very similar. We work with the lights and darks, the shadows and bright areas that comprise a moment in time.

Back in the cave, today's discussants are trading photographs.

A Universal Supreme Court

Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and now Samuel Alito?


Hmmm, 5 Catholics and two Jews out of 9 justices? Sounds to me as if the protestants need affirmative action if they are going to get on the Court.

How did this happen? Could it be that the only intelligent Christian attorneys are those educated by the Jesuits? What happened to Kenneth Star? Or have the evangelicals begun to suspect that educated Protestants become evolutionists?

Does religion matter? How can it not? We keep hearing that religion is the basis for morality, at least that is what the believers tell us. Can a child attend Catholic schools for six years and not be effected? Is it possible to accept mass and NOT feel a need to respond, postively or negatively, to the rulings of the Pope?

Will anyone ask Alito how he feels about joining a largely Catholic body?

Does this mean that Ash Friday will be a court holiday?

The Plame Blame Game (c) 2005

All of this excitement about the indictment of Scooter I Louis Libby has left me despairingly looking for a note of humor.

Perhaps there is humor, or at least good news, in the cable news industry. The Industry has every reason to revel in and encourage the blame game. The indictment is great news for advertising prices, Wall Street should be cheered by a huge increase in money coming into the coffers of Time Warner, NBC, and, of course Mr. Murdoch. One wonders what book deals are already in the works for Messers Fitzgerald and Libby? Will Mr. Libby succeed Mr. Liddy in the talk show business? How long till we get to see Tom Hanks overplaying Mr. Bush in a upcoming docudrama, “The Taste of Chocolate, II” If Hanks plays Bush as Gump, who plays Libby? The answer has to be Ollie North! The full metal, medal chested marine who went bravely into the jungles of Nicaragua to defend the virtue of Ronald Reagan. If Ollie is not available, I suggest Tom Cruise.

I do wonder if TW, CNN and Faux are totally uninvolved in making the news today. After all, how long can they sell a blonde girl in Aruba? Do they offer the perps perks if the story can be stretched out? Is Judith Miller the Deep Throat of “The Taste of Chocolate, II?” If GW calls Roger Ayles over at Faux, what advice does Mr. Ayles give and is that advice given in Faux’ interests, or the interests of Mr. Bush? One assumes Mr. Ayles’ would not be motivated #1 by the national interest. Or should we accept Mr. Ayles as the patriot he claims to be? Is what is good for Faux good for the Nation?

Still, there must be something funny in the image of the Greatest Nation being governed by a Gumpish, likeable fool. When Rove and Chaney join Libby in the day time saga of cable news, who will Bush turn too? I have an idea! Maybe the analogy to Forest Gump is unfair. Perhaps we should see George more like Ozzie in Ozzie and Harriet? Can Laura rise to the role? I imagine the President, lying awake in the White House four poster, looking for solutions to his work. Laura may be concerned with the two kids, but George, well George needs to pay attention to nuclear weapons in Korea, ayatollahs in Iran, and that damned virus in the chickens. All this is pretty hard for a boy who really never wanted much more than owning a baseball team. Can Laura rise to the rescue? Does she know whether we should trust President Hu or mistrust President Putin? Just imagine her reassuring George that farmers will love him even if he has to have all the chickens burned.

Laura’s biggest job, however, may be helping Geroge with football, The Football. Since the presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower, American Presidents have been accompanied by a silver briefcase handcuffed to a member of the Secret Service. We have always been assured that the President could make The Decision, if needs be, The system protected us even when Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer's had progressed too far for the old man to be trusted with the football. The mysterious elders of the party, selected Howard Baker to provide day and night care of the dribbling old man. It is hard to imagine a similar individual appearing for Mr. Gump. The Republican Party is not exactly replete with mentally stable senior officials of the status of Mr. Baker. Can anybody spell Newt Gingrich? Of course there is Daddy Bush. That’s a reassuring thought. Remember those cartoons of the Bush’s as Dr. Evil and mini-me? Or, maybe the time has come for America’s first military coup. If Bush is the Commander in Chief, doesn’t he deserve the full time services ofthat Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Japan tried that, it was called the shogunate. The shoguns did pretty well until WWII.

Ethical Dilemma Solved.

The fundamentalists worry about the facile taking of life. If we take the life of a fetus can't we also take the life all of a patient with Alzheimer's? Can we clone without destruction?

Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) has a surprising answer. Founded by a reformed fundamentalist, Michael West, the Massachusetts company is devoted to cloning .. dogs, tissues, maybe people Their idea? Instead of using an entire embryo, West’s employees biopsy the original ball of cells, leaving enough cells to go onto make a viable embryo. The biopsy can then be grown to body parts.

Beware of fundamentalists who switch sides. The atomic bomb, like Hitler’s rockets, was built by passionate believers, people convinced of their good intentions We all know the result of such scientific certainty. Oppenheimer led the effort of American physicists leading to Hiroshima and a life time of apologies.

My issues with cloning are not solved by West’s trick. We should worry about the power science can give to the convinced. Wasn’t it North Korea that cloned its great leader back in the 21^st century? Look where that led us? How did you react to the news that Bill Gates’ foundation had provided its Founder with cloned organs letting Mr. Gates survive to today’s versions 1.11 and 1.21. Mr. Gates, we all know and love, but the evil done by the Dear Leader is too frightful to imagine. Oh well, we all do love having Michael Jordans on every NBA team.

There is more to look forward to. Imagine an endless succession of Queen Elizabeths. QE II 1.0, 1.01, 1.02, …. Charley stays prince forever! Or we could clone the Pope! Would an immortal series of Pope clones solve the dilemma of Papal infallibility?

The unfortunate truth is that the fundamentalists have led us all to misplace the debate. Disposing of a conceptus is something women do normally ... only 1/4 of all embryoes survives through the first trimester. If the religious are so righteous they should fund drug research into saving this massive loss of lives. I am far more concerned with a modern Werner von Braun misusing the biology than I am about Michael West's solution of an insignificant ethical dilemma.

See http://slate.msn.com/id/2128306/nav/tap2/

The Barbarism of Pagans

The term "pagan" is deeply offensive. Why should there be a dichotomy between those of us who believe the story of Abraham and those who do not? It is possible to prove that the morality of cultures correlates with the decision to worship one invisible God, rather than worshiping a tree.

Of the following list, whom would you describe as "barbaric?"

Mahatma Gandhi vs. Ozma bin Laden
Chief Seattle vs. Pope Pius IX
Marcus Aurelius vs. Theodoric
Confucius vs. Marx
Montezuma vs. Cortez
the current Pope and the current President of China
Squanto vs. the Pilgrims

Of course, my list is anecdotal. It would be equally easy to tilt such a list toward the Abrahamites. What pagan society has invented vaccines, created red cross, or conceived of democracy? Could Jefferson, ML King, the enlightenment, have arisen in Africa or China. My answer is facile .."why not?" One need not demonize (to use a common phrase) Christendom to question the Western depiction of pagans.

In his wonderful little book, Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe describes the religion of a Nigerian village during the period of early British colonialism. This religion had been intentionally agreed to, actually created by the elders six generations before in an attempt to decrease strife between the tribes. The hero of the book, the head priest, is attempting to deal with the attractions of the Christian missionaries and their colorless God. As depicted by a Achebe, the village God is very real, literally the soul of the people, motivating morality and family life. In contrast the colorless Christian God is a tool of the missionaries used to pry a Achebe's son away.

The Achebe story is all too familiar to Jews who have suffered from Christian evanagelism. Even during WWII, Chrsitian kindness was temepered by the forced conversions of our children to the religions of their hosts. Teh horror stories of Jewish children stolen by Pious IX are infamous. The Muslim world has been better, although depriving us of the rights to vote, wear clothing of our own choice, or to accept converts. In contrast, Jews who have lived in pagan societies, including India, China, and even amongst Native Americans, have been treated with respect.

The anti-pagan bigotry is not uniquely Christian. With all due respect to the Prophet, his tolerance of Jews and Christians does not excuse his intolerance of those who worship the sun or moon. Islam's claim to tolerance stops short of accepting Buddhism, never mind accepting worship of Manitoba, Siva, or Thor.

Bertrand Russel made much the same argument in his essay, "Why I am not a Christian." The philosopher damned the Jews for our invention of an exclusive truth. Judaism, however, has never had the opportunity to practice the kind of intolerance that comes with a Universal Church or the Ummaya of Mohamed's world conquering successors. Rather, living as an often persecuted minority, we have developed a unique passion for religious freedom reflected in the prominent roles Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries played in the labor and civil rights movements.

I would like to offer a theory. Historians tell us that the Jewish scripture was assembled or perhaps written during the period from 500 B.C.E. on. This is the period of ascendance of Greco-Roman society. It seems to me that the chauvinism of the Jewish culture, most probably represents an effort to protect the Jewish people from Greco-Roman society rather than a statement of elitism. We, the Jews, are unique .. the pagan (non- Greco-Roman) people who survived.

Greco-Roman culture became Christendom. Christianity as formalized under Emperor Constantine was a state religion. That religion represented not only Roman power but Roman civilization. 200 years later, with his successful conquest of Mecca, the Prophwt brought civilization to Arabia. Like Constantine, Mohammed taught the unity of the state and religion. He created a social system, Islam, built on the premise of the great wisdom of those entrusted with interpretation of the Koran. Koranic law, as interpreted by Mohamed's success ors the Caliphs ruled from Spain to Indonesia.

I vote for joining the pagans.

The Rest of the Story of Genesis

Dinosaurs still exist.

It is well known that deep in the forests of Brazil there is an area yet unplumbed by humans except of one tribe of women, the Amazons. The Amazons have domesticated their lizard-like friends. You should taste an Amazonia
omelet. One egg feeds the entire tribe!

The Amazoni are, BTW, Jewish and direct descendents of the women who provided Cain's wives. They survived the flood by riding from present day Syria to West Africa on the backs of aquatic dinosaurs. Their great story is told by the Great Song. This beautiful song takes on year to recite, with different verses for every day of the year. The Amazoni language can not be written and even Amzoni who have learned to read and write Portuguese insist that a written version of the Song would not be faithful to the original tale given to Zipporah by G-d.

You might ask how can they be Jewish if they were isolated from the rest of humanity since the flood? For that you need to understand that the Torah never claims to be complete. Just as it does not mention the Maine Lobster, it never mentions the experience of Zipporah, the prophet of the cavern. She received a separate set of commandments from Hashem during the great Exodus of the Amazoni from their enslavement by the black skinned Bantu or Nigeria. As sung by the cantors, Zipporah gathered the last of the dinosaurs and the Jews of Africa onto a great arc and rode the seas all the way to the mouth of the Amazon.

Niger Yom Kippur

3,000 children dying each day of starvation, according to the NY Times. Shoah, Holocaust, shame .... Jesse Jackson in New Orleans complaining that not enough people are being housed on the cruise boats, Bush chopping bush at Crawford, Nazis .. we aren't Nazis, they are. Hitler did it. Stalin gave me no choice. My niggers love me. We brought them Jesus. All we do is go along.

Yom Kippur is not about confession. That Roman Catholic ritual is about me, about how I deal with my guilt. Yom Kippur does not offer forgiveness

Nor does Judaism offer salvation as a reward. The Bal Shem said that he had no need of paradise if he loved God in this life. But in Judaism love for God is not a good deed. Loving God is a nice thing, like being blessed by the priest at confession, but loving God is not itself a mitzvah, a good deed. The law, ethics, good deeds, obligations to others ... these exist regardless of rewards.

But how can I talk of rewards when 3,000 children starve to death every day in Niger?

Using a Camera in a Mall

www.nbc5i.com/news/5086442/detail.html

A photographer in a Texas mall was arrested for taking lewd shots of women and children. Apparently under Texas law you are committing an offense if, a) you're taking a picture of a person who hasn't given you consent to do so, and b) that picture is for the sexual gratification of any person.


My knee jerk reaction is to protest the photographer's rights. After all, photogrpahy is a form of expression and is, therefore, guarnateed under the First Amendment. In contrast the right of privacy, as the Bushies keep telling us, is NOT in the Constitution.

I also wonder why the camera is an issue. Would the cops have acted differenblty if the perp's camera was empty? ... or just out of focus? What if instead of a camera the perp was using a sketch pad and creating lewd drawing of women and children in the crowd. Would that be acceptable?


Or ... suppose I am sittin in the mall and as I sit there, a very beautiful woman walks by. I write, "she is has such beautiful breasts, if only I could strip of that blouse. Her name must be Mrilyn, I can see her in a negligee, a sheer negligee, her hands bound, her feet in mules with 4 inch heels, kneeling before me ...." "If only she would bend over ...."

Disgusting? Is it only disgusting if it is written down or expressed as a photograph? Would it be legal to think these words or only to write them? If someone sees me staring at Marilyn and she complains, do the cops have a right to see what I am writing?

Father Joe and the Nobel Prize

I just read that the Swedes have awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine. They gave the prize to two Australians for figuring out that peptic ulcers are caused by bacteria. Why the Swedes? Why ulcers? Why Australians?

Consider the alternatives. Here in the US the Nobel has become the ultimate academic degree. In the United States everyone gets a bachelor's unless they qualify to play basketball. After that we give out master's and Ph.D.s. Oh yeah some folks get MDs, DVMs, TDs, NDs, and ODs. Actually if you decide to become a lawyer, here in Washington state we give you a JD and California awards MDs to anyone who gets an OD. OK?

In reality, the US does recognize a gradation of importance within the Ph.D.. Ph.D.'s in rocket science, for example, are recognized as being far more difficult to achieve then, let's say, Ph.D.'s in college athletics. Any Ph.D. from MIT is more important than, well more important than almost anything ... other than being selected in the football draft. Of course the tile "coach" far exceeds the title "doctor" in importance but few Ph.D.'s aspire to become coaches. What is more prestigous than being a coach?

Back to Sweden. Why Sweden? Actually the Nobel could be given in any of several European countries as long as that country is politically acceptable to the United States. We Americans are the most important pople in the world, but we recognize the greater prestige of the European Ph.D.. Certainly, an Austrian professor of psychiatry with a beard and an obsession with oral sex has more prestige than any UCLA graduate. Ph.D.s a from Oxford and Cambridge and the Left bank (France's main unoversity) are highly respectable as well. All Americans know that the best mathematicians come from Russia and that Asian scientists are very clever but not original. In contrast the English are smart and original. Certainly the Nobel prize could be located in England. It could not, however, be located in Germany, France, or Spain. Germany, as we know, has always been filled with guys that make horrible wars and lose them. The French always lose wars as well, because they disagree with the US of A and are cowards. The Spanish? Don't be silly.

So that leaves Sweden. The Swedes must have a lot of fun deciding who will get the Nobel prize. Has anyone ever made a movie about this? Imagine the dialogue:

Hans: I propose that we give this year's award to Mendel.

Katrina: Isn't he dead?

Christopher: But the Pope just made Mendel a saint. Under Swedish law we cannot discriminate against a spirit simply because it is passed on can we?

Per: (why do we have Catholics on this committee?) This is silly. Who would shake the King's hand? Remember the amateur golfer who won last year's Scandinavian Golf Association? She wasn't dead but she was from California! She said she could not participate in a ceremony in Stockholm in January! Too dark!

Per: In any case, I understand that Mendel faked his data. Look, we need to choose a scientist who shows real courage. Think about Galileo, Curie, Pruissner, .....

Katrina: Courage? Since when is courage important in science? Shouldn't we give an award to Lee Hood?

Goran: Hood? What did he discover? Besides he's an American!

Ahmed: I agree with Goran. Hood is too American. Besides it was guys like Phil Green and Hunckapillar who made it happen! Besides, if we want to award a prize for quantitative genomics shouldn't it go to Botstein and Lander?

Goran: Ahmed, you surprise me! I thought a physiologist like you would help us steer away from fashionable molecular biology! Isn't anybody doing anything clever in rheology? peristalsis? mastication?

Christopher: Mastication? Goran you can't be serious? They can't be anything new in eating food?

Katrina: I think Goran has an idea there! We keep giving the Nobel Prize for things nobody in the public understands. This is supposed to be a prize for Medicine! As they say in the US medicine isn't supposed to be rocket science. It should be simple!

Per: and courageous! Simple and courageous! That kind of Nobel prize should really get the public's attention. I don't think there's been a movie about the Nobel Prize in medicine since that Paul Muni flick about Pasteur. Don't we have a Pasteur today?

Ahmed: I have an idea! There are these two guys in Australia not just in Australia but in Perth....

Goran: (I knew adding a Turk would liven things up!) You mean the guys who figured out ulcer disease? Didn't one of them actually swallow the bacteria?

Katrina: Didn't King Carl-Gustav have an ulcer? I think we have our choice!

And so it goes. Each year the wise faculty of the Karolinska choose the Nobel list for the entire world. These two Australians will proceed from the isolation of Perth in the summer to the mid winter darkness of Stockholm and thence to platforms around the world lecturing not only a peptic ulcer disease but on the courage to follow one's own convictions. This prize sends a message that not all great science is accomplished by large teams. It sends a message that even in the era of the genome grande, small science can still succeed. Somehow I believe that this year's award reflects as much on the unique national culture of Sweden as it does on the worldwide culture of science.

So what is this about Father Joe? When I was a kid, we lived in an Irish-Italian Catholic neighborhood. My dad was the Jewish physican (there was a Catholic doctor too for when patients were not sick) and Father Joe the parish priest. My dad was a handsome young war veteran. Some of his female patients would come to the office seeking marital advice. After all Jews are less inhibited than Catholics, don't you know? This embarrassed my father who sent the patients on to Father Joe for counciling. Father Joe, it turned out, was rather good at marital counseling and gave practical lessons. Eventually, Cardinal Cushing discovered Father Joe's activities. Cushing sent the good father to Columbia as a Maryknoll missionary. Courageous folks, the Maryknolls ... leading peasants against the oligarchs. It used to be called "Liberation Theology." As far as I know, Father Joe disappeared. The last time I saw Father Joe, he (secretly) gave me last rites when it appeared I was going to die from a bleeding ulcer. So I associate Father Joe's courage with the courage of these two Nobelists.

More Reality in Science

I am working on a paper with some colleagues. Trouble is that the data in the paper are very soft. Is there anything wrong with that? Is it wrong to publish data that are difficult to interpret and the suggest how e might interpret the data?

I wish I knew the answer. Trouble here is that the arguments are very statistical. If one does not reject the Null Hypothesis, does that mean that there is no difference between the data sets even if I, based on my judgment alone, feel that thee is a difference?

Imagine where the world would be if we insisted on such proofs for political decisions or worse made quarterbacks prove that their evlauations were correct?

Reality, von Braun and Justice Roberts

Something is missing. The Justice tells us his written memos from the Reagan or Bush I eras were lawyer work ... writings to support his employers. Fair enough? Isn't that why we employ lawyers?

Maybe fair to the employer, but how do lawyers justify their choice of employers? I think America was here once before .. at least in spirit. In 1945 we rescued Werner von Braun and his fellow rocketeers from the oncoming Ruskis. von Braun's missiles from the Nazi era were engineer work ... devices to support his employer.

There is, of course, real differences between the two situations. Reagan may have been senile but he was no Hitler. Bush I was not a Nazi either. Roberts' however does not take the road of accusing his critics of making odious comparisons. Instead, Justice Roberts appeals to the high ideals of the Law ... without the rule of law, there is no law. and Werner? Dr. von Braun's best claim is that science justifies itself. Our North Korean colleagues certainly show us that support for science does not undermine a fascist society.

Still, the scientific community is a lot more moralistic then our pin striped attorney friends. After WWII, many of the world's scientists condemned Heisenberg for working on Hitler's bomb. "Physics" unlike "the Rule of Law" may not be self justifying. I was personally criticized for accepting tainted research dollars from the Tobacco Institute. I guess my credentials as a working scientist permit me to be judgmental?

Roberts himself is not the issue for me. The issue for me is the Democratic Senators acceptance of Roberts' claim. Shouldn't someone of these attorney-legislators ask the Justice to explain the extent of his of isolation of attorneys from ethics? Why isn't it relevant to know Justice Robert's personal beliefs on murder of the unborn? Would the Justice rule in favor of infanticide simply based on Roe v Wade as a precedent?

I suspect Roberts' antagonists accept the arguments for legal immunity form the demands of morality. .. or at least they accept these arguments until our representatives someday sit as prisoners in Nuremberg trial of their own.

Reality in Science

The fundamental achievement of the West was a discovery ... the discovery that the universe is under gridded by a reality. Einstein said it best ... "God does not play dice" (or some such), he argued. Einstein's argument was against the quantum mechanical world ... a world where the laws of chance govern at the level of subatomic particles. This great man, however, missed the point ... quantum statistics itself is the reality. Some alternative world may have other laws, other stats, but we live within the confines of probability.

Photography: the poetry of reality

This essay is pompous, arrogant, even epistemological.

I am going to attempt to define a basic term. Not "good," "being" or" bad" but "photography". More specifically, "photography" as an art form .. akin to painting, music, acting, etc.

1, Photography is NOT technique. Mastery or methods do not define photography any more than canvas defines painting. A masterful picture of a corn flakes box, a technological feat but probably not an art form.

2,, Photography is not about light, cameras, or pixels. Most folks can recognize "photographs." However, this does not say much about how the images are made. Photographs, that is images that appear photographic can be made with an air brush. Cameras can be dipped n paint to "make" images. Man Ray used photographic film and paper to record shadows, making "Ray-O-Grams" ... was this painting?

So what is Photography about? a Zen answer might be "Photography is about what." That is Photography uses reality, elements of reality, elements of belief in reality ... the "what" we mean in the sentence, "What is that?"

Like the words used in poetry, the elements of a photograph limit the work of the phtographer. Where the painter has no limits in choices of image or tone, as a photographer I need to work with a limited vocabulary of real objects with realistic impact.

This image from Bremerton illustrates my point. Is this image "real?" Do you believe I "made" this with a camera? Or, perhaps is it a B&W drawing? If the entire image is real, is the seascape real? Is the seascape in color or is the real seascape a B&W mural? Maybe the foreground is pasted onto a seascape?

The image may be called a play on reality. This play on reality, like the poet's playing with the "meanings" of words is the essence of photography.

Rebuilding a Slum

The NO story is unfolding in a bizarre manner. Estimates of the costs of response to Katrina have risen to $300,000,000,000. That is 1/3 of a trillion dollars!.

Beyond all this none seems to have any sense as to what rebuilding might mean. NO was largely a slum. How do you rebuild a slum? Barracks? Public Housing? Is someone going to put aside money for rebuilding the (crucial) drug industry?

Has there EVER been a comparable problem? Responses to floods and tsunamis in the oceanic east have largely focused on rebuilding the homes of the coastal poor and, of course, the luxury hotels. Rebuilding the hotels is easy, but it is even easier to rebuild homes for people who are going to continue to live in a marginal culture. In contrast NO ONE believes that slum living is healthy.

What happened after WWII? Did we rebuild gypsy camps and impoverished areas of Germany or Japan? How did such areas do after the Marshall Plan?

Rebuilding a slum ain't easy. Of course you have to create some form of very low income housing. But what form and for who? Do single parent families qualify in the Bush era? Do gay partners have a right to a one bedroom apartment? And who is going to own this slum housing? Does anyone want to create the NO Soviet? Or do we have a raffle to decide which lucky person lives in the nelwy built ocrner apartment /c view and who lives in the basement?

Schools, food markets, banks, are all similar issues. The bottom line is that no amount of money can rebuild NO. Social decisions will have to be made and none of these are obvious or easy. Does NO become Venice West? ... a shell of a city maintained for tourists? Or does it become a corporate Kremin, antiseptically tied to big businesses and covnentions with little local housing?

New Orleans, the news real

Where are we? Some third world country, was it Louisinesia or New Bangleans?, is on the news day and night. We see poor (black) children, eyes full of despair while warm lords lead teen aged gangs on a hunt for helicopters to shoot down!

The only fair reaction to Katrina is that New Orleans, if you are poor is not a lot different than Bangladesh. Nothing, nothing was(or is) in place here in the US to deal with the needs of the underclass in case of a disaster. At best a feeble effort was made at a refugee camp in the New Orleans football dome.

Imagine the self righteousness of the US if Indonesia rounded up its poorest citizens after a disaster and placed them in soccer stadia .. w/o food, water or toilets. Pity? Outrage? Worse, imagine the UN making a contribution and the comments of our new UN ambassador, John Boltan:

"
For the United States, what is the importance of extending the United Nations Mission , I mean it’s a very small mission, there aren’t many people in it. What’s the Mission's importance to Seatle? : Well it has a variety of roles, but two issues that have been extremely important are assistance in the re-establishment of governmen. ----we’re --- happy that the government of New Orleans has welcomed the UN and other international assistance, recognizing that of course it is a fundamentally American process.
(adapted from a press conference).
New Orleans is really not so much a result of lack of preparedness for a disaster as it is a result of Bushist belief in a self-reliant society that ignores the needs of the less than affluent. Today, the rich poor gap is all too clear in New Orleans, but the more important gap is the ability of the less than affluent to get an education, get health care, avoid service in foreign wars or retire.

Rainier from Longbranch Marina

Rainier from Longbranch

A Beginning

As SJ starts, our vacation ends. We took the Aquila (our 34 foot Tollycraft) South this year to be closer to home. Our son, Hillel could only spend a few days with us and our daughter, Havi a few other days. New Orleans is said to be drowned forever, The Iraqis ... some of them .. wrote a constitution that pledges obedience to Shariah and Democracy, Renquist is dead, Bush isn't.