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Of Ghosts and Chickenhawks

David Swanson is excerpted here from www.AfterDowningStreet.org, my favorite website of the day:

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact.

While prisoners of war can be theoretically stripped of their rights by calling them other names (like "unlawful combatants"), they are probably most effectively stripped of all rights by keeping their imprisonment secret. That is what Rumsfeld says he did.

My comments, submitted as a reply, below:

The Administration tries to defend these types of practices by scaring us with terrorism, and saying that the practices are practiced on those who deserve no rights. But if there are no rights, no procedures to defend those rights, and no legal recourse for "certain people" that certain other people can choose, without any review by anyone else who is relatively impartial, then anyone can disappear, anyone can become a "ghost", anyone can be tortured. Allowing some of these loopholes, not necessarily "ghosting" per se (but close), under the Patriot Act was a huge, bipartisan mistake, which many Dems defend by saying "we thought that we could trust the Administration". Of course you can't, but even if you could, a United States that starts removing its Constitutional bridles from the government must eventually begin itself turning into another USSR or a northern version of one of the "banana" dictatorships that, showing warning flashes of our dark side, we helped create. As it happens, it feels like the transition is happening sooner than later. But perhaps We the People allowed this pattern to develop, by standing by when it seemed to be happening mostly to other people in other lands. And now our chickenhawks have come home to roost.

Donkeys v. Elephants v. Shrubs

In response to a post on AfterDowningStreet.org reiterating the "sameness" of Democrats and Republicans as a bit of a yawn toward impeaching Bush (although the writer acknowledged that Bush deserved impeachment, and the site as a whole wholeheartedly supports it), I posted the following today:

While you do point out many good reasons that it would probably be an understatement to say that Democrats have a long way to go before they can assume the true moral high ground, this is true of the vast majority of governments through the ages. But where there was once Julius Caesar, a monster to some and a wise leader to others, there was later Caligula, a completely self-absorbed monster with hardly a shred of wisdom or rationality. Where the Democrats and even some Republicans might at least realize some limits upon the wisdom of allowing wars to happen or the environment to be degraded, and where run-of-the-mill Dems and Repubs might sometimes resort to skullduggery thinking it somehow necessary for the benefit of the nation, Bush and Company see only opportunities to gain more power, while lining their own pockets and those of their benefactors. This is epitomized by the act of awarding so-called no-bid contracts to the incompetent likes of Halliburton after lying the nation into war, sending children with their whole lives ahead of them off to kill and die on false pretexts of honor and "national security".

While the differences may be largely of degree, make no mistake that Bush has hastened the decline of our civilization, and we cannot afford not to impeach him. He is our Caligula.

The original post, and also links to Representative John Conyers preliminary look at impeachment, entitled The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, are to be found here.

Fully Flippant Definition of the Day

synchrophant - a type of elephant which synchronizes with other elephants such that they all say the same thing at the same time. e.g. the Republican Party.

Interestingly, synchrophants are often sycophants as well, and synchronize best when being sycophantic to one another. It is the species of elephant most commonly related to the common parrot.

With apologies to self-actualized, freethinking Republicans, all three of you. I just thought of this while jogging this afternoon.

My Slightly Flippant Comment of the Day

To the BBC, on the Bush's brazen surveillance policies:

If we go too far in allowing surveillance, there will be no such thing as privacy, and a lot more people will go to jail for meaningless "crimes" besides terrorism, such as smoking marijuana or having sex in the wrong position. In any case, there must be standards and processes beyond arbitrarily declaring someone a terrorist and therefore beyond legal protections, or the government that is supposed to protect us will in fact become the rogues and the terrorists.

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=629&&&edition=1&ttl=20051222225026

Antagonistic and Harmonious Patterns of Life

What's it all about? My feeling is that it's very important that everyone enjoy living; not that I enjoy it at the expense of you, or you at the expense of me or someone else. That we all enjoy it. Although this idea resembles utilitarianism, which is often snubbed by those who want to have a "deeper" basis for their morals, even most people who want to rest their values on religious principal recognize it anyway, either through the notion of Good Samaritanism (making someone else happy or helping them through a time suffering and need) or through the notion of themselves receiving a later reward even if it is after death. We all want to be happy in the way (pattern of living) that we have learned. Many of us are too attached, however, to that pattern; instead of simply trying to exist in the way we have found, we try to make others live the same way (propagate the pattern) or try to destroy their alternate ways of living (cause the extinction of competing patterns). My belief, however is that the most important aspects of any way of living, or cultural/religious/moral pattern of society, is compatible with coexisting with other patterns, so long as those patterns adopt a similar attitude. Most of us are dealing with similar patterns of existence, trying to get through our lives on Earth; if there is a god and only one god, then it is the same god we are dealing with as well. In fact, even an atheist would be dealing with the same god and might even be seen not so much as denying the existence of God, but as merely refusing to use the same metaphor as everyone else, since we are all finite beings trying to explain the same existence from differing understandings and points of view.

So why do people from different walks of life fear each other? There are a number of reasons that come to mind:

1. Another's way of life tends to contradict one's own. It is not just that the beliefs or lifestyles are side by side within the world, which may be enough to trigger cognitive dissonance leading to paranoia, but that the alternate set of ideas may have some attraction to one's community and family, which could cause behavior oneself, one's family, or one's community would consider inappropriate, even criminal or schismatic. It might be feared that this will happen more or less through osmosis, or perhaps even because of proselytization by the other group.

2. The other group may actually wish the extinction of one's own group (ethnic or religious "cleansing") or the patterns of one's own group (proselytizing), or this may at least be feared.

3. One may wish one's own way (pattern) of life to become totally dominant, out of a combination of the escalation of these fears and being convinced that one's own way is totally the right one, and all the other ways are bad.

Note that by writing a blog and by trying to convince the reader of certain things, I too am trying to propagate patterns from my existence; I am trying to "provive", make my patterns, or the ones that I find valuable to the survival of my community, survive and propagate themselves, in the sense of a previous entry to this blog. But in this, I am no different from almost anyone else. (It is conceivable that from time to time someone might commit suicide in order to remove their own patterns from the world; but in most cases, suicide also involves making some sort of a point, in other words, propagating a thought pattern.)

But reasons 1-3 above, I believe, are generally rooted in paranoia. Once a group becomes paranoid and becomes a threat to others, then the fears of the other group become more legitimate, and the cycle spirals into an antagonistic pattern that is harder to break. Since this has already happened across the world for centuries, the question becomes, can we break the pattern?

The first step in breaking the pattern, or in any project, is understanding the problem. In human affairs, understanding, particularly if it is mutual, can do more to dispel many problems than one might think. Many people believe in deeds over words and thoughts. But in people, words are actions, and changes in thoughts quickly influence other less ephemeral actions as well. So if we can understand that our fear of each other is rooted in paranoia, and prove to each other that we both understand it, we can begin to trust each other with our differences, knowing that we are also the same in being human and wishing to survive and thrive in happiness.

What I am trying to do here, and what many other peace activists have attempted to do over the years, is basically inject a small pattern into the overall pattern of human existence, like a small strand of DNA into a cell, to make the organism heartier. This can be a risky practice, and in fact I am rather opposed to most gene splicing. But at the same time, every act is a modification of the pattern, and everything we do in a world with a chaos of causalities (everything effecting everything else, directly or indirectly) is a risk. In most cases, I think that speaking one's mind is a positive risk -- even if you are wrong, someone can correct you, and it is known what sorts of patterns of thought are out there. (In the case of gene splicing, I think there is often less to gain and more to lose, with a greater overall risk, compared to talking. But that is a different discussion, which I am only forced to touch upon here by the analogy, which is meant to be illustrative. Another analogy might be to a module of code into a computer program, that positively influences the overall function. Perhaps this is a better one.)

Elections in Iraq

On yesterday's elections in Iraq and their "high turnout", I posted the following to the BBC forum:

Hopefully this is an auspicious, new beginning for Iraq; only time will tell. It does not mean, Mr. Bush, that we should now condone the war that led to this point, or any war. War is always a terrible thing, and the consequences of this war will continue for a long time. What is really needed is to find ways to (nonviolently) break the worldwide cycle of violence.

Added the following 12/16/2005:

The most popular comments here seem also to be the most onesided and singleminded cheers for the war and all. Assuming this is not orchestrated by anyone, I think people are forgetting all the hell that has transpired and the lies that led to the war. I don't have space for a laundry list. Let us hope for the success of democracy in Iraq, but let us not tumble headlong into militarism, but consider also the successes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and Dennis Kucinich's proposal for a Department of Peace.

I may not have phrased this perfectly; "success" is meant to refer to Gandhi and King, whereas Kucinich's proposal has not happened -- yet. Just looking at the other comments surrounding my first one, I'd noticed that those with 25 or 30 "recommendations" did seem to be of the sort I described in my second comment, and of course I wouldn't put it past Karl Rove to try to stack discussion groups to some extent, similarly to excluding "antis" from Bush rallies and providing fake pro-Bush protesters after the 2000 election in Florida.

The Death Penalty and Stan Tookie Williams

The death of Stan Tookie Williams has inspired me to start a new blog against the death penalty, accessible at http://stopdp.blogspot.com. This note, which I also emailed to the governor's office, is also part of the first entry.

Governor Schwarzenegger,

I'll never be able to watch your movies again. The man did everything he could to apologize for his legacy as a Crips leader in writing those books for urban youngsters who might be tempted by the gang life. It really looks to me like he might not have committed those murders, that false evidence was used against him. If this is so, we cannot have expected him to apologize for the murders themselves, to admit them. The death penalty is wrong to begin with; anyone who claims to have the power to decide who dies thinks much too much of themselves. This goes for judges and governors as well as "murderers". But to kill a man who might be innocent of the crimes, and who has in any case brilliantly proven that he has become a good man and done so much good, and could still have done so much good... The Terminator indeed. I will be publishing this on RavingModerate.com and stopdp.blogspot.com. Sincerely, Thomas Marshalek, The Raving Moderate

I would add that it some articles on the subject appear to suggest that Schwarzenegger was hedging his bets by complaining that Williams had not apologized for murders by Crips in general. If this were the case, he would truly be wrong in denying clemency, perhaps even abusing his power in a sense, because it is a principle of justice in this country that at least one should only be punished for the crimes for which one is convicted, not the ones for which one has not been convicted. Were he killed for someone's anger at murders by Crips in general, while the actual convictions for which he was sentenced to death were highly questionable, then the system has truly failed, and the Governor, in making this shift, would have a certain special responsibility. However, this is hypothetical at this point. I say, of course, that the system has failed whenever it executes a human being in the first place.

A Little Illuminati Fun | Observations on the Trials (Tribulations and Torturing) of "Terrorists"

Posted the following on Jeff Goldstein's (apparently conservative) "Protein Wisdom" blog, where I ran across his year old satire of John Kerry placed in an Illuminatus context, channelling Robert Anton Wilson. In a moment of weakness, I added a smiley at the end.

Thought it was interesting at the time (of the 2004 Presidential election) that BOTH the "liberal" and the "conservative" candidates were members of Skull and Bones. Illuminati conspiracies running the world????? Also, there was a little historical subplot in Illuminatus in which George Washington was replaced with another George W. (I'd have to look up the name of the replacement). Now we have George W. B. fomenting chaos. Bush was also the 46th Governor of Texas, and Cheney is our 46th Vice President. 46 is 2 times 23, so we have 2 times 2 times 23 in the White House now, and 23 is of course an important Illuminati number. Hmmmmmmmm... :-)

Protein Wisdom item is here.

I also commented today on the BBC website on Condoleeza Rice's comments on the alleged lack of human rights abuses by the United States. The second and third sentences refer to another comment that we should remember that these folks are "terrorists":

Ms. Rice may at least be skirting the question of "extraordinary rendition" by only referring directly to the actions of Americans. Incidentally, two of the reasons prisoners are accorded rights are that not all are guilty of what they are accused of, and that governments often abuse the leeway that they are granted, hiding behind presumptions of guilt. There must be standards of evidence and procedure beyond arbitrarily slapping a label of "terrorist" on someone, thereby triggering a clause that says "do what thou wilt".

"Extraordinary rendition" refers to the practice of sending prisoners to prisons around the world, presumably so other countries can do the dirty work of torturing and abusing prisoners so the US can keep its hands clean. A recent conversation on Democracy Now also brought this practice to mind. The BBC thread is here.

Watched a great episode of the science fiction series "Babylon 5" while working out yesterday. The ISN (Insterstellar Network, or something like that) news crew came and shot footage of the space station, which was then edited together with innuendo from the reporter to recast our heroes as sick psychopaths trying to turn humans into aliens. A few overly broad strokes -- you could tell in advance at least one instance where the interviews would be taken out of context. Typical for the show: some great drama, a few klunkers, always keen insight into politics. You'd think sometimes that the show's creator, Michael Straczynski, knew in advance during the 90's about Bush II, not to mention Fox News. But this probably has more to do with the hackneyed but genuine fact that, as the show sometimes points out, "some things never change". At least not until the universe implodes. This episode really makes you question whether you know anything about anything, which brings up the interesting spectacle of Ramsey Clark working as a defense attorney for Saddam Hussein. Interviewed by Ted Koppel a few days ago, he refused to grant much about Saddam's guilt (gassing Kurds, raping and torturing etc.), insisting that we need to be openminded and that Saddam was "demonized" starting before the first Gulf War.

Now, personally, my inclination is to believe that Saddam is about as bad as he has been portrayed in the press. I opposed both wars on Iraq not on the basis of any sympathy for him, but rather because war almost by definition is horror and devastation for so many people, not just some targeted, "evil" leader, and because I believe, following the lead of such folks as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, that violence is a bad excuse for a lack of imagination in solving problems. In the Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov wrote "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" -- and the character uttering the phrase was no idealist. I carried this quote around on a sign in D.C. during a protest of the first Gulf War. I also did echo the complaint about demonization during both wars, and I think it is true, but my complaint is more that the bad things about Saddam were trotted out only when it was convenient, as part of making the case for war, whereas prior to the first war the United States actually aided and abetted his evil practices. Then the old charges resurfaced as one excuse for the present war. However, knowing what we know now about the ways that the current administration tries to manipulate the news, Clark's comments are not wholly to be dismissed. We need to keep asking ourselves, what do we really know? How much are we being spun? It is this uncertainty that makes conspiracy theories intriguing at times. Still, I really doubt Saddam is any kind of an angel. But Clark is also doing his job as a defense attorney; if an adversarial system of justice is to have any chance of succeeding, the defendant must be able to tell his side of the story and make his arguments. It may seem damned obvious that a defendant is guilty, but sometimes we will be wrong anyway. According a defendant his full rights and representation is the only way we have right now to minimize this risk; to make even one exception and summarily execute even the worst and most obvious dictator would tend to create a slippery slope towards wholesale witch trials, as it sometimes seems that the Bush Administration would like in the context of its other prisoners in the so-called "War on Terror". Furthermore, as Clark points out, in this specific instance it is even more important, and I think the Bush Administration understands this much, that the world sees a fair trial of Saddam so that others can respect the legitimacy of both the new Iraqi government and the United States -- although we have additional work to do in terms of regaining this respect in the wake of George W. Bush.

More Thoughts on Pattern Theory

Yes, this is still a political blog. Hang on tight. By talking about the shifting, changing, and - yes - evolution of patterns, we can stand back a couple of feet from some of our emotional reactions to events in our own political and personal lives and be somewhat objective and analytical, from time to time.

Physical patterns basically have three ways of surviving and/or propogating same/similar patterns, vis a vis other patterns. Let us create a term for survival and propogation as a single concept, since these are the two basic ways in a which a pattern can continue to be registered as having a place in non-abstract existence -- we'll call this concept "provival" The modes of provival are side by side coexistence, interdependence, and competition. Let us first consider these modes where they are relatively successful. In the first, coexistence, the primary pattern -- that is the pattern in question -- is basically indifferent to the existence of the secondary pattern, at least with regard to provival, because it is able to continue in its current state without significantly interacting or being affected by the other (pattern). In the second, interdependence, the primary pattern in fact exists in its current state, or achieves a subsequent state with strong provival qualities, in part because of the effects of the other. The primary pattern takes on qualities of the other, or is otherwise influenced by the other in a manner that at the "worst" has little effect on provival, and at "best" enhances it ("bad" and "good" being value-neutral designations in this theoretical discussion, because this discussion applies to any pattern). This process of influencing the other is likely to manifest itself as a two way street, since most patterns will have some effect, direct or indirect, upon each other when they come into contact. This is near the essence of chaos theory. But the degree and nature of the effects may be asymmetrical, as well as diffuse. Finally, in the mode of competition, the existence, survival and propogation of the other presents a threat such that the primary pattern, in order to provive, must contain the kinetic (active) ability to cause the alteration, diminishment, or extinction of the other. Which if any mode will be the most successful, where success is defined by provival, depends of course upon the how the mode is implemented, the nature of the other pattern, and the modes and methods it employs. In an inanimate world or when unaffected by intelligence, there may not be "choices" as to the mode or the methods; things simply "happen", although there may random or quasi-random factors involving such things as quantum and chaos theory. Chaos and other modes of randomness are important to take into account in any case, since the universe consists of untold numbers of patterns interacting with each other. But to a certain degree, we should be able to focus on discrete interactions between discrete numbers of patterns, just as physics can focus on Newtonian mechanics for many practical purposes even while allowing that there are chaotic and quantum factors to be taken into account; the latter factors also can be used practically in many situations.

However, this is a political blog, so the specific types of patterns I am interested in are human beings and patterns that directly and perceivably affect human beings, especially ones that human beings can influence. So I am interested in applying this theory of patterns to questions, most obviously, or war and peace, and also to issues such as our attitude towards our environment and towards one another as human beings. But let me also remind everyone that this theory of patterns, or if you prefer, way of looking at everything as patterns, applies to all realms of analysis pertaining to the physical or non-abstract world, for example chemistry, physics, and biology. The interesting thing when you get to human beings is really the question of choice. Without choice, patterns arise, jostle and affect each other, sometimes propogate, and then eventually disappear, perhaps replaced by their progeny of same or similar patterns. With choice and intelligence such as our own, the same things happen, but they don't just happen. We human beings are able to think about, choose, experiment with, and refine our modes of provival -- or choose indifference or extinction. Of course, any choice or strategy may backfire and produce the opposite of its intent, unless the actor is truly indifferent and so has no intent. So the discussion of provival becomes not just a question of examining uncaring forces, but of what we "should" choose to do about the condition of our existence, since we care -- whatever it is exactly that means!

An additional interesting wrinkle to the provival of human patterns is the aspect of guessing. Unlike, say a kaleidoscope or chemicals interacting in a beaker, humans try to look ahead at what the other pattern is going to do next and how it will affect them. Examples from game theory and economics are brought to mind. Both patterns are trying to maximize provival; it is possible to imagine instances in which provival is maximized by either cooperation or conflict, as generically outlined above, but that also depends what the other chooses. However, it seems to me that this is an argument for building mutual trust as a long term process; when our guesses at the behavior of the other become more reliable and we are working for either common or mutually compatible goals, cooperating, success will be maximized. Imagine our energies being directed as vectors, which are additive in their combined effect. If we combine them in a common direction, there will be greater progress for both (or more) patterns/people/civilizations. If we apply these vectors in opposite directions, our provivial efforts would tend to cancel out. Let us take war as an example: One side may defeat the "other" and declare "victory", but meanwhile many people have been killed on both sides rather than nurtured so that they could contribute to the provival of society; schools, hospitals, and other buildings have been blown up rather than built; violence has been given longer term credibility and inertia rather than discredited; and in general many patterns contrary to the pattern of human provival have been carried out and given inertia, and much energy has been expended that could have been applied more constructively and effectively to the provival of either humanity as a whole or to that of one side or the other. Two vectors pointing in the same or similar directions move much more quickly towards a common goal.

(It may be another interesting essay to consider the current Iraq war and of the so-called "War on Terror" in the context of the professed or likely goals of all sides involved. An additional factor in the dance of human patterns is the renegotiation of goals themselves, which takes place in the context of a hierarchy of goals, in which provival itself may be the "highest" goal, but the negotiation will affect the precise nature of what type(s) of pattern(s) provive(s).)

Like everything else on this blog, this is to be continued in future posts and/or edited above...

Alito Bit More

Think they needled Alito in school with that pun?

Time magazine ran a story on Judge Alito this week, which portrays him as conservative, but cautious, analytical, one who carefully does the job of interpreting the law as it is handed to him, making it sound unlikely that he would overturn Roe v. Wade, and that even if he did help to chip away at it, it wouldn't be because of personal sentiments, but because of what the law told him to do. In the case where he supported spousal notification prior to an abortion, in his dissent he indicated he would have made an exception where the spouse was abusive. This would of course open up a can of worms in terms of defining and proving "abuse", and I think that anyway, while I sympathize with the expectant father and even with the sentiments of pro-Lifers, it is the woman's body, and it's up to her what she does with it. But, OK, let's say that, given the climate today, that Alito is sort of "moderate", moderately right, where I see myself as (ravingly) moderately left, although the scale has been tilted in recent years to make my moderation look far to the left (which will be another discussion to return to). Let's say that his version of "strict constructionism" is really just that, not an excuse to come to the conclusions he wants to and to bash "liberal" decisions, no matter how they were reached. That would be a judge being simply guided by what the law told him, doing his job in a wholly impartial manner, right? End of story?

But no, there is more to discuss... Stay tuned, I'll be back...

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OK, I'm back. Hope you enjoyed the commercials. Like millions of people were waiting for me to continue writing this article. Since the previous paragraphs, Alito's opposition has found its "smoking gun" -- Alito's assertions 20 years ago that he thought the law should be used to fight against abortion. Maybe he would do so now, or perhaps 20 years later he will be truly scrupulous in upholding the law of the land, even if it is against his beliefs. But all of this raises exactly the question I've been trying to get to, one which is to some extent addressed in a book I studied in law school, Robert Cover's Justice Accused. When I thought about this book, I looked it up on Amazon.com and wrote a short review; I'll quote most of it here:

The book explores the conflict that occurs when a judge perceives that the law applying to a case before him is not a just one and will result in injustice if applied in the current case. Does the judge simply apply the law, or find some way around it to allow for a just result? This is an interesting question today, given the debate between "strict construction" of the Constitution and Holmes' popular notion that the Constitution is a "living document" whose interpretation must evolve with the times. The chief example used in this book is the infamous Dred Scott decision, in which a slave who had lived for many years on free soil, sued for his freedom, but was ultimately turned down by the Supreme Court.

I may have ended that review a bit too early. The point being, that Chief Justice Taney, wrote that decision on grounds of a lack of jurisdiction. He gave some indication that he new this was not "justice" in any grand sense, perhaps he even knew it was quite the opposite, but believed he was constrained by the Constitution. His Court had the opportunity to do a great justice, but presumably they could not do anything but allow the injustice to go on:

It is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws. The decision of that question belonged to the political or law-making power; to those who formed the sovereignty and framed the Constitution. The duty of the court is, to interpret the instrument they have framed, with the best lights we can obtain on the subject, and to administer it as we find it, according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted.

In theory, an "activist" court which also happened to be enlightened about the subject of slavery would have found a way to free Dred Scott, but a "strict constructionist" court, a court that felt constrained not to "legislate from the bench", had no choice but throw up its hands.

It's a difficult subject, because our country does have a separation of powers. The legislature legislates, the executive is supposed to execute the legislature's laws, and judiciary upholds those laws.

But what is happening when the executive and the legislature cry out that the judiciary is "legislating from the bench"? Are they honestly policing the process and upholding the Constitution? A few of them may think so, but I think the situation tends to be more one of "jealousy over powers" rather than an objective view of the "separation of powers". Remember how the Dred Scott Court threw up its hands at freeing a slave? Most of those who currently crusade to stop judge's from "legislating from the bench" (let's call it "LFB" from now on) want the Courts to throw up their hands whenever they encounter a conservative bugaboo, especially any one that involves corporate economics or unbridled Executive power. The Courts, in strictly applying the Constitution and the laws written and sneakily passed in omnibus legislation by an increasingly conservative clique of politicians and lobbyists, cannot interfere with the destruction of the environment, the erosion of the rights of laborers and ordinary citizens, with human rights violations in the so-called "War on Terror", with the theft of our tax dollars funnelled into pork barrel corporate socialism... for interference with any of this is perceived as highly inconvenient to the powers that be. So no no, imply the strict constructionists, we can't have the Courts go around and actually dispense "justice", they need to just stick with "applying the law" as it is written.

Is there something wrong with this picture? Is there a way out?

Stay tuned...

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My feeling is this. The Constitution is a compassionate document. The Preamble to this document reads as follows:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This is the paragraph that kicks off the Constitution, and it explains why the document is being written. Unlike the Declaration of Independence or The Federalist Papers (oft-cited commentaries by framers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay), the Preamble to the Constitution is part of the document itself, and so cannot be ignored -- but it usually is, especially by "strict constructionists" who are trying to tell us that the Constitution is a cold set of rules that can only be read in the narrowest sense possible -- so that the other branches can do any favor that they want to for their corporate pals. Yet this is the statement of the purpose of the Constitution which was agreed to by all of the framers of the document, and it practically begs us to ask the big questions about the rest of the Constitution: how can we apply this or that clause to help so that it helps us a form a more perfect union, establishes justice etc. How could keeping slaves ensure the perfection of our union? What justice is there in that, and what does it have to do with the blessings of liberty? There must be another reading of the word "citizenship" such that the Dred Scott Court could have found jurisdiction to free the man!

Still, justices can't go around inventing the law out of "whole cloth", as the strict constructionists often accuse them of doing -- "LFB, LFB!" As a law student, I read enough cases to know that every case does cite the Constitution and/or the other laws of the land that are deemed by the justices to be relevant. They are at least making reference to these laws. It is quite certain that the logic is often difficult to follow, and this makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that the logic is "tortured". Indeed, Griswold v. Connecticut's and Roe v. Wade's "right to privacy" emanating from "penumbras" in the Constitution may sound like a stretch, even if one agrees in principle with the right to abortion subject to reasonable limitation and that people should have a right to privacy from the government, certainly stretching to control of their own bodies. It might seem that privacy is at the core of many of our rights, but unfortunately the framers of the Constitution and of its Amendments chose to enumerate the more specific rights, missing the big picture of privacy and the specific instance of abortion. But the actual language of Roe makes a fair amount of sense, particularly with regard to the rights of the mother, and does not ignore the notion of the rights of the unborn altogether:

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1968), Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 (1967), Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S., at 484-485; in the Ninth Amendment, id., at 486 (Goldberg, J., concurring); or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923). These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937), are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967); procreation, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541-542 (1942); contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S., at 453-454; id., at 460, 463-465 (WHITE, J., concurring in result); family relationships, Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944); and child rearing and education, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, supra.

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

On the basis of elements such as these, appellant and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree. Appellant's arguments that Texas either has no valid interest at all in regulating the abortion decision, or no interest strong enough to support any limitation upon the woman's sole determination, are unpersuasive. The Court's decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) (vaccination); Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) (sterilization).

We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.

To be continued further soon...

---

Comments on Israel

I've added a couple of comments to the BBC website recently, both on the subject of Israel. You can participate in these and other conversations at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm.

On the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's death:

Sunday, 13 November, 2005

Rabin came close to a big step forward in Israeli-Palestinian relations, making his assassination all the more regrettable. But before we romanticize too much, I seem to recall that practices like bulldozing the homes of the families of alleged terrorists -- the families, not just the terrorists themselves -- continued under his command as the Prime Minister. But at least he saw that a way to get along had to be found eventually, and he tried to do find it.

On the opening of a new border between Gaza and Egypt:

Tuesday, 15 November, 2005

I can understand the fear of weapons coming in through the border. Yet I find it hard to believe that Sharon would agree to it without knowing what he was doing. Maybe it is that the weapons would be no closer to Jewish families than before, when they occupied Gaza and lived on that border, or perhaps they've devised suitable precautions, or even developed some level of trust with the Palestinians. In any case, I'm beginning to develop some respect for Ms. Rice as Secretary of State, although I still think she was a shill for the Bush Administration in her previous post, stuck with the job of systematically lying about yellowcake uranium all over the TV.

Honestly, prior to the invasion of Iraq, I felt as though "Condi" was spewing yellowcake out of her mouth everywhere she went, as though taking a big bite just before going on camera and talking, without chewing it at all. However, in her new position Ms. Rice strikes me as patient and determined and interested in achieving some balance, although I am sure I disagree with her on many, many points, not least of all her determined loyalty to Bush and his band of thieves. At best, she may be using them as a means to an end -- power, perhaps with some noble intent for using it wisely, a difficult task given the karma of "yes-ing" your way to the top, the preferred means of climbing in this so-called "Administration".

Sam Alito and the Springboard to Democracy

According to Democrats.com's petition to Senators to reject Judge Sam Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court:

George Bush's nomination of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court is unacceptable. In his 15 years on the Court of Appeals, Alito has compiled a record of right-wing judicial extremism: requiring battered women to notify their husbands before an abortion; prohibiting Congress from restricting the sale of machine guns; prohibiting Congress from enacting Family and Medical Leave; allowing employers to discriminate against workers with AIDS; even allowing police to strip-search a 10-year-old girl. Alito's financial dealings are also unacceptable: he ruled on a Vanguard case while he had a large investment there, and accepted an unexplained gift of as much as $250,000 in ExxonMobil stock. Bush chose Alito simply to reward his far-right supporters. Sam Alito would be the deciding vote on the most fundamental questions of our time, and he would invariably vote against personal freedom and in favor of a corporate theocratic dictatorship.

Petition is here: http://democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/74

I signed on with the following added note:

When new Supreme Court members are chosen, there is a lot of talk about "strict constructionism", the strict and literal interpretation of the Constitution, restricting its meaning to what is there in black and white. Similarly, there is talk of "not legislating from the bench". All of this is well and good in theory. Legislators legislate, the courts interpret. But the Preamble to the Constitution, a part of the actual document, needs to be kept in mind: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." This sets forth the purpose of the Constitution, and therefore the light in which it must be interpreted. Liberty and Justice are just two of the principles that seem to have been forgotten in the decisions by Judge Alito which have been set forth in this petition. Please keep the Preamble and these cases in mind when you consider this man's nomination.

Unfortunately, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh seems to have decided that these online petitions are spam; to write his office, you have to go through his own webpage, everything else gets bounced. He is missing out on seeing just how many thousands of people are participating in petitions and protests, and would like their voices heard even if they are not writing letters from scratch. Even some of those of us who write for ourselves also can use the springboard which is provided by these online petitions.

You can email Senator Bayh at http://bayh.senate.gov/WebMail1.htm

I forgot to mention that when a politician says that a judge is "legislating from the bench", it means "I don't like the judge's decision." "The judge was only strictly interpreting the Constitution" means "The judge made the decision I wanted, but a lot of other people are disgusted by it, so let me help him hide beneath the cover of the Constitution". At least this is how it works much, if not most, of the time.

I also love that phrase "corporate theocratic dictatorship". Boy, what would that look like? A curious blend, to be sure, but the natural result of Bush's habit of placating his two-faceted "conservative" base, corporations and the religious right. Actually, the country has already been close to that condition, when there were no labor unions and children worked sixteen hour days, and you could be thrown in jail for sodomy. Or having an abortion.

Scooter, Coulter, Halliburton

Reading up a bit on the progress of the Valerie Plame leak investigation, I ran across the following excerpt from a CNN interview involving Ann Coulter:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/28/coulter-leak/

O’BRIEN: So there you have it, Karl Rove apparently escaping indictment, but that’s the good news. The bad news is, on goes the investigation. What are your thoughts on that one?

COULTER: That is like the worse possible outcome.

O’BRIEN: Oh, an indictment would be better?

COULTER: I think so. I mean, I don’t think indictments are particularly big deal politically. They’re a big deal for whoever gets indicted, but I don’t think it really matters to the White House. I’ve just been thinking, this is going to be lancing the boil. Let’s just get it done one way or the other this Friday. Either they get indicted and they leave, or they’re not indicted and it’s over. To stay under investigation — that is not the best possible outcome.

Responding to this and quite a litany of ad hominem attacks on Coulter, of whom I am admittedly not a fan but have no desire to harm as long as I don't have to watch her on TV, I posted the following:

I think an indictment for leaking information in order to help to cover up other information used to deceive Congress and the public into supporting a war would indeed be a serious problem for the administration, and would and should open up more investigations. I also think the shots are going beyond cheap here (not that I haven’t seen worse on conservative bulletin boards, Jeremy), but I will go so far as to agree that Coulter’s arguments and opinions have never impressed me any more than any of the other so-called "conservative pundits", a job for which the chief qualification seems to be the unwillingness to back down from the latest spin. One has to be a sort of a cross between a bulldog and a parrot, metaphorically speaking. But today, I’ll give Coulter a little credit for showing a bit of humility on behalf of the neocons, who should be chastened.

I also saw Joseph Wilson on C-Span yesterday, talking to the National Press Club. Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband and former Ambassador to Iraq, is considered to have been the actual target of Plame's outing as a CIA agent, as he had begun publicly speaking out on the fact that he had travelled to Niger on a quasi-official trip and determined pretty conclusively that no yellow cake uranium from there had been sold to Saddam, contrary to what the Bush Administration claimed after they should have had his report, buttressing their case for war with the fear of nuclear weapons which they didn't know to exist and which in fact did not exist. All of which, if I may say it one more time, has produced enormous profit for Halliburton, the company which still pays Dick Cheney a stipend (always follow the money when watching the Bush Administration). So in other words, for those who are confused by the talk of indictments, the Administration is accused of illegally exposing the identity of a CIA agent, exposing her to possible danger, in order to retaliate against her husband for exposing evidence that the Administration lied to get us into war. Add to this that the real motive for sending American youths to Iraq to fight and die may have been profits for Administration cronies, e.g. Halliburton, and one can begin to see why many people are calling for Bush's impeachment.

On a sidenote, Wilson seemed a bit puzzled by the fact that everyone but his family refers to his wife by her "maiden" name. The Raving Moderate (doing his best imitation of Miss Manners by referring to himself in the third person) is perfectly in favor of women keeping their name, or men changing theirs with equal frequency, but is also quite willing to call people whatever they would like to be called, and occasionally to call them things they don't want to be called.

BTW, I'd like to thank those folks who are at least watching my blog closely enough now to reply with SPAM comments whenever I add a new post. This is progress. Perhaps I will begin replying on your sites.

Proof Bush is the Anti-Christ!

I was going back through my previous posts, and was amused to note that I'd made a reference to Bush as the Anti-Christ. Just casually tongue in cheek, to be sure, and even then not an outright assertion that he was really the AC -- only that it might be hard to believe that he's not. It might (or might not) be appropriate on Halloween to note that, a few weeks later, I was flipping through the few channels on my television set (I have what you might call "sub-basic" cable, the minimum you can order) and landed briefly on a program discussing such phenomena as the rock group Black Sabbath and the so-called "religion" of Satanism. Although film clips of the group rocking out and of Satanism founder Anton Lavey looking silly playing cheesy organ in a cape might at first have seemed like an amusement and even a pretty good advertisement for Sabbath records, the show turned out to be a couple of relatively sincere evangelical guys warning about the DANGERS of Satanic -- er -- stuff. However, when they quoted (I think) the Bible to remind us that the Anti-Christ would come dressed as a preacher or a prophet, I could not help but to stop and think once again that perhaps "W" was the mark of the beast this season. True, George W. Bush is not a religious leader in the strict sense of the term, but much of his appeal is through his own claim of being "born again" (videotaping his conversion at the feet of the Rev. Billy Graham, no less -- but was this a calculated move?) and the perception he wishes to bring forth policies in the spirit of true belief. Yet with his ill-advised adventures in Iraq, his wholesaling of the environment and natural resources, his brilliant plans to make nuclear bunker busters acceptable and bury nuclear waste next to earthquake faults, to arm all Americans to the teeth and set us against each other (OK, that's a slight stretch, but not that far, given recent legislation in Florida), all of which seems to lead to the short term profits of his mega-wealthy but incompetent cronies... and on and on ... you can't help feeling he's leading us to Armageddon. By the time he delivers what the Religious Right presumably really wants -- an end to abortion -- we'll all be dead, from war, radiation, bullets, pollution etc. There will be no more babies to deliver and not much of a world for them to be born into. Now that's a macabre thought.

Boo! Happy Halloween from W!

Just another way of saying it here...

Impeach Bush petition here:
http://democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/65

Here's the note I added to my Congress members:

In every regard, it becomes more clear all the time that the Bush Administration thinks it is running the government for the personal benefit of Bush's cronies, through laws, policies, and the appointments of yes-men and yes-women that benefit the Administration's best friends and contributors at the very top of the corporate ladder. It's already criminal to sacrifice what's left of our environment for these sordid goals. To sacrifice human lives directly in the cause of falsely conjured wars is the ultimate insult to the people.

I forgot to say, "If this ain't grounds for impeachment (high crimes and misdemeanours), I don't know what is!"

Hanging on to War

Here's my reply to a young man in the local student newspaper, hanging on to the presumed righteousness of the Iraq war, in the context of the new terrorist bombings in Bali. I must admit that I failed to pay attention to the Bali question in my reply, and will have to give further thought to the connections. Brian Stewart's column may be found at
http://www.idsnews.com/subsite/story.php?id=31610&adid=opinion

Ah, "Publius", thou art but a young fool, daring to call over half the country "naive" when you still seem to believe that if things are bad enough somewhere, war must be the answer. Basically, you just ain't lookin' at the whole picture. But perhaps the testosterone coursing through your veins has blinded you only temporarily.

Hardly anyone disagrees that Saddam is a bad man, and made for one hell of a nasty dictator. Still, removing even the nastiest of dictators isn't necessarily synonymous with "liberating" the tyrant's country. First of all, the means to the end was horrible, and Americans mostly only viewed sanitized footage of what went on. Thousands of people, many of them innocents, were killed and mutilated by our bombs. Just about everybody else in Iraq has had their livelihood and survival plunged into lasting uncertainty, which brings us to a second issue, the actual outcome of the war, which has been mediocre at best, potentially catastrophic at worst. Sure, the war got rid of Saddam, taking power away from an evil dicator. But did we liberate the people of Iraq? Let me use an analogy. If you meet a family who is in chains, remove their chains, but then, whether or not it is your intention, leave them lying in a minefield without a map, have you liberated them? You can hardly deny that living in Iraq today is like living in a minefield. Aside from the literal minefields there, there is of course the minefield of terrorism.

Who created the minefield of terrorism? Surely it is the terrorists who conspire to create this unholy hell, which somehow they see as a holy act. They seem to believe (somewhat as you do, "Publius") that countering a perceived evil with evil can somehow result in good. They are wrong, wrong, wrong to be doing what they are doing. But, frankly, the war helped them to get there, by creating a vacuum of power and by making the United States occupation look bad enough, whatever our intentions (the subject of a future conversation, perhaps), to create a fertile recruiting ground for new terrorists. This was bound to happen, and saying so is not a matter of hindsight. Months before the invasion began, I downloaded a poster depicting Osama bin Laden dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing a finger and declaring "I Want You to Invade Iraq". A sad comment, indeed, but I knew it was true. Later, by allowing torture to happen and looking for exceptions to our own rules about treating prisoners, "our" side made things that much worse in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, of young Muslims, and of people everywhere.

It is not that we should be afraid of angering terrorists. We can't capitulate to their threats and terror, thus allowing them to realize their ambitions of power. But that doesn't mean that just any old thing we do that is "against" them is morally acceptable, or even helpful. We must dissipate their appeal by acting morally ourselves; Muslims and all other people of good will should have little or no cause for grievance against us, of the magnitude that leads young people toward terrorism. Again, terrorism is always wrong, and, yes, the terrorists bear their own responsibility for choosing this path. But in almost any feud -- whether between families, clans, nations, religions or some combination thereof -- both sides almost always bear much of the responsibility for being stubborn and insensitive to the needs and grievances of even total innocents born on the "wrong" side, for exclusively blaming real and imagined enemies while refusing to look within for responsibility, and simply for either not realizing or not caring that even seemingly righteous violence sows the seeds for more violence, often lasting centuries into the future. Everyone must consider the consequences of their own actions, even if some of those consequences proceed indirectly through provoking "bad" people whose responsibility is therefore also great.

After all of this, we can only hope that a new Iraqi Constitution will not just be approved through the process that has been put into place, but that it will successfully provide the means to govern the country according to just principles, leaving both the people of Iraq and people everywhere better off. If, my young friend, and I do say "if", if that happens, we can reasonably ask "was it all worth it?" Even then, we must take into account the viewpoints of untold numbers of mothers who had their children killed and mutilated by both sides, as well as everything else that has been stirred up. Even if the answer is "yes, it was worth it, and it was the best we knew how to do at the time", we must further ask "Is there a better way for us to accomplish these goals next time?" We might start this inquiry by studying the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There's a lot more to this war thing than meets the eye, "Publius", and a lot more than I've said here. But consider my words well, my young friend, and perhaps we shall speak again.

Cronyism: The Bigger Picture

I took the Moveon.org "How Are We Doing" Survey today, which ended with the open-ended question, "is there anything else you'd like to share with us?" This is my reply to that question.

I don't know if we have to go rabid over every single so-so appointment Bush makes. What we need is to go after and educate people about the Big Picture. In the case of the Bush Administration, the Big Picture is what is finally being recognized as cronyism. But it goes well beyond rewarding Yes-men and Yes-women with good jobs that they're not qualified to do, the way Time magazine recently portrayed it, albeit as a cover story. Jim Hightower (Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush, Thieves in High Places) and Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) have nailed it more precisely. The really key jobs are going to exactly the people who want to do the opposite of what the jobs are for, often for their own or for their own cronies' profit, like giving control of the EPA to anti-environmental corporate lobbyists, with Bush Pioneer fund raisers benefitting in particular. So the country is being sold out; the environment that sustains us and the lives of our young men and women who, bravely if perhaps foolishly, become soldiers, are being traded for profits in the forms of avoiding regulation, allowances for pollution, and war profiteering. The government is being run essentially by a criminal network, a gang if you will, of "business" people who are willing to quite literally destroy everything we hold dear to make a quick buck! To build a movement, people need to see the fundamentals of what's going on, and this extreme of Faustian bargaining is what's dominating the current Administration's policies. Some appointments and policy maneuvers are more crucial and emblematic of the phenomenon than others, and those are the ones we really need to focus on.

Let me add what has become somewhat of a common place disclaimer, but one which bears repeating. Bush and Co. did not invent cronyism. They have just taken it to new extremes, and these extremes threaten untold lives, and almost everyone's way of life. At best, as I've mentioned before, maybe they know not what they do; but make no mistake, they're doing it.

Rolling Stone on Bush the Polluter

I have to say that Rolling Stone has put out some of the best, bravest, and to the point articles criticizing the Bush Administration. My question is, could he and his cronies really be so evil, or is it possible that they just comprise a culture of spoiled brats with too much power who knoweth not what they do? Of course, the theft of our natural resources -- of the very environment that allows us to live and breathe -- for the short-term gain of cronies and contributors, figures prominently. Check out this one, full text at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7605389.
If you happen to be one of those who still sees Bush as some sort of war hero or savior to family values, well, follow the money, baby. The spoiled brat scenario is about the best we can hope for, but with that much power behind his indulgences of his personal friends at the expense of, well, all of humanity and the very environment that supports our existence, sometimes it's hard to believe that Bush isn't the anti-Christ.

A Polluter's Feast

Bush has reversed more environmental progress in the past eight months than Reagan did in a full eight years

By TIM DICKINSON

What can you say about the environmental record of an administration that seeks to test pesticides on poor children and pregnant women? That argues in court that a dam is part of a salmon's natural environment? That places a timber lobbyist in charge of the national forests and an oil lobbyist in charge of government reports on global warming? That cuts clean-air inspections at oil refineries in half, allows Superfund to go bankrupt and permits the mining industry to pump toxic waste directly into a wild Alaskan lake?

Only this: It's about to get even worse.

Read on.

Fractal Love

One thing that's encouraged me to remain interested in spirituality and optimistic about the human condition is the theory of fractals. You know those beautiful, psychedelic looking, brightly colored, swirly patterns generated mathematically from Mandelbrot sets (or something like that)? What got me about fractals was that they were patterns within patterns. When you zoom in on the picture, you see the same picture. And to a certain extent, it appears that these patterns within patterns do well at depicting aspects of physical reality.

So, it occurred to me one day that perhaps if there is a fractal nature to the universe, then patterns of goodness, of morality, of caring, of love, which we do see manifested at the social level, may not only exist in this finite and transient microcosm of earthly life, but may be writ larger in the very nature of existence. The same goes for consciousness -- our little lights of awareness may be part of greater awareness. Of course, the same would then likely be the case for the "negative" aspects of our existence -- or, if we look at things in a somewhat more detached manner, the "yang" to our "yin" -- such as hatred and war. But still, with a grain of hope that our little bit of paradise is not all there is in some vast, cold universe.

Spouting Spirituality, Religious Rambling, Theological Thoughts

Since I've mentioned God a few times, I should probably add, for the curious, that I'm not a "Christian" myself, just what you might call a "fairly spiritual person", who is far from perfect himself but has real values, and that's some of what is driving this blog. I waxed a little "theological" in a previous post, and that's a side of being human that's worth a look every now and then. The reason I don't affiliate with a specific, organized religion is that I personally feel that whatever "God" is, it/he/she is greater and more unfathomable than any codification or understanding created by humans, which I suppose makes me closer to some forms of Buddhism than anything else. One might refer to my ramblings about chaos theory -- as a finite human being, I can barely begin to fathom the physical universe or the workings of the society I live in. How can I fully fathom God, or expect any other human to do it for me? I think many, perhaps all, of the great religious works can point a finger in the right direction, but none is so complete as to preclude learning from the others, and all, if they are not occasionally misleading in themselves, can be misinterpreted and/or used to mislead. Religious wars are the most egregious examples of religion being used to mislead. God didn't create us to all be the same, nor do we need to eliminate conflicting points of view. We're all looking at the same thing, just from different angles. We'll probably get closer to the truth if we take as many angles into account as possible.

Crony Connections

I posted the following, along with signing a petition to protect forest lands, on The Petition Site The particular petition can be found at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/202243741, along with many other petitions posted at thepetitionsite.com. In terms of the contours of Bush's cronyism, I'm not the expert, but I mainly want to point out some sources that are pretty hard to argue with once you've taken a look. To me it was always just kind of obvious; whenever I saw a new Bush initiative, I would just ask myself "What industry benefits from this". The answer was usually Energy (and I'm not talking about solar cell startups) or Defense (let's allow the tactical use of nuclear "bunker busters" and finally retake the lid off of Pandora's Box after 60 years!!). We the People are allowing "W" to sell our country from underneath us.

My impression is that cronyism drives both appointments and policy in the Bush administration. Agency appointments are given to contributors, friends and their lobbyists whose chief interest is to gut the agency they are appointed to in order to maximize profits. Policies and laws are composed by the same people, or with them in mind. See, for example, Jim Hightower's Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush or Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy for numberous examples. This pattern fits the administration's "work" on the environment and on Iraq. Nevertheless, the people must not be "cowed", and must continue to raise their voices, for instance through petitions like this one, if we're ever to slow down or stop this disgusting display of Pigs at the Trough (Arianna Huffington's book on the same subject).

On the redeeming side, the New York Times Magazine, in its cover story, reports that Bono Vox of U2, who is not only a rock star but an activist who manages to run in top government circles around the world, claims to be able to make some headway with "Christian Conservatives" by actually appealing to their Christian sides and quoting the Bible. So it may be worthwhile to find those CC's who are actually sincere about their beliefs and question then a little more closely. Is it possible that George Bush really cares about his professed Christian values, making it somehow possible get past the selfish, lying about his military service, crony-paybacking-at-the-expense-of-all-humanity, spoiled brat to show him the error of his ways? I hope somebody tries. Good luck getting past Karl Rove, his Machiavellian Mephisto. --The Real Raving Moderate

Smoking Guns in Iraq

The thing is, that Downing Street memo is nothing special. It merely states someone's opinion that the Bush Administration was working backwards, twisting the facts to suit the theory rather than other way around, as Sherlock Holmes once observed of an adversary. It's a telling insider observation, but not a smoking gun. Similar observations have been made by Clinton and W's former terrorism czar Richard Clarke in his book Against All Enemies. Again, not quite a smoking gun, but Clarke does point in general terms to earlier "writings and speeches" by the likes of Cheney and Wolfowitz, and also to the fact that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill also thought that these Administration insiders had been planning all along to attack Iraq (p. 264). The "writings and speeches" might provide a bit more of a smoking gun were someone to identify the key passages. Even without that, all the rest of the above, taken together with the cronyism evidenced by Bush's appointments (see my next posting) and by the administration's awarding no-bid contracts, in Iraq and now in Louisiana, to the likes of Halliburton, who apparently overcharges and in many people's opinion does a lousy job but still pays Dick Cheney a $194K annual honorarium, is enough circumstantial evidence to convict any ordinary defendant. And those things are all documented in the media, not speculative rumors. Bush is using his office, sending kids off to war and making a shambles of everything from the environment to foreign policy, for the profit of his inner circle.

A Society of Rules

The pragmatic theory is that we live in a society of rules, which are created in order that things will function smoothly. The question for rulERs then becomes what it is it we would like to have function smoothly. Is it everybody's lives, all of society in harmony with the environment which sustains us? Or is it simply the lives of the rulers?

Then there is the meta-rules theory, which is that rules are rules because they are rules, either because they are created by a higher power, or just because they are rules. We don't need to understand them, they are there to be obeyed.

All of this can also be very convenient for people who are in the position of being rulERs, who may in fact be following the narrow version of the pragmatic theory (personal gratification) while preaching the broad version (fairness and/or equal opportunity, which may not be the same thing in a zero sum game) or some version of the meta-rules theory.

Either way, they're ripping you off.

Some would suggest responding violently. In general, though, violent revolutions are also rip offs, and their leaders are gratifying themselves in one way or another, whether through the sheer sense of power and "glory" or through the wealth that can come along with power, at the expense of those they lead, and certainly not in accordance with any higher power. If the early leaders are sincere, someone will soon come along in the chaos of revolution to steal a personal advantage.

Mahatma Gandhi, in titling his autobiography, termed his life "My Experiments With Truth". The truth about rules, I think, is that they are convenient creations of man which function best when they are created in accordance with Truth. Truth on some level can be equated with Tao, which I have seen defined as "the Way Things Work". So Truth is both practical and relating to whatever higher power exists; to me, it is both personal, somebody watching and listening, usually at the edge of consciousness, as I write and think and live, and speaking to me, telling me what it is, and it is everything, the way of things, the nature of existence itself and all the myriad qualities it takes on, he, she, and it. Verging on pantheism!

But I wax nutty. That's OK, we all have our version of that.

Does this help us to make better rules? What was the nature of Gandhi's experiment with truth, and what sort of rules does it suggest we follow -- and why? How are they practical? How are they spiritually motivated?

Tune in next week to find out! It's a cliffhanger, and I have no idea how it will conclude. Well, maybe I do, I just have to ferret out the answer. Or maybe this is just another loose end in the blog.

Well, maybe I'll ramble on a bit more.

Lesser leaders tend to fear the truth, because the Truth will suck out their power, if their power is based on lies. Truth is leverage, at least to the degree that Truth is embraced by the people and they allow it to decide whether they give or withdraw their support for the leader
(Impeach Bush!). It is usually then that the leader must rely upon violence. If the leader was right, violence would not be necessary, because the power of Truth does not rely upon violence for its existence. Truth against lies will win eventually, but must be buttressed by conviction and strong arguments, which can be derived by keeping the focus on Truth. Lies cannot be as strongly buttressed by those elements, and so tends to reach for violence as a crude way of silencing its competition. An alternative to physical violence is to simply shout down (Bill O'Reilly) one's opponent, which is nevertheless violence: spiritual and psychological violence to the person being shouted down, especially while trying to speak of the Truth, and violence to Truth itself.

Incoherent Ramblings Rave #2 (Updated 9/23/2005)

Note: I'm attempting selectively publish what I expect are essays in progress that will grow significantly longer over time, but allow the reader to eavesdrop to some extent on my "thinking out loud." After all, my primary goal is to stimulate thought and debate in the world at large, and only secondarily, for the sake of shelter and bread, to garner some sort of recognition for my own thinking and writing. So, since it's not about bread, why not start the discussion while it's still half-baked? (How noble you are, pretending not to be a raving moderate egomaniac, then throwing out your paltry humor!)

Outline:
Us & Them, You & Me
Order & Chaos

"It's Us versus Them." "It's Us against the World." "It's Me against You." "It's just Me against the World." "It's CONTROL versus KAOS. Would you believe it?"

"Pick your battles."

It's all a matter of perspective. Let me throw in one more.

"We Are the World."

Maybe I'd better take these little quotations one by one, although I'm supposed to be rambling incoherently to get the ideas out there. Anyway, these are all slightly different perspectives on how we view the world, on what we think are important units of organization. Do we identify with a group? Only with ourselves as individuals? Do we feel a part of a greater whole, of which all human beings are a part? So I don't mean to be too organized, but here we go. Most individuals, by the way, are, in my opinion, a blend of all of the following:

"It's Us versus Them." This seems to be the mindset of the so-called "War on Terror", or perhaps it is just as well termed a "War of Terror" depending on whose "side" one is on (or not) and how objectively one is willing to think about it. This is a competitive point of view in which the individual identifies with a greater whole ("Us") composed of some identifiable subset of humanity, which might be composed of one's family, or those of one's religious affiliation, nationality, ethnicity etc. Other subsets who are not a part of this subset (and are therefore viewed as "Them") are chosen as a focus of emnity and competition. The reasons for this may be realistic, largely historical, illusory, or intentionally or unintentionally promulgated to manipulate the group. In most cases it is a combination of the above factors, with further input from the motivation to rationalize some sort of political or economic gain, or even merely a catharsis of violence.

"It's Us against the World." The affiliation to the group has become so strong that everyone else is considered to have some sort of a problem. This can happen in at least two ways. One is that the group has such cult-like qualities that it acquires an extremely powerful primacy in the minds of its members. The group promulgates a worldview which the membership comes to accept as infallibly correct. Meanwhile the rest of the world, whether by birth or by training, is far enough off the mark that they must either be converted, suffer some egregious punishment, or even be eliminated.

Another factor in an "Us against the World" point of view may be one of historical and/or current persecution. Many religions and ethnicities have at least a mild sense of some such persecution; if it comes from several different quarters and the group does not form strong alliances with outsiders, to one extent or another the members may have trouble trusting anyone outside the group as much as those inside the group.

"It's Me against You" or "It's just Me against the World." To one degree or another, all of us are alone in our individuality, and we are fighting or working for our own survival or self-interest. Some may primarily feel a part of a group, but even then, the individual's worldview is bound to conflict at some points with the received worldview of the group and/or with that of individuals within the group who may be central figures in one's life. This may lead to conflicts with the other individuals, with one's own group, or with others in the world, in which one feels one is standing alone. At some point, an individual may feel his or her aloneness as having primacy over any sense of group affiliation, and thus stands as "Me against the World". This is usually harmless to the world at large, in some cases may be beneficial as it brings about unique ideas that might be stifled by "groupthink", but in extreme cases might hypothetically be an important factor in the behavior of psychopaths whether merely murderous or, as in the case of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, having a certain self-important sense of idealism.

"It's CONTROL versus KAOS. Would you believe it?" I throw this one in as a reference to the 60's spy spoof TV series, "Get Smart". Although the show was played mostly for slapstick laughs, there is some depth to the irony that the bumbling, chaotic US spy agency was named "CONTROL" and operated for the purpose of fighting "KAOS", another bumbling spy agency, roughly equivalent to SMERSH in the James Bond films. When we look at the efforts of the current US government administration to "control" terrorism or even control the chemistry of all the different groupings of people in competition across the world, if either is indeed their goal, we have to ask ourselves if they are not in fact stirring up a greater proportion of "chaos" than they are ameliorating in the process?

In fact, I think this question is one that any movement, organization, or effort to reform or improve the world, coming from any mix of the above perspectives, has to ask itself. We operate in a complex, interwoven world in which many forces are at play, so many forces that the system probably should be considered as "chaotic" in the scientific sense of the word that implies an exquisitely sensitive system in which small actions may have large consequences, such that our focused attempts at creating some desirable order may produce larger patterns of disorder in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Introducing a new force or stimulus amidst such complexity, though intended to create greater stability, may create greater instability, as it is arguable that George Bush's intervention in Iraq has done.

"We Are the World." The theme song from 1985's Live Aid concert may be hackneyed in some people's minds, perhaps even mine, but it's key phrase is philosophically important. It may even be important to the survival of humanity as a species. It is a shift in perspective that may be viewed spiritually, or may also be viewed mathematically from a systems viewpoint. To me, the two are intertwined, although I am neither spiritually all that high nor much of a mathematician. Simply put, each object or system we think of as a "thing" is part of a greater "thing". A fingernail is part of a finger is part of a hand is part of a person is part of a population (say, "Americans" or "Christians" or "Muslims") is part of a greater population (the population of the planet) is part of a greater system (such as the ecosystem of the Earth) is part of a still greater system (like the Universe)... is, perhaps, a part of "God" or "the Infinite". And we can go smaller as well; the fingernail is made up of cells, made up of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles... down to the most infinitesimal "thing" we can imagine or manage to talk about, and perhaps God is found there, too, the substrate to all existence. In any case, we are a part of everything, and we are intertwined such that everything is a part of us as well. Chaos theory, at least in layman's explanations, postulates that a butterfly flapping its wings may be a proximate cause of a hurricane thousands of miles away. It is only one of billions of tiny causes, but if it hadn't flapped its wings right then and there, and everything else had stayed the same: no hurricane. That is how connected our existence is.

Given this complexity, we have no choice but to simplify so that our brains can handle reality and make choices. If we were butterflies, we would have no choice but to flap our wings, and we have no choice but to act in the world. But if a butterfly can make the difference to a hurricane, what are the consequences of such choices as sacrificing large chunks of our environment for short-term profit or creating a power vacuum in Iraq -- choices whose enormity and absurdity are already evident, but whose ripple effects are almost unfathomable? So we must try to view things with some complexity even as we are forced to simplify our thinking relative to the vastness of existence and the infinite interactions of cause and effect.

Shot London Bombing Suspect "Not Connected"

From BBC News:
The Met Police Chief has insisted that the policy of "shoot-to-kill in order to protect" should continue.

Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, 27 was shot dead in error by police at Stockwell Tube station as part of the inquiry into attempted bomb attacks. He was later found not to be connected to the incidents.

Met Police Chief Sir Ian Blair has apologised to the family and warned that more innocent people might be killed in the fight against terrorism.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/4711189.stm

My reply to this "Talking Point":

It's not entirely clear to me what evidence the police had to lead them to such drastic measures. What should be clear, however, is that there are thousands of relatively dark-skinned people in London carrying bags of one sort or another, the overwhelming majority (to say the least) doing so perfectly innocently. It should also be clear that yelling the word "police" does not conclusively identify one as a police officer, and that merely running from the police does not necessarily identify a person as particularly dangerous. Here in the US, many people would run from the police merely because they are carrying marijuana, or simply because they are distrustful of the local police's treatment of minorities. These are factors that armed police in London, dealing with terrorism, will have to learn to take into account. Shooting to kill is not "protecting" if the person shot is not a dangerous criminal. One has to accept a degree of ambiguity in society -- anybody could be a dangerous criminal, but most people aren't -- if the cure isn't going to be worse than the disease. Here in America, we are still wrestling with the problems presented when the government grants itself too much power in order to "protect" us from terrorism.

Consumer Kvetch Rave #1

(Maybe I should start mentioning "rave" in all my blogentries. I hear the kids enjoy "raves", perhaps they will find me on Google when looking for another one. Then I put on ads for glo-sticks and make a fortune. Anyway, here is the rave, or blogentry, a new word I thought I just coined, except that it already has 70,000 hits on Google. But has anybody else pronounced it with the soft "j" sound yet, making it a general term for "the art of blogging"? OK OK, here it is, remember the title is Consumer Kvetch Rave #1...)

Artificial preservatives I kind of understand. Who hasn't savored the pleasure of eating eighteen month old pickles out of the jar? Personally, I thought the vinegar was supposed to do the trick, but hey, let's add a little Polysorbate 80 for good measure! Who says it causes cancer? And, hey, not everything is pickled to begin with. Personally, I'd rather eat fresh food (or merely 12 month old pickles), but OK OK, I understand. It might kill me down the line, but for now it saves me the horror of opening up the package and having something green and hairy walk out of it.

But artificial color and flavor I do not understand. Yuk! With those nice, bright colors, now I'm seeing with my own eyes the laboratory chemicals you're feeding me, which makes me feel the cells turning and multiplying into a deadly mass somewhere inside my body. But the FDA doesn't outlaw anything anymore, at least not when there's major corporate backing. And hey, Mr. Moderate doesn't really have cancer, he's just suggestible, hypochondria runs in his family. He's as healthy as an ox, and we feed livestock this stuff all time. And, oh, BTW, let's give an extra big dose of that to children, they love colorful stuff. What a great idea.

Artificial flavor? I get to smell and taste the test tube's contents, too? Oh boy! No, give me something real so I can have an ingredient list that doesn't make me scratch my head. How much could a half a teaspoon of real vanilla extract cost you, better yet the real bean, which should be cheaper because it hasn't been poked, prodded and "extracted" yet?

And, oh, BTW, I can add my own 800 mg of sodium if I really want, and you can keep the fraction of a cent you saved by leaving it out, instead of charging me 50 cents extra for being forced to continue storing it in your warehouse and making you print "low sodium" on the label. The same goes for the pesticides you didn't have to use on the head of organic broccoli that I splurged for, thinking I might actually get that fifteen seconds of added life from broccoli and not have it get cancelled out by sprays. No, I'm not libelling your *%#$ sprays and all those other chemicals, just, er, expressing my involuntary, knee jerk moderate response to them. But you all corporate interests are probably going to sue me anyway. Well, you'll be squeezing blood from a turnip. Of course, if it's a GMO (genetically modified organism) turnip, anything is possible. But that's another blogentry.

I WANT REAL FOOD! I AM CONSUMER, HERE ME ROAR! MAKE THAT "RAVE"!

Incoherent Ramblings #1

If you've read anything else on this blog, you may think that this is not the first installment of incoherent ramblings, but this will take incoherence to a new level, until finally it all comes together and coheres. At least that's what I'm hoping for. I think. I'm looking for the grand structure of current events, politics in general, economics, religion, life... Oh yes, Douglas Adams said it best in one of his book titles: "Life, the Universe, and Everything." But mostly politics and economics, because these are controlled by humans, and have so much influence upon their lives.

What is the overarching struggle here? Greed and hunger for power v. compassion and caring. Greed and hunger for power, I think, are bred from fear and insecurity, and the whole package is taken to a nearly psychotic level in high level politics and economic activity. After all, if you have incredible amounts of wealth and power, why would you feel an insecure need to exploit those who are less advantaged? "I must have more." No, you have enough to live the rest of your life in comfort, pleasure and splendor. Why do you need to wring a few more dollars out of people who may not be able to pay for food or medicine? Part of this problem may be driven by the capitalist emphasis on competition. Competition is supposed to lead to better products at cheaper prices. Sometimes it does, but a continuous drive to become bigger and cheaper eventually leads to a downward spiral, as concerns for the environment and the conditions of labor are completely shouldered aside in order to gain every advantage to keep the corporation in existence, squeeze out every penny of profit, and keep the shareholders and an overpaid CEO happy. But in cases like Enron and Worldcom, even the shareholders and finally the concern for the existence of the corporation itself seem to get squeezed out, in favor of an overly powerful CEO and handpicked executive buddies who will even sacrifice the corporation and its constituents to make a buck or a hundred million, and have a nice party in the process. Currently, the United States government in particular appears to be in alliance with such greedy multinational corporations and entrepreneurs, and has no problem with their devastating refusal to take responsibility for the broad consequences of their actions. Meanwhile, the incredible machine that is our environment, our link to existence, is allowed to crumble, and deadly poverty is ignored, sometimes even encouraged to continue.

Criticizing the US government or capitalism is not to deny the tremendous corruption, greed, and decadence that occurred under the heyday of Communism. Either way, you have those who are in a position of wealth and power taking advantage of their situation to get more of the same for themselves, at the expense of the people. The Cold War, we should realize, was not mainly fought as a struggle over what system would most benefit the people of the world. It is better explained as simply a struggle over power (and wealth and privilege), which is why so many committed Communists became committed to capitalist "reforms" after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are genuninely committed socialists, and even genuinely committed "capitalists" who aren't particularly greedy. But the Cold War had a name for them, which was slyly batted around by both sides in reference to the other: "dupes". Not that their idealism lacked beauty, only that it was irrelevant.

"I must have more." But what for? To deny death? We will all die someday. To prove oneself to some other neurotic figure in one's life, who also clings to excess wealth, power, and/or privilege for a sense of self-worth? This neurosis feeds itself with success: when the greedy get what they want, their drive is psychologically reinforced, and their coffers, their means to run roughshod over human beings and the planet in pursuit of even more, have grown larger.

In a hypothetical world where people have been brought up to believe that the role of a human being is to care for other human beings, one will have the security of knowing that others will help one to look after oneself, and this will give the individual the freedom to reciprocate, taking care of others, knowing that this is the fabric that enables human existence to not just continue, but thrive. In a competitive world, the role model one sees is to compete. If the competition is harsh, one must be harsh, or such is the feeling one gets.

Our world is a blend of these hypothetical worlds, but competition has been exalted and then spun out of control, so that the rich are in a state of desperate neurosis, while the poor are increasingly in a state simply of desperation. If we continue this way, we will destroy ourselves. And yet, this is only a small piece of the puzzle.

BBC: Muslim leaders in call for action

Muslim leaders in call for action

Muslims protest against terror at a rally in Leeds

Britain's top Muslims have branded the London suicide bombings "utterly criminal, totally reprehensible, and absolutely un-Islamic".

Click on the title for full story.

Thank you to these leaders -- very nice to find this after my last rave a few minutes ago!