Last April Saturday

Workout Notes 1 mile walking to warm up, 5K “running” in 26:27 (trail/road mix). This was the Wildlife Prairie Park Race in, where else, Wildlife Prairie Park. Barbara and I picked up my buddy Tracy and we got there early for some warming up and socialization.

The race used to be a 4 miler on the floodplain trail; this one was a mixture of roads (maybe 1 km), gravel roads (maybe another 1 km) and then grass trail. There were a few small hills and ups and downs.

I started too far back in the pack and had to do some weaving in and out to get to mile 1. That took 8:55! After which I settled; I seemed to do ok on the grass and not so well on the road. But, this is my first run in about 3 weeks. Mile 2 came at 17:15 and I was going back and forth with another guy; he got away but I almost ran him down at the finish line.

But when I stopped…wow…my lungs burned and my heart was pounding. I am just not used to the intensity of running.

At just over 35 minutes Tracy came in; she was using an almost “shuffle walk” style of run. I joked about “you know, they say that the longer a couple stays together, the more alike they become” and she just roared.

Then 23 minutes after that, Barbara came in. She had thought that she had signed up for a two mile walk; they ended up doing 5K instead.

At the race, I got to talk to the Jefferies, the Fennels, Steve Shane and Carey Weaver among others.

It was a fun way to spend the morning though I’ve come to realize that I am going to be slow-slow-slow so long as I do nothing but walking and swimming during training.

I ended up finishing 79 out of over 240, but there were many walkers there.

Politics

Rudy Giuliani: evidently he is going to have problems with the Republican base; remember that he has had some views on things like abortion and gay rights that don’t sit too well with the fundies, as I’ve blogged before. He is also wrong about Iraq.

This is what it is leading to. (thanks to R. J. Eskow)

Jerry Falwell highlighted Rudy Giuliani’s dilemma in an email to supporters today: Guiliani’s only hope of becoming the GOP nominee is to overcome his past by being publicly held hostage to the religious right. He’s probably already lost some centrist support by reversing himself on core social issues, but if he expected gratitude from his new allies he’ll be disappointed. In fact, Falwell wasted no time before turning up the heat.

The canny ex-DA’s been checkmated by the preacher from Lynchburg.

The New York Sun covered Giuliani’s reversal on the topic of civil unions yesterday, calling it “a startling departure from his previously stated position.” But this change does more than just leave him open to the charge of compromising his convictions for political expediency. It also gives the far right extraordinary leverage over his candidacy. Having burned his bridges to moderates, he now has to do whatever it takes to placate religious conservatives.

Falwell immediately used his email list to remind his supporters of Guiliani’s past positions on abortion as well as civil unions. Falwell wrote of the former New York mayor, “he is the candidate we wish we could love.” (emphasis mine)

The politician/preacher goes on to take predictable swipes at Hollywood before re-emphasizing the need to take control of the judiciary. He concludes: “So while Mr. Giuliani’s abrupt rebuke of the New Hampshire Senate’s bill is welcomed, we are still hopeful for more encouraging evidence of his commitment to social conservatism.”

Here’s where it now stands: Giuliani has already exposed himself to the charge of political expediency, which a Democratic opponent would be foolish not to use against him. So he’s already paid a high price. The mayor has foreclosed the option of running to the left of his party (which, in fairness to him, probably would have ensured his defeat in the primaries.)

I love it! Grab the popcorn….

Yeah, this is Mr. Straight Talk express (aka Senator McCain) with the “Rev.” Falwell. I wonder if gluttony is considered one of the deadly sins in his church.

Laura Bush’s gaffe

Finally, she is getting the type of attention that she richly deserves. Thanks to Matthew Hubbard.

“No one suffers more than their president and, uh… and uh I do.”

Laura Bush on the Today Show, interviewed by Ann Curry.

Don’t you wish that for just one moment, you could have been Ann Curry and asked the obvious follow-up question?

Here’s how I would have put it. “Mrs. Bush, let’s do a thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine that one of your daughters isn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. She isn’t coming because she’s dead, she died in Iraq. She won’t be at Thanksgiving or Christmas or any family get together ever again, because she died in Iraq.”

“Now open your eyes. Here’s the reality; both of your daughters are alive and well, and there is no chance of them dying in Iraq. That’s the real world.”

“Which felt worse: The time with your eyes closed or the time with your eyes open?”

Of course, she’d be pissed as hell when she opened her eyes, like I would care two cents about her feelings after she had made such a ridiculous comment. But how does she even think to say such a thing?

The first option is that she wasn‘t thinking. Her mouth started moving and what came out came out. Being fair, we all say stupid stuff sometimes.

The second option is that she has no feelings whatsoever. The thought experiment I asked her to might be an impossible task for her. Empathy might be completely beyond her capacity. Humans like this certainly exist, and not all of them are psycho killers.

A third option is that she is a run-of-the-mill modern conservative, the pissed off people, many of them at the top of the heap in America, who actually buy the nonsense argument that they are an oppressed class. How can the people on Fox Noise Channel sell the idea that the phrase “Happy Holidays” is an attack on Christianity? How can a third-string academic like Ward Churchill become a sign of the apocalypse? How can Giuliani act like the Republicans will keep up safe and the Democrats will put our lives at risk given the record of the last six years? Because the “just plain folks” have been indoctrinated that their changing way of life is not a natural consequence of the modern world, but instead a deliberate attack by the enemies of all that is right and good, which in the conservative world means the liberals.

Oh, you don’t remember who Ward Churchill is? You know, the only time I hear about him is when I get a mailing from a right wing nutjob group, warning us that liberals like him are out to get us all! Hmmm, when is the last time you saw this guy with one of our candidates? Now ask the same about, say, Ann Coulter.

Ok.

Religion/Humor

These are mostly for entertainment value.

Fun with Fundies

Those Fundies say the darndest things: from Illinoize blogger Dan L.

Here, some of what the local fundies are up to are discussed. For the record, I am against “hate crimes” laws; to me acts can be punished but thoughts shouldn’t be. Yes, motive indeed matters (e. g., killing someone who has just harmed a loved one versus killing someone for money). But, as far as I am concerned, you should be allowed to hate whoever the hell you want to hate; it is the ACTION that should be punished.

But nevertheless, I enjoyed the rest of the article; here is a bit of it:

But the real fun these days comes from HB1331 or as IFI dubs it The Homosexual/Shack-Up Teachers Bill which gives some employees the right to grant their domestic partner their death benefits. It’s interesting that IFI writes up as an ‘excessive cost’ issue as where if these particular teachers were married we’d be paying the benefits anyway therefore IFI’s sole argument is that queer folk and people who don’t subscribe to Christian extremist rhetoric about relationship validation through the church shouldn’t get any money should their spouse pass. Remember: People who don’t live the so called Christian life style are second class citizens and aren’t entitled to superficial ‘special rights’ like money.

Side note: If you’d like to know why fighting gay marriage is entirely a lost cause, it’s because even if SSM legislation doesn’t come quickly, major employers are quickly adding domestic partnership benefits to their employment jackets and as the business world moves in that direction, so too will the public sector regardless of what trailer living fundies boycott – simply because queer folk on the whole have a profound amount of disposable income based on the fact that the vast majority of them are DINKs.

In order to really understand what’s going on here you can spend some time taking a look at how the fundies view marriage but if you’re really interested in seeing how they think, your best bet is to start with the fundie views on sex – simply because you’ll find that almost every issue they take a huge stance on really relates back to sex. Even abortion, the long time fundie call (and probably one of the few issues where fundamentalists are on an acceptable side of the fence, though for entirely the wrong reasons) really is more about sex then it is about babies not being killed in the womb.

Jill Stanek was nice enough to admit it for us:

Gays and pro-aborts both fight for the same goal: Sex without judgment or consequences.

So while Jill is busy cooking up arguments for why we shouldn’t vaccinate girls against the HPV vaccine, the real reason is because it empowers men and women to have sex without consequence, which if I remember correctly I already told you people and here she is essentially admitting that I’m right and that all of you wingnuts babbling about the great evil of STD vaccination are also full of it. And yes, I am gloating.

Here is another one of those “don’t despair, even the unwashed fundies might be won over but only if we quit insulting them” type of articles:

Redneck Liberation Theology: or, Why are leftists so fucking afraid of God?
By Joe Bageant

[...]
But in looking back, I realize I’ve used a very broad brush in painting American fundamentalism…over simplified some complex things, because painting any big picture of a big nation must necessarily be rendered with the largest brushes in the artists’ bundle.

Broad strokes or not, America is an extremely religious nation, especially for an alleged member of “The First World,” with all the implications of social progress the term implies—or once did. And we will remain a religious place for a long while yet. So when it comes to social change, a religious country is what we have to work with. Not a socialist nation, not a particularly moral nation, and certainly not a spiritually liberated nation, but a religious one that seems especially prone to fervid kitschy expression (hell, what in America isn’t kitsch?) such as being “born again in the blood” or “raptured up” or mega-churches that resemble Wal-Mart stores, but with lousy parking arrangements.

[...]Joke as I may though, I have witnessed men and women be quite convincingly born again, shed old selves and become different and better human beings for the rest of their lives. The most recent was a one-eyed ex-con crack dealer named Jerry who studied nutritional science in prison, then upon release lived with his mom while he worked as a dishwasher and fry cook to accumulate money so he could go to Africa and save babies from malnutrition. Now if a man like Jerry, who is a Charismatic Holiness Pentecostal—which is about as fundamentalist as you can get—can be that born again, moved to genuine ecstatic and absolute belief in the promise of liberation through the elimination of human suffering, (which, by the way, is a fundamental Buddhist principle) then others can also be born again into on-the-ground liberation of the kind we lefties claim to admire, the kind that is shaping a new Latin America.

Jerry has done just that. He says “My liberation came while I was in solitary lockup, after raping a white dude so I could stay protected by my gang.” Today I called the bar-restaurant where he washed dishes. The manager said he’d left the country, but didn’t know where to. Jerry is proof that any man may arrive at inner liberation by his own solitary path, but most are led to it, and all arrive along one of humanity’s many roads of human suffering, both material and inner, that instill inner peace and compassion.

Upon surface observation these days, it is difficult to believe that not all American fundamentalist Christians are lacking in the compassion their leadership only mimics on the television screen. Yet millions of them donate billions toward what they are told provides heath care and sustenance to the world’s indigenous peoples, but which is used to sponsor religious demagoguery in unseen corners of the world. This is not to say there aren’t plenty of fundamentalists solely interested in conversion of vulnerable Second and Third World strangers, plenty of “churchy folks” who cannot get enough of video footage of their sponsored missionary’s ministry unto the Hottentotts or “Keechee” Indians of Latin America. “Look at’em eat with their fingers, Janet, and they let them little babies run around with their ding dongs hanging out.”

In the world’s big picture, however—the unedited version we are never allowed to see in American media—most American fundamentalists are being screwed blue by the same global economic pillage as, say, the Quiche Indians of Guatemala. Working class American fundamentalists suffer extractive capitalism’s vampirism the same as the Third World, but by a more incremental yet nonetheless relentless process. A scam is a scam and while you may blame the victims for ignorance, you cannot blame them for trust and good will toward men.

Now hold onto your drawers and get this. Some working class fundamentalists are beginning to get a sense of what even the most educated of Americans seem congenitally blind to—the inevitable brutality of capitalism’s march through history—mainly because it is marching in their direction this time, creating bankruptcy, lost homes, credit meltdowns, and job insecurity for the hardest working, most obedient and faithful people in America—the traditional working class. Just like their brothers in the Third World, the economic “cures” they are subjected to always turn out to be worse than the sickness. Some now notice that when unemployment rises, so does the stock market, and when real wages drop the “economy” soars, according to the news reports. All sorts of folks are beginning to disabuse themselves of the notion that the American economy and the American people are the same thing. As in: “I work like hell, get paid and I buy stuff and I pay taxes. Ain’t that the fucking economy?” Or as one very dedicated local blue collar fundamentalist put it a while back when I was writing my book, “The big guys have always had it all over the little feller, but it’s gettin’ entawrly out of hand. Sooner or later somethin’s gotta be done to give a workin man a chance again. This ain’t what Our Lord intended.” [...]

Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins debate about religion and science: Time ran a nice article which had these two men discussing some of the issues with one another. Both are world class scientists; both way, way, way smarter than I can ever hope to be. Both believe that evolution happened; both see it was fact (as it is). But Collins believes in a deity that exists outside of our space-time universe and sees nothing in science that conflicts with that belief, though he accepts a handfull of supernatural miracles. Dawkins is an atheist, though he holds that it is possible that there is “something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.”

In short, “being consistent with science” is good enough for Collins, where Dawkins wants evidence if he is going to believe, and he sees none.

The link to the article (which I can recommend) is here; I’ll post a few highlights.

Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins’ expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.
[...]

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a “strong Christian defense” of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline’s major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins.

Collins’ devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins’. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis’ map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science’s largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate TIME arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:
[...]

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin’s theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story.

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God’s existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don’t see that Professor Dawkins’ basic account of evolution is incompatible with God’s having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that’s a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don’t think that it is God’s purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?
[...]

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can’t observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam’s razor–Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward–leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can’t understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you’re shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those “How must it have come to be” questions.

DAWKINS: I think that’s the mother and father of all cop-outs. It’s an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, “Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this.” Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don’t do that. Scientists say, “We’re working on it. We’re struggling to understand.”

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That’s an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as “Why am I here?”, “What happens after we die?”, “Is there a God?” If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn’t convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That’s God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small–at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.

[...]
DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been–may I call you Francis?

COLLINS: Oh, please, Richard, do so.

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues …

COLLINS: It’s not so private. It’s rather public. [Laughs.]

DAWKINS: … It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he’d save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don’t do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

Good stuff, that. It appears to me that Dr. Collins is comfortable compartmentizing his mind, saving his scientific mind (which works very well) for non-religious matters. For me, that isn’t a satisfying way to live.

Perhaps that is why 60% of all scientists are atheists, and 93% of “Academy of Science” caliber scientists are atheists as well. (Source: God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins)

On a less lofty level, ….enjoy…