Old Ex Cathedra

Dear friend Tim sometimes chides me for what he perceives as the lack of quality and the abundance of bias in the data I present. Perhaps a visit to Gapminder
might help me. And, who knows, perhaps all of us.

h/t to Jaguarnoelle
who posted a video of Hans Rosling’s presentation at TED last year on Miriam’s LJ. Miriam herself is no slouch at extracting and analyzing data. And Noelle’s LJ is more like a swim in beauty.

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Senator Barack Obama had a few words of advice Saturday for his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: Do not drop out on my account.

“My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said at a news conference in a high school gymnasium here. “Her name is on the ballot. She is a fierce and formidable opponent, and she obviously believes she would make the best nominee and the best president.”Former President Bill Clinton dismissed the notion that the discord had hurt the party’s chances of capturing the White House.

“We just need to relax and let this happen,” Mr. Clinton said in Girardville, according to The Associated Press. “Nobody’s talking about wrecking the party. Everywhere I go, all these working people say: ‘Don’t you dare let her drop out. Don’t listen to those people in Washington, they don’t represent us.’ ”

On Saturday, Mr. Obama, answering a question on the subject at the news conference here, seemed to agree with Mr. Clinton.

“You know, there’s no doubt that among some of my supporters or some of her supporters, there’s probably been some irritation created,” he said. “You can’t tell me that some of my supporters are going to say, well, we’d rather have the guy who may want to stay in Iraq for a hundred years because we’re mad that Senator Clinton ran a negative ad against Senator Obama. And I think the converse is true as well.” – Kevin Hayden, American Street

You see talk all over the Intertubes, even from my fellow bloggers on Ex Cathedra, about how the Obama-Clinton brawl is destroying the Democratic Party. Two comments: It’s in the interests of the wealth and power elites for people to believe that. And it’s in the interest of the media corporations who support them for people to believe it.

We have failed to ask the simplest question of all: Cui bono?

The Republican Party’s grand strategy has been coalition busting — breaking up the Democratic Party’s coalition — since the late 1970s.

And now they’re doing it again? What a shock!

Second, people who expect the Democratic Party to fragment are assuming that the members of the one party in America that isn’t based on pure rapacious selfishness will suddenly become just like the leaders of the party we know full well whose selfishness has ruined the country and turned it into a wounded and impoverished banana republic colonized by our own corporate conservative aristocracy.

Besides being lousy, even suicidal tactics, petulant selfishness is wicked and wrong. Even if the political Right don’t know it any more, we still know it.

Distinguished historian Michael Medved shows us that slavery wasn’t all that bad.”

But it’s amazing how some people missed the best thing about that article: the blatantly offensive T-shirt ad in the left column: “Imagine… No Liberals.”

I imagined that a long time ago. That’s why I’m a radical.

Sorry, neocons and theocons, once again you can’t imagine what’s out here in America, but I guarantee, it’ll turn your bowels to water.

Drawing inspiration from something Oliver Willis said a couple of years ago, Christofascists and apologists for evil don’t need to be brought into the American community while we all sing “Kumbayah.”

They need to be stopped

So here I go surfing along happily, reading a blog that recommends an article on RHReality.org. I try to go there — hey. I’m easy to get along with.

Now, instead of giving me a simple 404 or “nslookup failed” and letting me get on with my life, Charter gives me this:

Sorry, the page you are looking for cannot be found.
Search the Web
Were you looking for:
Sponsored Results
Rhode Island Real Estate Agent
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage helps you search for Rhode Island homes. View thousands of real estate listings. Multiple photos and virtual tours. Find a real estate agent
Rhode Island Realty
Homes for up to half price. Over 1.3 million listings. Try it free.
Ri Realty
Find ri realty. View realty listings for free.
Foreclosed Realty
Search distressed properties. HUD and government foreclosures. Free trial.

See, Charter has bought and installed a package from Yahoo — pretty much the world’s most useless search engine — that redirects failures to a search page — actually a sales page where most of the “suggestions look like scams. Still, the money keeps rolling in.

And of course, Charter “helpfully” sends the URL of this redirect page back to my web browser so I have to type the whole goddamn URL in again, so in case it was a typo, I’m screwed.

So I go to Charter’s service chat applet to complain about this idiocy — hey. somebody had to install this package. But now they get all the joy of maintaining it.

and on that applet some person with a really cute pseudonym tells me:

(a) rhreality.org isn’t on charter.net and

(b) They don’t know where the email came from.

I write back to tell them this is HTTP, port 80, ever heard of it? and Brainiac signs off. Or maybe it was a timer. Same IQ.

If you get a chance not to buy internet service or anything else from charter.com, please take advantage of that opportunity. If you know how I can get the hell off of Charter, please let me know.

When I started my book on the nineteenth-century scientist Maria Mitchell, I expected to find that she had triumphed against impossible odds. “Bias and Barriers” against women’s achievement in the science are pretty intense in the twenty-first century, and I presumed that the obstacles must have been much harsher nearly two hundred years ago. My presumptions were bolstered by earlier accounts of Mitchell that tended to emphasize her exceptional qualities and minimize the encouragement she received from her family and her community. The great surprise for me was that Mitchell faced relatively little bias. In her time, girls were thought of as naturally scientific—and science itself was considered a feminine pastime.

The shocks of history can be hard to parse. On one hand, it’s exciting to realize that there was a time (not that long ago) when a girl like the young Maria Mitchell grew up believing that there was nothing preventing her from achieving scientific greatness. On the other hand, it’s a bit discouraging to realize that when I was born in New York City in the late twentieth century, the odds were worse for girls in astronomy than they had been when Mitchell was born on Nantucket more than a hundred and fifty years before – Renée Bergland,: Beacon Broadside: Against all odds?

“the encouragement she received from her family and her community.” Where have we seen that before?

It’s another face of our old friend intersectionality. Mitchell found some natural allies. No, they weren’t “oppressed,” if you’re hung up on that word. Maybe they were, who cares? But the real message always was finding allies. Maria Mitchell got there with a small circle of family, friends, and supporters. My schemes have always been to take over the world.

Some more thoughts in the article at Beacon Press about building whole communities of support, of allies. Thinking of a previous reply I’d made to Tim, I remembered Ron and Eva’s book, The Volunteer Community: Creative use of human resources. I ought to read that again. It’s the instruction manual for the human revolution.

What does the dog’s tail smell like when it’s on fire?

OK, no danger of that. But he showed a definite interest in dinner when it was cooking on the patio. Robert got a little apartment-balcony-sized grill and cooked a couple of steaks (mesquite smoked — yum), baked beans and cornbread.

The beans were “Bush’s best” steakouse , but even after way too goddamn many years of Bush’s best, they were still pretty good. I’m sure Chimpy didn’t have anything to do with them. Robert didn’t need to add a drop of ketchup or a grain of brown sugar.

Here’s a hint: if you get cornbread mix you’ll end up with something 4 inches square and 1/2 inch thick, but if you go to Krogers’ bakery department you get something enormous and delicious. I know and admire some people who claim to be foodies, but nothing they go out for can beat good old cornbread.

An update on the dog: he’s 18 and he’s had two strokes, but I noticed just this afternoon that he can raise his leg to pee again — not anywhere near the food, but on the base of an old horse-drawn carriage seat with leaf springs that we use as a seat on the patio. He trudges instead of scampering and sometimes gets fascinated by smells and loses track when he’s out surveying his domain (the back yard) and has to be called back in. But his quality of life is better than Robert’s and mine.

Occasionally the blogosphere contains more than the incoherent rants you’ll find on Ex Cathedra. Sometimes you’ll find people who can actually write.

You’ll find quite a lot of them, actually. I’ve mentioned some of them here, but there’s three writers who recently knocked my socks off with their writing.

First is my dear friend Miriam English who with her novel Selena City, gives us, like Pickwick Papers, a look at a writer coming into full mastery of her craft. Please send her a note urging her to write more and finish this novel! I’m dying to read the rest of it.

Second among the reasons my socks are lying in a pile on the floor is Sara Whitman’s story, “Walking Home“.

Though it seems at first to be a typical blog entry about daily life, you’ll find the joy of raising children and seeing them become little people, pain and joy from a personal past, and present , sentences that leave you open-mouthed in amazement as you recall them over and over, and beyond all, hope.

If people can do that, not just the writing but the living of what she wrote about, I’m kinda glad I am one.

Third on the list, there’s John McKay’s article on
planets and moons and other stuff in our solar system and how they got their names which calls to mind Isaac Asimov’s science writing and the wit of Steve Mirsky.

if religious people follow dogma, could communion wafers be called dogma biscuits?

“Science is everywhere, even when you’re not looking” -Lurleen the Elder

In a comment on one of my faves, Pam’s House Blend.

The peace that “passeth all understanding” probably does. Start smaller and you might actually get somewhere. Start with good old nonviolence. You’d be surprised how many people just don’t get nonviolence. But most of us can figure it out after a while. – Rev. Bob “Bob” Crispen

Step two might be treating your neighbors decently. That one’s kinda rare, too.

Step three: how about not making war? OK, I know war is flashy and exciting. There’s an old word for that: glamour. Glamour is the bright, shiny stuff the residents of Faerie use to seduce people into their snares. Only these days the guys doing the seducing don’t look like elves, they look like Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, and John Howard.

And step four: maybe not making weapons. Oh sure, there are people who want to make weapons and “weapon systems.” We don’t have to be the ones.

If everybody on our “side” followed that suggestion and decided they should stop making implements of war, it would be suicidal — if we did it long enough. Does your country look like they’re all out of weapons and they can’t find any if they need some? Mine sure doesn’t.

intersectionality holds that knowing a woman lives in a sexist society is insufficient information to describe her experience; instead, it is also necessary to know her race, her sexual orientation, her class, etc. The theory of intersectionality also suggests that discrete forms, and expressions, of oppression actually shape, and are shaped by, one another. Thus, in order to fully understand the racialization of oppressed groups, one must investigate and examine the ways in which racializing structures, social processes, and social representations (or ideas purporting to represent groups and group members in society) are shaped by gender, class, sexuality, etc. While the theory began as an exploration of the oppression of women within society, today sociologists strive to apply it not only to woman but to discussions of all peoples.

A new word for my vocabulary: Intersectionality . I’ve been reading feminist blogs and websites, thinking that some kind of answer to The Olshesky Problem might turn up there, or at least a corner I might grab onto. Sometimes your instincts lead you in the right direction — or at least in the direction of a thread you can pull on.

Unsurprisingly, Echidne has a whole fistful of threads, with some links and some specific examples of how a paradigm that ignores intersectionality is an easy victim for the kind of coalition busting that the wealth and power elites rely on.

I don’t see any great gobs of rhetoric and power-group cant that need to be jettisoned, but the concept of intersectionality (if rationally considered and applied) could inform a new kind of radical activism. — a kind of activism I’d sign up for. OBTW, anybody who’s put off by the occasional use of the word “oppression”, get over it! Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are out to get you. It’s the same guys, the same agenda, but different scripts — against women’s rights, against gay rights,against workers’ rights, and on and on.

Work from the edges toward the center. But find natural allies and resist!

Just to start making sense, my blogroll category “Grrrls” (i.e., feminism) is gone and I’ve added a category “Activism.” Does it really matter if we’re talking resistance to gender bias, racial bias, economic bias, rampant corporatism, hate toward GLBTQ people, xenophobia — even (as a smart friend of mine reminded me not long ago, left-handed people. It’s not like othering people is hard. I’ve done it enough myself. A few blogroll entries will eventually be moved, and we might add another category or two, among them “People” for more person-oriented blogs . “Belief and “Non-” stays, so far. Consider it remarkable that I’ve got this organized.

More on housekeeping: I still haven’t figured out how to upgrade without killing off some of our old comments. But I’m working on getting comments back up, hopefully keeping all the old ones.

Here’s an idea whose time has come (a long time ago): Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood h/t to Bitch Magazine

They’re doing it exactly right. The way we win is one malefactor at a time, one outrage at a time. Can we win like that? Here, stop off at your favorite bar across town, have a couple of drinks “for the road, ” and drive home.

Unthinkable now. Not so unthinkable before MADD.

Set your goals high, keep your actions and your targets incremental, keep it up, and we can win.

As you can tell from the error message in the right-hand column, comments are a little screwy right now. Yes I really do know how to repair a SQL table (I looked it up). But as far as I can tell from R-ing TFM, the best thing to do now is install a newer version of WordPress. But I’ll probably postpone that a couple of days until I see the Australian Grand Prix and see what happens when the Whitney Houston of motorsports discovers he’s got yet another driver in his garage who wants to go racin’.

There’s been a lot of discussion on the intertubes recently about what the meaning of life is without gods and demons One of them is on my good friend Miriam’s LiveJournal. And there have been several good discussions about that in recent Humanist Symposiums. If you’d go look on the right-hand column of this blog and click on some of the entries under “Belief and Non-” you can find some more.

This is one place where freethinkers sometimes feel like their believer friends may feel they have some advantage. I know a good number of believers must feel themselves called on to say so in public forums. And apart from bald assertions that “We have a meaning to our lives and you don’t,” or “No, you don’t,” there may be one or two things worth thinking about

So let’s cut away some of the underbrush. If some deity shows up after our lives are over and sums up our lives like a bad joke, like Shecky Green saying” And the moral of the story is…” they should send that act back to the Catskills. Life is too rich to be summed up, even by a deity. It’s an insult, not just to our intelligence, but to the capacity of the human mind and all our human capabilities.

I also hear sometimes from believers that such a marvelous thing as life is a mere preparation for an afterlife. Even assuming it’s not a lifelong series of hurdles, trials, and tests, even if you solve the problem that there’s no way to get a “B” on those tests (it’s either “A” or “F”), I still find that hideous. Even in the constant training-for-tests world of Bush’s No Child Left Behind, there’s moments of doing and learning and simple joy. Not in life, evidently, according to some folks. We might as well be in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. That’s a meaning for life? That’s reason to get up in the morning and leave your razor in the medicine cabinet instead of using it to slash your wrists?

Since the truth of the matter is unknowable and we’re in the realm of wishful thinking and theology (pick your favorite), why would the creator have not simply given us a life in the first place?

Which is exactly the position we’re in without a creator.

And the question is, what should we do with this life, whether we’re given it, or whether we just sort of end up here?

I have some answers — well, you don’t think I’d pass up an opportunity like that, do you?

First is to grow and change and become what I can become.

That’s the purely selfish answer (the libertarian answer, if you will). Growing is what people do. So this is nothing more complicated than being true to my nature. Yours, too, if you’d like to do the same.

But there’s another answer too:

I can do the best I can to help other people grow and change and become what they can become. It may be political or through direct action do-goodery. Self-actualization isn’t at the top of starving people’s list of priorities, as Maslow said, so getting there from here matters.

Penultimately, since that’s necessary but not sufficient, I should show as much unselfish love to the people around me as I can.

And, finally (as you must be saying, at last!) I should do whatever I can to help other people to show their love and nurture others.

Even if there isn’t a final summing-up, and all there is is what we do day by day, minute by minute, that’s not a bad way to spend your day

Comment (merely one example among many) has been going on nonstop about this conservative Republican administration’s decision to award a huge tanker contract to Airbus (fronted by Northrop-Grumman).

I’m sorry if any of my friends in the Big Airplane Company are affected by this loss. If they are, I hope they find a soft landing for themselves.

My regard for my friends and colleagues will never diminish, and I’ll always hope for the very best things in life for them. I hope they won’t mind my saying that if Boeing never made another nickel from selling implements of war, I’d be prouder that I once worked there.

Senator Clinton is continuing her “win at all costs” campaign for the Presidency, and unfortunately recent wins in Ohio and Texas have strengthened her resolve.

Hillary’s campaign of fear is now focused on discrediting Senator Obama’s ability to be Commander In Chief, and in a recent speech, she even aligned herself with Senator John McCain to further her point:

I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Senator McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy.

Even someone who is non-partisan can see the destructive nature of that remark.  What happens if Obama does eventually get the Democratic nomination?  Will Hillary stand by this remark?  Can’t Senator McCain state factually during the general election campaign that even a Democratic heavyweight such as Senator Clinton doesn’t believe her own party’s nominee can cut the mustard as Commander In Chief?

And now, after Obama won Wyoming, the Clintons have the audacity to propose a new strategy – a Clinton-Obama Democratic ticket.  Screw the delegate count.  Screw the popular vote.  Screw the number of states won.  Senator Clinton is clearly the Big Kahuna, just because she’s Senator Clinton.  And this upstart Obama needs to be put in his place.  Never mind that proposing him to be Vice-President completely contradicts that last strategy – you know, the one where Obama is clearly not qualified to be Commander In Chief.

Senator Clinton even has lackies like my state’s pitiful Governor, Ed Rendell, arguing that since Hillary won in “battleground” states such as Ohio and Texas, she’s the logical and rightful nominee.  Is Governor Rendell really saying that Democrats would rather vote for Senator McCain in these “battleground” states, rather than Obama if he becomes the nominee?  Wouldn’t Hillary’s success in those primaries transfer to Obama in the general election?

The answer is of course, unless Hillary succeeds with her master plan of poisoning the waters so badly, that voters will be left with the fear-based candidacy of former independent and now Bush-lackey Senator McCain, or the fear-based candidacy of former First Lady but potentially Ueber-Commander-In-Chief-Who-Can-Still-Cry-When-Necessary-And-Has-Clearly-Found-Her-Voice-Now Senator Clinton.

Perhaps Samantha Power had it right after all.

Like Oscar Wilde said, I can resist everything except temptation. Even though these stories have appeared everywhere, I can’t pass them by

only five per cent of 18-40-year-olds had cooked a spotted dick – Daily Telegraph

And this from the Daily Mail

And a bit of good news: Republican former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who ran the Foley coverup, is outa here.

Icing on the cake: the National Republican Congressional Committee spent 1/3 of all the money they had on this election. More icing: Obama endorsed Bill Foster, the Democrat who sent Hastert to the showers. Careful wth that soap, Denny.

Time to celebrate!

From the LA Times

The recent decisions of Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism. Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey’s action.

In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey’s Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.

humans are the only entities in the entire universe, for all we know, who have the capacity to make truth their object. The other needs and wishes, the ones that can conflict with truth, the needs and wishes for contentment, happiness, comfort, feelings of security and safety and being protected, are ones that other beings can want and strive for after a fashion But truth? No. We, by this strange provocative contingent accident of natural selection, have the kind of brain that can conceptualise reality as existing independent of us, and the possibility that we can discover what it is, along with the possibility that we can try to do that and fail, that we can think we’ve discovered it and be wrong, that we can discover part of it and be at a loss about the rest, and so on.

So one intrinsic reason for thinking we ought to respect the truth, and try to find out what it is, which entails not fudging it whenever we don’t like what we find, which entails deciding firmly in advance that we will put it first and all other considerations second – one reason for all this is simply that we can, and that as far as we know we are the only ones who can. We can, so we ought to. It would be such a waste not to.

If only as a sort of tribute to the remarkable accident of natural selection. To the staggering amazing chain of being – from nothing to something, to life, to intelligence, to truth-seeking. – Why Truth Matters

Holocaust deniers, Primitive “Christians and creation “scientists” who claim we lived alongside dinosaurs like the Flintstones. Alternative “ways of knowing. Whites, males, conservative evangelical Christians and the other largest and most powerful groups claiming they’re oppressed. Religions themselves, where belief is utterly divorced from measurable, sane reality. The United States Congress declaring Washington, Adams, Madison and Jefferson weren’t children of the Enlightenment, but bible thumpers. Fox News. Neoconservatives who talk disparagingly about the “reality-based community. Presidential press conferences where the President and his spokespeople simply make things up and claim their lies are facts . Media that report on disputes about facts as “he said”, “she said” without even trying to look for themselves. “Alternative medicine” which claims that a medicine that doesn’t actually make you well is equally “valid.” These stepchildren of Postmodernism aren’t just just weird cultural artifacts like belief in Bigfoot and flying saucers. They’e starting to dominate in a new century where people believe that reality itself can be whatever you want it to be.

People being people, it’s a very short step from a circle of happy hippies in the park singing “war is over if you want it” to the wealthiest and most powerful of us constructing the reality they want and using their power to force the rest of us to live in it. Facts have become contaminated by wishes and contaminated by power.

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, proprietors of the marvelous blog Buttereflies and Wheels have published a book that should be required reading fror people who not only want to live during the 21st century but want to live in the 21st century and have some hope of controlling our own lives.

Some sizeable excerpts from the book are available on the website. Let’s get started.

Halitosis, farting, vaginal discharge, [acid] reflux, snoring, rheumatism, warts, smelly armpits, varicose veins, menopause, brewer’s droop [erectile dysfunction] … these are not the mark of a designer at the top of his game. -PodBlack Cat

A lovely, irreverent Aussie skeptic blog. I have no idea whether Cadbury’s advertise in .au, but lots of Australian skeptics and skepchicks keep up their peckers just fine. They haven’t lost the thread: there’s some scary shit out there, but we’re winning!

After all, the things everybody worries about are imaginary. Even without invisible spirits and demons, we worry about things that don’t exist. They haven’t happened yet, and either they won’t happen or they will happen and we’ll do what needs to be done. Or we’ll just panic and screw everything up by pretending invisible spirits and demons will take care of everything.

Mind you, the guys out there with dynamite vests are’t imaginary. But the guys blowing us up with dynamite vests are imaginary. They’re out there, not here. If they are here, maybe it’s time to get that payment off to the Stopping Guys With Dynamite Vests Insurance Company.

And they aren’t blowing us up now.

If they are blowing us up now, run away!

If we think and take precautions, chances are pretty good they won’t blow us up. Even if they do, we’ll be dead and we won’t have anything to worry about.

Sweeping all the patently unreal things out of our lives builds good habits and frees us up to sweep out the less obviously unreal things.

Let’s not dwell on the struggle. We’re winning it, and we know the fight is inside our heads (and “our” includes everybody, even the frightened fundies who aren’t part of the community of America yet — or the community of wherever you live. And the way to win is to think.

Maybe some folks who don’t know that yet may join us one day, and none of us will be frightened any more.