Maureen Dowd gets serious

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: The Red Zone

I'm no fan of Maureen Dowd. She's often pointlessly bitchy or cloyingly craven. Today, however, she shows her talent.

... The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

..."He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create.

Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji.

Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage."

He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.

Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate.

Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools.

Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."...

Robert Cringely on the futility of fighting fire with fire alone

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

Robert Cringely has long held the title of most insightful commentator on the overall computer industry. He's not a master of software, he is a keen observer with abundant industry contacts. He's also experienced more than an average share of suffering -- including the loss of his son to SIDS about two years ago.

In today's column we learn that his journalistic credentials extend a bit beyond circuits and venture funds. I would like to take this gentleman to lunch someday.

... Back to the election. If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain't us.

Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: "How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran." The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.

I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

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So, fighting this war the Bush way, we have a few options:

1. Kill them until we get tired of it -- or run out of bullets.
2. Miss one and be blown up.

This is the war our "moralists" voted for. Armed conflict and surveillance should be only one component of a multidimensional campaign. Instead we have incompetence at the White House.

How bad is the outcome of this election?

Salon.com | Forget the "heartland"

... By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality -- and their own best economic and national-security interests -- and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of '04, she's the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the "heartland" has foisted on the rest of us.

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Yep. This is not business as usual folks. We've driven off the cliff.

Salon.com | Bush, God and the Democrats

Salon.com | Bush, God and the Democrats

There is no sense in belaboring the point. Kansas may have a problem, but it will not be solved without a political strategy that has recourse to a religious and nonrational rhetoric and imagery. The Democratic leadership needs to do some hard thinking and feeling in the coming weeks and come to terms with a not so simple, but obvious fact: The country we live in is neither secular nor rational and won't be for quite some time to come.

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America is, at this time, not a secular or reason-based nation. It is a faith, intuition, and feeling based nation.

As I wrote some time ago, in a different context, perhaps China will assume the mantle of reason and science going in to the 21st century.

The challenge for many Americans, especially those who are not Christian conservatives, will be how to live within this new culture.

I'm betting the pendulum will swing back again -- but I don't know when. As the country ages it is likely to become more, not less, socially conservative and "simple". The US will be an aging country for about the next thirty to forty years! That's the extreme case for the pendulum, obviously I hope there will be some countervailing force.

Presidential votes -- a graphical representation of american politics

Purple-USA.jpg (JPEG Image, 616x483 pixels)

There's room for more of this. Maps that allow us to visually parse geography and culture/political allegiance. It may help some of us decide where we want to live.

BTW, MN, a bluish state, had a 77% turn out for this election. Global warming is giving us mild winters and huge corn yields. There's a vast hinterland to escape to when terrorists start to get really serious. Lots of water -- no droughts here. We border on Canada. We're multi-ethnic (ok, sort of). Come on up guys.

The new motto of the rationalists: "States' Rights".

Yes, it's bad

Salon.com | Bush unbound by Sydney Blumenthal

...These emotions were linked to what is euphemistically called "moral values," which is actually social and sexual panic over the rights of women and gender roles -- lipstick traces, indeed. Only imposing manly authority against "girlie men," girls and lurking terrorists can save the nation. Bush's TV ads featured digitally reproduced crowds of cheering soldiers, triumph of the leader through computer enhancement. Above all, the exit polls showed that "strong leader" was the primary reason Bush was supported.

Brought along with Bush is a gallery of grotesques in the Senate -- more than one of the new senators advocating capital punishment for abortion, another urging that all gay teachers be fired, yet another revealed as suffering from obvious symptoms of Alzheimer's.

The new majority is more theocratic than Republican, as Republican was previously understood; the defeat of the old moderate Republican Party is far more decisive than the loss by the Democrats. And there are no checks and balances. The terminal illness of Chief Justice William Rehnquist signals new appointments to the Supreme Court that will alter law for more than a generation. Conservative promises to dismantle constitutional law established since the New Deal will be acted upon. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned and abortion outlawed...

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Most post-election commentary follows the traditional paths of urging unity, assuming the wisdom of the voters, cursing the folly of the loser.

Bull.

Blumenthal sums it up. This was a great battle, and the good guys lost. The problem wasn't Kerry, it was the electorate. We are the problem.

America: Divided by religion

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Election reveals divided nation

...According to the exit poll, 22% of the electorate said "moral values" was the issue that mattered most in how they voted - compared to 20% who cited the economy, 19% who cited terrorism, and just 15% who said Iraq was the key issue.

Not surprisingly, four out of five voters who cited moral values as their key issue voted for President Bush - as did the same proportion of those who cited terrorism...

...Two-thirds of voters who attend religious services regularly (once a week or more) backed President Bush rather than Senator Kerry - and they make up 40% of the electorate.

Those who never attend services, in contrast, backed the Democrats by the same margin - but they make up only 15% of the electorate.

More data supporting my prior post. America now has a vast divide between faith/feeling and reason/empiricism. This correlates with religious observances, but I think it's a primary distinction. Obervances may be secondary.

Insofar as Democrats are a party of tolerance, freedom, and inclusion they cannot, by definition, encompass groups who's very essence is the exclusive correctness of their religious observances.

The issue we stood a chance on, and failed, was the very high correlation between terrorism as an issue and votes for Bush. I agree that terrorism and security are the dominant issues for all nation states in the 21st century -- however I feel that Bush has a very wrong approach to these problems.

In any case, "nice" to have more data to back up my intuition.

The 92% factor

Faughnan's Notes - October 22nd

On October 22nd I had a premononition of what would happen on 11/2/04. I wrote then:

The Washington Monthly: "92% of Americans for whom terrorism is their major concern plan to vote for George Bush."

I am stunned. I wonder if North Koreans, famed for their isolation and media control, are really any more ignorant of the world than we Americans.

Today I heard on NPR that polls showed voters favored Bush over Kerry on security by an 8:1 margin. Were we to rerun the last few months, this would probably emerge as the (impossible?) test Kerry failed -- despite an astonishing fight.

Given those numbers, it is incredible that Kerry got as close as he did. As a colleague of mine noted, this means Edwards was absolutely the wrong choice for VP. We needed a Cheney-equivalent, probably General Clark.

The election for president is not done, but Bush won the popular vote and Republicans gained in the house and senate. It was a huge uphill fight, and Kerry and his supporters fought well. Heck, I fought well.

Now I want to understand why the electorate made its decisions. I'm coming up with three reasons:

1. Social conservatism: This is the anti-gay, anti-intellectual, anti-feminist, AM radio, power and dominance cohort. They appear to have voted in good numbers.

2. Evangelicals: Overlaps with #1, but a slightly different group. They appear to have turned out in greater numbers than in 2000.

3. Americans appear to have opted for the Bush war. That means fairly severe limitations of civil rights, continued restrictions on immigration, unilateral military action, abandoment of alliances, torture and one-dimensional conflict. It also suggests that a significant majority of Americans are ready for a military draft.

All of these played a role in the house and senate outcomes, but #3 feels to me like the reason we lost Florida and are lagging in Ohio.

These will be the dominant forces in American life for the next four years. Economics, the environment, civil rights, social justice, integrity in government, respect for the law -- all are in retreat. Humanists and rationalists are in retreat.

What will Europe do?

The evolution of the vertebrate (human) eye

Science -- EMBL About Us - News and Communication - Press - Press Release 28 October 2004 - Darwin's greatest challenge tackled: the mystery of eye evolution

By studying a 'living fossil,' Platynereis dumerilii, a marine worm that still resembles early ancestors that lived up to 600 million years ago. Arendt had seen pictures of this worm's brain taken by researcher Adriaan Dorresteijn [University of Mainz, Germany]. "When I saw these pictures, I noticed that the shape of the cells in the worm’s brain resembled the rods and cones in the human eye. I was immediately intrigued by the idea that both of these light-sensitive cells may have the same evolutionary origin."

To test this hypothesis, Arendt and Wittbrodt used a new tool for today’s evolutionary biologists – 'molecular fingerprints'. Such a fingerprint is a unique combination of molecules that is found in a specific cell. He explains that if cells between species have matching molecular fingerprints, then the cells are very likely to share a common ancestor cell.

Scientist Kristin Tessmar-Raible provided the crucial evidence to support Arendt's hypothesis. With the help of EMBL researcher Heidi Snyman, she determined the molecular fingerprint of the cells in the worm's brain. She found an opsin, a light-sensitive molecule, in the worm that strikingly resembled the opsin in the vertebrate rods and cones. "When I saw this vertebrate-type molecule active in the cells of the Playtnereis brain – it was clear that these cells and the vertebrate rods and cones shared a molecular fingerprint. This was concrete evidence of common evolutionary origin. We had finally solved one of the big mysteries in human eye evolution.

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There was a Wired magazine article recently in which a fairly bright geek celebrity argued for intelligent design based on the computational impossibility of evolving anything like a human cell.

That article, as well as most of the "intelligent design" literatrure, perpetuates a deep and common misunderstanding about what Darwin said and about natural selection. Let me correct that misunderstanding in five words. We are not the point.

Or, in other words ...

This discovery demonstrated a starting point, from which it is possible to imagine a series of steps, each of manageable probability, that would lead to the design of the verterbrate eye.

But wait, say creationists -- what are the chances that all those steps would occur? Aren't the odds a bazillion to one?

Well, say the evolutionists, yes they are. A bazillion to one.

That's the point.

Start the game over again, role the 200 sided dice 10,000 times -- you'll get a different sequence of numbers. A very different light sensor. But, that light sensor will also have a plausible path of descent from the same worm brain.

Start over from those early terrestrial cells. Run the simulation forwards. Maybe you'll end up with sentience. Maybe you'll end up with a bacterial soup. Maybe you'll end up with something else. You will never, however, end up with anything that looks anything like us.

The New York Times > Opinion > Bob Herbert: Days of Shame

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Days of Shame

Also mind-boggling is the attempt by Republican Party elements to return the U.S. to the wretched days of the mid-20th century when many black Americans faced harassment, intimidation and worse for daring to exercise their fundamental right to vote. A flier circulating extensively in black neighborhoods in Wisconsin carries the heading 'Milwaukee Black Voters League.' It asserts that people are not eligible to vote if they have voted in any previous election this year; if they have ever been found guilty of anything, even a traffic violation; or if anyone in their family has ever been found guilty of anything.

'If you violate any of these laws,' the flier says, 'you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you.'

In Philadelphia, where a large black vote is essential to a Kerry victory in the crucial state of Pennsylvania, the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House, John Perzel, is hard at work challenging Democratic voters. He makes no bones about his intent, telling U.S. News & World Report:

'The Kerry campaign needs to come out with humongous numbers here in Philadelphia. It's important for me to keep that number down.'

That's called voter suppression, folks, and the G.O.P. concentrates its voter-suppression efforts in the precincts where there are large numbers of African-Americans. And that's called racism.

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If you're a Republican who can't stomach voting for a democrat, vote for McCain this year. If George Bush disapproved of these maneuvers, he'd have spoken out against them.

I pledge allegiance to .... Herr Bush?

One Nation Under Bush - At a campaign rally, Republicans recite the "Bush Pledge." By Chris Suellentrop

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.—"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.

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Arms aloft eh? With elbows bent, or straight?

Bush did wear something

Salon.com News | NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate

I've mostly been ignoring this, but now I'm curious. I'd put it at a 50-50 chance Bush was wearing something at the first debate. I've no idea what it was and the article really doesn't address that.

Republicans for Kerry 2004

Republicans for Kerry 2004 - dKosopedia

An extensive list of well regarded Republicans who will not vote for Bush. Some will vote for Kerry, some will write in McCain or George Bush senior.

Bob Smith, a right wing NH republican, joined this group today.

Yesterday The Economist endorsed Kerry.

Go Sox Go.

Kay (the weapons inspector guy) on Qa Qaa (via CNN)

The Talent Show: An Expert Opinion

Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security....

...Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

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Bush can blame the soldiers. Who else can he blame?

Butterfly ballots -- what a nation

Pandagon: Follow The Rules, You Will Lose

I've never seen a butterfly ballot. These are astounding. We don't deserve this nation.