Gods and Morons

A common but quite silly accusation from certain folks is that atheists have no morals, or that we just make up our rules as we go.

In this post I will attempt to explain why atheists are in fact more morally responsible than many non-atheists. I'm pretty sure most non-atheists will disagree, but my purpose is not to convince them, but to have a short-hand way of dismissing those silly accusations.

Morals are rules of behavior. Whether or not we agree on what the rules ought to be, most people do agree that rules exist. Even people who do not agree that the word "morals" has real meaning will agree that people manage to live together in complex societies by establishing rules and convincing at least most people to abide by them.

So there are a couple of ways of coming up with rules of behavior.

On the one hand we can think about the rules, and decide on rules that work well towards a goal. The goal itself is of course also a moral rule which can be chosen randomly. However, it is unlikely that societies whose moral goals are harmful will survive for long. So now we're looking at a number of societies that have chosen moral goals that are helpful to their survival. People in these societies can examine their moral goals and the rules that work towards those goals. They can decide if their rules are consistent with their goal, insofar as the rules deal with human nature and physical reality and how they relate to the goal.

I'll call these people secularists.

On the other hand we can allow the rules to be imposed on us. Thus, most modern non-atheists will say that rules are moral, whether or not their deity says so, but human beings should just follow the rules the deity provides, because the deity would never make an immoral rule. The way you can tell if a rule is from the deity is by checking if it's a moral rule, and if it is then it's from the deity.

I'll call these people panglossians, after Voltaire's character, Dr Pangloss, who satirized Leibniz's optimistic appraisal of the Christian deity.

But the silly accusation doesn't come from the larger body of non-atheists. It comes from a minority body, from people who argue that the moral value of a rule doesn't derive from the rule, but from the fact that the rule comes from the deity. For these non-atheists this is how it works: Their deity decides that a certain rule should be obeyed. Because their deity says so, that rule is automatically moral. There is no consideration of consequences or of human moral goals allowed. If the deity orders a murder, then that murder is a moral act, by definition.

Ronald Dworkin discusses how one might decide if a rule is truly moral or not. He draws an analogy from science. A fact about science depends on the exact configuration of the particles that make up nature - baryons and leptons and bosons. So, he says, maybe a fact about morals depends on the exact configuration of another kind of particle, so far undiscovered, which confers moral value: morons. Yes, he's making a joke.

But people who believe that a rule is moral if and only if it comes from their deity are effectively saying that their deity is such a moron. I'll call these people moronists, and their belief moronism. I have observed it among all faith communities, so I'm not picking on any particular one, even if some of my friends might feel personally addressed.

Moronism is a highly problematic position to take. For one thing, no one has ever measured the value of a moron, so it's hard to say how moronists can know if a rule is moral or not. Their position is that their rules come from their scriptures and from their theologians. However, their scriptures are hardly consistent in the rules they lay out, and it's a plain fact that the scriptures have been used over time to support wildly inconsistent moral rules. That leaves their theologians, who claim to have a special sense for the value of a moron, but even they disagree among each other.

What it all boils down to is that moronists adopt random rules without consideration of their morality, but on the say-so of other moronists. They are essentially following orders, in the best tradition of a concentration camp commander. They are good soldiers, perhaps, but one thing they are not.

Moronists are not morally responsible actors.

Panglossians do a little better. While panglossians will look to their theologians and their scriptures, they do admit the possibility that immoral rules might be just as easily drawn from authoritative sources as moral rules. The main complaint one might have about panglossians is that they bother with scripture and theologians at all, but ultimately panglossians and secularists do meet on common ground.

Both have to examine the moral consequences of a rule before agreeing to live by that rule.

And that is the very essence of being a morally responsible actor.

Getting a Handle on Handel

I play second fiddle in a small community symphony. I enjoy music, and even if I don't play well myself, the music we make as a group is a lot of fun. This time of year (around Christmas) we play in at least two performances: one for Christmas, and then there's a long running (over twenty years, I think) tradition of putting on a Messiah sing-along.

I'm also an atheist. How should I respond to the accusation that I betray atheists in some fashion by participating in a transparently religious celebration?

I don't think I have a good answer. I enjoy the music. David Blackbird, an amazingly talented and thoughtful man of my acquaintance, pointed out at one time, "when you sing about Frosty the Snowman, are you telling everyone you believe in magical top hats? No? So why should singing about Jesus suggest that you believe in a magical carpenter's son?"

That was good enough to make me feel better about singing "Silent Night" and playing my arm sore at Christmas concerts. But it really isn't a convincing argument that a Christmas concert put on by a community group that receives tax monies from a city government is not violating the First Amendment's prohibition of "respecting an establishment of religion."

Maybe Fox' Bill O'Reilly came to my rescue the other day. In an interview with American Atheists' Dave Silverman O'Reilly tried to avoid the accusation that when a government entity supports Christmas it is legitimizing a religious holiday by suggesting that Christianity is not a religion. It's a worldview, or a philosophy, according to O'Reilly. The Catholic Church is a religion. Baptists are a religion. But Christianity is not a religion.

However, I'm sorry to say that it is obvious to everyone that Bill O'Reilly was being disingenuous (again). There may be definitions for worldview or philosophy that would allow us to include Christianity, but those don't change the fact that Christianity is also a religion, and that it is what the Constitution's First Amendment refers to when it prohibits making laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof."

After all, if Christianity were not a religion, then it wouldn't be unconstitutional to make a law prohibiting the practice of Christianity. "In the interest of preventing the formation of groups holding extremist views, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are banned. Persons caught practicing or promoting these worldviews or philosophies, or found to give material aid to anyone practicing or promoting these worldviews, will be prosecuted under the Patriot Act's penalties for acts relating to terrorism." For an atheist like me it sounds like a good idea, but I bet Bill O'Reilly wouldn't go for it.

Not the Christianity part, anyway.

So I'm still left with a quandary. I suppose a city government can put up lights and seasonal decorations, arguing that they promote shopping and a civic spirit, which is good for the businesses that pay taxes in the city. They might even get away with supporting a community orchestra that plays Christmas tunes in public venues, like the community senior center, or the city library's auditorium. I think it even is OK when the performances are in churches and seminaries as long as the public is admitted regardless of religious affiliation.

When the same question is asked about the Messiah it gets a little more ticklish. Most Christmas carols are familiar enough tunes that they are arguably folk songs. The Messiah, however, is not like that. The Messiah was written in 1741, when Handel was at something of a low point in his career. He had been reasonably successful writing fairly conventional music, and he really wanted to try his hand at something new. But after months of having nothing to show for his time his funds were running low and he had to produce something to make the cash registers ring again. So when his friend and longtime collaborator Jennens approached him with a libretto he had written as an explicit response to deists (yes, the same kinds of deists that are responsible for our Constitution's disestablishmentarianism), Handel tossed together a few dozen bits of baroque elevator music, which were then performed for the first time around Easter 1742 in Dublin.

OK, describing the pieces as baroque elevator music sounds a bit cavalier, but, seriously, critical acclaim for originality or compositional structure is not something you'll be hearing about the Messiah, no matter how much fun it is to listen to, even if you consider Handel's original arrangement (which most performances, including ours, are not). Plus, from its origin the piece is effectively a refutation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. That makes it special in this context.

Finally, there is a fair amount of effort to select pieces from the work that suit the theological understanding of the participants, rather than the poetic value of the lyrics or the compositional integrity of the music. Some sections that make theological references that are unfamiliar to American Protestants are not even included in typical American publications of the work, or are set aside into an appendix. The work is clearly far more religious in nature than, say, "Rudolf the Rednosed Reindeer" or even "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem."

So I have no very good answer. I probably won't be playing this year because I've injured my arm. Last year, however, I participated, and I will be there next year, too, if they'll let me. The music, however hackneyed and unoriginal it may be to a musicologist, is just too much fun to give it a pass.

I first heard about the shooting in Tucson when I received an email message from CBS. The initial report listed Representative Giffords as dead. She managed to survive, but six other people did die.

The upshot of Jared Loughner's amok run is calls from all quarters for more civility. Some folks pointed out that Giffords was featured in Palin's hit list, and that Palin's response to criticism was a metaphorical "reload." While Palin and her allies say that it's unfair to politicize this tragedy, it's now gotten expanded to a general call for civility in politics. It's not really the first time. The Coffee Party, a response to the Tea Party, has been calling for civility since its inception a year ago, but folks who're paying attention know that nastiness in politics has been in the news for a while, now, and every election cycle sees renewed calls for civility. This is an old problem.

When Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days, a story that takes place in 1872, he describes elections in the USA as being a single continuous riot. It seems that nothing has changed. We pride ourselves on our democracy, but it's never been a drawing room affair.

Jared Loughner's amok run wasn't about politics. Sure, his facebook page allegedly contained crazy talk, but so does Fox Cable News. I mean, if we locked up everyone who rants crazy, Fox Cable News would have to open a studio in an asylum.

So that I'm not just picking on Loughner, let me quickly point out that after Columbine, Harris and Klebold became the posterboy victims of bullying, or of boys who listen to deathmetal, or whatever. There wasn't a lot of discussion about sanity then, either. Someone like Ted Bundy was just a serial killer. I have no idea why cases like this are made to appear as if we're not looking at a failure of mental health. We seem to have no problem describing Ted Kaczynski as insane, maybe because the Unabomber lived as a hermit and wrote a manifesto. But are we ready to lock up all hermits who have strange political ideas?

Insanity is at least in part a political issue. The Soviet Union used to lock up dissidents as insane. Krushchev was perhaps the first Soviet official to make the abuse of psychiatry an official tool of the Soviet government, by arguing in 1959 that dissidence must be the result of insanity. By the time of perestroika and glasnost, hundreds of dissidents had been committed to asylums and subjected to compulsory treatment.

So we need a more objective way of deciding that someone needs help besides referring to their desire to see Obama's birth certificate, or their conviction that Dubya organized 9/11.

But the problem doesn't end there. While I agree that Loughner might not have gone on a rampage if he had gotten timely and effective treatment, I don't think that we actually know how to give timely and effective treatment.

Just the other day I'm sitting on the train going home, when I notice this guy talking loud up front. I think first he's just one of those people who don't know how to moderate their tone on their mobile phone, when he steps further into the car and starts randomly pointing at us passengers, telling us we're "the worst." Apparently we weren't treating him right. He ranted like that for a while, until he got off the train. His ranting probably would not have gone over to violence, even if he owned a gun. At the time I certainly wasn't worried about it. These kinds of things happen in every town, every day, and nothing bad comes of them.

Tuscon was a one in a million event. So what do we do about it?

When the Soviet Union's psychiatric institutions were being investigated by the WPA in 1989, it was found to be a maze of understaffed and over crowded "coffins" where hundreds of thousands of patients had little hope of ever receiving treatment or even getting out to return to society.

The present situation in the USA is not a lot better. The famous 1973 Rosenhan experiment demonstrated that, at least about fourty years ago, psychiatrists had little chance of being able to tell the difference between sane people and insane people. Criticism like this lead to the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals in most parts of the world that had them. Perhaps it was throwing out the baby with the bath water, but the fact remains that psychiatric diagnosis is still a controversial mine field. Look around for news on DSM-5 to see for yourself.

While most of us can agree that Loughner needed help, it's only in hindsight that it becomes clear. Since religious beliefs and political beliefs all may fall under the heading of "out of touch with reality," deciding who needs help is a touchy issue, before we even get around to asking what kind of help they need.

What do you do when you catch someone staring at you?

What if they're taking pictures of you?

Suppose they're taking pictures of your car? Your home? Other family members?

Clearly each of us have different ideas of what kind of privacy or lack of privacy we're comfortable with. But unless we're hermits, or never leave our home unless we're wearing a chador, there are clearly some kinds of public appearance we're willing to accept, since most of us are listed in the phone book, use credit cards, go on walks, go to church, participate in community activities, etc.

But where do we draw the line? Especially, why is online information something so many of us are uncomfortable with?

The names of myself and my family members, our pictures, addresses, phone numbers, places of work, schools, and a host of other information are, strictly speaking, all publicly available with a modicum of effort. (A private detective could collect all of that information in the space of an afternoon. Someone without the resources and training of a detective might have to work a little harder, but it wouldn't be difficult.) Why is it not OK for this information to be exposed publicly on Google or Facebook or any of the other places online where "social networking" or whatever people are pleased to call it is going on?

I think part of the problem is the anonymity of the way in which that information may be obtained. My neighbors, for example, know a bunch of stuff about me that isn't even publicly available in any sense of the word. Yet it doesn't bother me. I think it doesn't bother me because there is a reciprocity: I know the same kind of things about them, and we both know that we know. It's part of living in a community, and people who are reasonably sane are OK with that. It's part of who human beings evolved to be.

Information that's available online may be accessed by anyone, in the same sense that anyone may walk down my street, stop in front of my house, make notes, take pictures, all perfectly legal (in the USA - other countries may have stronger restrictions on what is permitted) as long as they don't trespass. However, someone who stops in front of my house stands a good chance of being noticed by me or my neighbors.

Someone who accesses information online is not likely to be noticed by anyone.

And I believe that is where the difference lies.

David Brin in his book "The Transparent Society" suggests that hiding behind secrecy and encryption is pointless for us. Sure, it's a bit creepy to think that complete strangers access this information, but it's essentially impossible for us to prevent it. No matter what lies we tell, or what permissions we restrict on our online profiles, the details of our lives are always accessible to people with power or money.

No, the thing that will keep our future from turning into something like Orwell's 1984 isn't stronger privacy, but stronger transparency. Brin suggests that the reason why people don't stare at each other in public is because they'll get caught staring. We need to bring the same thing to the web.

Maybe we should be able to see a list of people who went by our house on Streetview. Maybe we should get a message from Facebook when someone checks out our profile. And not just these things, which are in my opinion small potatoes. We should be able to see who ran a credit check on us, who sold our address to a mailing list, who passed along our credit card usage habits to a marketing firm. It's not as if we can really prevent it from happening, so instead we should be able to see it when it does happen.

People don't stare when they might get caught. It's a lesson Facebook and Google should probably adopt. And I'd love it if this two-way transparency were to become the law for everyone who collects information about us.

I definitely have mixed emotions regarding the new health care reform bill. I don't know everything that's in it, yet, but what I do know bothers me intensely.

Perhaps I think of the entire health care issue a bit differently from most people?

For me health care is a public policy issue similar to the way we deal with fire departments, public school, or national parks. In other words, the choices we make here have an effect on all of us, not just on those of us directly involved. A house that burns down isn't just a problem for the home owner. People who don't know how to read or write in our modern world aren't just a problem for themselves. Losing the areas we've designated as national parks doesn't just mean fewer places to go and enjoy nature. And like them, people without adequate health care are not just a sad story to read about. The effects are far reaching, both economically and socially.

It's not like some people want to characterize it: we need to be nice to each other and take care of each other. I mean, that'd be nice, too, but adequate health care for everyone is necessary for rather more bloody minded, hard headed reasons.

So I see the whole thing as a three part problem.

1. Health care is too damned expensive. Bills are itemized down to the fare-thee-well. You're charged for a change in rubber gloves, for every single aspirin, and the charges are outlandish. Every doctor and p.a. that has a poke at you submits their own bill. If you walk out with something like a pair of crutches you may well end up getting a bill from some medical supply store in Timbuktu.

   Didn't use to be like that.

2. Insurance is about risk management. Now, you might argue that you don't take risks, so you should pay less for your insurance than others who take more risks. Or perhaps you're willing to bear a greater risk. But that flies in the face of the economic realities of health care. Risk management works best when the entire population is included, rather than allowing groups to take some kind of privileged position.

   In other words, a single payer system that has the entire US population as subscribers is what will be most efficient and most effective at managing the cost of health care.

   Yup, no choice. But you're trying to hold onto an illusion of choice. It's not a real choice. Whatever insurance plan you currently have is governed by actuarial tables, coupled with some sort of commitment of profits to investors. Everything else devolves from there. Your own input here only means something if you incur catastrophic expenses that will have to be paid for by the part of the system outside of your insurance plan. And that's precisely the problem.

3. The tail is wagging the dog. The reason why there's even a question about how we deal with the health care issue is because there are far too many people making money doing everything but providing health care, and any attempt to change that is bound to generate a lot of opposition from a lot of very wealthy people who are trying to maintain the status quo. About 2/3 of all the money spent on health care goes here.

   But in one respect health care reform has to deal with that: these millions of people currently employed doing everything from collecting payments to denying health care can't actually be tossed out into the streets by closing down the likes of Blue Cross Blue Shield, right?

Essentially, a health care plan has to do all of that.

It needs to find a way to return medical billing to sanity. Do away with the practice of charging $1,000 for a hang nail, all but $50 of which ends up being disallowed by the insurance plan anyway.

A single payer system means that you will be able to get medical care whenever you need it, and, more importantly, providers of medical care don't need to inflate costs to recoup from people with the ability to pay the money they lose on the people who don't have the ability to pay.

The hard part would be re-purposing the machinery currently devoted to inefficiency and greed, the health insurance companies and their employees. I gather there's a shortage of nursing staff and doctors. Hey, I have an idea.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the recently passed health care bill does practically none of all that. I know, the Senate version is still to come, and then there's final conference version... I wouldn't be surprised to find that it makes some things worse.

So that's why I have these mixed emotions. Should I be happy that we had movement of any kind on this issue? Or should we have scrapped this bill and tried again later?

There's a classic experiment in psychology.

Suppose you're watching a run-away railway car. It's big, it's heavy, it's going fast and out of control. A little way along the track splits, and the car might go right, or it might go left. On the right track a man is working, wearing hearing protection. There's no way you can warn him in time. On the left track a car is stalled with a family inside, mom, dad, two kids. They don't notice the coming disaster, either.

You can't know which way the run-away train is going to go. But which track would you prefer it to go on?

Suppose there's a switch by your hand. You can't tell which way the train is going to go, but if you press the switch, then the train will definitely go right. One man will be killed, but the family will survive.

Whatever choice you might make, most people will choose not to press the switch. They prefer the 50/50 chance of killing an entire family by not doing anything to the certain chance of saving their lives by doing something that will kill a man.

The reason for this is buried in our processing of moral choices. Moral thinking is something we all do instinctively, and in most cases we do it well enough. But under certain circumstances our moral judgment seizes up, like some kind of rickety steam engine that needs a bolt tightened. This is an excellent example of such an instance.

It is doubtful that any of us will ever be in the position that is described by that psychology experiment, right?

Wrong.

Right now tens of millions of parents in America face exactly that kind of a choice. An H1N1 flu epidemic is threatening this country. It is already hospitalizing and killing people around the world. The risk to our children is significant: at least 1 in fifteen of non-immunized children will be hospitalized due to the H1N1 flu. If the epidemic gets bad enough, then the overburdened health care system may well not be able to prevent many deaths.

But there is a certain risk to the vaccine, as well. The risk is tiny for most serious problems, on the order of 1/100,000 or less.

If parents do nothing, they risk a 1 in fifteen chance that their children will become seriously ill. If they get their children immunized, they risk a much lower, less than 1/100,000 chance that their children will become seriously ill.

And yet parents around the country are deciding not to immunize.

They're deciding not to press that switch, gambling a family's life.

In actual fact, these parents are doing worse than gambling their own family's life. Since non-immunized children will get ill and spread the disease, parents who do not immunize their own children are gambling with the lives of everyone else, as well.

But because of the rickety old steam engine that runs our brains, it is hard for them to recognize the immorality of this choice.

Factcheck.org has more detailed information.

It was later than I thought. This morning everything seemed to be going well until I was about 10 yards away from the bus stop, and the bus went by.

I yanked out my cellphone - I use it instead of a watch - and checked the time. Sure enough. The bus was not early.

The bus runs up the street, but instead of going straight downtown it winds back into the next neighborhood. I have a good chance of catching it when it comes back around to a stop about a mile from that corner, so I started jogging. When I was about half-way there, someone called my name, and I get a ride with a neighbor.

Nice guy, give you the shirt off his back, and we haven't talked in a long time so there's a lot to cover. When talk turns to insurance, how much he's paying, how he has to be careful to stay insurable, how his deductible and copays about keep him broke, I say, "with all what we have to deal with, I wonder what they're talking about when they say national health care would eliminate choice."

"You'd be surprised," he says.

Well, I was surprised. I expected someone who isn't having any fun at all with the current health care system to be on the side calling for reform, but apparently not. There weren't any specific problems he meant. "You'd be surprised" is about all it amounts to.

There is a curious kind of cognitive disconnect when people don't trust government to run a health care system, but it's OK for government to send our sons and daughters off to war. On the one hand they raise a ruckus when the census comes around, and then they have no problem with warrantless surveillance. A health care system that bleeds them into poverty - most individual bankruptcies are due to medical bills - is OK, even if insurance company execs make billions and the care they receive is demonstrably inferior to that in any other industrialized country, but even a suggestion of raising taxes and out come the tricorns and the Tetley tea bags.

I'd go to Canada. I'm told their system doesn't work but Canadians aren't going bankrupt over their medical bills, they have a lower infant mortality rates, and longer life expectancies. If that is what it means when something doesn't work I welcome failure.

Problem is, of course, Canadians would love for us to solve our own problems. They're pretty tired of Americans crossing the border to cadge free medical care, cheap medicine, and lower car registration fees. Well, actually, I bet they don't mind the car registrations.

But meanwhile folks here wonder why we're in such a hurry to fix a broken system.

I tell them it's because it's later than they think.

A chuckle on the digital age.

From an emailed editorial I was sent (don't know the original link):

"... Gordon Bell (and fellow Microsoft researcher Jim Gemmell) have written a book called Total Recall, in which they describe the benefits of recording literally everything we do in digital formats, and the process by which we're going down that road. Among the benefits they describe:

• definitive and easily-accessible health records;
• settling who-said-what disputes with your spouse;
• being able to figure out who was at last year's Christmas party; and
• never losing an important written document or photograph.

..."

OK, definitive and easily accessible health records: no one wants those. If "death panels" bothered people, the prospect of the lovely folks at an insurance company telling you, sorry, no, you're not covered for that bypass because we know you ate a Big Mac a week for the past ten years should be a lot worse. (Don't tell me that wouldn't happen. You know it would.) We want plausible deniability.

Settling who-said-what disputes with your spouse by playing back a recording has got to be the single most welcomed idea - by the divorce lawyers association. If that really worked, why wouldn't the spouse play back their own recording and avoid the dispute in the first place?

Christmas parties? If anyone knew you were recording those kinds of details, they wouldn't come to your party, and you wouldn't get invited. Figuring out who was there will be quite easy: not you.

Never losing an important written document or photograph. Yeah, right. Between disk crashes, lost backups, and not knowing where you filed it in those terabytes of indispensable information, good luck.

Why is it that tech mavens seem to have such tenuous contact with the real world?

Sometimes the shiny new present turns out to be not at all what you thought it was.

For reasons unrelated to the inauguration on Tuesday I was listening to classic rock, including The Who. Just before Obama gave his inauguration address, the song "Won't get fooled again" came on. I paused the song and turned on the sound to Obama's speech.

It was a nice job of speechifying, I thought. I enjoyed it when Obama gave Bush and the neo-cons their well deserved and public spanking. I liked Obama's retelling of the American Myth. I took the whole thing to be what it was intended: a spectacle to signal to the Rest of the World that the USA was still in business, and that a new hand was guiding the Ship of State.

Throughout the speech the camera switched from views of Obama at the podium to views of the crowds thronging the Mall. People with hopeful faces. The song I had just been listening to kept swirling through my mind as background to Obama's speech.

When the swearing-in was done with and the nattering nabobs of the media took their turns telling us what we'd just watched, I muted the stream and returned to my music. Next came the great guitar bridge from the song, followed by the last two lines, which sounded disturbingly prophetic: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

I am by nature an optimistic person, but news items like this one from WiReD (which detail how Obama's administration is unlikely to return to principles of accountability, at least as far as the government's ability to spy on citizens without a warrant is concerned) certainly help to sober me up.

When we're about to anoint America's first president of African descent, some folks might call it churlish to suggest that there's still racism in America. Well, here's an article, published last year, which might change their minds. I have nothing to add.

So Ann Coulter's broken her jaw. (Yes, I know that was more than a month ago.)

No one seems to want to say exactly how.

Which isn't to say that folks aren't willing to make wisecracks about it.

What no one mentions is that someone with their jaws wired shut can still talk perfectly well.

So is someone hoping she'll break her hands, next?

Anyway, the funniest comment appeared in Tom Tomorrow's "Year in Review." Go there and admire it for yourself.

Fred Thompson has some thoughts on how Congress is dealing with the current economic crisis.

What he doesn't say is that current mess isn't the first of its type in recent memory.

Those of us who have a memory span that slightly exceeds that of a gerbil with lead poisoning may recall the Savings and Loan scandal, where the Bush (#41) administration and Congress set up the "Resolution Trust Corporation" to bail out S&Ls to the tune of over a trillion bucks.

The names will sound familiar, though. Like John McCain, who was rebuked in the Senate for his role in shielding Charles Keating from the consequences of bad management. And, before people accuse me of partisanship, Cranston, Riegle, DeConcini, and Glenn, all Democrats, got in trouble alongside McCain. I guess that's what made McCain a maverick?

Or Neil Bush (one of Dubyas many brothers), who was accused of skimming money from his failing S&L.

Anyway, the point is, this current mess is not like the Depression. It's more like what happened *before* the Depression. You all remember the Roaring 20s? When that bubble burst and the markets crashed, bankers (gotta love 'em!) said that people would just have to suck up the margin calls and ride out the market. Sound familiar? They didn't want intervention, because they were afraid that might dilute their holdings in gold. Then they discovered that you can't eat gold, and it won't build houses or cars for you...

I'm not suggesting that giving bankers $700 billion with no strings attached was a good idea. The trouble is that Congress has no idea what banks do, and there's no one in the current administration who knows much more. Even Hank, who came to his current post from Goldman Sachs and was arguably one of the many architects of this mess, doesn't really know, a fact to which he testified in congress.

Anyway, while Thompson is fun to listen to, he's just being a sarcastic know-nothing. He knows it. I wonder if everyone else does, too?

An email from a friend: she's going to wear a headscarf, like Muslim women do, pray five times a day, and study the scriptures, all until the end of September. She says she's done similar things with other religions. She believes this will help her understand the perspective of other people.

Now, I'm wondering if she would consider living for a month as an atheist. Since atheists don't have a regimen of ritual it seems that there are no challenges to that life.

But I wondered.

So here's my summary of how an atheist lives (as opposed to someone who just doesn't pay attention). (Why six points? No reason.)

1. Appreciate the people in your life who depend on you, and those on whom you depend. From family to friends to neighbors to colleagues, other people is how you give your life meaning and purpose.
2. Treat your fellow beings with courtesy and respect. Be humble. You will all eventually end up as dust, no matter what you do or what you believe.
3. Attend to your health every day. No supernatural forces will do that for you. Doctors can help, but they're only human. Ultimately you're your own responsibility.
4. Be careful and attentive at all times. There are no supernatural forces that will protect you or others from accident or injury if you make a mistake. Seatbelts or helmets are always a good idea.
5. Life is about change. Take every opportunity to step outside of your comfort zone. Learn things that seem difficult. Don't judge the worth of these efforts by their success, but enjoy them, just so. Live, because this is the only life you've got.
6. Know what you can change, and what must be endured, and learn to tell the difference between the two.

From here we can go on to discuss various things.

We could, for example, discuss if wearing a headscarf, frequent prayer, and studying scriptures (we'll assume she meant the Quran) is sufficient to give one insight into the lives and perspectives of actual members of Islam. Especially given that this project is going to run only three more weeks or so.

Is it possible that any one of the points in my summary is more of a challenge than all three of my friend's challenges put together? She admitted to expecting a certain amount of criticism from people who might be upset with discovering a Muslim in their midst, but is that really a hardship? Many people seem to enjoy taking a position of what they believe is moral superiority where they might evoke expected but undeserved anger from other people.

Or we might wonder why atheists don't have rituals. I suspect that one of the reasons why religions are successful is that they do have rituals. They have rules of behavior that require an effort to engage in, and all members of the religion who subscribe to those rules automatically bond as a result. It's built into the human skull, programmed into our very bones, that shared misery is half the misery, and that we're rewarded for it with social reciprocation.

What do atheists do for social reciprocation? Since we don't get together to discuss our atheism (at least most of us don't, not as such), there is no community of atheists where reciprocation can take place. At best we can share stories about silly stuff we've seen people do in the name of some ancient superstition or other, but that's not much of a ritual. Joe Sixpack gets to do better than that when he visits the pub on Friday nights.

So this might explain why atheists aren't a community akin to proselytizing religions like Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. This isn't to suggest that atheists should start some rituals. There isn't really a need for a community of atheists, because atheists look for community in other ways. Atheists keep the essential nature of human beings in mind. We have religions because our mental and social structures support them. If we wanted to get rid of religions, we'd also have to modify the human mind and human society, to remove the existing supports for religion, and replace them with community forming structures that do not depend on tribalism, ritual, and superstitions.

Until we do, consider the list above. It's at least as challenging as wearing a scarf.

My dad loves to use the word "mainstream media." It's a funny thing, that word. It implies that there's some other sort of media, not "mainstream," which is somehow more salient, more balanced, better informed.

My dad's a smart guy, smarter than me in many ways, but this is one bit where he along with most liberals and conservatives who like to use this word are living in a fantasy land.

Oh, sure, we can point out that the likes of Wolf Blitzer, about as mainstream as they come, has used the platform of the presidential debates to ask over 3,000 questions. Six of them were about global climate change. Some of the other questions that were asked concerned UFOs and Chuck Norris.

I think it doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative or whatever, that's got to look bad.

Consider that, if global climate change is in fact a non-issue, and the next president decides to get all medieval about carbon footprints and the like, we'll be paying a steep price for a scientific boondoggle.

Or, if global climate change is real, and the next president decides to instead indulge in an endless series of studies financed by Mobil Oil, the price will be equally steep, if not steeper. It seems this is the sort of question where we need to know what a future president will do.

Compared to that, Chuck Norris and flashing lights in the sky aren't really in the running, are they?

So how are the non-mainstream media doing?

Well, Weekly World News just interviewed the bat boy...

But that's not who we mean by non-mainstream media. We mean people like the redoubtable Erick Erickson who blogs on RedState.com, right? One of the pioneers of journalism, a true patriot forging into the wilderness of political chaff, to return with morsels of Truth!

Um.

Sorry, I think I got carried away, there. Where was I?

Oh, yes, Erick Erickson. I listened to him talk about Barack Obama this morning. Clinton, he said, was a policy person. Obama, on the other is a Big Idea person. Erickson's words were along the lines of policy would bore Obama and his fans.

Yes, folks, there you have it. Insightful political analysis the way you won't find it in the New York Times.

Incidentally, wasn't the "Big Idea" thing what made Dubya such a great guy? I mean, he can't watch TV and eat pretzels at the same time, but policy bores him, so that makes him alright.

Just a thought.

Sometimes my liberal friends manage to really pick up the wrong end of the stick. So I got this link sent to me, along with the following comments from MoveOn:

"[...]if you're as amazed, saddened, and angered as we are—pass it on to a friend, neighbor, or co-worker and help make sure people all over the country see it."

Who's amazed or angered?

This was the reply from Bush I when questions were asked why it seemed that we were encouraging the Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Sadam but didn't provide any material support when it came to the smackdown. You may remember stories of Iraqi government helicopters strafing Shiite villages and of Kurds fleeing into the highlands on the Turkish side of the border where they froze and starved. Did we abandon our allies in Iraq?

Under Bush I the answer was that it was not expedient to do more, so we didn't do more.

Under Bush II things had changed a little. We'd looked at eight years of Iraq bashing, with the people of Iraq really getting the worst of it, and regime change didn't look likely, and then there was 9/11. We already had a military operation under way in Afghanistan, so...

I'm not saying that Cheney was wrong both times or right both times or right one time and wrong the other or changed his mind or lied or anything of the sort. I'm just pointing out that comparing the situation in 1992 with the situation in 2002 as if the two situations were identical is not smart.

The present facts of course seem to say that this administration was wrong in invading Iraq. I'm thinking that it was not just wrong in hind sight, but also wrong ahead of time. Not because Cheney was right in 1992, but because there were many other reasons besides those he gave not to go to war. Reasons which were ignored (or considered less significant than reasons to go to war) not just by this administration, but by 90% or so of congress, and perhaps even more of this country's population.

So this "saddened and angered" stuff kind of leaves me cold. Liberals are, of course, just as bad as conservatives. Both ends of the spectrum seem to love the easy stabs at the opposition, even when they completely miss the point.

I think pretty soon we'll hear about a naked exhibitionist standing on the steps of town hall and screaming at people not to look because she wants her privacy.

Seriously, it's gotten that silly.

On the one hand we have people lining up to appear on camera as they eat, sleep, and fight with each other, and are generally obnoxious and unlovable. They take their disputes to court TV, and if they happen to make an appearance on COPS, hey, what price fame, right?

On the flip side there's the latest hurrah over Google's Streetview.

The folks at Google simply drove a van around a few selected cities. The van carried a special camera that took panoramic pictures every few feet along the road. These pictures are now available on Google Maps, where you can see what the city looks like at street level.

The camera was never aimed. The van wasn't driven to selected spots. But, out of thousands of pictures, there are a few interesting ones - for certain values of interesting.

• A man apparently trying to climb over a locked gate.
• A number of bikini clad women sunbathing.
• Someone getting a ticket.
• A woman whose thong is showing.

The resultant uproar in some parts of opinion land has been deafening. "Invasion of privacy." "Creepy!" "Spooky!"

You'll forgive me when I say that we're all losing our minds.

I want that van cruising my home town. I want everyone's browsers to be able to access all street light cameras and security cameras around the city, any time they feel like looking. No, I don't mind if the cameras watch me, too.

I'll be sure to smile and wave.

We aren't talking about an Orwellian police state. Google doesn't carry their cameras into peoples' homes. Google doesn't punish you when you attempt to evade their surveillance. Google doesn't use their pictures to force us to obey the people in power.

If anything, Google must make the people in power distinctly uncomfortable. I wouldn't be at all surprised if DHS dispatched some of their Gestapo to Google headquarters to demand that Streetview be dismantled. They'll demand it in the name of security, of course.

We should all remember that information is an enemy of tyranny. Instead of trying to suppress information, we should applaud the people who provide it.

OK, anyone who reads my posts knows that I despise the current administration's scare tactics and their fascist methods. Now I read this:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's internal network security practices are a mess, according to a report by the General Accountability Office. In a report released on Thursday, the GAO said "certain information security controls over the critical internal network reviewed were ineffective..." (GAO: FBI needs a lesson in network security)

See, this is what I'm talking about. These guys don't really mean it. They tell us to be scared, but they aren't scared. They tell us it's a dangerous world, but they don't protect themselves. They subject us to history's single largest bureaucracy and all of the excesses and outrages that go along with that, but they themselves ignore it all.

It's pretty clear. When you're told the barking sound from the basement is a dog, but you find no evidence of dog food or leash or even so much as a turd on the lawn, then you're probably listening to a foley artist.

As David Horowitz will tell you, Republicans have a big tent, big enough to fit many different ideas. He tells you that to contrast his party with the Democrats. The Democrats do not have a big tent, says David.

Well, I like big tents.

Which is why, when Republicans in Utah required voters to be registered with their party to vote in the Republican primaries I promptly registered. Those close minded Democrats didn't require registration, so I didn't bother with them.

Ever since then I've been getting lot's of love from my friends in the GOP. I get to write editorials that start with "as a registered Republican", and people pay attention. I get Republican newsletters and even Republican spam!

So today I received the annual survey from the Republican National Committee. It is full of opportunities to express my opinion on important GOP matters:

1. If Democrats try to gut the USA Patriot Act...

   Pen in hand I got ready to mark Yes, but then I read the rest of the question:

   ...and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

   Um. Wait. The Patriot Act is that bit of fascist legislation that no one actually read when it was first passed, right? Those of us fighting to retain our freedom from intrusive government were pretty upset about it. So that's bad. We voted out some of those who supported that law, in part because of that support. But what's that about "other important laws"? The Democrats are trying to gut other important laws? Which ones? This is the first time I've heard of that.

   So, no, Republicans shouldn't fight back. They should get behind that effort and push. Aren't we for freedom, and against oppressive government? I know the tent is big enough for a little freedom, at least.

2. Should we stop the Democrats from cutting funding for our intelligence agencies...

   No, that doesn't sound good at all. We need well funded intelligence agencies, otherwise we'll have more disasters like Iraq and Korea. But wait, there's more:

   ...or bringing back Clinton-era restrictions in inter-agency communications?

   It's a funny thing about that Clinton era. It seems to go back about 35 years. I never knew he was in office that long. But I do know why we had those restrictions. One word: Nixon. No, he didn't impose them, but his abuses required them. You know, politically motivated fishing expeditions, targeted IRS audits, warrant less wiretaps. That sort of thing.

   Not that anyone has tried warrant less wiretaps or politically motivated fishing expeditions since then. Right?

   Mind you, the CIA, NSA, and FBI should probably share information where appropriate. Why they're still not doing it, almost 6 years after 9/11, is a mystery, especially since my Big Tent party has been in power all that time, and even created the single largest government bureaucracy ever in the history of the world to do the job.

   OK, one more.

3. Do you support the use of air strikes against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?

   Um. No?

   I mean, that sounds like a great idea, except that, you know, we won't be hitting the individuals or organizations who don't like us. Instead we'd be giving them even more reason not to like us, and giving a considerable boost to their recruiting.

   "Look at America," they'll say. "They kill women and children because they happen to be Muslim." Because, you know, it's Muslim countries we're talking about. Not to put too fine a point on it, we're talking about Iran. Anyway, if we do, then people will flock to their cause.

   So. No.

The survey is 23 question long, all along about the same lines. Whoever wrote it was pretty sure of his opinion, and figured no one in the Big Tent could possibly disagree with him. We all see where that lead over the past seven years.

Anyway, I filled it out and sent it in. I'm glad the Big Tent includes me. Otherwise who would set them straight?

When you've put yourself into a bad situation, is it proper to blame someone else for your errors?

Because that's what I think is going on in Congress these days. Because of the way the '06 elections turned out everyone is convinced that they've got to stand up against the war in Iraq.

Even the folks who originally voted for the war.

Hillary Clinton tells everyone who asks that the president lied to us, and that's why she voted for the war.

Well, maybe.

But exactly what would have been different if the president hadn't lied to us?

Wouldn't we still be stuck in Iraq, WMDs safely found and neutralized (if we were lucky), but bedeviled by a culture and a conflict that our leadership seems incapable of understanding, with thousands of our kids in coffins, tens of thousands wearing plastic arms and legs, and who knows how many Iraqis dead or maimed?

From where I'm standing it makes no difference at all. You voted for war, dammit! War isn't a nice, safe prescription for solving problems. If you didn't know that back in 2002, that's not the president's fault. If it's an intelligence failure, its the intelligence of people who were entrusted to make these kinds of decisions which failed. If it was the result of delusion or wishful thinking, it didn't originate in the White House, but in the minds of hundreds of Representatives and Senators most of whom never even served a day in the military, and the vast majority of whom do not have any close family members in harm's way.

Everyone who voted for the war bears full, entire responsibility for all of the misery that has resulted from it, and all of the misery that is sure to result from it in the future.

It's time they started admitting it, starting with, if you please, presidential candidate and Senator from New York Hillary Clinton.

Why are we stuck in this politically correct hole? Do people really believe that the sons and daughters of our privileged citizens are seriously considering the military for a career choice? Especially at this time?

Because they aren't.

You don't need a college degree to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. I know, because my son has already spent a year there. He joined the National Guard to help pay for college. Most of the kids dying or getting maimed over there are in the same boat.

This politically correct bullshit, trying to suggest that they are all highly educated people serving out of sheer patriotism, or because they actually think getting shot at for Burger King wages is a good career path, that's truly stupid.

Yes, I think Kerry really said that: If you don't get an education, then the only job you'll be able to find is signing up with one of those recruiters who are desperately trying to fill their monthly quotas. I also think Kerry is wrong in trying to correct what he said. I've never liked that asstard.

A man should have the guts to stand by his convictions.