A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

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The George W. Bush Freedom Liberry and Family Fun Center

Don't think for a minute that The Decider is being a lazy lame duck these days. The San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Fiore breaks the story of Dubya's next big project: the George W. Bush Freedom Liberry and Family Fun Center!

Looks like we're still in for quite a ride!

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First Wednesday in November: Obama Wins

In my recently less-than-sporadic efforts to bring you the latest news, I'm sure I'll be the first to mention that Barack Obama won the election and will be the next president. I'm glad for this. The alternative was clearly a very poor one and, of course, we're all aware by now about the historic context of his victory. This is big stuff, a sea-change, a climax in a struggle that began long before my own ancestors ever arrived in America.

I have followed the election closely for these past couple of months, even though I haven't had time to write about it. I have been all too aware of the hatred and panic, as well, that certain elements of our society have expressed over the impending turn in US history as my email box was besieged by dire and dirty "warnings" from Don Wildmon's American Family Association and their nethermost organ, OneNewsNow. To hear them tell it, we are all about to be swept up in a vast wave of stoned, gay, incestuous prostitutes in leather chaps, bearing pitchforks and crucifixes on the soles of their Birkenstocks. Their weather report, now that Obama has been elected, calls for periods of void-swallowing darkness followed by a rain of brimstone with a 30% chance of pale horses storming through the streets of America. In truth, or at least we need all hope, that these are the final fervent prayers and feverish visions of small people with tiny and malign minds, the kind that are ultimately drowned in the eddying currents of human progress.

In all honesty, one of the things that I most look forward to now that the election has been conducted and the ballots tallied is the impending absence of the whiny, shrill, nasal sound of Sarah Palin. I look forward, too, to the absence of scientific research being held up by the losing side every time they wanted to bring up an example of "earmarks" or "pork." Whether they understood basic research or not, the fact that McCain and Palin cited research into population genetic structure or molecular biology or a new projector for a planetarium — a place of science education — did not exactly endear them to this researcher. Had they won, I had visions of funding for research not entirely unlike my own simply vanishing in a puff of ignorance. They will not have the chance to do this, it seems. I count myself and my colleagues fortunate in this regard.

Aside from the historical coincidence (albeit an important one) of his ancestry, we have instead gotten a president elect who, as far as I can discern, is one of the most intelligent and well-educated in our history, and certainly in my lifetime. There are those to whom such qualifications make him, ironically, a member of the elite which, they believe, is a bad thing. There are those who will still judge the fitness of their governmental leadership on the basis of how much they'd like to have a beer with them, and those people will not shut up and go away based simply on the fact that their strange criterion has been repudiated by the electorate. On the other hand, I think that I would enjoy a beer with Barack. I would be very interested in sitting in a conversation with him without any beverages whatsoever, for that matter. We're not too far apart in age, after all, and more to the point I could easily envision a long and deep discussion of political and general philosophy with him. I felt no such thing in regard to McCain, certainly never have for Dubya, and I fear that were beer present during a one-on-one conversation with Palin, I might have sprayed it through my nose soon after she began wagging her chin. That would be rude, and I prefer not to be impolite when at all possible. The likelihood of any of this happening is nil, of course. I'm just Joe the Bio Grad Student and Obama has a government to run... and I have tarsomeres to measure. Still, my sense is that Obama gets it. He understands that the basic research of ten and twenty years ago is the technology of the present, and that once the pipeline empties it takes a long time to fill back up. America has dodged a bullet in a manner of which few people will ever be aware. It was a bullet aimed at our brain and the majority of my fellow Americans were smart enough to duck. Good for us.

So here we are on the first Wednesday in November. In about 60 days, ShrubCo at last begins its well-deserved dissolution and, we can be sure, a new track will be charted. We live in interesting times. Obama will need to exercise what I can only describe as greatness at a time when greatness may at best suffice only to staunch our collective bleeding as a nation. Anything less than greatness, anything short of a full application of his capacity to reason, to plan, to anticipate, is likely to result in a single term. Considering the smoking craters left by ShrubCo across our societal landscape, if Obama doesn't have greatness in him, it follows that we will need to find someone who does in four years' time. I am hopeful for now; the possibilities are endless and in most ways we have nowhere to go but up. Still, I am also a pragmatist, even in my idealism. I will say the same thing now to myself (and those who have read this far) that I said eight years ago: Let's see what this guy can do.

Having said all this, I do think it is important that Obama begin reaching out to the other side after this long and often fear-mongering contest. One way in which he could do this, I think, is to offer John McCain an appointment in his cabinet. As much as I loathe some of the tactics, even what passed for a strategy, in the campaign now ended, McCain should be given the benefit of the doubt and it should be recalled that he was not some fiend before the Ring of Power that was his quest for the presidency turned his Smeagle into our Gollum. McCain's strength, it has been said, was in foreign policy. He might be well-employed as a Secretary of Defense. Even making the offer would help to heal the divisions that were pried wide open in these past months. This might have another, even more important, effect in the near future.

Obama is in a good position, I think, to have an impact on the upcoming reformulation of the Republican Party. I believe that one thing that the GOP will learn from this election is that the base is not enough and, indeed, the very constituencies that make up what they have come to consider their base are, in fact, a polarizing power that precludes their having the support of more reality-based Americans. In the end, after all, McCain had to distance himself from Ted Hagee every bit as much as he sought to distance himself from George Bush. Obama could drive that point home with a few key appointments, I think. Few things could be healthier for this country, even for this civilization, than the showing of the door to the Dominionists and Millennialists by the party over which they have exercised enough influence to pry perilously loose from the reality of American life. We saw the base (and base they were!) "energized" by Sarah Palin, and we saw the GOP lose big. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan have recently said the same thing, so I don't think this idea is too radical. It's time to disentangle that which was supposed to be the party of fiscal conservatism from the business of attempts to legislate morality. Giving Americans a choice of a party in which these two things are no longer intricately wound together will be a boon for all of us, even if we are not ourselves fiscal conservatives.

Which brings me, sadly, to the thing arising from this election that most drags upon my spirit this morning. It appears that Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, is going to pass by a narrow margin. It is for this reason that I prefaced this long and much overdue entry with the point that Obama's win marks a climax in a long struggle but not the climax. Just as there will continue to be intolerance to people of African ancestry in places in America, even though one will be our next President, just so we should keep in mind that others will still be marginalized as well. Even though they lost the Presidential election of 2008, those small-minded busybodies determined to stick their noses in everyone else's crotches as a test for righteousness are still very much with us and they may very well win this victory, as short-lived as it is likely to turn out, on the West Coast of the United States. They are, and will continue to be, dedicated to a "culture war" in which our own culture makes war upon itself. They will continue to seek to do harm in the name of nothing more than personal belief and preference.

They will be with us, I am sorry to say, for many years to come.

It took nearly 400 years for people somewhat like the man we have just elected President to get the right to self-determination, the right to own property, the right to vote as a whole human being (and not just some fraction thereof), and to marry whomever they liked. It took generations to get to this point, and it took sacrifice and struggle and, yes, the deaths of some very good people brought about by some of the worst people who opposed them. This is the course, too, that gay equality advocates have faced. It was once a crime punishable by death to prefer sexual friction with a member of one's own gender. It is not so now. As long as there are people courageous enough to speak out, progress will continue and the tiny, malign minds will, in the end, be swept away by the current of human history once again.

The leather chaps are, of course, optional.

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Extraordinary Claims: Jesus vs. the Psychics

I stumbled across a story in today's St. Petersburg, FL Times about the Tampa Bay Skeptics, a group of empirically-minded investigators of paranormal claims working in a place where they're sorely needed. The story contains a humorous recounting of the reaction of a supernaturalist named Virginia Levy, a self-proclaimed psychic who failed a double blind test of her abilities rather spectacularly.

Tampa Bay Skeptics: true believers in the truth
By Emily Nipps, Times Staff Writer

Virginia Levy walked into the library downtown to prove she was psychic. A group of doubters called the Tampa Bay Skeptics questioned the claims of people like her and had set up a challenge. Levy came to meet it. There sat a row of boxes. Could she guess which contained crystals? She was given seven chances. Seven times she failed. It wasn't inability that did her in, she said recently, the bitterness still evident in her voice. It was the bespectacled host of the project, Gary Posner, an unbeliever who she said patronized her, creating an atmosphere filled with negative energy. She purposely chose the wrong box each time, she said, then left in a huff. Today, she lives in Arizona...

Levy, the psychic who took the $1,000 challenge at the library, knows the feeling.

"They called it a double-blind test," she said by phone. "What I called it was a scam."

The group's negative and mocking attitudes hampered her abilities, she said.

"What they're doing is using the laws of attraction," Levy said. "They're actually using the same powers that psychics use, except in reverse."

The experience was appalling, she said, adding that the Skeptics are "working on behalf of the dark side."

She still believes in her powers. Today, she organizes spiritual journeys and "vision quest adventures" in the Arizona desert...

Levy's explanation for why her alleged powers failed her is one that is frequently used by the purveyors of woo. More to the point, it demonstrates that there is no way to convince someone dedicated to preserving a falsehood that makes them feel distinguished in some way that what they believe is nonsense. When someone's identity is wrapped up in tall tales, they're never going to let go of their investment. Nobody enjoys an identity crisis.

The whole point of the Tampa Bay Skeptics and of skeptics in general is summed up in the statement that TSS uses as its motto: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." We needn't even go that far, though. Extraordinary claims could be validated even by the most ordinary proof, the more unembellished and simple the better. Someone claiming the power of remote sensing, as Levy did, could prove their claims by doing what should be an ordinary thing, no more extraordinary than someone who claims to be able to see would do. If I state that I can see the color red, all I need do to prove it is pick a red object out of a lineup. If I claim to be able to see the color red from ten miles away, then all I need do to prove the claim is to pick a red object out of a lineup ten miles from my current position. Levy couldn't find the box of crystals, so her claim to special power lacks ordinary proof and a rational person, rather than inventing convoluted explanations about "negative energy" and "laws of attraction" would say, "She's lying." That should be the end of the story.

Except, of course, that it isn't. Levy is still a believer in her possession of magical powers and makes a living by accepting money from the credulous to put her hocus pocus to work for their benefit. Mind you, Levy's own explanation of why she failed that test in Florida itself demonstrates her reliance on the unthinking credulity of others; skepticism itself is a magical force capable of disarming her otherwise astounding abilities. Those who wish to fork over their cash in exchange for her dubious services must make some profession, no matter how veiled so long as Levy herself is aware of it, that they will not engage in any examination of her claims. They must approach her from an attitude of full belief in her psychic emanations before they've had any demonstration that would support their existence in the first place.

Levy is not some isolated perpetrator of irrationality on the public, however. She is part of a long tradition of shamans, wizards and priests that has made a living out of extraordinarily unsupported claims for at least as long as mankind has had the ability to keep track of its own history. In this regards, she is no different from the priests of ancient Egypt or the Vatican of today. If a claim of the ability to sense the contents of a sealed box is something not to be taken at face value by the reasonable, how much more unreasonable is it to accept uncritically the notion that jackal-headed spirits guide the immaterial shadow-doubles of the deceased before scales that balance the weight of their hearts against a feather plucked from a vulture? How much more bizarre is the claim that an individual returned from the dead, stepped out of a rock tomb and thereby changed the nature of all reality? There are claims made in the name of religion that make Virginia Levy's assertion of her powers pale into insignificance.

I could pick out any religion to demonstrate this point, but several other news items today demonstrate the lingering need for skepticism as regards Christian claims and, more to the point, speak to the weakness of critical thinking among those who we should hope should embrace it. These are people upon whom a special onus falls to embrace reason and, indeed, seek out at least ordinary, if not extraordinary, support for outlandish claims.

For instance, there's William Reville, a professor of biochemistry at University College Cork. In a column in the Irish Times regarding the current effort to date the shroud of Turin by Oxford University researchers, Reville makes some rather unskeptical and self-contradictory statements:

...if the TS is a forgery, how was the image formed? One hypothesis is that the image was made by a medieval photographic process. This would involve hanging a linen cloth in a light-proof room in one wall of which is a quartz crystal lens. The cloth is impregnated with silver salts. Outside, a body is hung in strong sunlight. The lens is opened and over several days the image is exposed on the cloth. Then the forger must enter the room without letting light in and fix the image using urine or ammonia. Experiments using this technique have reproduced many but not all of the TS's image properties. However, it seems highly unlikely to Wilson and Schwortz that a medieval forger could have invented in one go a process that was later invented in several steps over an extended period.

What if the TS really is the burial cloth of Christ? The Gospels record that the disciples found the tomb empty and the linen cloths left lying there. The Gospel account of the resurrected Christ is that he was entirely different to a physically embodied Christ - able to pass through walls, and to appear and disappear suddenly. What if his resurrection involved nuclear events in his dematerialisation? Dr August Accetta, California, has carried out a fascinating experiment in which he injected himself with a radioactive compound used in medical imaging to show up internal organs. He then assumed the pose of the man imaged on the TS and a gamma camera imaged the radioactivity emanating from his body. The results astonishingly replicated most of the features of the image on the TS...

In the first paragraph cited, Reville remarks that it is unlikely that a medieval forger invented a photographic process, yet in the following paragraph he seems to be supporting the idea that a being with supernatural powers rose from the dead in a manner involving nuclear reactions and cites an experiment in which a researcher produced something "astonishingly" like the shroud of Turin by injecting himself with radioisotopes. Why is the first circumstance any less likely than the second? Reville cites no evidence to support claims of the supernatural, let alone supernatural claims involving natural processes. That someone else found a means employing radiation to produce a shroud-like image doesn't imply that it's how the shroud image itself was produced. There are numerous distinct ways to produce an electrical charge, too, but unless we have some evidence to support a particular hypothesis, we can't say that a given charge was produced by one mechanism or another. In fact, August Accetta himself is hardly an impartial investigator (he's a true-believer himself and the founder of the Shroud Center of California, which isn't exactly objective in its approach to the alleged relic). In fact, Accetta's process also used chemicals to make the linen in his experiment sensitive to radiation, just like the example that Reville cites in the first paragraph. If the first example is "highly unlikely," so is the second, and for exactly the same reasons. If Accetta had absorbed enough radiation to produce burn marks on a piece of cloth without the aid of photosenstive chemicals, he wouldn't have survived the experiment. Why Dr. Reville finds the radiation explanation plausible but the merely photographic one implausible, then, is down to his own a priori beliefs.

In this instance, Reville is doing exactly the same thing as Virginia Levy. He's clinging to explanations and selectively citing mechanisms that support a belief rather than critically evaluating and presenting evidence to accept or reject a hypothesis. Levy at least has the excuse of not being a scientist.

Still, such oddball claiims show up in even more disturbing places. It may seem trite to cite a statement by US President George Bush in this context. Most of the planet's population has figured out by now that he's not exactly a sharp, critical thinker. Nonetheless, great responsibility does come with great power. With the degree of power exercised by a world leader (at least a nominal one) comes the highest degree of responsibility, and one aspect of this charge is the evaluation of arguments in light of empirical data rather than mere personal belief. Thus, when one of them makes a statement like

You should not fear religious people in your society as a matter of fact, religious people will make your society a better place that you ought to welcome people being able to express their minds.

— Bush Urges China to Improve Human Rights
New York Times, Aug. 7, 2008

a skeptical examination of the claim that the more religious a society the better it becomes is certainly worth pursuing. Is there evidence that such a claim is true?

Bush made this claim in reference to China. I am no fan of China's approach to free speech and I, too, disagree with its active suppression of religious freedom. It is worthwhile to conquer the gullibility fostered by religious belief through reason and argumentation; it is inhumane to prevent its free exercise by force. People have the right to think anything they want to, even when they've wandered as far from rationality as has Virginia Levy, provided that they are not causing harm to others in the process. Nonetheless, China has certainly had its problems with religious militants in the shape of Islamic extremists who have themselves made their voice in society heard recently by blowing up commuter buses. Having more of these "religious people" certainly isn't making China a better place.

Beyond China's borders, though, there are numerous other examples of societies in which religious people have a negative impact. While Protestant vs. Catholic violence seems to have finally subsided in Northern Ireland, certainly faith-motivated conflict remains a perpetual problem in Lebanon. Has a large religious presence fostered greater free speech in Iran or Saudi Arabia? One would be hard pressed to defend the position that it has. Even in the USA itself, arguably the most religious nation in the industrialized world, religious individuals have perpetrated brutal murders and are demanding that science education be watered down to suit their faith rather than acknowledge constantly-increasing volumes of data to the contrary. One could easily mention the recurrent strife in republics that were formerly part of Yugoslavia (Kossovo, Serbia, etc.) One certainly wonders if the gullible saps in Porterville, CA who are so convinced that an angel is appearing in the window of a flooring store is the real thing that some of them threatened a convenience store manager with personal harm if he turned out his lights at night, making their angel disappear, are doing something that betters our society.

Again, what we have in Bush's statement is very much like what we have in Virginia Levy's claims of extraordinary powers. In fact, religious belief per se doesn't seem to make a society better or worse overall. Reason can do so, and certainly empathy does so, but religion does harm at least as often as it does good. Bush could as easily have said that it is unreasonable to use force to counter belief, and China is in the wrong for doing so, but this isn't at all what he claimed. All he's done is to assert his own identity; he thinks himself a better person for having become religious after an early life spent largely intoxicated, so based upon his own identity he asserts that others should do as he's done. He takes this, as do many believers as common sense and neither provides nor, in fact, has any evidence that what he's saying is true. Throughout his tenure as president, in fact, he has made policy decisions based upon that belief. Religion, he believes, straightened him out, so the whole country can be straightened out by providing funding to religious organizations — and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was born.

Perhaps when Bush leaves office next year, he and William Reville can take a trip to Arizona together and have a nice, long talk with Virginia Levy. I think they'll find that they have a lot in common.

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Confederacy of Dunces Lumbers On In Its War on Science

Pointing out the instances of dishonesty perpetrated against scientific findings is almost too trite to bother with. Writing about the shriveled mechanical blackness that substitutes for a conscience in the psyche of Dick Cheney is doubly so. Still, the latest revelation of Cheney's attempts to suppress information about climate change needs to be highlighted. His attempt to remove the findings of studies related to the potential impact of climate change on public health are beyond the pale, so over the top, so demonstrative of how this administration is willing to sacrifice the well-being of Americans for the benefit of corporate cronies, so totally immoral that I simply can't let it pass without comment.

Cheney's office accused of censoring climate data
FORMER EPA OFFICIAL SAYS TESTIMONY ON HEALTH RISKS WAS DELETED

By Frank Davies, Mercury News Washington Bureau

Vice President Dick Cheney's office last year blocked testimony on how global warming endangers public health, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said Tuesday.

It was the strongest evidence yet of White House efforts to censor data on climate change.

Jason Burnett, former top adviser on climate change to EPA chief Stephen Johnson, made several other damning revelations in a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, also released Tuesday. Among them: new information about the recent disclosure that White House officials had refused to open an e-mail from the EPA with its findings on global warming...

In October, Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was prepared to testify before Boxer's committee that climate change "is likely to have a significant impact on health," warning of extreme heat and weather, water-borne diseases and food and water scarcity.

But Cheney's office and the Council on Environmental Quality effectively deleted six pages of Gerberding's testimony, Burnett said: "CEQ requested that I work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change..."

This is disgusting stuff, and Americans ought to be outraged that people in their government are attempting to cover up findings related to issues that stand to profoundly impact their lives. This is not some small thing; this is an abrogation of an elected official's primary responsibility to the governed. The people deserve to have access to the findings of studies that not only point out what their future may hold but are being paid for with the money that they themselves pay to their government with their taxes in the first place. What they do with that information, and whether they agree or disagree with it, is a secondary consideration. They have to know that the information exists first, and for Cheney to interfere with that basic right should be enough to have him removed from office, hung up by the ankles and used as a piñata at a child's birthday party in Turkmenistan.

Let's just hope that what we get for a new administration come January 2009 will be better and more concerned with the health and well-being of the American people than these black-hearted sons and daughters of jackals that we're saddled with until then. It's hard to conceive of an administration that would be worse in this regard.

Still, we shouldn't worry about Cheney's career after ShrubCo plods off into the annals of governmental ignominy. I'm sure there are job openings out there for an experienced puppy-strangler and propagandist for which he'll be well-qualified.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States doesn't seem to be taken too seriously these days, but so far the Ministry of Truth hasn't quite managed to get it expunged. As a reminder, it reads:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I'd say that knowing about possible outbreaks of disease and famine touch at least a little on the general welfare and that an informed citizenry is necessary for the preservation of liberty, but what do I know? I'm just one of those crazy liberals who thinks that a government owes honesty to the governed before all other things. What a wacky concept!

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You'll be watching an episode of the Masters of Horror series. This one's by Joe Dante, and it's called "Homecoming." The run time is just under an hour. Political zombies; ya gotta love 'em.

I wonder if the Bush League has seen this. Nah, probably not.

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Great Things in Boston Part 2: Laurie Anderson at the Opera House

Saturday night's concert at the Boston Opera House by Laurie Anderson on her Homeland tour was, in a word, terrific. The opera house itself is a magnificent place and the restoration appears to have gone well. The only downside of the place was that there's not much leg room, at least not in the mezzanine where we had our seats. Be prepared to get a little bit acquainted with the knees of the person sitting behind you if you go. Still, the acoustics are phenomenal and the decor appropriately regal in a Louis XIV way.

Having seen a few clips from previous shows on Anderson's tour as well as having seen her perform once before in Berkeley about 15 years ago, I was expecting a multimedia eye-popper of a show. I was thus surprised when the performance consisted of Anderson, three accompanying musicians, and a stage set with nothing more than numerous votive candles and a few glaring, bare light bulbs suspended above the stage from long wires. There were otherwise flood and spotlights throughout the performance but there were no high-tech visuals. This was a stripped-down, bare-bones show as far as that aspect goes.

The performance itself was technically perfect and Anderson is as much the consummate artist as ever. Ethereal, fragile sounds alternated with biting humor and poetically skewed analysis of the state of the Homeland. The show began with a poem about the birth of both memory and mortality in a time before the world began and there was nothing but endless flights of birds circling through unbroken sky. A lark's father dies and, not knowing what to do with the body, she buries him in the back of her own head — and so memory came to be.

From there, Anderson launched into a piece about how experts manufacture problems in order to have something to solve. The music was dark, sad, sardonic and mesmerizing throughout. Anderson had the audience in the palm of her hand, eliciting laughter and stunned silence alternately. While most of the pieces she performed flowed into one another, leaving no time for audience reaction, there were a couple of moments when a piece would end and the audience took a moment to recover, as if they were trying to sort out in their heads what they'd just heard before gaining the ability to applaud. I know it happened to me; this was some powerful art. I don't think I can see myself sitting around listening to the material like I'd listen to mainstream music, but that takes nothing away from the performance itself. This isn't the Foo Fighters, after all, this is Laurie Anderson.

Judging from this concert, Homeland is some of the most political material in Anderson's long career. She's very clear in what her purpose is here; she mourning the death of democracy and the madness of America in the "post-911" world. In what was the most moving moment of the performance, Anderson invokes imagery from old Westerns; someone runs into a saloon and shouts, "There's trouble at the mine!" and everyone stops what they're doing to run out and lend help. Why, she wonders, isn't that happening now when the "trouble at the mine" is the dying of freedom? In an emotive male voice sounding nearly on the verge of tears, she implores over and over again, "There's trouble at the mine!" Nobody leaves, of course, and why should we? We have already been told in the opening piece, "Only an expert can see the problem, and only an expert can deal with the problem." She brings this dilemma to light in every thing from the Iraq War to global climate change to the struggle of everyday Americans to barely scrape by ("When you're 1.3 weeks away from homelessness... one paycheck away from homelessness... that... is... a problem.")

Anderson's Homeland tour will continue through mid-June. Check the tour schedule and if you're within 100 miles and go! This is intense stuff. If you're someone who regularly reads this blog, there's a good chance you'll be moved by Anderson's performance of this material — even if you've never heard any of her music before or never heard of Laurie Anderson before. Take the risk. It's worth it.

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People Who Have Never Read the Constitution Shouldn't Be Charged with Defending It

Part of the presidential oath of office requires the inductee to defend and uphold the Constitution. Common sense dictates that this includes the president not having cabinet members who attempt to subvert the law of the land.

Dick Cheney has maintained that he is not part of the executive branch of our government because the vice presidency is essentially an office of the legislative. Curiously, the Constitution appears to disagree with his radical notion of the structure of American government:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice-President chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector...

In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President...

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them...

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

— from US Constitution, Article II, Section I

It doesn't get much clearer than that, does it? The office of the vice president is, without question, in the executive branch and has been since the very beginning.

Cheney has shown himself to be opposed to the very substance of the governmental principles upon which the USA was founded. As part of his oath of office, it is incumbent upon Bush to dismiss Cheney without delay. If he does not do so, he has failed to uphold his oath and should therefore himself be removed from office, along with the vice president who, in light of his anti-Constitutional views of government, is unfit to serve in any capacity whatsoever. What he's done is no less grievous than would have been an insistence that those who criticize him be publicly hung as a warning to others.

How far have we fallen from the ideal of representative government in this country when we stoop to electing leaders who have either never read or who callously disregard the Constitution? How much worse is it when the people and the Congress allow blatant oath breakers to continue serving when such willful ignorance and/or malice becomes so screamingly obvious?

We're in big trouble. For all their blather about originalism and strict adherence to the spirit of the Constitution, people like Bush, Cheney and Gonzalez are nothing less than imperialist radicals who are attempting to undermine every freedom and subvert government entirely. We should not be forced to wait for another election; the damage done already is far worse than ever should have been tolerated. These traitors to the people should be impeached, removed and exiled to a country with a history more befitting their view of proper government. I hear Bush is very popular in Albania; perhaps he could go there and stage a new coup.

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