Yesterday's Daily Kos contained a diary by ademption featuring a recent interview between Sy Hersh and Wolf Blitzer discussing Hersh's latest New Yorker article. Hersh's sources are telling him that Bush plans to pull most of our troops out of Iraq next year and step up air support for the Iraqi troops. That this would ultimately lead to Iraqis selecting targets for American bombers and tactical aircraft is causing the Pentagon "great unease" due to the penetration of the Iraqi army by the militias and the insurgency. The Iraqis calling in strikes could just as easily use America's vast air power to eliminate their political opponents as to use it against insurgents. Hersh said that our military leaders, frustrated that they cannot convey their objections to the president, have been talking with other people in government, like Representative John Murtha (D-OH), in an effort to influence national policy.

Ademption points out that this sounds a lot like "Vietnamization" during the Nixon years, designed to beef up the South Vietnamese troops and reduce American casualties. It also is reminiscent of Nixon's gradual detachment from reality shortly before Congress would have voted to impeach. The latter parallel is not exact, since the Bush administration decided to abandon a "reality-based" approach to policy years ago, whereas Nixon's unhappy condition at the end was an aberration from a very realistic, if immoral, political philosophy. Our present posture, however, is for that reason far more alarming; a national policy based on anything other than reality makes this administration a hazard not only to the United States, but, in a nuclear age, to the entire world.

Today, November 27, is the earliest possible Advent. For reasons I cannot completely fathom, Advent was always for me the most meaningful season. It's observance is not a matter of mere expectation, nor of filling one's mind with thoughts of the coming Christmas or even the first Christmas. We are called to live in the present, not the past or future.

We are called to live in the now during Advent as at any other time.

It is said to be a season of contemplation, of expectation, of awaiting. It is living in a world that is always pregnant with a new world and the infinite possibilities inherent in new worlds.

For me, Advent is a good time for sweeping the cobwebs from one's soul, of deconstructing one's mental edifices of how both the world and the spirit work; of being as realistic as I can about everything; of seeing things as they are and not as I would like them to be; and of accepting all things, not as the best of all possible worlds, but as the world we have to work in and to work with.

May Advent be a blessed time for you.

Article on Advent from the Catholic Encyclopedia

From the Wikepedia

It looks like things will get a lot worse on the coast before they get better. The Washington Post is reporting that tenants, their jobs destroyed and their income cut off, are now being evicted in large numbers.

... this politically conservative state has a threadbare safety net. Two weeks ago, county officials lifted an informal moratorium on evictions. Tenants cannot claim rent breaks for water-damaged apartments. One can sit now in housing courts in Gulfport and Biloxi and watch judges order the evictions of hundreds of tenants, often with a speed that startles the tenants.

"There's a hanging judge mentality and, my God, it's going to create a social crisis," said John C. Jopling, a lawyer with the Mississippi Center for Justice, which represented a few tenants.

The mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi's second largest city, recently removed a tent city of contract workers from a golf course. And under pressure from developers, he balked at signing off on emergency trailer parks, even though the inhabitants would be displaced city residents. "It creates an environment people don't want to live around," Gulfport developer Don Hall told the Harrison County Board of Supervisors recently, according to news reports.

Apparently FEMA is strapped for funds, unable to help and unlikely to have its budget increased by the Republican Congress, which obviously regards tax cuts and overseas military adventures of higher priority than the suffering of one of the reddest congressional districts in the nation. I suppose this is an example of tough love.

And, as always, the land developers are calling the shots. Get the riff-raff off the golf course. First things first.

I came across this old article from Time Magazine about how a Hong Kong company infused a lot of money into the RNC just before the 1996 elections.

Some time ago, I posted an article entitled "The Dollar and Sanity," predicting problems with the persistent current account deficit. Thanks to Max Sawicky's blog, I've been reading a Keynesian economics blog by Thomas Paley, "Economics for Democratic and Open Societies," which seems to me to be a sensible series of macroeconomics commentaries well worth reading. The article that inspired this post, "Two Views About a Possible U.S. Hard Landing: Foreign Flight versus Consumer Burnout," is a more sophisticated approach to the current account and the domestic economy than my previous article, although I think most economists are underestimating the eventual effect of peak oil.

Paley was formerly Chief Economist of the US – China Economic and Security Review Commission. Prior to joining the Commission, he was Director of the Open Society Institute’s Globalization Reform Project, and before that he was Assistant Director of Public Policy at the AFL-CIO. He holds a B.A. degree from Oxford University, and a M.A. degree in International Relations and Ph.D. in Economics, both from Yale University. He's a "heavy."

For the first time, I used an automated checkout machine at I-55 Kroger this evening. Only if I'm starving and there are no checkout clerks available will I think about using them again. The procedure should have been a breeze, as I was purchasing four TV dinners, all of which were bar-coded. Almost immediately I became irritated at the woman's voice that told me what to do. It was neither commanding nor soothing, just harsh and loud, like the voices that blare out over the PA system calling somebody to the front of the store or the battle-ax of a principal at Boyd School yelling at us in the cafeteria.

Worse, nothing on the machine was intuitive. At first, I couldn't even figure out how to start the process until I searched diligently, trying not to look completely inept and clueless, and eventually found the correct button on the touchscreen. There were no instructions on where to hold the bar code, so I had to hold it in a variety of positions until it beeped. I couldn't find the receipt until the customer behind me pointed it out. By the time I left, I was really aggravated. Ideally, you should be able to check out by pushing your grocery cart past a sensor, or at a minimum placing your groceries on a conveyor belt. Even the current contraption could be modified to make it much easier to use by such simple measures as shining a beam of light where the customer is to hold the bar code and posting written instructions on a sign that can be readily seen by a customer inexperienced at using the machines.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a geek machine, designed by and for geeks. I'm something of a geek myself, but when I shop at a grocery store I have no desire to encounter an obstacle course, technical or otherwise. Next time I shop I'll stand in line to be checked out by a human being.

Juan Cole posts a powerful response to Five questions non-Muslims would like answered, an LA Times article by Dennis Prager, an obnoxious right-wing syndicated radio host who writes a column for townhall.com.

I list Prager's 5 questions here to preserve them when the LA Times moves the article to its archives:

(1) Why are you so quiet? (when Muslims do bad things)
(2) Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?
(3) Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?
(4) Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?
(5) Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?

Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan who has clearly earned the right to be heard on middle eastern and Islamic matters, is not kind to Prager:

Somebody named Dennis Prager wrote a frankly bigotted op-ed for the LA Times asking "Muslims" 5 questions. The questions are fairly easy to answer in themselves, but the stupidity of the whole framework is what is objectionable. Why is it that our media personalities cannot think their way out of a paper bag? Why don't high school civics courses alert them that there might be a problem with stereotyping everyone that you categorize as belonging to a particular group?

Prager begins his "questions" directed, apparently at all 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, by referring to the recent riots in France. He is thus framing his questions with the implication that those Muslims are all trouble-makers and have something to answer for. But the alienated in-between young African- and North African-French are mostly not very involved in religion and a lot of them couldn't tell you how to pray to save their lives.

And it goes on from there. Read Prager's 5 questions, all of which are loaded with anti-Muslim assumptions and then Cole's question-by-question response. If the American people had the benefit of Cole's viewpoint and knowledge in a nationally-syndicated radio show, maybe they might have a more realistic view on the policies of the Bush administration towards the middle east.

Thoughts while blogging at the free WiFi hotspot at the AmSouth Building downtown.

The last time the Democrats ran Congress, they were a sorry lot, snuggled in bed with so many deep-pocketed donors that they were almost indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts across the aisle. It's not good for any party to remain in power too long. It corrupts, thank you Lord Action.

Where is the Democratic Party now? Is it substantially different from what it was in 1994? Kerry's presidential campaign and Joe Biden's agenda give little grounds for optimism. Much of the Democratic party is still in the hands of operatives whose influence rests upon their relationships with big donors.

Big donors expect access and sympathy from the public officials they support. Really big donors expect something approaching obedience. The interests of big donors and really big donors do not necessarily coincide with the interests and desires of the rest of us who work hard, earn a modest living and would like to bequeath a decent world to our children and grandchildren and perhaps even a little nest egg to help them get started. In fact, the interests of the big donors are often in direct conflict with the interests of the people of this nation.

Where do the current leaders of the Democratic Party stand on this matter? If the party is like it was in 1994, it might as well not bother with the election, because it will offer little more than the Republicans. If it wins, its governance will be a failure and its victory ephemeral.

The New York Times featured an article today on the diminishing support of both the government and the private sector for invention.

"The inventiveness of individuals depends on the context, including sociopolitical, economic, cultural and institutional factors," said Merton C. Flemings, a professor emeritus at M.I.T. who holds 28 patents and oversees the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program for inventors. "We remain one of the most inventive countries in the world. But all the signs suggest that we won't retain that pre-eminence much longer. The future is very bleak, I'm afraid."

Mr. Flemings said that private and public capital was not being adequately funneled to the kinds of projects and people that foster invention. The study of science is not valued in enough homes, he observed, and science education in grade school and high school is sorely lacking.

But quantitative goals, he said, are not enough. Singapore posts high national scores in mathematics, he said, but does not have a reputation for churning out new inventions. In fact, he added, researchers from Singapore have studied school systems in America to try to glean the source of something ineffable and not really quantifiable: creativity.

Noticeably absent from the article is an effort to get at the real reasons why the government and corporate America are not fostering inventiveness. Our inadequate educational system is merely a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

The likely cause of the declining support for invention in the United States is that corporations are either already outsourcing or planning to outsource invention to places like China, Taiwan, and South Korea, where it is cheaper. Americans do not have a monopoly on brains; there is no reason at all why China, Taiwan or South Korea cannot foster inventiveness much like what the U.S. has done for the past 150 years if they are willing to devote the resources to that end, and it appears that they are willing to do whatever it takes.

All work that can be done more cheaply elsewhere will be outsourced. Corporations are driven to this by competition and the pressure to maintain profits. The effect of such policies on individuals, communities and nations is irrelevant. There is no patriotism in a modern corporation. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, once said that the ideal factory was located on a boat, so that it could move where the cheapest labor could be found.

That means not only manual tasks will move offshore, but intellectual and professional work that brings high incomes and much prestige here. As long as the work doesn't have to be on the spot it can be outsourced. Computer programming is already being outsourced to India, for example. In my own field, law, I can envision legal research, writing and even consulting done from Asia by highly-educated men and women trained in the law willing to work for a fraction of what an American lawyer makes.

What is to be done? A high standard of living in this country depends upon technological superiority. Given a schooling system that deliberately suppresses excellence, creativity and independent thinking, it is difficult to imagine much improvement without our doing something entirely different about the education of the young. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine that happening.

Over and over again, inventors and creative thinkers have done their work in spite of the educational system. The long and productive career of James E. West, member of the Inventors Hall of Fame, who appears in the NY Times article is illustrative:

Mr. West began testing his limits at an early age, defying his family's wishes that he become a dentist and setting his sights on a doctorate in physics. To dissuade him, his father introduced him to other African-American friends with doctorates - all of whom had failed to land university posts and held blue-collar jobs instead. Still, Mr. West pressed on, coached by a series of mentors, memorizing text and numbers to mask his reading problems, building on his mathematical gifts and eventually enrolling as an undergraduate in physics at Temple University.

AFTER a summer internship at Bell Labs, he invented a pair of headphones; enthralled by his lab work, he decided to forgo his physics studies and to stay on at Bell Labs, where he developed microphone technologies and explored a range of interests in acoustics. When Bell Labs became part of Lucent after AT&T reorganized, the scope of its research operations shifted, and Mr. West eventually moved on as well. At Ms. Busch-Vishniac's invitation, he joined Johns Hopkins in 2000.

West, an African American, was lucky to have the mentors and the burning desire to learn physics as a boy. His real luck, however, was in being recognized by one of the few corporate institutions in the nation that cultivated genuine out-of-the-box thinking: Bell Labs. His kind of mental attitude would not be welcome elsewhere. Somehow, this nation must figure out a way to cultivate exactly those same attitudes and mental abilities in a myriad of fields and then learn how to create institutions that allow them to flourish. In order to do their work, they must be insulated from the drive for short-term profits.

Of one thing we can be sure: corporate America will not be very helpful.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and The Cancer Project recently released the results of a study assessing the carcinogenic properties of grilled meats. To everyone's surprise grilled chicken contained the highest amounts of heterocyclic amines (HCAs), cancer-causing substances produced during cooking from the creatine, amino acids, and sugars found naturally in chicken and other meats.

“The riskiest aspect of chicken is not grease or salmonella,” says Cancer Project managing director Jennifer Reilly, R.D. “Few people are aware that chicken is the single biggest contributor of carcinogenic HCAs in the American diet.” In addition to high HCA levels, chicken contains about the same amount of cholesterol as beef and is also typically high in fat. Even when the skin is removed, dark meat is thrown away, and a non-fat cooking method is used, chicken still derives 23 percent of its calories from fat.

Below are the amounts of HCAs in common foods. The only safe foods to grill are veggie foods like veggie burgers, veggie brochettes and portabello mushrooms, which can be cooked at high temperatures without producing HCAs. PCRM furnishes a number of healthy recipes on its web site for grilling and picnics.

The Five Worst Foods to Grill (by HCA levels)

Food	HCAs ng/100g*
Chicken breast, skinless, boneless, grilled, welldone	14,300 ng/100g
Steak, grilled, well done	810 ng/100g
Pork, barbecued	470 ng/100g
Salmon, grilled with skin	166 ng/100g
Hamburger, grilled, well done	130 ng/100g
*100g portion equals about 3.5 ounces grilled

There are few things this writer enjoys more than a plate of ribs or a half chicken barbecued over a smoky fire. Looks like those meals are going to be far apart in the future.

Addendum: Readers might wonder why a health article appears on this blog. I apologize for not connecting the two, assuming that the average reader of the JP would understand that meat is highly political. Industrial farming creates serious environmental and public health problems and must be highly regulated to minimize damage. In addition, we are learning that eating too much meat is causing health problems in the entire population. The meat industry has spent money and energy attempting to kill environmental regulation designed to protect the public. It has spent money on advertising that tries to convince people to eat more meat. These are public issues and therefore political.

This is an enigma: while spending hundreds of billions on a disastrous military operation on the other side of the world and cutting taxes over and over for the most wealthy and powerful, the Republican-controlled Congress is de-funding the VA. What is going on? Is this conservatism? Are we soon to have Bushvilles, the modern version of Hoovervilles?

So much for the patriotism of these pious frauds that are currently in power. A pox on their house.

This will be my first and last comment on the great ID controversy.

Science cannot explain singularities; it depends upon repetition and falsification. Something that happens only once can't be replicated or falsified.

The biggest singularity of all is the universe. Science, for all its miraculous achievements, cannot create big bangs in a laboratory, nor would we wish it to do so. We can look at the universe as it exists now and, by applying our knowledge of how matter and energy currently behave, make some educated guesses about how it all started, but there won't be any replication or falsification anytime soon. Scientific hypotheses regarding the origin of the Universe will remain hypotheses and nothing more.

Science is discovering, however, that matter possesses amazing self-organizing properties, properties that could explain the origin of life and its evolution. We can study those properties and we can design laboratory experiments that, while they cannot replicate the evolutionary process, can test exemplars that mimic to some degree the historical course of evolution. We can learn how chaotic systems can spontaneously organize themselves, not through the workings of an external force or intelligence, but through the channeling of random events among self-organizing entities.

Intelligent design, as I see it, teaches that God created the Big Bang and while doing so invested matter with all those seemingly magical self-organizing properties described above, so that life can be said to have arisen through the initial design of the Universe itself and not through "accident". I see no contradiction of this with any kind of science. Science has no way of determining how matter acquired its properties. As I explained above, it has no way of applying its usual methods to determining how the Universe began because the Universe is a singularity.

On the other hand, believing that God created the Big Bang and made matter self-organizing is neither useful nor detrimental to evolutionary science. Once you state such a belief, there is nothing more to be said from a scientific standpoint. It doesn't lead to anything beyond theological speculation. As such, while it might be constitutional in a public school to mention in science class that some people believe that God created the Big Bang, etc., much like a history teacher might explain the Reformation or the Enlightenment, it obviously cannot be taught as a significant scientific alternative to evolution, because it is a religious proposition, forbidden to be taught as literal truth by the establishment clause of the U. S. Constitution. It might be true but it really doesn't matter to scientific enquiry or the theory of evolution.

In the end, it all comes back to how it's presented.

Addendum: Physicist Brian Swimme, Priest/Theologian Thomas Berry, Jesuit/Palentologist Teilhard de Chardin and Priest Matthew Fox have been studying and writing about the spiritual dimensions of the Universe for many years, but somehow I don't believe that the proponents of I.D. would take to their works.

Congress is working through a renewal of the PATRIOT Act, a collection of laws passed shortly after 9/11 that gives our government's law-enforcement agencies unprecedented power to violate a citizen's privacy without any kind of judicial oversight. Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran The FBI's Secret Scrutiny, an article that sets out in layman's terms just what is at stake in this legislation.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the courts, forms the basis for privacy rights. It states that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The text is comprehensive; it designates a line around the individual that governments may not cross without submitting their reasons to a judge, who must refuse permission unless the government can show a good reason for the search permitted by law. The amendment also requires governments to narrow their searches to only those particular persons, houses, papers and effects that they can show good cause to search or seize.

In their effort to square the language of the amendment with the dictates of common sense and political and social reality the courts have created exceptions to a literal interpretation of the amendment. One class of exceptions involves the right of police to investigate suspicious circumstances that do not arise to the level of probable cause. For instance, if a person is behaving suspiciously in public, police may stop him and perform a Terry search--a brief questioning and a pat-down for weapons--named after Terry v. Ohio, a 1968 Supreme Case.

The second class of exceptions, if that is the correct word, expands the notion of personal security into a generalized right to privacy. Our modern technological society provides so many more ways in which the government (or others) may obtain personal information, a rigid interpretation of the amendment can lead to absurd results. The courts have grappled with the idea of privacy for a long time. Is intercepting a telephone call a violation of the 4th Amendment? What about a person's bank and credit card records? Can police cruise the streets using infrared detection devices to look for indoor marijuana farms? Many of these methods of gathering personal information, either with or without the knowledge of the object of the investigation, were inconceivable at the end of the 18th Century. To insure privacy under a strict interpretation, the Constitution would have to be amended every time a new surveillance gadget was invented.

The USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56), passed after 9/11 with virtually no debate or discussion, represents a powerful intrusion by the Congress into the philosophical give and take between proponents of privacy rights and and proponents of broad law-enforcement powers. By creating a new class of offenders--terrorists--it has seriously weakened the protections that most Americans have long taken for granted. If the government designates you a terrorist, you suddenly lose a number of rights guaranteed to you by the Constitution, chief of which is the right to challenge that designation in a court of law. Even without your being designated a terrorist, the FBI may now subpoena your bank records, credit card records, and a host of other personal information held by third parties, including library records showing which books you checked out, without judicial approval and without your ever learning about it. The person or institution subject to the subpoena cannot inform you that your information is subpoenaed, and if he does, he is subject to criminal prosecution.

In order to get the bill passed in 2001, many of the more controversial provisions were written to lapse after a few years. Congress is now considering renewing those provisions. To get a taste of how the act works, here is a short excerpt of the Washington Post article:

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

Is this the America that we know? Unfortunately, it is. If you don't like it, you need to let your feelings be known. These are not lettres de cachet, but they are getting close.

I played in an out-of-town community symphony orchestra last night. We drove up Saturday morning, rehearsed all afternoon, and in the evening played works by Mozart, Bizet, Ponchielli and Tchaikovsky, all of them well-known and well-worn chestnuts, or warhorses, as they are called in the music world. Although most of us had played these works over and over again, one rehearsal was horribly inadequate. A conductor must have the time to shape the music and the 50-60 musicians that comprise a modern symphony orchestra must have time to become familiar with the conductor's individual conducting (including his weaknesses), as well as the playing of the other musicians.

The result was nothing to be proud of.

An aging audience of about 200 showed their appreciation by attempting to clap like an audience of a thousand. These civic-minded citizens who love good music are the remnant of what once was a substantial constituency that contributed generously to all the arts and encouraged their own children to learn music. That contingent is disappearing, even in the large cities, and we are all the poorer for it. Money spent on the arts is as least as effective in reducing juvenile delinquency as money spent on law enforcement, and the pride a community can take in the artistic work of its citizens is far more justified that any pride it may take in the size of its prisons.

Not long ago the mainstays of art in the community were prominent merchants, who could always be depended upon to contribute to worthy causes. The few industrialists in Mississippi were also generous. Now, when so many of our merchants have been superseded by the box retailers like Walmart and Best Buy and the local civic-minded industrialists have either sold their factories to multinational corporations or moved their factories to Mexico and points further east, there are fewer and fewer potential donors with deep pockets that feel any moral obligation to nurture and improve the communities and cities where they do business.

This is not a Mississippi phenomenon; symphony orchestras and other arts organizations are shutting their doors in droves. Hardly a month goes by without news of another orchestra biting the dust.

Archeologists have discovered in the ruins of ancient civilizations fine ceramic pottery followed only a few years later by crude clay vessels, as one generation, for whatever reason, ceased to pass on its highly-developed skills to the next. Those declines mark the decline not just of art but of an entire civilization. It is true that only one generation often separates civilization from barbarity. The soul of a civilization is its art and when art goes, so does civilization.

Excellent background article by blogger Steve Gilliard on the riots.

The rioting in France is reprehensible but, like many situations that have been festering for a long time, quite predictable. The only unknown was when.

Since the beginning of this blog, we've been using RapidWeaver for Mac OS X, a simple program that lets one concentrate on writing, rather than working with HTML. For the main Jackson Progressive page we are now using Nvu (pronounced In-View), a free, open-source application for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. So far, it looks like a winner. Anyone having experience with Nvu is invited to share their experiences with this program.