Go Go Godzilla!

Godzilla gets a star.

Religious Leaders

I saw this morning's edition of Meet the Press with Jerry Falwell, Jim Wallis, Al Sharpton and some guy I'm not familiar with, Richard Land; and it's written up here. I'm not sure what I think about it yet, but it didn't help illuminate any of my questions regarding religion and morality. If anything, they left them more troubling. Jim Wallis was perhaps again the most reasonable in the group, but he took some serious shots from Jerry Falwell. Seems like these Christians can't really get along all that well amongst themselves. But why should they?

I also channel-surfed a bit and watched a few of the many religious programs on my cable service on Sunday morning. One minister was asking his viewers to come to his service next week so that they can learn how they too can get a new car, or a new house, as God has blessed so many of their fellow church-goers with. That's probably grammatically incorrect, but what else is new? Another was talking about faith, which was kind of interesting. I may start watching these shows and studying them. This may be a good reason to own a Tivo-like device.

Movie Review: National Treasure

National Treasure is a fun movie. Sure, it's fun in the kind of superficial, sterile, carefully calculated kind of way that Disney World is fun, but it was a welcome antidote to the previous night's Saw. Plus, it's almost always a pleasure to watch Nicholas Cage work.

It's a bit of The DaVinci Code, a bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a bit of a caper flick, and it's got the usual dash of light comedy. It's a great afternoon or evening distraction and the American history part of the story was really interesting. Hopefully most of it was accurate? (Well, obviously except for the part about an enormous fortune hidden from the British and all that...) The editing included many of the same jump-cuts and sped-up action sequences that movies use today to indicate the passage of time and events, so it has a contemporary look. It's a very bright film, which was also a relief after the abysmal gloom of Saw. I liked the soundtrack as well, and I almost never notice the soundtrack while I'm watching the movie. There were a couple of affecting lines in it as well. I'll let you find them for yourselves.

I'll buy National Treasure on DVD because it'll be fun to watch it again. It's like The Mummy in that regard.

Something I noticed for the first time yesterday and Friday night: the previews of coming attractions are tailored to the movie you're about to see. On Friday night at Saw, all the coming attractions were for horror or suspense movies of some kind. I noted that it seemed unusual at the time. Then, in the coming attractions before National Treasure, all we saw were promos for Disney movies or light family fair, including Robots from the people who made Ice Age. Looks gorgeous! This was in two different theaters from different theater chains. I guess they're looking at "targeting" their marketing even in the coming attractions.

Euan and I

Euan and I go way back. I mean waaaaay back. I think it was the Congo in '64, right? Hmmm, maybe not. Perhaps I'm thinking of someone else. Regardless, Euan and I are friends. I know he was "taking the mick out of me" a bit and that's why I suggested that I might have been uncharitable reading him more literally. But the more literal reading helped me to try to illustrate something I think is important.

We're still pals. Euan is an authority on Euan, and for that I admire him and I enjoy reading his weblog. I'm also very pleased that he reads Groundhog Day and always, well, mostly, has nice things to say about me! ;^)

Just wanted to clear that up.

Maybe it was the Sinai in '56? I had a case of gin and you had a couple of boxes of linked 7.62 rounds? Maybe I'm thinking of someone else. So hard to recall these days...

"Sometimes the only way to win is not to play the game..."

I think that was the punchline delivered by WOPR (aka "Whopper") at the end of Wargames, perhaps an especially appropriate obscure cultural reference to lead off this morning's waste of time and bandwidth.

In a post he called A Violent Agreement, Euan Semple refers to my Hierarchy post and declares me the "loser," saying:

In his very desire and ability to have a voice and throw something into the ether with not a thought of what may follow he is modelling, for me, the most significant change the new technologies are bringing about.

In the old, analogue world Dave's rantings would, at worst, have been emitted vocally as he wandered lonely around his local park, casting his best thoughts to the four winds and drawing alarmed glances from mothers with young children. At best, without a publishing deal, he could have consigned them to paper which would lay yellowing in dusty drawers until discovered by future generations of Rogers'.

Imagine my relief to discover that in this new, digitally networked world, flatter "wirearchy" I can be nearly instantaneously described and categorized as a ranting loser who scares children. Huzzah! That's progress! Witness the careful consideration of the ideas, followed by the conventionally necessary declaration of a zero-sum result, a "winner" and a "loser." Let he with the most "authority" win!

I suppose I should refrain from excessive use of exclamation points, lest it further the impression that I'm ranting. Am I ranting? I don't think I'm ranting. But I digress.

Jon Husband's not a winner and I'm not a loser in our "conversation" (which isn't really a conversation at all, since I'm just commenting on things he and others have written, but whatever). At least, that's so from my perspective, because I'm not playing the game. Euan sees the posts in the context of competing authorities, which is the world we live in, the water we swim in as fish. At its best, this is a good world, because the "most fit" ideas get to survive, while those that are "less fit" pass on to yellowing papers in dusty drawers; and presumably that makes the world a better place. For the most part, it has. But you and I are not the world. Your experience of "you" and my experience of "me" will be all that we ever have of this thing we call "life." We can experience it as competitors seeking advantage in hierarchy, see that as being all that life is, and live out our entire lives looking over our shoulders to see who might be gaining on us, or wondering if we're ranting losers. We can throw our efforts into supporting authorities that attract groups we find to be the most advantageous to us. We can then help to compete with the other groups that have a superior position in the hierarchy than us, or who threaten our own, and believe that that is what life's all about. "That's life in the food chain, baby." But that's pretty much an unconscious existence, in my opinion.

I can maintain that I'm not a "loser" because I'm not playing the game, but that's an ineffective argument. It really only takes one to play the game. In this case it's Euan, who can look at two pieces of writing, and declare one writer the "winner" and the other the "loser." Implicit in that is a third party, an audience, so I guess it does take notionally two to play the game.

If it sounds as though I'm offended at being called a ranting loser who scares children, (which is perhaps an unfair characterization but really, Euan chose those words for some reason, to leave some impression) I am. But only mildly so. I don't really have much to "lose" in this "game," and I've dealt with much worse before. I guess I'm disappointed, if unsurprised, that the things I write about, however badly, are reduced to simple declarations of winners and losers that support the very notions I'm cautioning against. But to get upset about that is to exhibit attachment to results and that's another formula for suffering. While I didn't really expect to change any minds, I guess I really didn't expect to be so quickly, so neatly and so publicly dismissed. But even in that, I'm a bit flattered I suppose, because it seems I did get some attention.

I would just point out that Euan makes my point for me perhaps better than I ever could, and while I don't think he gets that, I thank him for it anyway.

In Hierarchy We Trust (Not)

I received some e-mail this morning that suggested I had misunderstood Mr. Jarvis, and I don't happen to think that's the case. I think it's more likely I haven't made myself clear. I'll try to do a little better, briefly, here. I'm not sure I'll be any more successful, because this is sort of a fish/water problem.

We all want to improve our rank in the hierarchy. We'd like to win the lotto, we'd like to get a raise. We'd like to lose 40 pounds. We'd like to get our hair back, or our youth back. We want to feel good about ourselves, and we'd like others to feel that way about us too. We're social animals, we don't live alone even though some of us think we'd like to. We can't.

Much of what one reads on weblogs by so-called A-listers, or high attention-earners, is little more than self-promotion. "Pay attention to me, because I know what's going on." That's what I'm doing here, irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, but I have little interest in promoting myself. I'm a pretty poor example of anything worthwhile. But I don't like to see fraud either, even if it's unintentional. Fraud is authority without responsibility or accountability. I have no responsibility to you, nor am I accountable to you, in any large measure, for what I write here. Libel being a noteworthy exception, and possibly plagiarism. Because I don't wish to be a fraud, I disclaim any pretense of authority. I make all this shit up. I encourage you to do your own thinking, because nobody else can do it for you. And if you do let others do your thinking for you, they'll be advancing their own agendas, not yours.

Trust is not the organizing principle in hierarchies. Authorities would like to you believe it is, because it makes their job easier. Hierarchies are about competition and mostly it's zero-sum. There are win-win exceptions, but they are exceptional so don't expect to find them everywhere. You should be skeptical when dealing with authorities, whether it's the government, your church, your doctor, the talking head on TV, or the high attention-earning weblogger. They all purport to want to do something for your benefit, but ultimately it's to secure their own benefit. There's nothing wrong with that, that's the way the world works and its unlikely to change. Just understand the rules of the game, and we'll all do better.

When dealing with an authority, reflect on their responsibility and their accountability as well. If you can't find any, then they're not an authority, they're an autocrat or a fraud, often both. If you're dealing with someone who purports to have authority, consider whether they really do, or merely garner a lot of attention. If you look at Technorati, the weblogger's tool of choice for monitoring rank in the hierarchy, you'll note that one of the two ways you can order your list of links is by "authority." Their use of the term "authority" is a reflection of the number of inbound links to the weblog that's linking to you. So a weblog that links to you that has 1,000 other weblogs linking to it, has more "authority" than a weblog with only 100 weblogs linking to it. This is using attention as a substitute for authority, with the idea that, in the long run, attention does equate to authority. And I suppose when action-movie stars get to be elected governors, that's probably true. But I don't think it has to be that way. Again, I think if we all understood how the game is played, we'd all be better off.

We all make choices about what to listen to and what to ignore. I would just suggest that trust is a pretty poor basis for making those choices. You can develop, over time, a subjective assessment of the reliability of certain authorities, but you should always remain skeptical, especially if the matters they purport to be authorities on are important, like your health or war and peace.

And understand that those who point out the excesses of hierarchy are themselves members of one, and seek to improve their rank in it. They want your attention, and ideally, as Mr. Jarvis notes, your trust. This helps to secure their place, and if it's secure, it's easier to focus effort on improving it.

Finally, those who wish to tear down existing hierarchies do so to establish new ones with their own ranks significantly higher than they were in the old ones. That's not evil, and there is likely some small amount of virtue in it, but be aware of what's going on.

And now, this...

Thanks

Experimental. This seems to work on my Mac using Safari. Not sure whether it'll work on a Windows machine or not. It's an audio clip from one of my favorite movies, Joe Versus the Volcano. Appropriate for this weekend, I think. I have another I want to post a little later.

Movie Review: Saw

Don't see Saw.

Worst. Movie. Ever.

There's no way to describe all the ways it is so wretchedly bad. The only redeeming feature was that it was bad in a way that made the gruesome climax laughable; but the laughs were distinctly unintentional and not worth the price of admission. Don't rent this movie, and don't buy it when it gets marked down to $5.00 on DVD. Don't even waste the time it would take to find out why I think it's so bad even if it's offered for "free" on cable TV. Somebody should pay me for the time I wasted sitting through this piece of crap. I excuse myself by pleading morbid curiosity, and I'm sad to say that was a mistake. Makes something like the Steven Seagal turkey Ticker seem like high cinematic art. Well, maybe not, but it's close.

Hierarchy

Connecting some boxes along the org-chart.

Hierarchy, what a lovely word. I wonder why I overlooked it for so long. Instead of the somewhat inelegant "pecking order," I could have been using "hierarchy" and it would have been nearly perfect!

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

1. Dominion or authority in sacred things.

2. A body of officials disposed organically in ranks and

orders each subordinate to the one above it; a body of

ecclesiastical rulers.

3. A form of government administered in the church by

patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, and, in

an inferior degree, by priests. --Shipley.

4. A rank or order of holy beings.

From the much more contemporary WordNet (r) 2.0:

n 1: a series of ordered groupings of people or things within a

system; "put honesty first in her hierarchy of values"

2: the organization of people at different ranks in an

administrative body

I especially love the archaic use of the term and its reference to religion and the church.

In a post he called TCP/IP vs. NTSC (For the non-technically inclined TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol - the method by which messages are transmitted on a network with each node in the network having some responsibility for assembling and forwarding the parts of the message. This was intended to ensure that messages could be passed along the hierarchy, even if the network was experiencing damage, like from a nuclear attack. NTSC stands for National Television System Committee - the body responsible for standardizing the way television broadcasters and receivers handle audio and video signals.), Britt Blazer writes that hierarchy is "the underpinning of all human societies." In this assertion, I believe he is correct. I also believe he is mostly correct in the main point of his brief post, that a networked medium is less conducive to hierarchies than a broadcast medium. Networks are peer-to-peer, essentially (though some peers are more equal than others), while broadcasts are typically "top-down." In this post, he's commenting on some unstated events, observing that, "Patriarchs everywhere are stung by the growth of peer-to-peer messaging: wounded elephants, thrashing around breaking the pottery."

In a post he called Rather, not, Doc Searls, a would-be patriarch of all things open source, new media, and "cluey," points to a comment at another weblog, citing this quotation: ...right now, I'm a citizen of a nation where more than 55 million people voted for a guy who wanted to continue an illegal war and supported restrictions on our basic civil liberties — and even more voted for George W. Bush. The forces of evil — corny phrase, but why not call them what they are? — are well organized and well funded. Where Weinberger sees a radical leveling going on, I see a reconfiguration of existing hierarchies — the same ones that thwart progressive/left attempts at reform or change.

This caught my attention because, among other things, the commenter noted "a reconfiguration of existing hierarchies," and did so in rebuttal to a talk that Dr. Dave Weinberger gave to the Library of Congress, which you can watch here and if you're interested in these sorts of things (how knowledge is categorized), I think it's worth watching.

The weblog that hosted the comment is Jon Husband's Wirearchy, a clever, if a bit obvious, pun-o-nym on hierarchy. In the post Doc referenced, Mr. Husband wrote: The working definition of Wirearchy is:

“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”

And he goes on to give a rather upbeat assessment of this new "organizing principle."

As for me, if you've been here before you already know, I'm very skeptical. First, I wonder how truly "organizing" new "organizing principles" really are. Or, I'm inclined to believe there are no new organizing principles, we're genetically equipped with all the ones we're ever going to have. We evolve new ways of expressing those, and managing and mediating their more corrosive and "sub-optimal" expressions, but I think we're stuck with hierarchies until extinction. C'est la vie, as our former allies and now the enthusiastically reviled French like to say. But, I digress.

The main subject of Doc's post is an endorsement of a post by Jeff Jarvis on the retirement of Dan Rather and the "end of days" for broadcast news. Mr. Jarvis is something of an authority on the media, and is frequently a guest talking cranium on many broadcast news shows. You can find out which ones by reading his weblog, he's never delinquent to mention which broadcast show will be broadcasting him. In his commentary on the death of broadcast news Mr. Jarvis wrote:

Oh, trust is still important. In fact, in this new, distributed world of ours, it is even more important. Trust is our organizing principle. Trust is what makes weblogs, Technorati, eBay, Craigs List, RSS, chat, and email work: We pay attention to those we trust; we filter out the rest. We each decide whom to trust; it's no longer decided for all of us.

The first sentence of the next paragraph is: "We control trust."

Here we have another "organizing principle," in this case - trust.

Let's think about that one for a minute or two. Oddly enough, Doc Searls chose to open his endorsement of Mr. Jarvis' piece with this old saw, "You trust your mother, but you cut the cards," which is kind of the opposite sentiment, or perhaps orthogonal is a better way to describe it. If I trust you with the keys to my car, it means I believe you're a competent driver and you won't damage it or hurt someone else and you'll return it to me. Do I know all of these things? Not in any concrete sense, no. So it's mostly an act of faith. In the "cut the cards" saying, implicit in the relationship is competition. Cards are a zero-sum game, and we prefer to compete in games where the competition is fair. What is the role of trust when it comes to competition? As Doc's old saying suggests, there should be none.

This "new, distributed world of ours," is the same world it has always been. Technology does not change human nature. It changes how humans do things, it doesn't change what they do. People don't seem to be willing to come to grips with this notion. Perhaps its because "what" we do is like water is to fish, we swim in it so we don't even notice it. "How" we do things is always changing, and changing the "hows" is one of the fields of competition for rank in the hierarchy - or "wirearchy" if you prefer that.

The advent of a networked world has created an enormous new medium in which people can compete for authority, and therefore, rank within the hierarchy. We all want to be higher in the hierarchy, even if it's only for the brand of beer we drink, or the manufacturer or our automobile or pickup truck; or, for that matter, our operating system. Some unique thing sets me above others, and therefore you should pay attention to me and listen to my authority. It's all about being able to pass along my genes. Of course, that's by no means what it's really all about, but that's what we spend 99.44% of our time doing and worrying about.

Authorities, where they don't compete directly with one another, will ally with one another to compete with other authorities. This is what one observes when one sees so many webloggers commenting on the deficiencies of "broadcast media," and promoting the supposed virtues of the new distributed media. The main point of their effort is to establish their place within the hierarchy of authority, why you should "trust" them, and so one should always be willing to "cut the cards," so to speak. Take everything they say with a, rather large, grain of salt.

There is nothing truly new here. It's all about monkeys climbing in trees. We've got a new forest now, and everyone believes "that changes everything." It's not true, and anyone who tells you that is just promoting themselves, not the truth.

As for me, I maintain you shouldn't listen to me. You should think for yourself. I am an authority on nothing, this is all just my opinion. I make it all up. I don't want to play in the hierarchy game, but I don't want to see people abused when others play it either. I don't have a blogroll, and I don't usually link a lot, because that supports the hierarchy competitors. I don't post advertising and I don't affiliate with Amazon and I don't have a "tip jar." I'm not trying to convert my lack of authority into wealth, the liquid form of authority. I'm just here to try to say what I think, and I hope I approach whatever "the truth" is. Maybe it'll give someone else something to think about too. And if it doesn't, that's okay by me too. I'm not trying to "change everything." I'm just trying to change myself.

Library

There's a little utility available to allow you to export your Delicious Library to html. Read the instructions carefully, you have to install a RubyCocoa package first, and I found the export app has to be in the same directory as Delicious Library (I tried running it from the disk image and it didn't work). Here's the result for my library. I've got several more books in the bedroom I haven't scanned yet, and I haven't done my DVDs or games at all yet. Pretty cool though. (The applications, not my library.)

Rather Pissed

I haven't watched the CBS Evening News regularly since I first had access to cable TV, more than 20 years ago. I've probably only seen a handful, if that many, of 60 Minutes shows in that time. I don't have a strong opinion about Dan Rather one way or another. Like most people my age or older, I remember Richard Nixon asking Rather if he was running for something, and Rather flipping the question around to the president. I always thought he intended to ask, "No, sir. Are you running from something?" But whatever. He was a guy trying to make a name for himself following in the footsteps of the beloved Walter Cronkite, who I did watch nearly every night as a kid.

I'm familiar with the 60 Minutes flap over the fake National Guard memos. I certainly believe Rather and CBS News stepped in it over that one; and I believe they were eager to promote a story that was unflattering to the president. Not like there wasn't any of that going on against both candidates this past election. But that's not to say I think it was a good thing to do, it wasn't.

But none of that irritates me as much as the spectacle of puffed-up, self-important, self-promoting, arrogant little prigs congratulating themselves and celebrating the announcement of Rather's retirement, all the while heaping scorn upon him in an orgiastic ecstatic exercise in self-justification and mutual masturbation.

Happy to Hear

Some time ago I went looking for Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the iTunes Music Store and there was nothing available from them. I'm happy to report that there is much of their material available there now. Naturally, the one thing I really wanted wasn't there, which was Works, but there's a live album with most of what I wanted. Then I bought the whole damn Return of the Manticore (Box Set).

Sigh.

Yes, I'm hopelessly trapped in the 70s for most of my music preferences. I guess that makes me old. So be it. It's good stuff.

Still Thinking...

I'm still wondering about this church and public moral guidance issue, and the more I think about it, the more complicated the issue appears. But some questions linger, and I don't think there are any satisfactory answers.

Consider the issue of the tax-exempt nature of churches. I'm not a tax lawyer, and I can't say I'm familiar with all the issues regarding taxation and religion; but my impression is that all churches enjoy tax-exempt status from the government. I don't know if this extends to local property taxes, but my impression is that it does. This is, in effect, a special privilege extended to religion by government. It allows a church, or a religious group, to keep more of the wealth it acquires than many other entities.

It seems reasonable to wonder how much churches value this privilege? Since it is a privilege extended by government, naturally it stands to reason that it could be revoked at any time. So it seems there is the potential for a conflict of interest here. Is a church willing to criticize government on all matters of morality when, by doing so, it may risk losing its privilege? We seemingly already have the rather odd notion of the IRS telling ministers what they can and can't pray about.

Perhaps more troubling than that, today we have this idea of "faith-based initiatives," where churches may be made eligible to receive federal money to support social services delivered by churches and religious organizations, like, say, Scientology. So not only is religion beholden to government for a tax exemption privilege, it now wishes to receive more wealth from government in order to provide social services. Again, it seems reasonable to wonder how willing is a religion to criticize government when it hopes to receive wealth from government?

It seems to me that any religion's claim to moral authority, or at least the exercise thereof, is seriously compromised when they are in some way beholden to secular (which is not to say amoral or immoral) authority, particularly with regard to issues of wealth.

I'll be thinking about this some more.

It Goes

Spent the weekend with the Caitie-monster. We visited St. Augustine together yesterday. I hadn't been down there in years, and I'd never actually visited the old fort there, the Castillo de San Marcos. It was a nice day and I thought it would be something we could enjoy together.

Caitie sleeps pretty late on Sundays, so we didn't head out until a little after 11:00, but it's a nice drive down A1A from Ponte Vedra. We made it into St. Augustine a little before noon. I had forgotten where the visitors' center parking was, so I ended up erring on the side of not having to drive around a lot looking for parking, and parked in a lot further from the center of town. So we had a nice, if some what long, walk!

The fort was pretty cool. Caitie kept looking for bloodstains and evidence of people who had died there, but alas, we couldn't really find any. After the walk into town and prowling around the fort, which is notionally designated a "castle" because it has a moat that was once water-filled, we decided we could rest and have a little lunch at a Mexican restraurant across the street from the fort.

As cool as the fort was, the highlight of the visit was a horse-drawn carriage tour. Cait had never experienced one of those before, and I think it was quite a thrill for her. I think she liked the horse and riding in the carriage a lot more than the tour, though Dee, our driver was an amusing and knowledgeable guide. Ben, the horse, was quite the charmer as well; Caitlin was able to get a kiss from him at the end of the tour.

I decided we had spent enough time (and money!) for one day, so we didn't really get a chance to do much walking around visiting the shops and looking at some of the historic landmarks on foot. We'll visit again and do mostly that another time.

Of Two Minds

This is an interesting, if very brief and superficial, survey of some of the things we're beginning to observe in the brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging. I would take some of the descriptions of what appears to be going on in the brain during complex moral reasoning questions with a grain of salt for the moment. The implication in the article is that there are, in effect, two minds wrestling with a moral dilemma, a logical one and an emotional one. I think it's somewhat more complicated than that, and that there are other ways of thinking about what's going on, other possible explanations, as the various centers of the brain become activated while dealing with those sorts of problems.

"Fine! Whatever."

Interesting article on passive-aggressive behavior.

Angry Beavers

This story was pretty funny.

Another Album

I didn't play around with Booxter last night. But I did spend a little more time in iPhoto. I uploaded another collection of pictures. Some of them I've published before here or at the old editthispage.com site. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you'll find them here.

List o'Books

On the heels of the thrill of Delicious Library, I'm going to look at another, more mature, application: Booxter. Booxter also offers the convenience of iSight barcode scanning and Amazon lookup, along with several other databases as well. It only tracks books though, so it's not as useful for things like DVDs, CDs and video games. On the other hand, it's a lot less expensive.

For a number of reasons, I'm interested in text export, and Delicious Library is kind of broken in that regard. At least, I'm unable to import a text file of the library contents into Excel because at least one of the tab-delimited fields contains data separated by carriage returns. I wasn't able to figure out how to work around that in Excel, so the list is always garbled. Hopefully, Booxter will have that part figured out. I'll let you know later today.

I still think it would be a very cool thing if I was able to search the contents of my library by way of Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature.

Man Against Nature

I bathed my cats this morning.

"The horror... the horror..."

21st Century Living

I was browsing through Target the other day, and if ever there was a sign that I was indeed living in Tomorrowland, this was it. I overheard a woman say to her son, "Another laser? Are you sure you need another laser, Timmy? I keep finding them all over the house."

Sounds like an interesting house.

Images

I stopped by the Navy Exchange today and happened to notice a Disney DVD collection I had never heard of being released before, Walt Disney Treasures Tomorrowland Disney in Space and Beyond. Woot!

I happened to record part of Man in Space when I caught it on cable one night. I remember seeing parts of these as a kid. I loved the Man in Space program because it had appearances by Willy Ley and Werner Von Braun. So I was delighted to see the entire series had been released as a DVD collection. I'm watching it now, it's so cool! I've got styrene models of most of the vehicles and the the space station used in the series that I've been intending to assemble One of These Days™. (You know, as long as they're still in the box I can imagine how cool they'll look once I assemble them perfectly. Once I actually assemble them, imperfectly, they won't look quite so cool. I know, it's an attachment thing.)

In other news, I played around a bit more with Ofoto Express and posted an album of some pictures I took last weekend when Caitie was with me. Interested family members and bored readers will find them here.

I'm going to be playing around more with iPhoto, .Mac and the Ofoto service. I'm still not sure what I have in mind yet, but there's something there that's piquing my interest. So far, I think I'm happier with .Mac's presentation, but interested family members (that's you Mom) can order prints of pictures they might want directly from Ofoto's site. It's not exactly easy, though I don't think it's too hard.

Flash!

The price of large-capacity flash memory devices just keeps dropping; almost faster than I can savor a good bargain. I have two 128MB Lexar JumpDrive Sports that I bought from Target. I think the first one was about $35.00 when I bought it a bunch of months ago. Later, they had the same device marked down to around $23, which might have been an error because it was significantly less expensive than anywhere else I'd seen them, even online. So I snagged another one.

Well, I just bought a 1GB for JumpDrive Sport for about $80.00 after rebate. It'd be about $68.00 retail, but I bought it through Tiger Direct and they don't offer free shipping and they charge sales tax. But still, that's a pretty good price for that much flash memory in a convenient USB drive format. It's USB 2.0 as well, so it's actually practical for that size device. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but I have a few ideas I'm kicking around. Dell had a better deal shortly after I bought mine through Tiger Direct, so shop around if you're in the market.

I like the JumpDrive Sport design because it's a slim package that'll allow another connector to plug into the adjacent USB port on the iBook. It also comes with a rubber cap with a wrap-around band that secures the cap to the drive and provides a modest measure of shock protection to the whole device. I had a Lexar Secure USB drive a year ago, but the cap went missing shortly after I bought it. One day I dropped it on the floor and it landed on the connector and it stopped working after that. I'm guessing the impact broke an internal connection or something.

Secure Digital (SD) and MultiMedia Card (MMC) devices are nearly the identical form-factor, and they're usually compatible across devices. SD have been more expensive than MMC cards because they incorporate additional circuitry to implement the "secure" feature. This also makes them a little thicker and they incorporate a few more signal lines on the connector. My Kodak 6490 can use either SD or MMC cards, but since MMC was less expensive I bought a 256MB MMC card for it. My Nokia 3660 only supports MMC cards because of the tight fit behind the battery in the phone, and I've got a 128MB MMC card in it.

Well, it came as a surprise but 515MB SD cards have come down below $30.00 after rebate, sometimes below $20.00 if you look hard enough. I bought a 512MB SD card for my camera and I'm moving the 256MB MMC card to the phone and the 128MB card will move to the backup phone.

I'd really like to see the cost of Sony's proprietary Memory Stick come down more, but it's less of an issue to me these days as both of my Cliés only support 128MB of Memory Stick memory. I have a Sony camcorder with a slot for the newer Memory Stick Pro format, which might be useful for something I suppose. But they're way more expensive than any other flash memory format.

Reformat Your Life

Shelley writes about overcoming some technical maladies with her TiBook, and the performance improvements attendant to wiping the hard-disk and reinstalling the operating system and all the applications. She concludes, "If only we could reformat our lives so easily."

Indeed.

Of course, it's not easy. And, like Shelley's hardware problem, it usually requires some sort of catastrophe before one even tries. Then there's the tendency, in the midst of catastrophe, to view oneself as a victim and not responsible for the state of affairs as they exist. It's hard for us to see ourselves. Instead, we have our self-image, which we have constructed in such a fashion as to allow us to feel good about ourselves, but we don't have a readily available, easily accessible, objective way to view ourselves. Which goes a long way to explain why catastrophe is usually the first indication something may be wrong.

If we can get past the feelings of loss and failure after catastrophe, if we can set aside our anger and acknowledge our fear after catastrophe, then sometimes we can find something of value in what remains amidst the wreckage. We can begin to see things in ways that were hidden to us before, because they didn't support our notions of our self-image.

Some catastrophes are worse than others though, and not everyone survives to discover something of value. Sometimes you can't reformat and reinstall. Life doesn't guarantee happy endings.

Ironically, there are those people who make regular backups and a hardware catastrophe is little more than a few minutes of inconvenience. They just restore from backup and it's almost as if the problem never happened in the first place. Maybe they lose a few recent files, but mostly everything is right back to "normal." Which is probably okay if the seeds to the catastrophe aren't lurking there in the files and applications and directory data you just restored. It's probably stretching the metaphor past the breaking point, but this is just another form of denial, except one gets to avoid adopting the victim role and retain one's self-image because it gets restored from backup each time catastrophe strikes. I have some familiarity with this situation. You can get by for a very long time if you have the patience and the resources to keep buying new hard-disks and reinstalling your old home directory. If you're lucky, you'll get frustrated and seek technical help. If you're really lucky, you'll do it sooner rather than later.

Anyway, that's probably enough about all that.

Interesting Program

Talk of the Nation had a segment on one of the seven deadly sins today, in this case anger.

It's a great segment and very apropos of current events. You can listen to the program in Windows Media Player. I heartily recommend it to everyone. It's a brief segment, maybe fifteen minutes.

Delicious Library Dream

What I'd really like to see is Tiger's Spotlight search function integrated with Amazon's Search Inside This Book, via my library as documented by Delicious Library. I buy most of my books through Amazon but that isn't essential for this to be useful. All I would need to be returned from Amazon via Spotlight would be a list of citations for the books I already own with page numbers and two or three sentences highlighting the search terms to provide some context. The idea would be that Amazon would be a huge electronic index of every book I own.

Unfortunately, not all of Amazon's books have been indexed and there is some resistance on the part of publishers, I gather, to make too much of the content of the books available on an ad hoc search basis. But for books already in my library, all I need is the title of the book and the page numbers. I could certainly look things up in my books by hand, but this would allow me to effectively search all of my books at the same time.

I don't think this will happen, but I think it'd be pretty cool.

Monster Meme

Okay, Delicious Library is too cool for words...

I had a lookup failure on the Signet Classic edition of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and it was unable to read the barcode on Meditation and the Martial Arts, perhaps because it's on a yellow background and the light wasn't great. I just opened the blinds and tried again and it worked. It's pretty damn fast, too.

Ofoto Test

I'm playing around with Ofoto Express, a pretty neat little app that'll upload pictures from your iPhoto library to Ofoto's online album service. This is just a test to see if the URL is accessible from another machine (publicly accessible). The pictures are from the Distinguished Citizen of the Year award dinner for my dad.

More on The Boss

I'm still trying to wrap my feeble head around the loaded ideas of religion and morality, responsibility and authority, and I was doing some browsing around that Sojourners web site when I happened to find this brief note about Springsteen's appearance on the political stage. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't a critical comment. Cool.

Authority and Responsibility

Or, "You're Not the Boss of Me Now."

The only power that anyone has is the power to choose. We can make choices for ourselves, and we have a certain amount of power that is the technical description of energy expended over time. I have enough power to drag my sorry carcass out of bed in the morning, for instance; but I don't have enough power to leap over tall buildings in a single bound.

We sometimes describe people as being "powerful." It's not literally true, it's more like an analogy; it focuses on the effect of the phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself. Powerful people have just about the same amount of power you and I have, they probably can't leap over tall buildings either. What powerful people have that you and I don't have as much of is authority. Equating authority with power is an error that tends to work to the advantage of those with authority. Authority is something of an abstract concept, we don't talk about it much just because it is kind of abstract. Power is something we think we understand, although our understanding, apart from its scientific or technical meaning, is incomplete or mistaken.

Authority is the means by which one person may compel another person to act in accordance with the choices of the person with authority, and not in accordance of the wishes of the other person. As children, we become familiar with the most basic form of authority, violence or physical coercion. Parents use it, siblings use it, bullies use it. Once we become familiar with physical coercion and experience its effects, then the threat of physical coercion is often as effective as the violence itself. At the root of all forms of authority that are intended to compel some actual behavior is at least the threat of physical coercion; in many cases there is the physical coercion itself. If you don't get right with God, you're going to go to hell. If you don't walk the straight and narrow, you're going to go to jail. If you don't take your medicine, you're going to die.

Nobody likes this, but we're stuck with it because we're humans and we can't live without authorities. But, clever creatures that we are, we've evolved some pretty sophisticated ways of coping with this bit of unpleasant reality. One of the other ideas we're seemingly "coded" for in our repertoire of behavioral responses is the notion of "reciprocity," the idea of "give and take." In return for your acknowledgment of my authority and compliance with my wishes, I will give you something. Without reciprocity, authorities that actually expect to receive compliance find themselves in frequent and inefficient conflict with those over whom they wish to exercise their authority. This expectation of reciprocity, which makes authority much more efficient, has been manifested as the idea of "responsibility." Anyone with some authority must have some responsibility attendant to that authority in order to avoid inefficient conflicts and low levels of compliance.

The mechanism that is intended to preserve reciprocity, to keep the balance of authority and responsibility, is the notion of accountability. Those who are given authority are expected to meet their responsibilities in the exercise of their authority. If they fail to do so, then some entity with authority over them will call them to account and exercise their authority to ensure compliance.

It can become a very elaborate and complicated set of relationships, but it isn't that difficult to understand. A doctor is an authority by virtue of his or her academic and practical training, and their demonstrated competence. Usually as attested to by other agencies that have the authority to grant certifications and licenses to practice medicine, which is really just another way of saying to exercise authority in individual health matters. The doctor is an authority on medicine, so when you're ill you will try to see a doctor so that he or she can tell you what choices you need to make in order to get well again. A doctor has the authority to write a prescription in order for you to receive a medication that you couldn't receive just by asking for it yourself. (The prescription isn't sufficient unto itself, you also need money or insurance, the transfer of wealth, which is another form of authority, in order to complete the transaction.) The doctor can ask you to disrobe and can poke and prod you in all kinds of personal places and make you feel uncomfortable. The doctor can order others to perform various tests and measurements in order to understand how to best help you to get well. You, and quite a few other people, will do what your doctor tells you to do in order for you to get well. In return, the doctor has a responsibility to exercise his authority to do only those things that will help to remedy your illness as efficiently as possible, and to do nothing that will make you any worse.

For example, it would not be a responsible exercise of authority for a male doctor with an unremarkable male fascination with a woman's secondary sexual characteristics to examine a female patient's breasts, if the patient presented herself for an infected ingrown toenail. But there are plenty of examples of just this sort of behavior, because it is also all too likely that people who have authority may not exercise it responsibly, and may abuse it to serve their own personal desires. If we don't have a clear understanding of what the responsibilities are of the people exercising authority over us, we are at some risk of being abused by them.

With that in mind, I intend to ask some questions about the responsibilities of churches and religious authorities. If religious authorities are going to tell those who are subject to their authority how to vote, what are their responsibilities in this regard, and who are they accountable to? Do their members know? How are they informed? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'll see if I can find them.

Weekend News Update

Serious cheese-sandwich post follows. You've been warned.

It's been a lovely fall weekend down here in my Secure Undisclosed Location on a Barrier Island Somewhere Off the Coast of Florida™. Caitie has been my daughter-in-residence this weekend. Yesterday we spent about five hours taking our qualifying test for December black belt testing in taekwondo. Caitie will be testing for 1st degree black belt (decided), and I'll be doing a midterm toward my 2nd degree.

It was a pretty exhausting day for me, Caitlin seemed to come through better than I did. She had hurt her right elbow at home following some horseplay with a neighbor, and it was still a little swollen yesterday, causing her some pain. So she did all of her board breaks with her left hand, successfully completing all of them. We did ten board breaks, five with hand techniques and five with kicking techniques, including one jump and one turning kick. I broke all mine on the first attempt with the exception of my side-kick. For now, the key to me breaking a board lies in being able to see the target. If I can see it, I can hit it at the center and it'll break. If I can't see it, chances are I won't hit the center and it won't break. When I raise my kicking leg (usually the right leg) and tilt back on my standing leg, while I'm holding my arms up, my right shoulder interferes with the line of sight to the board. If I extend my right arm down and toward my hip, I can see the board. I had discovered this earlier during the board-breaking seminar, but had forgotten it yesterday until I had exhausted three attempts. I broke it on the fourth attempt, but it's possible I'll have to repeat that demonstration before I mid-term in December.

There were then five rounds of endurance, which is a round of punches on a target, a round of kicks on a target, a combination of punches and kicks on a target, and then a round of push-ups and a round of sit-ups. Each round is a minute long. Following that were, I think, sixteen one-minute rounds of contact sparring. I say, "I think," because I'm not sure. Toward the end, you're exhausted and it's not possible to do higher-order cognitive tasks like, counting. We got a few minutes to recover while we put on shoes and went outside to do three different forms in the parking lot. Ordinarily we would do our forms barefoot in the school, but there were too many of us and too little time to get through everyone before we had to leave to go do a mile run at the beach. After the forms we had several more minutes to recover as we prepared to drive over to a park on the beach for the mile run. I had hoped we'd actually be running on the beach, as there was at least the prospect for, you know, a little eye candy. Alas, we did laps around the park. Sigh. And then we were through. Some of us more "through" than others.

Caitie wanted a "big sloppy burger" after all that, having not eaten since breakfast. I was too tired to care where we ate. We ended up at the new What-a-Burger, which, I gather, has the biggest, sloppiest burgers in town. We were seated in a booth and apparently a manager was in the booth behind us interviewing people for jobs. That was oddly depressing in a way. On the way out, we encountered a seriously mentally ill homeless person, which also put kind of a down note on what was otherwise a great day.

We got back to Dave Cave II and I took a shower while Caitie explored my neighborhood. We tried to put air in the flat tire on my bicycle, but all we managed to do was remove the valve stem from the tire, so she explored on foot. After I showered, the cable guy showed up to investigate an intermittent problem I've been experiencing here at headquarters. On many evenings for the last few weeks, the cable modem will just stop seeing the network. It usually happens around the same time in the evening, and it usually resolves itself after some amount of time. The technician ended up just disabling one of the cable outlets I don't use here in the Cave and hopefully that will improve the signal strength enough to preclude the problem. We shall see.

We decided to head over to Target to buy an inner-tube and some cookie dough to bake cookies. We ended up getting a Crayola activity package for Caitlin to play with. While I burned the cookies, we started watching Mystery Men. I was certain I'd set the timer on the oven, but apparently I didn't start it or something, because it never went off. They weren't really burnt, just thoroughly browned. We ate all of them anyway. So much for the calorie loss benefits of taekwondo testing. It was still early after Mystery Men ended, so Caitie said she wanted to see the "giant grasshopper movie." I'd told her about it earlier. It was the first movie I can recall that actually scared me as a kid, and it was recently released on DVD. It's actually called Beginning of the End, a rip-off of Them! But it has virtues of its own, and we enjoyed watching it as I faded in and out of consciousness.

After that was over, I checked my e-mail and decided I was better off sleeping than trying to stay awake. Caitie stayed up and watched television for a while.

Today we're going to have dinner with Melissa and Pat, my other daughter and her husband, who were married a year ago last Tuesday. Chris is down in Orlando, or should be on his way back from there by then, so he won't be joining us.

So that's a summary of my action-packed, live-on-the-razor's-edge, thrill-a-minute weekend. Stay tuned, boys and girls for the continuing adventures of Action Dave! Cool-guy soon-to-be bachelor! Now in Technicolor! (And stereo where available.) Limited time offer. Some restrictions apply.

Envious

My brother Mark was able to attend the opening of the new Apple Store in Syracuse, New York. I gather it's one of the new mini-Stores, with all the merchandise on the two long walls and a Genius Bar at the end. The first 500 people got t-shirts. Mark arrived about 15 minutes before opening and was number 231 in line. It took him an hour to get into the store. I demanded that he send me photographs, he kindly obliged and you'll find them here.

I wish we had an Apple Store somewhere around here in North Florida. We're supposed to get one sometime next year not very far from where I live at the moment. Given my frequency of changing domiciles, that's not likely to be true when the store opens; but at least I'll be somewhere within easy driving distance.

This Looks Interesting

Hank Azarea is one of my favorite comedic actors, and Huff looks like it'll be a fascinating series. Unfortunately, I don't subscribe to Showtime. I might have to think about that.

My Father

My father, a WW II veteran (and, incidentally, a John Kerry supporter) was recognized by his local American Legion Post as their Distinguished Citizen of the Year. You can read about it here.

Of course, in my opinion, he's the Distinguished Citizen of my life.

More on Morality

I've been going back and making numerous minor edits to Morality of Control, and I really should learn to read my stuff more before I post it. Or hire an editor. Rather than make a significant revision to the post, I'm just going to add several more paragraphs here that will, hopefully, help make my point clearer.

Morality is being cited as one of the reasons why voters went for Bush. The specific exit poll question cited has been criticized for being too vague and ambiguous. Most people who are interpreting it as meaningful are pointing to the issues of abortion and gay marriage as the "morality" issues that swayed voters toward Bush. Others are interpreting it even more broadly than that, but that's another discussion.

The implication, it seems to me, is that many people feel abortion is a more important "moral" issue than that of the Iraq war. I think that's wrong as a matter of morality; but I think I understand why it happens to be the case as a practical matter. I believe the morality of many religious leaders is compromised because of a conflict of interest, and an over-cautious desire to preserve the authority of the church by not coming into open conflict in a major way with the elected branches of government.

The conflict of interest appears in a number of areas and I briefly mentioned them in the previous post. I'll be more explicit here.

First, war is good business for religion. I can't cite specific statistical evidence, nor do I even know if such statistics exist, but I strongly suspect that church attendance is up overall since 9/11, with another significant uptick at the commencement of the Iraq war. Again, I can't put my fingers on the evidence, but I'm confident that's the case. If that is the case, it's good news for religion. There are more of the faithful seated in the pews to hear the word of God, and put a contribution in the offering plate. War is good for business for religion.

Vigorously opposing war puts the church in conflict with political leaders. People are members of both groups (citizens and church-members) and naturally desire to feel good about the leaders of each group. Especially since President Bush was supposed to be such a religious person. Opposing sympathetic political leaders instills conflict in church members, and that's probably not good for attendance, or donations.

Government does not welcome challenges to its authority from the only other significant source of authority in many people's lives: their church. Any serious challenge to governmental authority would risk a governmental response to reduce the authority of the church. Most likely, I believe, by revoking the tax-exempt status of the church, and confiscating significant quantities of money from the church, which would effectively reduce the authority of the church. "Separation of church and state" is more than just some academic concept interpreted into the constitution. It's the uneasy truce we've evolved in this country between competing authorities.

The church is seeking greater authority from the government in the form of federal funding for faith-based initiatives. Opposing the government on the Iraq war would seem to place this effort in jeopardy.

Finally, the war in Iraq is being waged, at least in part, against another group that is a competitor to the church. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world and what's bad for Islam might be good for Christianity. I don't think you'll get any Christians to admit this; but I suspect it's a factor, even if only an unconscious one, in the relative quiescence of Christians with respect to this war.

Now, the issue is complicated because the war is underway and so there is a question of what is the moral responsibility of the church for a war that is already underway, unjustly or not? That's a somewhat different moral issue than the decision to go to war. I may attempt to examine that issue at a later time, but for now I'm trying to contrast the issue of the Iraq war and the issue of abortion as they were exploited in this election.

I think most of the people who cited the Iraq war as their most important issue in voting for Kerry, did so for what they would probably term moral reasons. I believe many religious leaders deliberately avoided addressing the Iraq war as a moral issue in this election for the reasons above. I also believe that many of those same religious leaders, and again, I can't cite specific cases or instances so this is mostly conjecture based on anecdotal accounts I've heard or read in the media, did choose to address abortion as a moral issue in this election. Abortion is a "safe" moral issue for religion because it only challenges a branch of government that can't be significantly threatened by the church - the Supreme Court. Justices are appointed for life, and their authority is enshrined in the constitution. The most religion can do is try to change the constitution. So the church is relatively free to attack the Supreme Court, and it provides a ready "bogeyman" or "scapegoat" to focus the wrath of the faithful.

This focus on abortion is good business for religion as well. As a moral issue, it probably doesn't attract as many people into church as war does; but it can, and has, inspired significant protest efforts and organization efforts. It has inspired extremist acts as well, which have been squelched by government authority through legislation, law enforcement and lawsuits. Yet it also seems to promote an unhealthy symbiotic relationship between elected political leaders and the church. Because the church can effectively mobilize and organize large numbers of voters to vote, to help get out the vote, and to contribute money, political leaders curry favor with religious leaders to leverage their moral authority, while religious leaders reciprocate the relationship to exploit their political authority. So, in my opinion, the net effect has been that abortion exists as a moral issue more for the purpose of concentrating and leveraging authority than it does for seeking to reduce evil or injustice in the world.

At another time I might examine the issue of gay marriage in the same context. But it should be relatively clear that gay marriage shares many of the same characteristics of abortion as a "safe" moral issue about which the church may appear to exhibit "moral" leadership.

So, what I'm saying is that the moral authority of religion has been, in my view, severely compromised by its efforts to seek additional secular authority in the form of wealth and political authority. I'm not an authority on Christianity by any means, but I believe Jesus recommended that those who would be religious leaders or authorities embrace poverty in order to preserve their moral integrity. I believe he also advocated "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's." Which, to me, is little more than the restatement of the doctrine of separation of church and state. And I believe this is for a very valid reason. If religion is to serve as the moral authority in the lives of the faithful, it has to be free to speak authoritatively on moral issues. When religion begins to get in bed with government for the purposes of increasing its secular authority (wealth and political influence), it compromises its moral authority, because it is no longer free to speak out clearly on moral issues.

So, in my opinion, the war was and remains a more serious moral issue than abortion. Religious leaders abdicated their responsibility for moral leadership on the question of war because their moral authority was compromised by their relationship with government. Yet they continued to try to exercise authority on moral issues that are advantageous to them in their efforts to promote their relationship with secular authorities. The exercise of authority without responsibility makes one an autocrat or a fraud. In neither case should we feel obliged to listen to such authority; and if some choose to, I don't think they should feel especially secure that they are making their political choices on a sound moral basis.

Morality of Control

One of the topics I'd like to see explored in the coming months is how the religious community, or communities of faith, (we need to come to some agreement on a vocabulary here, too) view the issue of abortion against another life-or-death issue like war.

My perception is that the some religious authorities view abortion as some intolerable evil that must be stopped, while war is some kind of tolerable evil that must be embraced from time to time. If that's a fair assessment, then let me outline my confusion. I believe war is a more urgent moral issue, one of greater moral weight than that of abortion. I find the organized and vehement opposition to abortion by the church to be incongruous with the, by comparison, deafening silence on the Iraq war.

In abortion, we usually have one person making a decision to terminate a pregnancy. Sometimes other people are involved, but ultimately the responsibility is usually that of the pregnant woman. Now, there are other issues of responsibility here as well, like that of the man who is responsible for impregnating the woman; but in terms of ending the pregnancy, which is the most morally objectionable act, it is ultimately the woman who gives the doctor consent to perform the abortion.

Religious people view this as the taking of a human life, and, as such, tantamount to premeditated murder. I don't know that I agree that a fetus is a human life, but I understand that religious people view it that way.

So, in abortion, we have one person taking one life. There are some number of thousands of abortions performed every year, and therefore an equal number of "murders" and "murderers." It seems fairly clear to me that the responsibility for those deaths lies squarely with the women who made the decision to seek an abortion. Again, some people may argue there are others responsible as well, but I think it's reasonable to argue that the greatest responsibility rests with the woman.

This is certainly a moral issue, and people of principle are obliged to act according to their principles. I think, in the main, most religious people have acted responsibly according to their principles on the moral issue of abortion. The same cannot be said, I think, on the moral issue of war.

War, of necessity, also involves the taking of human life, unambiguously human life. And not just the lives of combatants, it also takes the lives of noncombatants as well. There may be no intent to take the lives of noncombatants, but there is unquestionably the intent to deliver ordnance to achieve a military objective. Collateral damage is inevitable and unavoidable.

Not only do we have the taking of lives, we have grievous bodily injury as well and great physical suffering for many people. Then there is the emotional suffering of those who know and love the victims of war.

We also have the loss of lives of some of the soldiers we send to wage war, and their injuries and suffering and the suffering of their loved ones as well. And we have something else, something intangible yet nevertheless something that ought to be noted when we account for the "losses" of war. I think it's going too far to say it's a "loss of innocence," but when we send people to kill in our name, those that do so are burdened with something most of us will never have to bear. I think there's some moral responsibility for us there as well. Yes, I know all of those soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are volunteers; but they put their faith in us that we will place this burden on them in an unambiguously good and just cause. We have a responsibility to see to it that we do so.

Which brings me to the issue of responsibility. In abortion, one woman is responsible for the death of one fetus. In war, how do we apportion responsibility? It can't lie exclusively with the armed forces we send to wage war. Some of it must lie with the civilian leadership that made the decision to go to war. That civilian leadership derives its authority from us, the citizens. In war, I believe each citizen bears some responsibility for the decision to go to war, and for the death and suffering that results. One could argue that, in the case of abortion, we all share some responsibility for creating a permissive environment for a woman to obtain an abortion, but it seems to me that's a responsibility of a far different, less burdensome nature than the one we share for the decision to go to war.

It seems to me that in each abortion there is one responsible person and one notional "victim," and the responsible person had a choice. In war, there is shared responsibility among all citizens, and there are thousands of victims, perhaps into the millions if we include all those who suffer on this crowded planet. And who among all these people had a real, live, choice that could make their responsibility indelibly theirs? Presumably, our elected representatives would have a debate and take a vote to declare war. In our much more sophisticated times, that seems a quaint notion. Congress merely passes resolutions "authorizing" the president to take "whatever action he deems necessary," to effect the desired outcome.

Both abortion and war are issues of morality, to be sure. It seems to me that the issue of war is unquestionably a much more "morally" weighted issue. It seems to me that war is a much more demanding issue than abortion, in terms of grappling with it. It seems to me that any truly "moral" religion would treat those issues in that way. But it seems to me that is not what we have seen in our religious communities of late. I believe our religious leaders, who arrogate to themselves a claim to authority on matters of morality, have neglected their responsibilities when it comes to the moral issue of war. I use the word "responsibilities" deliberately, because with authority must come responsibility - or one doesn't have genuine authority, one is merely an autocrat or a fraud.

Now I will offer some speculation on why I believe this is the situation we find ourselves in today.

Religion and government are two classes of social organism. At the level of national governments and religious denominations, they are very large organisms. For a period of time in our history, at least in the west, religion and governments competed with one another for their position in the "pecking order" of authorities. That struggle is going on today in the middle east with religion seeking ascendancy over secular government. To some extent, that struggle is still going on in this country. At the moment, secular government is higher in the pecking order than religion. That is, government exercises more authority than religion, even to the extent that government can exercise its authority in a way to further reduce the authority of religion. How so? In any number of ways, but perhaps the one with the greatest potential to weaken the authority of the church would be revoking the tax-exempt status of churches. This would require churches to surrender some significant fraction of their wealth to government, and wealth is the most liquid form of authority. In addition, today we see churches working to receive wealth from government to offer social services in the form of "faith-based initiatives." Challenging the authority of government to wage war might jeopardize that opportunity as well.

So I believe religion recognizes it is at a competitive disadvantage with government, and therefore is careful to do nothing that would risk inviting reprisal from government by attempting to rival its authority. The authority to make war is, in this society, the exclusive province of government; and it is the ultimate authority of national sovereignty. While wealth may be the most liquid form of authority, violence is the most base; and when wealth won't work, violence is employed. Challenging the legitimacy of government's decision to exercise its ultimate form of authority, in effect challenging the authority of government to wage war, has the potential to reverse the pecking order, placing religion before government; something that government would find intolerable. It would respond to eliminate that challenge in whatever way it could.

In addition, war is not bad for religion. Suffering brings people to church. Fear and uncertainty cause the faithful to flock seeking succor and reassurance. Naturally, they also put contributions in the offering box.

Opposing abortion doesn't challenge the fundamental authority of government. Especially since only one branch of government is blamed for the scourge of abortion, the Supreme Court. It's the ideal bogeyman, because the justices are all appointed for life and change is slow and difficult to achieve. In a sad bit of irony, abortion is good business for religion as well.

So, those are some of my thoughts on why religion fails in its presumed responsibilities with respect to morality, at least with regard to the public policy issues of abortion and war. I'd be interested in hearing from knowledgeable and thoughtful people who may have something to say about this. The e-mail address is dave[underscore]rogers at-sign mac dot com. You can figure it out from the URL. Or you can reply in your own weblogs and just send me a pointer. I'll post the most interesting or worthwhile responses as I receive them.

One Item of Hope

Last night on The News Hour, there was a fascinating discussion between Gwen Eiffel and a number of people, at least two of which were leaders of some Christian groups that were unfamiliar to me. One was, I believe, Jim Wallis of Sojourners; and the other was Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church. There was also a woman author, and a Stanford academic who believes the "great divide is a myth" and there's a large "mushy middle" instead. I was less interested in what the latter two had to say, because it was fairly familiar material.

I gather Rick Warren is the figure behind this "purpose-driven life" publishing phenomenon. I've seen a lot of "purpose-driven" material at Books-a-Million, though I've never looked at any of it. My impression was that it was some sort of religious version of the Seven Habits franchise, but I didn't know. Still don't, in fact. I had never heard of Sojourners before in any context.

Of those two individuals, I found what Jim Wallis had to say more encouraging; though even Rick Warren seemed more reasonable and open-minded than my typical experience with evangelical Christians. It was only a relatively brief segment, though longer than most TV news shows as is the custom on the News Hour, so I'm not sure I want to draw any firm conclusions. But what I saw was somewhat encouraging to me. Jim Wallis made a point that there is a larger debate going on in Christian churches today about values and morality in a political context. In my experience, the only issues the "religious" part of the religious right are interested in are abortion, gay marriage (or the denial of civil rights to gays in general), prayer in school, teaching creationism in school, and the ten commandments and nativity scenes and other religious symbols in public buildings, with some interest in making divorce "more difficult." From their comments, my perception isn't that far off the mark; but apparently there are people of faith in these communities who are interested in wider issues of social justice, particularly with respect to poverty and war.

Rick Warren at first seemed kind of interested in crowing about the growing influence of churches, and took a gratuitous swipe at everybody's favorite whipping boy, "mainstream media;" though he later seemed to agree with Jim Wallis when Wallis started to raise the issue of concern within their community that there were important issues being neglected. And, near the end, it seemed as though both men were almost asking for an appeal by the Democratic party to turn to Christian churches for support on issues like poverty and other issues of social justice (though I'm sure the gay rights issue would be a huge problem), like the doctrine of preemptive war.

A number of things have discredited the role of churches in politics, for me. Among them has been the narrow focus on abortion and peripheral issues, which I listed before. Another has been the high-profile leadership roles of near-caricatures like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell; two people who I find to be unreasonable ideologues. I found Jim Wallis and Rick Warren, at least in this brief introduction, to be almost refreshing in their views. Finally, it has been the Christians' silence on the war, and tax and economic policies that facilitate the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very privileged few, that had convinced me that they were interested only in achieving political power for the purposes of imposing some sort of personal moral code on citizens.

I'd be interested in hearing more about this wider debate within the church or between churches. This segment and others in that edition of The News Hour also made the point that the Democratic Party had almost gone to extremes to exclude churches from any role in the party, almost to the point of making religious people feel unwelcome. It seemed as though Wallis and Warren were almost making an appeal to the Democratic party to approach them on these larger issues of social justice, and to engage with them in a dialog on issues related to personal responsibility (I gather that's code for "abortion," and "gay rights." I'm not sure.)

While I remain emphatically skeptical of the motives of many religious authorities, it seems to me that there is a significant vulnerability within the Republican party, which does remain the party that most protects the interests of the privileged, on issues like poverty and war. Perhaps this year wasn't the year for a real debate on the doctrine of preemptive war, because Kerry's record made him appear to be in favor of it. And it seems to me that now there are leaders within the community of faith who may be reasonable people and with whom leaders of the Democratic party might be able to find common cause, by which they might mitigate this near-monopoly the Republican party seems to have on "religious" or "moral" issues.

I think, in any event, the Democratic party is going to have to acknowledge the growth of religious influence in America, and engage with those leaders who will work with them, to shape the course of public policy. I am at least somewhat encouraged that there may be reasonable people out there who are interested in pursuing that dialog, and that they aren't exclusively in the pocket of the Republican party.

A Tip

There is little evidence to suggest there is any genuine mental health value in "catharsis." In fact, there is evidence that it makes things worse.

That is to say, if you're angry and you think that "venting" will help you get over your anger, it probably won't. It'll mostly likely just prolong it.

All things pass, even anger. There's nothing wrong with being angry, but there's nothing "wrong" with catching the flu either. If you're angry, do something you enjoy doing. Watch a favorite comedy. Exercise. Hug your kids. Enjoy the sunrise. Just sit and be still. It'll pass.

That's part of "the work."

I said it was hard!

There's that "dark cloud risin' from the desert floor"

Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be.

This is not a religious concept. It's merely a statement of the nature of suffering, the reason why we feel bad or sad or angry. It also suggests the answer to suffering, and that is to understand the nature of wanting. We have little power over the way things are. We have some power over what we want.

There's the story of the Chinese farmer that I've related several times. It's a story about a farmer who experiences a number of events in his life, and each is assessed to be either "good fortune" or "bad fortune" by his neighbors. The farmer's old father always cautions that it is perhaps not so, and each subsequent event seems to bear him out. No event exists in isolation to all other events, so no event can be said to be unequivocally "good" or "bad." We are all well advised when we are cautioned to "be careful what we wish for." It is a mistake to feel especially bad today, because we don't know how this will play out in time. And that's not a comment on recounts.

I would also say that those who were on the winning side of this question may wish to refrain from indulging in too much crowing. The less they do today, the less they may have to eat one day.

It is not a day to be angry. Anger comes from fear. We may be afraid of what this all means, and we may be afraid of what the future appears to look like now, but we have an antidote to that, and that's faith. Yes, we feel the fear, and we must acknowledge it. But we don't have to surrender to it. There are always reasons to have faith too. Right now, Republicans and the conservative right in America have a huge burden on their shoulders. I don't wish them failure, but I don't think what they believe will make them succeed either.

We should congratulate them on their victory. And we should work together with them where we share similar values and similar goals. But we shouldn't allow defeat to cow us. We shouldn't retreat into bitterness and recrimination. If anyone thought the campaign was hard work, they were wrong. The hard work begins now. And it begins inside each and every one of us who has a different view of America in the world than the one that seems ascendant now.

And, of course, the hardest work is the work we must do on ourselves. Each of us is an imperfect being, and to the extent that we devote our attention to the trivial accounts of successful tactics and strategic blunders, we squander a finite resource on something that has no meaning. That works to the advantage of the group, which requires large numbers of pliant minds, minds that don't know themselves, minds that can be easily led and manipulated. It elevates the roles of the "authorities" in the group. "Know thyself." If you want to "win" this fight, then "know thyself." Become the authority in your own life. "To thine own self be true." That's hard work.

It all comes down faith and fear. Love is faith in action, the first derivative of faith. Courage is love in action, the second derivative of faith. Have faith in yourself, have faith in one another. Turn that faith into action. Things will get better because you will get better.

It begins now.

Another Way of Looking at It

From Zen Speaks! Shouts of Nothingness

I'll Be Brief

I'm sure most of my longer pieces are boring as hell, and it isn't always clear what the hell I'm talking about.

What I would most like to convey is that we all need to take to heart Thales' admonition to, "Know thyself." And with that knowledge, then realize Gandhi's insight: "You must become the change you wish to see in the world."

There are a lot of good people in the world who want to "change the world," for the better. In order to do so, they struggle against "powers" and try to amass "power" of their own. This notion of "power" is incorrect and misleading. All "power" really is, is authority.

If we don't "know ourselves," then we can't exercise authority over ourselves. Only if we know who we are, what we are, how we behave and why we behave the way we do, can we begin to try to exercise the kind of authority over ourselves that we think we would like to exercise over others. And if we have authority over ourselves, we are less vulnerable to the reckless or feckless exercise of authority by others.

I see a lot of people signing up for "the pledge" in the "blogosphere." It's a noble sentiment and a worthwhile idea; but without self-knowledge, without being an authority on oneself, it will be an exercise in futility. Even with self-knowledge, as imperfect as that always is, achieving real change is difficult.

In the end, we have almost no power over the events life puts before us. Most of our struggles and conflicts are about trying to control events, something we have the least ability to achieve. Complex, "emergent" phenomena usually defy the intentions of individuals. Exhibit A: Iraq.

What we do have some small power to achieve, is the power to choose what face we will present to the events life puts before us. We will present one of two faces: one of faith, or one of fear. One affirms, the other denies. One engages, the other withdraws. One grows, the other shrinks. If we pay attention to the struggle to "know ourselves," we may develop enough authority, enough "power" to choose faith over fear.

Our challenge is not to change "the world." Our challenge is to change just ourselves. This is not to say to ignore the world and retreat to a kind of navel-gazing isolation. Quite the contrary. It is only by engaging the world that we can begin to learn about ourselves, and in that process, with that knowledge, begin to change ourselves. The world will always be the world. It is here in order that we may have the means to learn, and the incentive to change.

That's more than I meant to write. And it's probably still not clear, let alone succinct. But it'll do for now.

Smoke-Test

My little effort at hardware hacking ended in failure. Apparently, those component ratings actually mean something. I knew this, of course, but I kind of hoped I could skate by for a while anyway. I got the connections soldered together at work yesterday, and tested it on my iBook. It worked great, though the ball wasn't quite as visible in daylight as I'd have liked. You could definitely tell the difference if you unplugged it and it went dark, but if you were just looking at it without knowing it was illuminated, you probably wouldn't know. In a slightly darker environment, it looked very cool.

Well, I got it home and hooked it up to my keyboard USB port and the LED came up very dim, brightened considerably and then went dark. The LED didn't actually "smoke" which is the condition one hopes to avoid in a smoke-test, but it failed. I'm not exactly sure what happens in a solid-state device like an LED, but it doesn't work anymore.

So, the next thing to do is to either find a bright LED that'll handle 5vdc, or wire up an adequate amount of electrical resistance to drop the voltage to 3.8vdc. Dan Bowman even did the math for me and dropped me a note with a couple of suggestions for getting the voltage down to the rated value, which was pretty cool.

Election Day

I voted.