A 16 Hour Work Day?

There’s a new drug on the horizon that could eliminate sleepiness, courtesy of DARPA. Like so much of what is around us, it’s a Pentagon application that may make its way into our daily lives.

In a trial with monkeys, some who were sleep deprived for 30-36 hours were administered orexin A, and performed on the same level as well-rested monkeys.

The subtleties are way too obvious.

Our Mutual Aid Society

We were in Wendy’s the other day – the place was almost empty, and as we approached the cash register, a man appeared on my left. He had that depraved look of a lost cause – sunken eyes, ragged clothing, stooped posture. He asked me for money. My initial reaction was to avert my eyes. We ordered my food, and I collected my change, and then I went over and gave him some money.

Whadda guy, eh? My initial reaction bothers me. But I suppose I’m like everyone else, secure in my little nest. And he did take me by surprise.

Some would say I was wrong to give him money. I know what he’s going to do with it – he’s either going to buy some food, or some liquor. Food first, but by midnight of that day I know he’ll be passed out in an alley. In the not-too-distant future, he’ll turn up dead.

There exists in conservatism a strain of social Darwinism. They deny it. If someone says to me one more time “teach a man to fish…”, I’m going to get physical. There are lost causes on this planet. They only need comfort – food, shelter, the warmth of human compassion. We can do no more for them. Maybe they’ll come out of it, but what if they don’t? Is it so wrong just to give them shelter for one night without pestering them about Jesus? Is that a bad use of public funds?

But the Darwinism operates on a higher level than the pitiful poor. In the conservatives’ mind eye view, all of us are working away on a ladder, all of us are upward bound. To reach down and help anyone below us is wrong, as it robs them of incentive. To reach up and take anything from up above is wrong, as it punishes success.

It’s ice cold, heartless. And it’s wrong. We’re not like that. We are connected, each to one another, by a firm hand grip. Some, like George W. Bush, are born high up, and very dependent on the hand up. He’s been bailed out of trouble more times than Paris Hilton. But he removes his own hand from those below. His dad was the same way, scarred by lavish inheritance, a sense of entitlement and mythical achievement. As Jim Hightower so famously said of W, he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

It’s that sense of entitlement that bothers me, the idea that we should never involuntarily offer a hand down. Conservatives have a misshapen view of the privileged classes, that they will extend the necessary generosity to bring the lower classes along. And if they don’t, well, that’s how it works. If a man turns up dead in an alley, well, it’s probably best he never reproduced.

In the view of most of us, we’re all in it together. We can all use a break, whether it is help putting food on the table in hard times, or overcoming unaffordable illness. The best solution for most of us is education and job training. Private charity will never provide enough to help those who can use the help, because too many of the wealthy are like George W. Bush – “I’ve got mine. Screw you.”

Yes, there will be those who form a sense of entitlement to public resources. But they will be a minority. We should not all be punished for a few miscreants. Most people want to be self-sufficient, and only need help overcoming the early hurdles. So we eliminate some of them.

In other industrialized countries there is a much higher degree of public service to one another, and these countries have healthy economies, but more than that, happier people. In various measures of happiness, like this one, countries like Denmark, Canada and Sweden consistently outscore the U.S. Here we are tempered to hard-boiled competition, and can be wiped out by medical hardship. Our kids go deeply in debt to get an education and are chained to the wheel when they leave school by the need to service that debt. It’s a constant strain. We are hyper-busy, irritable, strained and insecure. We work harder, take fewer vacations, and have fewer public benefits. For all of those reasons, we Americans are very good employees.

How much better, how much more sensible, to use our resources for mutual aid. Conservatives say that no one should ever be forced to help another. But most of us recognize a duty, and see the tax system is the most efficient way to do it. Private charity, while important, is too small and selective to be as useful.

There are those among us who recognize no duty to one another, have no sense of fellowship, who want only to live in splendid isolation. They collect the bounty of all our labors and pretend that they created it. They are the strident voice of selfishness. They need to be dragged along, kicking and screaming, into humanity. Otherwise, they are safely ignored.

Greenwald on Tim Russert

From Glenn Greenwald’s 12/26/07 column at Salon.com, listing some of his favorite quotes of 2007:

“When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it’s my own policy — our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission” –Tim Russert, under oath at the Lewis Libby trial, citing the textbook function of a government propagandist to explain his role as a “journalist.”

“I suggested we put the vice president on ‘Meet the Press,’ which was a tactic we often used. It’s our best format,” as it allows us to “control the message” — Cheney media aide Cathie Martin, under oath at the Libby trial, making clear how well Russert fulfills his function.

John McCain’s Christmas Card

Touching. Very touching. John McCain says he was “mistreated” by a guard. I’m sickened and shocked, and I cry out for justice. But not for McCain. I want us just once to pay heed to that small voice deep inside us – we must have a collective conscience. We must know this stuff on some level!

John McCain was shot down while bombing civilians and their infrastructure in North Vietnam. He was violating the Geneva Conventions. The North Vietnamese could have hanged him and still have stood two rungs above him on the moral ladder. At least two.

Yet he’s a hero in America, and an example for our kids. God I love this country.

Let Them Eat Twinkies?

I ran across these words again today – they are worth repeating. In another time, when the media was not so forgiving of (or intimidated by) power, these words would be on banners and book covers as a classic example of a woman so removed from reality that she cannot begin to feel the pain of ordinary people. Is it any wonder her son exhibits indifference to the lower classes (like those who fight and die in Iraq)?

Anyway, we need to be reminded of who raised our president. From an interview with Diane Sawyer, here is Barbara Bush on why she would not be watching television coverage of the attack on Iraq:

Why should be hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

She must be of two minds. I’m yet to see the beautiful one.

Dammit

It seems like every other day, there’s a piece of news from the Middle East that makes me sick to my stomach.

This is today’s dose.  Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan this morning.

Whatever your take on Bhutto’s past, it was, in my mind, inspiring to see a female leader in the Middle East who inspired so many followers.  This was the risk she ran by doing so, and she knew it. 

We can at least take comfort in the fact that she’s now a martyr for her cause, and the backlash against this assassination will probably be pretty intense.  Let’s hope something good comes out of this.

Some Seemingly Good News

Has Global warming stopped? The earth’s temperatures have held steady since 2001, says a veteran science writer, a pattern that raises questions about intense efforts underway to stem the impacts of greenhouse gases.

What is indisputable, says David Whitehouse on the web site of the New Statesman, a generally left-leaning British weekly, is that the amount of gases such as carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has been increasing steadily for decades as humans burn more fossil fuels. Scientists believe these gases absorb outgoing infrared radiation from the earth’s surface, causing heat to be retained. In principle, it produces the greenhouse effect that is the fundamental theory of global warming.

The above quote is taken from today’s Wall Street Journal, page B8. The Journal is a generally right-leaning American publication. I feel compelled to identify its philosophical slant, as the Journal does with the New Statesman. This is just an aside – I think it’s odd that there is a tendency to identify publications and politicians as “left-leaning” in today’s media. It’s generally a warning to readers” “Don’t believe what you are about to read (or hear).” The compunction to do the same for right wing publications and people is barely noticeable. I think our media is generally right wing. That’s an aside.

But the journal article above felt the need to identify the philosophical slant because of the subject matter – global warming. If a left-wing publication is doubting, so must the doubt be universal, so can we all relax.

For myself, I’ve worried my share about warming, but have reluctantly concluded that we can’t do much about it in two ways – we don’t have the political will, and we don’t have the technical skills. So when I read that temperatures leveled in 2001 and have been steady since, I am somewhat relieved.

This is the key to denial, by the way. ExxonMobil has always had an easy task in creating doubt about warming. They are telling people what they want to hear. Al Gore’s task has been much harder. He deserves that Nobel if, for no other reason, it is given in recognition that he is a Munchkin fighting giants, and having success.

But I take heart at this news, that warming seems to have steadied. It says that we don’t understand climate yet, that we are at best making educated guesses. With that humility in mind, we are still wise to act as if the problem were real. It may well be.

But it is encouraging.

From the Leanin’ Tree

Good grief! It’s Christmas day, and we sit here in a mountain home surrounded by conifers, and it’s snowing. The whole scene is a Leanin’ Tree Christmas card. We’ll be around relatives and over-excited kids today, and I think back to the days when my own kids were up at 5AM jumping with excitement. In Billings, where the kids grew up, there was a guy who used to take his helicopter and fly a lit-up Santa sled with reindeer across the rimrocks north of town on Christmas Eve. We would go to evening mass (a hangover from my own childhood), and then tour the city looking at lights. But seeing Santa’s sled was the key – it meant that the kids had to get home and get to sleep so that he could come visit.

They figured that out soon enough, but it had charm. I wonder if he still does that. Not Santa – the helicopter guy.

Anyway, I often write about religion here – I don’t much care for it. Christians have coopted the winter solstice, and now maintain that it isn’t a real Christmas unless you also worship. Without Jesus, they say, it’s just a materialist orgy. It is that, for sure, but long before there was a Jesus, when it was deep winter and the fields could not be worked, when people were stuck in their huts for untold hours of darkness, they began to celebrate that date when the days would start getting longer. I too like that idea – Christmas is a sign that it’s only 65 days or so now until pitchers and catchers report to the practice fields in Arizona and Florida.

It’s a time for sharing our bounty and talents, for families to gather. I wish I was with my own kids today – they are scattered all over and each decided this year to stay in place. None of them are churchers, but when they get together, they are oddly like every other family, and their Christmas memories are just as pure as anyone’s.

So, from one who loves this pagan ritual to all of you who come here to, I hope, be entertained, Merry Solstice, and many more.

Google Knows All

I’m no expert on this whole blogging thing.  I mostly just sit back and let WordPress do the work.  But I do like to peruse the “Blog Stats” page from time to time.  It’s always good to know who’s linking to us and what are traffic numbers are. 

In addition to being able to find out those types of things, WordPress also has something called “Search Engine Terms.”  It lets us know what people happened to be searching for if they run accross our blog through that avenue. 

This is the good part:  today’s lone search engine term was the following:

Alcohol and boredom

How in God’s name did Google know what this blog was about?  It’s one of those things that goes without saying… but Google KNEW.

Google KNEW.

Good People, Bad Groups

The primitive mind endows the world with agents, and makes a god or gods the cause of events which affect man. (Joan Symington)

God allowed Katrina to happen to bring attention to lack of preparation for terrorist attack. (Charles Colson)

The discussion down below regarding Huckabee’s sublime appeal to right wing Christian voters reminded me that religion is a powerful force in our lives, and that no amount of reasoning will overcome it. We nonbelievers will always be a minority. But as I implied down in the comments, the job of leadership requires a realistic sense of how the world really operates. For that reason, I suspect that most of our presidents have been either atheist or agnostic, or at least indifferent to Sunday preachers.

The question of evil underlies every debate on religion. The presumption on the believers’ side is that religion is a counterbalancing force to evil, that we are involved in a battle between light and dark. So sayeth the Bible, Pat Robertson, and Star Wars. But it doesn’t take much research to uncover how religion itself has been co-opted into doing evil.

It’s no surprise. Most people are good because good is its own reward. Most people are kind and generous. As individuals, humans have immense capacity for goodwill and benevolence. But as a group, humans can be truly ugly. I’ve often wondered about this – how our capacity for evil manifests in our group behavior. George W. Bush loves his family, will pray over a Christmas turkey, and unleash horrible violence on the Iraqi people. Hannah Arendt referred to it as the “banality of evil”, how kind and caring and generous people become cogs in larger machines that do evil.

I suspect it has to do with a couple of things – one, that human leaders are not chosen, but choose themselves. A person has to want power to achieve power. The very fact that a person wants to be president ought to disqualify him from that office. But that’s now how it works. In the end, we are led by people who are hungry for power. The trilogy of the ring was an illustration of the lure of power, and how power corrupts us. Perhaps our greatest president, George Washington, didn’t want the job. That’s what made him great. He chose not to be king. That quality is extremely rare.

Our inhumanity percolates up into our group behavior. Suppose I have within me a small lust – a dislike of Muslims or blacks – alone I won’t express my inner feelings. But if there are many like me, our groups will give voice to those impulses. The Ku Klux Klan is a perfect example – men hiding under hoods, their anonymity allowing them to express ugly sentiments toward their black brothers and sisters.

So it follows that our leaders can lock into our individual prejudices, and use them to foster our anger and enlist our support in attacking other countries. They create archetypes for us, objects of hatred like Saddam Hussein or Osama. With that object in place, our national hatred is set free, and insanity and violence ensue.

But there’s a counterbalance to this – there are organizations through which our good impulses are expressed. The United Nations is one, as is just about every charity I have ever encountered. The UN operates on a large scale, and though it lacks the power of the United States, it has on occasion counterbalanced the evil that comes from our leadership. It tried to do so before we invaded Iraq, but just didn’t have enough.

Most religious organizations embody individual charitable impulses. Most churches do good work. But this animal called the “Christian Right” is not such a body. Like fundamentalist Muslim extremists, the Christian Right calls upon us to hate other people and invade other countries. Clever leaders have seen their numbers, and have enlisted them in their power quests. The Christian Right gives expression of the evil that lurks in our hearts. As such, we need to call upon the good within us to expel them from our leadership. They are truly dangerous.