The Return of John McCain

His concession speech tonight echoes the comments he made on Saturday Night Live: The Mac is back!  This is the man of honor and integrity who pushes through adversity with honor and integrity and takes responsibility for his actions that I thought was a much better candidate than George Walker Bush back in 2000. He deserves our respect for making the effort to remind people tonight that Senator President Elect Obama is the president of all of us, and that his supporters need to get behind him.

"I would not be a an American worthy of the name should I regret a fate that has allowed me the extraordinary privilege for serving the country for half a century.... Tonight, I remain her servant, and that is blessing enough for any one".

Closing by calling Obama "my President:" was a great touch.

Kudos to the old John McCain. Candidate McCain of the last 3 months can now slink quietly back go to hell.

Heartfelt Condolences

To Senator Obama on the loss of his grandmother the night before he will likely be elected the President of the United States of America. I don't have the words to express how sad it is for him that the woman who raised him for so many of his years did not live to be able to express to him her pride in his accomplishments.

In some ways, her passing gives we, the people of this great nation, a chance to sit back and reflect on who exactly it is that has taught this man to be the man and the candidate that he is. I think Mr. Coates says it best here:

Likewise, I was looking at this picture of Obama's grandparents and thinking how much he looks like his grandfather. And suddenly, for whatever reason, I was struck by the fact that they had made the decision to love their daughter, no matter what, and love their grandson, no matter what. I'd bet money that they never even thought of themselves as courageous, that they didn't give much thought to the broader struggles in the the world at the time. They were just doing what right, honorable people do. But the fact is that, in the 60s, you could be disowned for falling in love with a black woman or black man....

Let us remember that Barack Obama learned the great lessons of life from courageous white people. Let us speak of those who do what normal, right people should always do when faced with a child--commit an act love. Here's to doing the right thing.

My House is not the one in the Middle of The Street

How timely can an album be, really? When singer-songwriter Cantinero dropped his latest album, I can't imagine he knew that the work he'd done over the course of a year would resonate so well with the elections of 2008.

He's been posting the relevant ones here on the Huffington Post's "rapid response" site 23/6. The latest is a good reminder that as the closing argument against Senator Obama is that he's an out-of-touch elitist with Marxist tendencies, that Senator McCain lives in many glass houses.

No Mo NanoWriMo

Sorry for the title. It was too hard to resist.

Another November 1st has arrived, and another year of not taking on NaNoWriMo.

It's just the more realistic thing to do. Maybe in 2 years, when all the kids are in school, it will be a possibility. Until then, I will watch my friends take on the challenge and cheer them on. Best of luck to you, Childhood Bud!

The Prosecution's Opening Arguments

I have read reviews of Mr. Bugliosi's book () that lead me to believe that book is worth a read. But given that the [alleged--Ed.] opposition party has declared that they will not pursue any form of prosecution (civil or criminal) of this administration and their high crimes and misdemeanors, I hadn't really pursued it much.

So, it was quite a shock to hear him give this presentation:



I think I might have to give the offices of Senator Clinton and Schumer a call tomorrow.

Too much blood on my hands

Is it really fair that we the men and women of our armed forces go to a foreign land and fight for us, but yet don't provide them the care they need when they return home?

I don't think so. I admit though that even though I've been trying to keep up with information on veterans and the small things that I can do to help, I was shocked to see these numbers:

The VA estimates that every year 6,500 veterans take their own lives. The mental health director for the VA, Ira Katz, said in an e-mail last December that of the 18 veterans who commit suicide each day, four to five of them are under VA care, and 12,000 veterans under VA care are attempting suicide each year.

18 people a day in the United States take their own lives as a direct result of doing what they believed to be their duty to God and country. I cannot account for God, but the tiny fraction of country that I represent just got a wake up call that I need to do more. I am not sure what that is. But I have to do something.

digg story

21 Days Later

I have this evening realized another failure of character on my part.

Being one of those who do believe that an serious pandemic influenza outbreak is on the horizon, as I read this article, I kept finding myself stumbling over something that I realize says more about me than the subject matter. This MedGuru article on a successful trial of a new flu vaccine targeted at the dreaded H5N1 strain of influenza details some good news on the preparatory work that the world of medicine is doing to mitigate the impact a pandemic would have. But, I must admit: it never occurred to me that they would be doing human trials so soon. I found myself stumbling over the term "volunteers":

The vaccine uses a clade 1 strain of H5N1 virus. Total 284 volunteers, aged 18-45 years were administered this vaccine, twice, with a gap of 21 days with and without adjuvant. The trials were conducted in Austria and Singapore.

Now, those who know about the recent work done to better understand flu pandemic of 1918 know that scientists have discovered that those most affected by the virus were healthy people between the age of 18 and 45. To know full well that scientists have compared H5N1 to the Spanish Flu in it's morbidity rate amongst healthier victims, and to then sign up to take 2 injections of (granted, a killed strain) of this virus separated by 21 days of monitoring requires a certain kind of bravery that I sadly don't think I am in possession of.

I would like to personally thank those 248 people and the folks working in the BHL-3 lab with live strains of H5N1 for taking the risks required to save the millions who might be saved should this vaccine prove safe and effective.

Now, before you go posting a comment decrying my use of the phrase "millions" above, let me point you to someone who has written more eloquently than I on the subject of what information is out there about the coming plague and how we all process it. This blogger, focused on the issue of the pandemic, has broken it down quite succinctly in the title of her post: We all make choices.

As she points out, the information is out there. There was news on the subject almost daily when the outbreaks in Asia were coming fast and furious. And now, the information is still there, but the impact of it is deadened by the fact that in reality, it is nearly impossible to determine how bad the outbreak could be until it starts happening. And, as she points out, "we don't know if H5N1 will cause the next pandemic (it may be some other pathogen)". So, in the face of all that uncertainty, yes, it is quite possible to think that those of us, like your humble correspondent, who keep an eye out for news on the subject are just wacko "Flubies". But I don't think we are. I would rather think that we are according to nature all of the respect she is due. And have chosen to be afraid. Very afraid. Yet optimistic.

As David said best in Psalm 139:14: "... I am fearfully and wonderfully made..."

Dirty Pretty Things

This blog is called "Random Musings", so in keeping with the rubric, I am required to bring your attention to this bit of somewhat old, but apparently still valid news:

At elementary schools, kindergartens, and preschools all across Japan, kids are losing themselves making hikaru dorodango, or balls of mud that shine.

As a mediative adult hobby, it sounds worth exploring. It is probably still too early to start our children on it. Maybe in another year or so. Then again, making objects of beauty out of mud resonates with anyone's beliefs about creation.

And the instructions seem simple enough.

On second thought, maybe I will try this out soon.

Tag Nabbit...

I have so far survived being "tagged". Today that changed, courtesy of Emily (who I am sure has more than two readers).

So, following said instructions, I offer up this from JG Ballard's War Fever, which was sitting in the box next to my desk:

Even so, I have to be careful not to give the game away. I maintain a reasonably kempt appearance, wave from the upstairs windows at Mrs. Johnson and gesture apologetically at the overgrown lawn. She understands -- I have been abandoned by my wife, condemned to the despair of a womanless world.

I won't name names with regards to tagging. But if anyone who reads this has a blog of their own (and you don't make your saving throw), then leave a comment and let me know you've taken up the tag.

Listen Up

Cantinero has published a new post on the HuffingtonPost spin-off 23/6, and with it an new song that captures the current vibe of the Clinton campaign with laser precision.

If it makes the front page of Digg, I can imagine that the conversation about it will be lively, which is why I'm posting the link to the Digg page as well as the directl link to the 236.com page.

A word about terminology here: Normally, I'd cringe at referring to the first viable female candidate for the Oval Office as Little Princess. But since Cantinero is a British fellow and the Brits (like much of the developed world) have a long history of women rulers, I am sure that this is not a sexist slam, but instead a targeted critique of the "funny thing that happened in the way to the inevitable nomination of HRC"

read more | digg story

A Good Cause

As a fan of genre movies, one of the most biting statements I use about a film is to say "that money could have been better spent". But being one who judges movies on how well they do in their genre, and don't hold them up to some gold standard in a completely unrelated area (say comparing Doomsday to Blow-Up to name two films I've seen recently) There aren't very many films I say this about. One that comes to mind most readily is House of the Dead. It was a complete abomination of a film, and I am not saying that about the zombies in the film, I'm talking about the film itself.

At first I thought that the director had a bad script. That maybe the budget ran out during filming and they had to pull some Plan 9 from Outer Space-like actor swaps mid-stream. Then after casting about for a reason that such a monstrosity could exist in the known universe, I discovered the cause: Dr. Uwe Boll. Please don't let the sedate Wikipedia entry fool you: I believe that the man's not quite right. (What other film directors have actually challenged their critics to boxing matches?)

This week, Slashdot and Digg reported the story that Boll has declared that should 1 million people sign a petition, he'll stop making films. Since then, he seems to be characteristically waffling, as Wired reports here. The serious note behind all this is that because of some tax incentives to encourage local film production (his films are financed in Germany), Boll can continue to make films that never do well in the theaters or on DVD and not get fiscally penalized for it.

So the German taxpayers are getting the shaft here, and lesser directors without the kinds of financial connections that Boll has are left out. Granted, there are some who do benefit from it (the crews and actors that he hires) but as this Slashdot comment points out, that's not enough:

As someone who actually works in the film industry, I'm not too quick to complain, since all of his films generally result in people working....

But on the other hand, his films are some of the most cynically exploitive junk you've ever seen. He uses a provision in the German tax code to get tax credits and free money, and uses those to bootstrap foreign distribution pre-sales and video-game tie in deals. In effect, he's made money before he even starts rolling the camera, and so the quality of his film itself is irrelevant as long as it cuts a good trailer, will have a good poster, and has enough "bankable" stars in the project to stimulate box office. It's essentially the Roger Corman model, just without the class and punk authenticity.

That's just wrong. And so I urge you, gentle reader, to take the time and sign the petition here.

Bravo: Lifetime lands the Runway

So, after years of toiling to produce some of the best reality programming for the fashionistas of the world, the Weinstein company's Project Runway will finally be moving from the Bravo network to Lifetime.

I still think that it should replace The Apprentice in that time slot since it's actually an interesting show (not that I watched last season, mind you, I am on a reduced intake diet of television)

Well, all this will happen if NBC's law suit to stop it gets decided in the brother's Weinstein's favor, that is:

The suit asserts Harvey Weinstein, the chief executive of the Weinstein Company, promised NBC that it would have an opportunity to match any offer to the rights of “Project Runway” and that instead, Mr. Weinstein concluded a deal with Lifetime on Feb. 7, even though he continued to negotiate with NBC Universal for two more months.

In a statement, NBC said “NBC Universal has continuing rights related to ‘Project Runway,’ including a right of first refusal to future cycles of the series, which the Weinstein Company unfortunately has refused to honor.”

My (obligatory) response to this is to say that in network programming, NBC: sometimes you're in. And then, you're out.

The Wages of War

No matter what you thought about whether we should have gone into Iraq or not, at this point, it has become clear that the cost of the war in lives and dollars has exceeded any of the estimates given by the architects of the conflict.

Specifically, with the number of US war dead over 4,000 and the number of wounded a factor of 10 greater than that, it is time for our nation to start thinking about how we are all going to pitch in to help the families of those who went to fight. Unfortunately, each day that these brave men and women continue to spend in Iraq reduces our nation's ability to provide them with the types of benefits that they will need to be able to recover any semblance of normalcy in their lives upon their return home.

Robert Reich touched upon this tangentially in his most recent post on his blog. Not only are we damaging our ability to provide for our soldiers, we are also losing our ability to provide for those they left behind. Dr. Reich's analysis is short and to the point:

The war is a terribly inefficient stimulus to the US economy. A dollar spent on repairing a bridge in Iraq doesn’t have nearly the multiplier effect on our economy as a dollar spent repairing a bridge here in the United States.

More to the point – and here’s what Americans need to understand – a dollar spent in Iraq is a dollar we do not have to spend here, not only repairing our own bridges, roads, and water and sewage systems, but also giving Americans access to health insurance and children access to good schools, fully funding Social Security and Medicare, investing adequately in non-carbon based energy sources and green technologies, and borrowing less from abroad. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the real economic cost of the Iraqi War doesn’t show up in the business cycle, and it's not responsible for the current recession. The real economic cost will show up years from now in a standard of living that for most Americans will be significantly lower than we might otherwise have enjoyed.

That's for those of us not dealing with a life-changing wound received in the line of fire. And those of us not dealing with the tragic loss of a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, a father or a mother to the chaos that is the "Iraqi theater of operations".

So what can you or I do about it? First, check this list and go and find out if your state's senators and congress folk have signed on to support the new GI Bill by clicking here.

Then go take a look at some of the stories shared by the soldiers at the IAVA web site.




They've earned it.

On the Governor

This song by The Frames best sums up how I'm feeling:

FRAMES lyrics

No surprise here...

I took this online quiz a while ago, and hadn't posted the results.

Given that my choice for Democratic Party nominee might be viewed as some as showing a particular gender bias, I submit this now to establish my bona fides...

The link to take the test yourself is at the bottom.

You Are 98% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

Notes on some music

On Friday, I got upstairs to my office a few minutes later than I should have because I had to sit and listen to the rest of The Last Town Chorus's version of Modern Love. If you've not heard it, you can listen and watch the music video on YouTube here. I never knew this song of Bowie's would benefit so much from some steel guitar, but it does.

Elizabeth and I have this running joke that Norah Jones' sole claim to fame is that she can sing anyone's song slower than the original artist can. At first blush, this rendition brings one close to that, but something about the delivery keeps it from being lame.

Another album for me to buy, thanks to the wonderful South By Southwest festival bit torrent file. You can get your copy by following the link.

The Magical Fruit

This flash "game" is just too random and fun.

[Thanks Digg, for pointing Eliel this way--Ed.]

Technorati Tags: Random Musing

Better Never Late

On July 8th, The New York Times finally published an editorial piece that unequivocally calls for US withdrawal from the war. It can be found here. I agree with their detailed analysis of what needs to be done and the risks involved. But it is the right thing to do.

The only bone I have to pick with them is from this passage snuck in after declaring that it's time to withdraw:

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

They mean "many Americans" for ever-decreasing values of "many" by my understanding. Here's an article from almost two years ago that shows what I mean:

Right now, the polls suggest a similar move. 13% want us to send more troops (the McCain position), 28% want us to muddle on as we are now, 23% want us to withdraw some of our boys, and 33% want a full pullout. For those keeping score at home, that means 41% want to continue this fight and 56% want to end it. [With "right now" being August 25th, 2005--Ed.]

Literary Theory and Software design

Some wonder how the 'twain came to meet for me. I used to joke that both computers and cultures both need programming, so there you go.

Now, a new book (reviewed here) has appeared that puts into better terms that notion:

This concept of 'process expression' is, he says, a common thread running through the various disciplines of computer science. "A logic circuit is an expression of a logical process; an architecture is an expression of a continuously acting process to interpret symbolically expressed processes; a program is a symbolic expression of a process; a programming language is an environment within which to create symbolic process expression; a compiler is an expression of a process that translates between symbolic process expressions in different languages; an operating system is an expression of a process that manages the interpretation of other process expressions; any application is an expression of the application process."

It does not take much work to replace those pairs of concepts with equivalent cultural components: architecture becomes language, a program becomes a signifier or ritual, a programming language a culture, etc.

Serendipity

[From 6/26/07--Ed]

So last night, I stayed up later that I should reading the exciting climax to the first full-fledged Science Fiction book I've read in a long time. [A review of which can be found on Eliel's Book Blog here--Ed]

And lo and behold, I go to do a search on Google, and my quotation block has this gem from George Carlin on it

If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

How random is that? Sometimes I wonder whether I am the recipient of a special extra lifetime supply of synchronicity, or whether in my desire to know more about the world around me, I expose myself to enough stuff from different area that the coincidental repetition of themes seems like Something Else™

An energy solution that's not corny

I am not a fan of corn-based ethanol. I think the "ethanol cure" to dependence on foreign oil is a sham of a hoax being perpetrated on the public by the farm lobby. As you can see from the two sides presented in this NCPA article, agribusiness folks are sold on the value of ethanol, while a cui bono-asking policy-analyst's distillation of the issue leaves them unconvinced.

The bottom line is that ethanol requires petroleum fuels to produce and transport. And by some measures, it requires more energy to make than it produces when burned in an internal combustion engine. And if you were to take away the farm subsidies, the cost of it would be greater than that of some of other alternative sources of energy.

So I am very happy to hear about a solution to the energy problem that still uses plant fuel but does so in a smarter way. This brief Scientific American article describes the process:

A recipe for fuel: take the carbohydrates like starch and cellulose that make up the majority of plants. Use enzymes to break them down into fructose, the sugar found in fruits and honey. Mix this fructose with salt water and hydrochloric acid. Add a solvent—in this case butanol also derived from plant matter—to protect the resulting hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) from reacting with the water, then extract it. This versatile molecule can be used to create plastic polymers or other chemicals. And by the way, adding a copper-coated ruthenium catalyst can also convert the HMF to DMF (2,5-dimethylfuran), a fuel that provides more energy than ethanol.

So, here's a potential fuel that's more stable than ethanol (which means lower transport costs as it could be shipped via pipeline, unlike ethanol), made from crops and providing more power per unit of measure than ethanol. That's a win.

Another plus to this research is the careful approach that the developers of this technology are using. Cognizant of the MTBE fiasco, they are moving cautiously and want to evaluate the environmental impact of their product before producing it in quantity. Nice move.

Technorati Tags: Nature, Politics

A curvy necked stalker...

As I sit here on the lawn updating the old blog, [Naturally, Eliel is sans camera--Ed], there's a beautiful specimen of Great Blue Heron strolling around our pond.

I imagine it's hunting frog for dinner.

Our pond can spare some, so I wish this bird some happy eating.

Piggy banks for Pain

An interesting article from a member of the Cato Institute on Medical Savings Accounts and their effect on his own recent need for urgent care. As usual, I am almost sold on the Libertarian agenda here. The shortcoming for me of mandating MSA's for everyone is the very issue that the author brings up but brushes aside: not everyone knows how to negotiate the best deal in health care. And in his case, he did not need emergency care, just urgent care. I am pretty sure if I were in pain, I wouldn't take the time to price shop. I guess like his friend the marine, I too am a wimp.

Caught a Bug....

A virus.

A music virus.

I got it from my Childhood Bud. He said

But I'm not going to be the only one stuck with this song in my head.

and he wasn't kidding.

So here I am, instead of being asleep, I am placing an order for the album Back to Black - Amy Winehouse, on which that forsaken hellspawn of a catchy song appears.

For those of you curious about how Ms. Winehouse's live performance compares to her studio work, it does so favourably as this YouTube video of the same song shows.

Truth and Reconciliation

Imagine a press conference on the lawn of the White House where the President of the United States stands up and says the following:

Yes, my position on fighting in Iraq has turned 180 degrees from four years ago. I thought then that fighting in Iraq was the best way to defeat Islamist terrorism. After four years of observing it, and its actual empowerment of Islamist terrorism, I've changed my mind.

It seems that this will never happen. But it has for self-avowed small-c conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. If you are not a regular reader of the Daily Dish, I recommend you become one.

Mr. Sullivan ends his posting (titled Busted) with a most compelling quotation that I wish someone from the White House press corp would ask the President at their next opportunity:

But as Keynes said, "When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?"

Technorati Tags: Politics

Nutopia

Meg Lee Chin's song Nutopia (which I got as part of the huge bittorrent file published by the SXSW festival organizers in 2005) is one of those songs that I don't listen to very often any more [Let's just say it went through a period of "high rotation" when Eliel first discovered it--Ed.], but every time I do, I am blown away by how much it captures the current state of affairs for "my generation"

When you open with these lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation
running on empty
Superglued to the TV
Dreaming of prosperity
talking incessantly
saying nothing

It's hard to not get a good idea of where she stands on commercial culture. One of my favorite lines skewering the gliterati is this one:

Flashing memberships to clubs so exclusive
nobody belongs

If you can stand industrial music, this one's worth a listen.

Technorati Tags: Music, Random Musing

Byrne down in the house

The Post-Talking Heads incarnation of the Artist continually known as David Byrne has long had a predilection towards South American music.

His years spent South of the Border have paid off: I just listened to "I Wish" which you can find on Salon.com right here. It's great. Combining the best sounds of early Talking Heads with the odd instrumentation that Salon credits to Brazilian country music.

I love it!

[Editor's note: Eliel would like to thank a fellow music nerd for reminding him to talk about what he's listening too these days]

Technorati Tags: Music

It's time to MoveOn

No matter which solution you favor for the war in Iraq, it is pretty clear that with the changing primary schedule, voters who want to get to know where candidates stand on this issue (and others) need to start getting involved in the election cycle early.

MoveOn.Org is hosing a Virtual Town Hall meeting and have invited all the candidates from the Democratic Party to take and answer questions submitted by MoveOn.Org members. If you'd like to attend one of these meetings in your area, follow this link.

Unfortunately for me, I will be traveling to and fro to the airport that day, so I won't be able to attend. But if you do, please let me know what you learned and if it helped you make up your mind about the candidates.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Saw Seen

While the family is away, I am catching up on some non-family-friendly movie viewing.

Saw was the Netflix delivery for Friday night.

This is the review I submitted to Netflix:

Unlike a lot of the crop of horror movies released of late, Saw harkens back to the old days of Horror movies that were not slasher films.

Don't get me wrong, this movie contains plenty of disturbing imagery. It fits squarely in the "horror" genre, not "suspense".

Having said that, the reason I liked the film is that it is more a study of people than of ways that people die, like a lot of new horror. Instead of the focus being on how many gallons of blood the director can use per scene, we're instead forced to consider the ugly questions of what a person would be willing to do to save themselves or their families.

Would you kill a stranger to save your own life?

Ultimately, Saw is a movie not about dying, but instead about what we would do to live. And unfortunately, the glimpse that it provides into the choices that some people make is the truly terrifying aspect of this movie.

To expand a little: lately, when I watch a horror movie (The Descent being the other recent entry) what I find myself being horrified by is probably not what a majority of moviegoers find scary (since the majority of the audience of these films is that prized 18-24 demographic, from what I hear): to wit, the loss of one's family.

The final scene of the opening sequence of The Descent in which the protagonist loses her family in a flash, scared me more than the claustrophobic cave-ins did later on in the film. And the same for Saw. The idea of someone sneaking into your home and terrorizing your children while you're not their is much more frightening to me than being chained to a pole in a subterranean bathroom.

Not easy watching. But if you're looking for something scary to watch, I can recommend these two movies.

High and Low

THe most common refrain I hear myself asking when I hear about appearences of impropriety in the Bush administration is one echoed in this article that appeared in Salon News a few weeks ago:

"You have to ask where else this might be happening and who is dictating it," one female soldier told me. "How high does it go?"

The issue this time are reports that wounded veterans are being re-deployed to Iraq after having their medical conditions "reviewed" by administrators who seem willing to write off serious conditions without any kind of thorough examination of the soldier's condition. To top it all off, soldiers being redeployed in the fashion are apparently feeling that their ability to speak publicly about their issues is at risk:

Another soldier contacted Salon by telephone last week expressed considerable anxiety, in a frightened tone, about deploying to Iraq in her current condition. (She also wanted to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.) An incident during training several years ago injured her back, forcing doctors to remove part of her fractured coccyx. She suffers from degenerative disk disease and has two ruptured disks and a bulging disk in her back. While she said she loves the Army and would like to deploy after back surgery, her current injuries would limit her ability to wear her full protective gear. She deployed to Iraq last week, the day after calling Salon.

Her husband, who has served three combat tours in the infantry in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he is worried sick because his wife's protective vest alone exceeds the maximum amount she is allowed to lift. "I have been over there three times. I know what it is like," he told me during lunch at a restaurant here. He predicted that by deploying people like his wife, the brigade leaders are "going to get somebody killed over there." He said there is "no way" Grigsby is going to keep all of the injured soldiers in safe jobs. "All of these people that deploy with these profiles, they are scared," he said. He railed at the command: "They are saying they don't care about your health. This is pathetic. It is bad." [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

These are our nations wounded warriors. People who have taken the step of not just saying they stand for America, but actually putting their boots on and going to stand for America fighting a war that never should have been fought. If our nation is defined by how we treat our most vulnerable, perhaps I (along with the soldier I quote from the article) am asking the wrong question. Perhaps the question is not "how high does it go", but instead "how low can it go"?

Between this and the debacle at Walter Reed (which Veteran's groups will tell you is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to how wounded veterans are treated) including a shortage of critical mental health services that could have been life saving for some who came home from the war and took their own lives, it is clear that we as a nation are not doing enough to care for the men and women returning from Afghanistan and Iraq in bad shape.

The good news is that groups like IAVA are making strides in getting congress to fill their role of oversight of the executive branch and mandating better rules for treatment of veterans. Click here if you want to help urge your Senator to do their job.

This nation needs lots of healing. Supporting our veterans is a non-partisan issue: Let's start with making sure that those who got hurt wearing our flag on their arms get the help they need. To do anything less would be to sink even lower than we already are now.

Technorati Tags: More on this later, Politics

Foggy, but far from the bottom

What a great day to finally feel like I've recovered my health. After having to go home sick from work on Wednesday, and basically sleeping until mid-day Friday, I woke up to a beautiful gray morning today.

The fog was thick and surrounded our house with a heavy gray mist. Visibility was probably a hundred yards or so. It was so humid that the 30 degree weather felt warmer than it was.

This is a view from our pond:



I love living in the country.

Technorati Tags: Nature, Home

The New New Thing

Andrew Sullivan points out this poll that shows that the Democratic party (at least at this point in the cycle) would be better off having Barak Obama as their candidate.

It's interesting to see how the "mainstream" candidates Clinton and Edwards are not polling well against their Republican rivals. I have to say that this makes sense to me. Since she seems to find herself unable to come out and admit that she was wrong on the vote granting President Bush authority to go to war with Iraq, I am finding it harder and harder to believe that she is viable candidate for the Democratic party.

Edwards on the other hand has the problem of not having any attention paid him by the media as the viable contender that he could be. Which of course makes it harder for him to be a viable contender.

So, those with baggage are not doing well, but the NKOTB (no, not that one! This one) seems to be hold his own. Oh well. It is so early in the election cycle that I am hard pressed to pay attention, but with the primary schedule moving up, it seems like it's time to start paying attention. So, more on this subject later.

Technorati Tags: More on this later, Politics

the key to this season of 24...

is to be found in this article on Salon about our Extraordinary Rendition Program:

The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

Jack and Graeme Bauer are cut from the same cloth. The difference is that Jack found an official state-sanctioned outlet for his sociopathic tendencies, while Graeme seems to have tried to sublimate his urges into his suburban family, but has (based on his appearances in previous seasons) not been very successful in curbing his need for more adrenaline.

Zen and the art of Trainspotting

[Updated 1/22/2007 9:19PM EST to link to definition of Trainspotting--Ed.]

Now that I am a commuter, I have been accused by Elizabeth of becoming Train-spotter.

She's probably right. But it stems from that need to normalize the daily trek into something automatic and regular so that I am not faced each day with thinking "oh my, I am going to be on the train for two hours this morning". So, when things fall out of the ordinary, it's noticeable. Today, for example, we've just arrived at the Croton-Harmon train station at 6:54, when we should have been here by 6:43.

This means that we'll probably be held outside Penn Station this morning since we'll run into Metro North traffic since we're off schedule.

Being a train-spotter is an exercise in futility though, because there's really nothing to be done now that I know this except to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Technorati Tags: Random Musing

A pox for an epoch

A confluence of news regarding the dangers posed by the coming flu season. A good summary of the problems to be had with the H5N1 strain of avian flu can be found here at Time Magazine.

The picture is not pretty.

It seems that the outbreaks from the 2006 flu season are being repeated again this year but with a larger geographic footprint. Outbreaks of avian influenza have hit all the usual places as well as spreading to Africa and more nations along the Pacific rim.

The scary part is that it seems at least one strain is starting to show resistance to the "old standby" cure for the flu: Tamiflu. This article has all the details about the various discoveries of Tamiflu-resistant strains. Specifically:

Two patients who recently died of H5N1 avian influenza in Egypt had a strain of the virus that was moderately resistant to oseltamivir (Tamiflu), the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today, but the finding has not prompted new health advisories.

The reason for no new health advisories that the method by which the flu is transmitted between avian and human hosts seems to require fairly close contact with the birds and does not yet seem transmittable from human to human. The article also highlights one of the problems with eradicating the sources of the virus in their animal hosts:

The Egyptian woman reported today as a new H5N1 patient was admitted to a hospital Jan 11 after having given birth on Jan 2, IRIN reported. She initially denied contact with poultry, but WHO spokesman Hassan el-Bushra told IRIN that ducks and pigeons were found in her home and chickens had died nearby. [Emphasis Eliel's--ed.]

Anyone in these countries admitting to being in contact with sick poultry faces the prospect of having those in authority arrive at their homes and euthanize their entire flocks in an effort to eradicate those carrying the influenza virus. For many of these people, that would mean either a loss of their livelihood or their family's sustenance. It is easy for us in the west to criticize and wonder aloud about the influezna-eradication efforts in these countries because we don't have to weigh the risks between our families having food on the table against that of contracting a dangerous flu virus.

The bad news for us though is that a recent study has given more weight to the suspicion that the method of transmission for the great flu pandemic of 1918 was through an avian vector that then mutated into a version capable of spreading via human to human transmission. A brief summary of the study can be found here. The danger is that H5N1 might follow in this viruses footsteps and become the kind of killer that the 1918 flu was.

But, there's some worse news from that article that I should share. [If you clicked on the link to read that article, and if you've been a regular reader of Eliel's blog, you will probably know what is coming next--Ed.]

While I commend the people who performed the study for determining once and for all how it was that the 1918 strain of the flu managed to kill so many, I cannot help but be shocked and appalled (again) that scientists have taken to re-creating viruses from gene strands obtained from those long-dead. It's kind of telling that

[t]he study "proves the 1918 virus was indeed different from all of the other flu viruses we know of," says Kawaoka, a professor in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, and at the University of Tokyo.

But now, this unique strain of influenza virus exists again.

Real smart going.

Technorati Tags: H5N1, Pandemic

Keep Hope Alive?

So this morning I wrote that I had hope that maybe this coming election cycle would not be as partisan and nasty as the last few have been.

And at 2:45PM, the Washington Post proved me wrong:

With only a slim, two-year record in the U.S. Senate, Obama doesn't have many controversial congressional votes which political opponents can frame into attack ads. But his eight years as an Illinois state senator are sprinkled with potentially explosive land mines, such as his abortion and gun control votes.

The man just announced his exploratory committee yesterday, and today we're talking attack ads?

Technorati Tags: Politics

Run Obama Run

Good article on Salon.com about Mr. Obama can be found here.

And when Larry told me that Obama had announced yesterday, I replied "you mean Osama"? Because of this CNN "gaffe".

And the drum beat in the press starting to Arabic-bait the candidate by pointing out over and over that his middle name is Hussein. From the same RawStory article:

Initially, a variety of news organizations and pundits began pointing out that Obama's middle name was "Hussein," given to him by his father who was born and raised a Muslim. In early November, Chris Matthews on MSNBC suggested that the "Hussein" moniker will "be interesting down the road." Republican pundits and strategists then began referring to Obama's middle name more pointedly. [Emphasis Eliel's --ed]

It's going to be a long two 22 months. Chances are this election cycle will be partisan and maiming to our psyches, but let's at least hope that our country will start down the road of healing from the last 6 years of this administration's policies.

All the Rage

I just found out that Music.Download.Com has 17 of NWA's best tracks available for free streaming. It seems that today is history day for me. For reasons I won't elaborate on since it's almost bed-time, today has been all about remembering the 80's for me. I posted a brief tribute to the album on the review page.

Before I sign off to nod off, I should just state that if you're into music, and want to be legit in acquiring and sampling new stuff, there's no better destination than the aforementioned site. I don't know how C-Net does it, but they've been able to consistently get "sampler" tracks from some of the best artists that ClearChannel stations will never play.

[One last note, NWA's album is in no way suitable for listening to if you are offended by the profane--Ed.]

Technorati Tags: Music, Nostalgia, More on this later

A Rescuer down under

As most have already heard, earlier this week, a man suffered a seizure and collapsed onto the subway tracks. He was rescued by a complete stranger who jumped down onto the tracks and got the two of them between the rails and into a shallow ditch that allowed the arriving train to pass over them.

Both men survived the experience. The reporting on this has been far and wide, but the one I thought worth linking to raised the question that's been in the back of my head since I heard about this story: would I have done the same?

Mr Autrey has repeatedly said that what he did is what he would expect anyone to do:

Mr. Autrey refused medical help, because, he said, nothing was wrong. He did visit Mr. Hollopeter in the hospital before heading to his night shift. “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help,” Mr. Autrey said. “I did what I felt was right.”

I hope never to find out if I have his strength. If I do have to find out, I pray that somewhere in me I still have the kind of compassion for others that it would take to make that leap.

Secret Agent

So it seems that the isotope that killed the former Soviet Spy Alexander Litvinenko has been identified. As reported by New Scientist here:

Litvinenko's death at the age of 43 from heart failure in a London hospital last Thursday was linked to traces of polonium-210 found in his urine by the UK Health Protection Agency (HPA). An inquest into his death is due to open later this week.

The interesting thing about this is that the choice of weapon is an almost certain indicator that whomever it was that killed this man had access to nuclear programs in 1 of 3 countries that used the isotope as a component for nuclear weapons [That would be the US, the UK, and Russia--ed].

And given the isotopes short half-life, one can rule out that this is some random attack perpetrated by someone who found some of this stuff on a shelf:

Other experts point out that, since its half-life is 138 days, the polonium-210 was probably made in the recent past. "It would become less usable as years went by and after five years would be useless," says Philip Day, an environmental radiochemist from the University of Manchester.

The Independent is reporting on the fact that some UK ministers are now starting to come out of the closet with their concerns about the involvement of Putin's government in this issue. Some off-the-record assertions have been made that Russian agents were the ones who carried out the poisoning.

Some security sources in Britain suspect that Russian agents - or a rogue element within the country's security services - were behind Mr Litvinenko's death.

Of course, these are all speculations. Those of you who read the Wikipedia article on Litvinenko that I linked to above will see that the Soviet era spy agencies have only one documented instance of killing a defector outside of the country.

Rupert Allason, the British intelligence expert, commented that he would be most surprised if the FSB had tried to kill Mr Litvinenko because it would fly in the face of 65 years of Soviet or Russian practice[.]

Of course, President Putin's Russia is suffering criticism for rolling back civil rights, so could this be a start of a new policy of not tolerating dissent abroad? Only time will tell. But the use of such a specialized weapon makes me lean towards believing that Mr. Litvinenko was speaking what he believed to be the truth on his death bed when he accused Mr. Putin of being directly involved in his poisoning.

On another note

In case I haven't mentioned it before, I have very eclectic tastes in everything, not just books. I also have eclectic tastes in music. I love getting recommendations on new music to listen to. As I've posted before, high on my list of new music is the group The High 48s Bluegrass Band. [And the recommendation for this one came from one of the band members, --Ed.]. Their songs have been making my commute bearable for the past few months.

On Friday, Larry lent me a new CD he'd picked up. It's good fun. The title is Mouse and the Mask, and it's by Dangerdoom and apparently all the tracks on it are inspired by the Adult Swim shows on the Cartoon Network.

I think that whichever media giant owns the Cartoon Network should be sending free copies of this CD out to taste makers. This album makes me want to start Tivo-ing Adult Swim.

Viruses going Ape

As if life wasn't hard enough for the Great Apes, this article is reporting that Ebola continues to threaten some of the remaining population in Africa:

In 2003, an outbreak of Ebola struck gorillas living in the Congo. Bats in the area at that time were also carrying the virus, researchers recently discovered (New Scientist, 3 December 2005, p 20). That meant either the virus had always been lurking in bats, and spread to the gorillas, or that the bats were newly infected as the epidemic crossed their territory.

Now researchers have found that the bat viruses all descended recently from a common ancestor, confirming that the virus was new to the bats and is on the march (PLoS Pathogens, vol 2, e90).

If you can, here's a link where you can donate some money and help out.

Faster Pussycat...

I can only say "ouch!"

As you can see here, I have to pick up the pace, obviously, or I will have change the title of this novel writing project to National Novel Writing 3/4's of a year.

To keep me honest, I have decided that instead of using the NaNoWriMo participant image, I should let it all hang out and use the word count widget.

Shame can be a good motivator:

Wahoo!!

Yes!

Finally got bluetooth connection working on the laptop to the Treo 650 that is my phone.

Now I can update the blog from the train [and send more words to be counted at NaNoWriMo as well, right Eliel? --Ed]

Reading On Writing

In his missive penned to those who would follow in his footsteps,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King writes that one serious about writing should also be serious about reading. He suggests splitting the day: 4 hours for writing, 4 for reading. I think I have no problem with the 4 hours for reading part. My issue is coming up with the hours for writing.

I thought I would be able to get some done this evening over at our closest internet-enabled coffee shop. After all:

Here at the Muddy Cup, we try to offer our community a place to go to share their art, their voice, and their opinions on life and the world.

The only problem is that there are other people around working on various projects. This is, unfortunately, most distracting at this stage of the process where I am shifting gears from writing the scaffolding words to the fleshy parts. I think I am going to have to do the heavy lifting on the afternoon train home.




Along the lines of using this project to get "over" myself, I've posted a paragraph excerpt on my NaNoWriMo page here. As I've mentioned before, the site is really slow because of it being, er... National Novel Writing Month and all, but if you can stand to look, feedback is always welcome.

Just plain stupid

I am a fan of scientific discovery and experimentation. Having said that, I must add that I am not a fan of stupidity. In science, stupidity tends to appear filed under "unbridled hubris". A recent study done by some genetic researchers falls squarely into that category. These researchers decided to recreate a human endogenous retrovirus. That's not what I find stupid.

Nor do I find their use of level 3 Biosafety instead of "Hot Zone"-style Level 4 biohazard equipment all that surprising:

Others worry that the study sets a dangerous precedent. Although it was approved by the French research ministry's Genetic Engineering Committee, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says any study that creates new viruses or activates old ones should be subject to a special review at the national or international level. What's more, he says, because the researchers couldn't be absolutely sure about Phoenix's infectivity, the study should have been carried out under Biosafety level 4 conditions--the best-protected labs available--instead of the level 3 conditions utilized.

Nope. What freaks me out is the way that these scientists "reconstructed" the genome for this virus. Unable to find a complete sequence, they designed an retrovirus by committee:

To "correct" for mutations, the researchers took dozens of known HERV-K(HML2) sequences and aligned them to create a so-called "consensus" sequence.

This smacks of just plain stupidity to me. These types of retroviruses actually have the ability to alter human gene sequences. Forever.

Retroviruses have the ability to make DNA copies of their RNA genomes and incorporate these into the host's genome. If this happens in a germ cell, the copy can be passed on to future generations.

So, knowing all this, the idea that they would aggregate variations of these gene sequences to come up with their "best guess" consensus design sounds like crazy talk. I just don't get it.

A late, but productive start

So I did not get any writing done on the morning train. Exhaustion overtook me and I slept and thought about process and slept some more. This evening, though, the words flowed well and I got 1200 words or so written in an hour and a half. Not quite the pace I need to keep to the suggested advice from Chris Baty:

1) Surge early. To be on par for the month, you should be writing 1667 words per day. In Week One, try to get 2000 or 2500 a day, and beg, borrow, and steal as much of the first weekend as possible to write. You won't need to keep up this pace throughout the month, but nothing guarantees a NaNoWriMo victory (and a fun month) like opening up a hefty lead in the first week.

Especially considering that I won't be able to write on weekends unless I give up sleep.

The NaNoWriMo.org servers are pretty much dead under load right now, so I won't even bother posting the link to my stats page at this time.

Inspiration is as inspiration does

The immediate challenge for me with the NaNoWriMo is laying out a plot with enough heft to it that I could spend a month writing and not run out of steam. Taking a literal turn of a page from Stephen King (the first author I ever read whose use of song lyrics exposed some of the more creepy undertones of popular music) I tried to think of a song.

It didn't take long, as I have always loved narrative-driven music. The chosen muse is Johnny Cash's Give My Love to Rose. It's a song I've been hearing and singing since I was a child. I know it well. Ultimately, it's a tragedy, which I think sets me up to challenge myself to write something with emotional depth to it. I would like to think that at the end of the NaNoWriMo challenge what I end up with is writing, not typing.

There's a calm-before-the-storm feeling that I'm having right now. I am attempting to let the ideas of what a 50,000 word novella based on this song would be like come in and out of my mind without trying to grab on to one particular version and choking the life out of it before the writing starts Wednesday.

The good news is that I seem to have some company. If I get permission from them to tell you who they are, I will say more about them here soon.

The plot is afoot!

Okay, it now official. I have joined NaNoWriMo

I will use this logo whenever I post something on the subject of how the effort is going. It's odd and somewhat daunting to see the "Word meter" so prominently displayed on my profile [For those who don't follow links from Eliel's posts normally, that's what the URL above points to--Ed.]

But that is the whole point, isn't it?

The site tries to get one to commit to a genre. I am not sure I can at this point. The swirling morass of ideas in my head has not congealed enough for me to know what form this creation will take. More on this after what I have done has sunk in....

Remember, Remember, the month of November

I started this blog with the intention of using it's existence as a tickler to remind me to write on a regular basis. I have discovered that the issue is not as much the writing as the publishing. I have lots of posts begun that are not completed because (another of my Achilles heels revealed) they are not as well researched as I want them to be.

I have a friendly co-worker who comes in to my office at 8:30AM on occasion and utters a sarcastic "nice update" when I've not been updating my site for a while. That's helped some, but not enough really. The biggest help have been the people who have left comments on occasion. I truly appreciate those and will be following up on some pithy ones in the near future.

It now seems like the right time to work on something a little more substantive. To that end, I will be joining up with other amateurs to take part in the the National Novel Writing Month next month. [Eliel would like to acknowledge that he heard about NaNoWriMo here --Ed.]

It will be hard, but I think I should be able to devote part of my time on the train to writing 5 days a week. Their FAQ lays out the why quite eloquently, so I'll repeat it here:

If I'm just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?
There are three reasons.

1) If you don't do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a "one day" event. As in "One day, I'd like to write a novel." Here's the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It's just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you'll have friends to help you see it through to 50k. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]


2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you'll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you'd never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

3) Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and "must-dos" of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.

So, tomorrow I sign up, and November 1st, I'll get to writing. Anyone else care to join me?

Oh to be in Fargo in two weeks...

If you're in Fargo, ND October 28th, by all means head over to Evergreen Conference Center and see The High 48s Bluegrass Band. I know I would if I could. If you follow that link to their Myspace page, there are some sample tracks there that will tell you why you should better than anything I could write here.

I have their album and love it.

[Full disclosure: Eliel knows Eric Christopher personally, and has been a bit of a fan-boy since he heard Rotate + Balance --Ed.]

A hobbled hobby

So, I was reading my usual suspects when I came across a link to an article entitled: how to draw female comic characters (according to Wizard)...

Starts out simply enough, the author has scanned in some pages from a drawing style guide from the people who publish the industry "standard" Wizard Magazine at the request of one of their friends:

brown_betty asked for examples "to illustrate the exactly how and why female comic characters are illustrated differently than the male." And I thought, really, what's better to illustrate these things than the books teaching the style in the first place?
A while ago I posted some scans from Wizard How To Draw series on drawing female superheroes (here and here), and I thought I'd post a bunch more from the first book of the series on "How To Draw: Heroic Anatomy".


As everything, it starts with the basics, i.e. proportions. First the male superhero [...]

And as you can imagine from that intro, the next section in is on the female superhero. Let's just say that the pages are sad. Most commentators on this livejournal posting are as speechless as I am. But suffice it to say that if this guide is demonstrative of the editorial quality at Wizard, then bankruptcy will be too good for them. As a person who grew up reading comics, and knows for a fact that gender representations (while still leaning towards the adolescent male) are improving, reading these excerpts is like finding a guide to techniques for corporal punishment in an elementary school principal's office: you know people used to think that way, and you can't believe that someone would still be holding on to those old ideas, and you're just kind of embarrassed so you put the guide back, shake your head, and move on.

Wizard has it's share of detractors already in the comic book industry as the Wikipedia article on them states:

For many, Wizard is the most visible face of the American comics industry, and it encounters a fair amount of controversy. Critics charge that Wizard discusses mainstream American superhero comics to the exclusion of other kinds of comics; although such comics are the dominant genre among the majority of American comics buyers.

And to me that's the sad part. With so many other genres of literate comics to choose from, most people still prefer Spiderman to The Sandman. Oh well.

It wasn't broke, but now we have to fix it...

A few years back, I was one of those people who left home early on a weekend morning to go spend six hours walking from lower Manhattan to midtown to protest the US invasion of Iraq. I believed then that the President was not representing how I, as New Yorker whose offices are no more than a mile from Ground Zero, wanted our nation to respond to the attacks of September 11th. Afghanistan and the bin-Laden hiding, opium profiteering Taliban? Yes. No-fly-zone enclosed Iraq and the embargoed Hussein? No. So, it comes as no surprise to me then that the joint report issued by 16 of our nations convert agencies has identified the war in Iraq as being a leading contributer to the spread of terrorism and jihadism around the globe. As the times article Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat states:

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

There's not much else to say on the subject. In two years, when this administration is finally out of office, our nation will have a lot of work to do to recover from these mistakes.

Oh yes, before anyone who disagrees with my view of the Iraq war responds with declarations that this is partisan information leaked to the press to make the administration look bad, let me add one more quotation from the times:

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Reducto ad Absurdum

Recently, some talented filmmakers and production companies have shown that it is no longer inevitable that film adaptations of books must suck. Look at The Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, most of the movies based on John Grisham novels, and you'll see what I mean. As exceptions prove rules, these good film adaptations only bring more clearly into focus the rule that book to TV movie adaptations are seemingly written by people who think that those of us who occasion to watch TV are idiots.

Unfortunately for Gayle Lynds, the TV movie version of Robert Ludlum's COVERT ONE: The Hades Factor falls into the rule category and is in no way exceptional. The film meanders around like a drunken sailor on the deck of the Titanic during a monsoon. The similarity between the plot of the film and that of the book seems to be derived mainly from some astute person writing down all the names of the Covert One series characters and then asking their 4 year old to pen brief biographies of them based on their memory of exactly what it was that their parents prattled off to them during bedtime story time.

Now, I read the Hades Factor more than a year ago, and maybe I'm being harsh to the "film"'s writers here, but the reason that the book was compelling is that it treated readers, if not like adults, then at least like high school students. Allowing us to come along for an enjoyable spy thriller about a terror crisis that causes the president to go outside normal national security structure and retain the services of some specialists that become the "Covert One" team. The tension between the various three-letter agencies (all working on the case and, in a true-to-life stroke, sometimes at cross purposes) is part of that fun.

The movie tries to build that tension while "streamlining" out the internecine fight subplots. It does so by adding in new characters in subplots so convoluted that if they were entirely excised, in say a directors cut, or maybe a sober person's cut, they would not be missed.

Dean Koontz once offered a production company money to take his name off of a film version of his book. Robert Ludlum is not in a position to do so, but perhaps Gayle Lynds is. She should.


[After re-reading this screed, Eliel has committed himself to re-reading Robert Ludlum's The Hades Factor and will report back on his Books Blog shortly --Ed.]

Death of a Salesman

The New York Times is reporting that Kenneth Lay has died of an apparent heart attack at 3:11AM today. It seems that we'll have to wait for more details to be forthcoming from their spokesperson:

A spokeswoman for the Lay family, Kelly L. Kimberly, confirmed reports of Mr. Lay's death but declined to discuss specifics. In a prepared statement, Ms. Kimberly said: "Ken Lay passed away early this morning in Aspen. The Lays have a very large family with whom they need to communicate. And out of respect for the family, we will release further details at a later time."

I can respect that the family needs some time. No matter how many lives he ruined, he was still loved by his family and friends and people should be understanding about their mourning period.

But I have to say it is easier said than done. Even reading the Times article, I am reminded of why Ken Lay deserved to be imprisoned:

At the trial, Mr. Lay defended himself as prosecutors tried to embarrass him by pointing out that he spent $200,000 on a cruise with his wife months before the company collapsed. "We had realized the American dream, and were living a very expensive lifestyle," Mr. Lay said, adding it was "the type of lifestyle where it is difficult to turn off the spigot."

It's that kind of statement that makes it open season on Mr. Lay. At Fanatical Apathy, the tag line about his passing is Ken Lay, Laid Low.

But as the BBC notes, in a longer article eulogizing Mr. Lay (Kenneth Lay: A fallen hero):

Enron's belief in - and its ability to proselytise - the idea of prising open markets, and trading energy futures just like other commodities, caused The Economist to describe Enron as an "evangelical cult" with Mr Lay as the "messiah".

"We like to think of ourselves as the Microsoft of the energy world," Mr Lay has been quoted as saying.

And hence the title of this posting. Mr. Lay clearly was a man who believed in the free market and that de-regulation of the energy markets was fundamental to his companies success. In my humble opinion, it seemed that he believed so much in his own vision, that he forgot sell a real product and started selling Enron's success at manipulating those free markets. Unfortunately, when the time came to pay the piper, he discovered that Enron's reputation, as a product, could only be cashed in on at the value that he thought it was worth by breaking the law.

It is a sad day when a family loses a member. It was also a sad day when all of those family members that Enron employed lost their savings and retirement funds. In the end, Kenneth Lay's family will just join the members of a very large number of families in this country already paying the price for the hubris of Enron.

A good use of the internet

A friend I reconnected with through Orkut told me about SONG FIGHT!. Having been an internet user back when it was mainly the domain of academics and researchers, sites like this one always remind me of those halcyon days of free-flowing data. From the FAQ:

Song Fight is a free Web site where Internet musicians enter their work into competition. Every week several titles are provided, the competitors write a brand new song inspired by the title of their choice, and the Internet at large is invited to vote for their favorite song for each title.

This is what the internet used to be like. Of course, I am not a ninny [So he says--Ed.] and I do understand that moving these bits around costs money. But at the same time, if someone (like the operator of Song Fight!) is willing to pay to host a site like this, then they should only have to pay once.

The idea of net neutrality is that everyone who uses the internet pays for what they use. When you pay your ISP for internet access, you are buying a ticket on to the onramp of the Information Superhighway [A hackneyed term, but useful here--Ed.].

Now, if you decide to download data from Song Fight!, you're entitled to this just as much as you're entitled to download bits from YouTube. Why? Because the owners of Song Fight! and YouTube are also paying (significantly more than you are, more than likely) to ship those bits you requested out onto the Superhighway.

The proposals being pushed by the infrastructure owners (the people who ultimately collect from all the Internet Service Providers and end users out there) would be tantamount to paying to get on a highway, then if it's determined that your car isn't of the right make or model, being forced into the slow lane for the segment of the highway owned by that entity. They used to call that highway robbery. Our congressman seem to be listening too closely to the points being made by the telecommunications companies and not enough to consumers and content providers.

But I digress [No kidding--Ed.]. You can get more information on the network neutraility issue here and here.

Back to Song Fight!: My old college roommate will be entering a piece in next week's contest. I listened to it and am impressed enough that I will be following the Song Fight! link and voting for his song. [Unless, of course, the other entries are better--Ed.]

I'd do whatever a Spider can

Apparently, were things different, I would be Spider Man. These are the results from my taking the "Which Superhero Am I?" quiz linked to below.

So, who would you be?


You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 85% Green Lantern 75% Iron Man 65% The Flash 65% Superman 65% Robin 55% Hulk 50% Catwoman 45% Supergirl 40% Batman 30% Wonder Woman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

The problem with Politics

Listening to NPR on the way home the other day, I was fascinated by the story Breaking the system of 'legalized bribery' on Marketplace. It caught my attention because of this statement made by the commentator:

Deep in plea agreements won by Justice Department lawyers are admissions by the defendants--Abramoff and his cronies Tony Rudy, Michael Scanlon and Neil Volz--that they conspired to use campaign contributions to bribe lawmakers. Even though these gifts were fully disclosed and within prescribed limits, the government said they were criminal, and the defendants agreed. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

My friends from all walks of life and all political leanings are all disgusted with the state of affairs in politics these days. Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans, and Independents all have joined me in expressing frustration with the perception that unless you have a lot of money, your voice is going to go unheard by your elected "representatives".

These admissions of guilt that prove that it's not a perception. It's a reality.

Follow the link to the Marketplace story: they've got links to the court filings. It's pretty sad reading.

Spy gear or life-saving technology?

Was pointed to this article about a new single-person glider wing a company has developed by digg.com. It's pretty exciting stuff in that it allows a person to glide to safety from very high altitudes and then use an integrated parachute to land safely:

The technology was demonstrated in spectacular fashion three years ago when Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner - a pioneer of freefall gliding - famously 'flew' across the English Channel, leaping out of an aircraft 30,000ft above Dover and landing safely near Calais 12 minutes later.

Wearing an aerodynamic suit, and with a 6ft wide wing strapped to his back, he soared across the sea at 220mph, moving six feet forward through the air for every one foot he fell vertically - and opened his parachute 1,000ft above the ground before landing safely.

As is usual with lots of cool gadgets, the manufacturer designed it with military contracts in mind. The idea being that it could be used by Special Forces personnel for behind-enemy-lines stealth landings.

But wouldn't you feel a little better on your next flight if you knew that the in addition to your seat-belt, you also had a safety device that could be used in instances where the pilot knew that there was no safe way to bring the plane down?

The cost is probably prohibitive now, but mass production for commercial use would make this something that could be standard on all flights in a few decades.

4 more years....

It's just sad. The New York Times is reporting that CIA knew where a Nazi war criminal was for several years. By not disclosing their knowledge to the global community, CIA let him continue to do the one thing his wartime actions denied millions of innocents: live.

Yes, it may have only been for an additional 4 years (until his execution in 1962 after being tried in Israel), but it was 4 years longer than the mother who survived a camp was able to spend with her children that did not. It was 4 years longer than a child in the camps got to spend with the father that Eichmann's orders killed. 4 years of extra time could have meant the difference between dying in a camp and being liberated by the allies at the end of the war.

Eichmann got those 4 years. His victims did not.

I'm not really interested in how he spent them. The bottom line is that he got them courtesy of our Central Intelligence Agency, which knew quite well what he'd been up to during the war.

And for what?

The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi government official then serving as a top national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

So a perpetrator of genocide was allowed to remain at large because CIA and their counterparts in the West German intelligence agencies did not want his arrest to cause the disclosure of other former Nazi officials who had successfully hidden their past. Card carrying members of the Nazi Party who had moved into positions of power in the West German government. After all, this was the Cold War, and West Germany, being host to NATO and considered ground zero of the new European Theater should World War III break out, could not have such scandalous facts revealed.

Apparently, the real issue wasn't the crimes these men had committed in the past, it seems that

... [t]he United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that American intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

So, again, the Freedom of Information Act has allowed historians to reveal exactly what the true cost of the Cold War was. In this instance, trading the restitution due innocents to protect the guilty so that they could "protect" our interests. Which of course the Times articles shows they did not do. In the end, all that happened was that our nation sacrificed it's integrity in exchange for the fool's gold of anti-Soviet "intelligence".

This quotation sums up the issue quite succinctly:

"Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.

Postscript: I wasn't going to post this to the blog, but today Daniel Schorr of NPR did his own story on the subject. You can listen to it here. Schorr's story adds more depth to the original story from the Times as he discusses how the German's were worried about Eichmann's trial and it's effect on German/Israeli/American politics.

Mice, Rice, and the Genie in the Bottle

An interesting article in this week's Economist regarding transmission of genetic traits in an odd way reminded me of an issue I'd wanted to mention here.

The Economist article is about this study published last week that indicates that during insemination (or during embryonic development), in some as-yet-undetermined fashion, RNA can play a factor in affecting the eventual genetic traits of the offspring, despite the characteristics of it's parents. In this study:

Unusual amounts of RNA were found in the sperm from mice with the mutant Kit gene. Leading the group to suspect that RNA was implicated.

[The Kit gene being one that causes white spots on the tail of mice, used in this study--Ed.]

When this RNA was extracted and injected into mice embryos, a white-tailed mutant was created--even though no genes for the white tails were present.

In this day of wide-ranging experimentation in genetic modification of gene lines, the implications of this are staggering. It has always been assumed that genetic mutations in offspring happened due to faulty copying of genetic material present in the genes of the parents. Here though, this research team has proven that previously undiscovered factors can affect the way in which genes are ultimately expressed in offspring. And apparently some other studies postulate that

... the effect can persist across generations, which means that genes that were not inherited from your great-grandparents could still be exerting an influence today. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

Turn now to the article that this story reminded me of. It was an AP wire story carried by lots of sources. Here's a link to the USA Today version. The article covers the backlash being faced by a company called Ventria which has developed what has apparently been proven to be a great additive for treating children with serious dehydration from acute diarrhea.

Their press release (PDF) from the study indicates that their product is a pretty viable-seeming additive that will save lives:

The clinical study was prospective, randomized and blinded, and evaluated 140 children who were admitted to the hospital suffering from acute diarrhea. Results showed that children who consumed oral rehydration solution with Lactiva and Lysomin (Lactiva/Lysomin ORS):

• Had 30% shorter duration of diarrhea. Specifically, children consuming Lactiva/Lysomin ORS were sick for 3.67 days on average, as compared to 5.21 days for children receiving ORS without Lactiva and Lysomin.

• Reached complete resolution of their diarrhea with much higher frequency than children receiving ORS without Lactiva and Lysomin. 85.1 percent of children who consumed Lactiva/Lysomin ORS recovered, while only 69.2 percent of the control group recovered.

• Were less likely to relapse into another episode of diarrhea. The percentage of children who relapsed after 48 hours without diarrhea was lower in the Lactiva/Lysomin ORS group than in the control group Lactiva and Lysomin (8.5 percent compared to 18.7 percent).

So what's the big deal? Ventria's product is produced through the marvels of genetic manipulation. As described in the USA Today article, the company:

Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries.

Given that the scientists doing the mice study have found that we don't fully understand how the process of passing along genetic traits really works, can we really trust that Ventria's claim that there would be no impact from their crops on human beings?

The company says the chance of its genetically engineered rice ending up in the food supply is remote because the company grinds the rice and extracts the protein before shipping. What's more, rice is "self-pollinating," and it's virtually impossible for genetically engineered rice to accidentally cross breed with conventional crops. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

Yes, maybe they can ensure (although they do use the weasel word of "virtually") that their products DNA won't be transmitted between crops. But wouldn't the very process of extracting the protein for their medicine from the rice provides a vector for RNA material to spread between batches? RNA material that could hold all kinds of genetic instructions that no one yet understands?

I'm worried.

What about you?

The Rule of Law

When I first heard about the President's idea to put National Guard troops on the border of Mexico, I wondered which of the Governor's of the border states had requested these troops for help and added security, which would be the only way that the troops could legally be deployed. Turns out there were none. Which means that the President is once again adopting a policy that violates the laws of the land.

Update: The author would like to extended his sincerest apologies to Mr. Laurence Hayes, who was the source of the link of the AlterNet article. The text in the paragraph below has been altered to correct this error.

You know you're in trouble when the ACLU and the Cato Institute agree on something. As reported in this AlterNet article forwarded to me by Larry:

A central issue of Bush's plan is that the troops would be under federal authority. One of the exceptions built into the Posse Comitatus Act is that troops may be deployed to support law enforcement agencies, but with the exception of insurrections and riots, nuclear attack or interdiction of drug smuggling (when working directly with law enforcement agencies), they must be under the authority of a state governor.

Which is all well and good, except for the fact that no governor seems to have come forward and said that they would take these troops on in a law enforcement role. From the Cato Institute letter linked to by the AlerNet article comes a good example of why this should be the case:

Because of the restrictions imposed by the Posse Comitatus Act, the federal law that proscribes the military from "executing the laws," the Marines who killed Hernandez operated under rules of engagement that prevented them from arresting or otherwise directly engaging civilians. Nonetheless, according to a senior FBI agent involved with the case, "The Marines perceived a target-practicing shot as a threat to their safety... From that point, their training and instincts took over to neutralize a threat." The camouflaged Marines tailed Hernandez for 20 minutes, and failed to identify themselves or try to defuse the situation. When Hernandez raised his rifle again, a Marine shot him, and let him bleed to death without attempting to administer first aid.

To be fair to the President, this is one time where's merely following a tradition established by his predecessors. A brief timeline of uses of the National Guard and uniformed Armed Forces can be found in this article written by an historian after the FEMA failures post-Katrina led to a discussion of turning over disaster response to the Military:

The Posse Comitatus law was carefully observed for nearly 80 years, but in 1957 President Eisenhower sent the military to Little Rock, Ark., to quell anti-integration protests, and President Kennedy sent troops to Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s the erosion of the restrictions on the use of the military accelerated. Under President Reagan, Congress authorized the use of the military's air and sea power in efforts to control drug smuggling. The Coast Guard served aboard Navy ships to handle the actual boarding and arrest, while the Navy provided intelligence, surveillance and other facilities.

The military later became involved in immigration control, tariff enforcement, civil disturbance riot control, national disasters and crowd control, as in the deployment of 10,000 troops to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Coincidentally, perhaps, public esteem for the military rose from a mid-70s low of 25 percent to a peak of 75 percent in 2000. Even after the prison scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the military remained in 2005 the most respected institution in the United States.

It is hard to argue that the Executive branches expansion on the Posse Comitatus law during the 50's and 60's were not justified. But as citizens, we also need to recognize that the precedents set during those tumultuous years of our nation's history are direct ancestors to the policies of this administration. We cannot call out Donald Rumsfeld for wanting to push an amendment through to nullify aspects of the Posse Comitatus act now, when we would have supported Eisenhower and Kennedy (and some even Reagan) in their stretching of the law to it's breaking point.

As I said in my last posting, the world is watching our nation struggle through these difficult years since September 11th. Given the global audience, it is far from enough for we the people who disagree with this action to shake our heads and say "there goes Mr. Bush again, flaunting Presidential power". Instead we need to prepare answers to those would would say "what would you do instead".

So, the ACLU has made their statement:

"Turning immigration enforcement policy into another military operation is not the answer. The president’s proposed deployment of National Guard troops violates the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from getting into the business of civilian law enforcement.

They have clearly stated what they believe is the wrong answer to the question of border security. What then is the right answer? Going back to the Cato Institute, we find that they have proposed that the answer to border security is to give the current processes more time to take hold:

Both the INS and the Border Patrol are getting a half a billion dollar infusion of new resources, and rapidly hiring new agents. If still more border patrol personnel are needed, they should be hired. But border security can be provided without eroding America's tradition of civil-military separation.

While I find myself agreeing with this in principle, the reality of the situation is that the INS is now a part of the Department of Homeland Security, whose failures to help keep our Homeland safe are what prompted many of these discussions of supplementing law enforcement with the military in the first place. [But that's really a digression for another day--Ed.] But the bottom line is to maintain the rule of law in our nation, we need to distance our federal policies from those that resemble martial law. Period.

And the idea that we can follow the historic example of China, and the more modern example of Israel and unilaterally build a wall seems just plain wrongheaded also. I do find some compelling ideas in this commentary on the subject, but I think Mr. Sullivan is being naive.

I am interested in what you all think, so please use the comments section to start a dialogue on this issue.

Just Say No, General

I was alerted to the Washington Post editorial on the Hayden Intelligence Committee hearings by this article on The Daily Dish.

It is really hard to believe that General Hayden, a man who has served in the armed forces for his entire career, would not understand the implications of there being any public waffling on the government's compliance to the anti-torture measures recently signed into law.

The Washington Post editors pretty much nail the issue:

AT THE SENATE intelligence committee hearing Thursday on Gen. Michael V. Hayden's nomination to head the CIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is "waterboarding" an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail." That was the wrong answer. The right one would have been simple: No.

It's not a question for which any answer other than "no" should have been given. If we announced to the world that we are a nation of laws, that we deplore violations of human rights in all corners of the world, then we cannot even allow the appearance of impropriety with regards to adhering to the McCain bill.

It is clear that some in Washington understand why. I remember watching some clips of the hearings after the Abu Gharaib scandal first broke. An impassioned Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delaware), frustrated by the apparent lack of understanding "of what the big deal was" with regard to brutal interrogation techniques being used at Guantanamo Bay in clear violation of the Geneva conventions replied: [and Eliel is paraphrasing here because he's not been able to locate the transcript of that hearing yet--Ed.] "Because when we up-hold these conventions, it gives others less reason to violate them when they have in custody people like my son.

The Hayden response makes me believe that too many of the policy-makers in this administration are watching 24 and have mistaken fictionalized threat-response for real ones. I can't shake the feeling that if Senator Feinstein had complied with the General Hayden's wishes and closed the door, he would have been whispering to her about how Agent Bauer had someone in custody and needed to use extreme measures to get information from the suspect.

Unfortunately, the global audience watching our government can tell the difference between our fiction and our reality. It's too bad some in Washington cannot do the same.

Speaking of globalization

I just picked up the movie Edukators when I was at the video store this weekend and watched part of it on the train this evening and finished watching the rest of it tonight. I found it very compelling and highly recommend it to anyone feeling reservations about the moral state of our consumer society.

[Please note that Eliel has a a bias that he seems to share with Elizabeth: any film whose soundtrack makes good use of Jeff Buckley's version of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah from the album Grace gets instant quality points in their book. --Ed].

It's a well crafted story about 3 German generation-Xer's muddling their way through their version of ennui. Looking for something to gravitate to, they all take part in anti-sweatshop protests and the two young men (Jan and Peter) form their own private band that takes to performing random acts of vandalism to "upset the rich". Shenanigans ensue when (while Peter's away) Jan brings Jules into the fold and they get caught by the owner of one of the homes they have targeted. In a fit of panic, they end up kidnapping the man and driving off into the hills (looks like the German Alps to me, but I could be wrong) and holing up with him there. [There is a much better written review of this film available here --Ed.]

That plot twist lets the film delve deeper into the real issues behind the kind of pro-worker, anti-bourgeois "days in the life of Jules at work" scenes that fill up the first half of the film. It's a rare director capable of giving voice to the captains of industry side of this equation without resorting to making them into cardboard cut-outs. The director here is able to show that in many ways, this very wealthy man feels just as trapped in his life as his working-class captors.

Even then, director Hans Weingartner is willing to not let things be so simple. Asked why he just doesn't give up all his material goods if he feels that maintaining the lifestyle he has is keeping him in a place he doesn't want to be, he almost throws away a telling line "Because I could only do it once". A line that to me sums up the way that idealistic people find themselves taking fewer and fewer actions for change as they get older--the nagging feeling that each action one would take would only last a brief minute, and then what?

It's a paralyzing feeling.

And it is why admire what Cat Mazza is doing with MicroRevolt.Org. Her act of social conscience is not simply to hand out pamphlets explaining the evils of sweatshops like Jans, Jules, and Peter do, but to instead provide others with the mechanisms to create their own personal statements. Like minded people can then take direct actions themselves (by creating their own clothing and accessories) that do more to create dialogues about where the clothes on our backs actually come from than any pamphlet or parade ever could. [Eliel would have mentioned the fishing and pedagogy cliche here, but it's probably not necessary--Ed.]

If only the internet had been around during the Crusades...

I had heard that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had written a letter to President Bush and delivered it to the US Embassy. Since this week's cover story of the Economist is also about the Iranian situation, I had not followed up on it yet. Andrew Sullivan has post an excerpt to the letter as a pop quiz here. I got the quiz wrong, even after having heard excerpts from the letter on NPR this morning. It is amazing that there is no difference in tone in what he's written to statements made by the three gentleman he's offered up as choices on his quiz.

I would be the same was the case during the Crusades; it is only my guess, not having researched it yet, but I imagine that if one were to parse the words of Christians and Muslims and presented them to a modern or historical audience without attribution, the words would sound strikingly similar. If two sides are arguing the same point, but believe that each other "has it wrong" in some fundamental [Word choice, Eliel--ed] way, then isn't that a fine example of an immovable object and and unstoppable force on a collision course?

So how to intervene? The internet has provided a platform for the words of Mr. Ahmadinejad to reach a wide audience. We as citizens of this country, watching this game of brinkmanship between our two nations, have a responsibility to educate ourselves as to what our "enemy" is really saying. And when we're done, we need to have a fair and balanced dialog about it. We've already seen in Iraq [and the former Republics of the Soviet Union, and Rwanda, and the Sudan--Ed.] what happens when these age old conflicts devolve from cold to hot wars.

So I'm following the link provided by Mr. Sullivan and heading over to read the full document here. I'll post more detailed opinion on it after I've had some time to digest it.

There, someone finally went and said it

If you heard Jimmy Carter speaking this past fall during his book tour for Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, he said (at least on his NPR interview) that he is both a Christian person who believes in God, and a nuclear physicist who believes in science. And that ne'er the 'twain should meet. Carter's thrust was that matters of faith are just that, and trying to mix one's faith and one's secular science (this was during the debate over Intelligent Design vs. creationism) was an untenable position and that rational people would not try to be literate about their beliefs in the face of scientific evidence.

This is a very reasonable approach, coming from a man of science and an ex-President. And, now, this same view (in much stronger language) is being espoused by the Vatican's own astronomer:

Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. "Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That's why science and religion need to talk to each other," he said.

"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."

This is more in tune with what I believe. That it's being stated so forcefully by Brother Consolmagno is a sign to me that either the new Pope is rethinking the hard-line stances he took when he was the Hierarchy's "enforcer", or that Brother Consolmangno is in deep trouble. It's hard to tell which is the case.

On the one hand, Pope Benedict is talking about taking some quite forward-thinking stances previously rejected outright by the Vatican. At the same time, he seems to also be not willing to cede any of his powers to outsiders, even in instances where doing so might have been the politic thing to do.

Perhaps one telling aspect of Brother Consolmagno's statements is that he also comments on the idea of Papal infallibility:

Brother Consolmagno, who was due to give a speech at the Glasgow Science Centre last night, entitled "Why the Pope has an Astronomer", said the idea of papal infallibility had been a "PR disaster". What it actually meant was that, on matters of faith, followers should accept "somebody has got to be the boss, the final authority".

"It's not like he has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear," he said.

Kind of like making a strong statement about the company you work for, then turning around and saying: "Oh yeah, by the way, my boss doesn't know everything either..."

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

In either case, this particular Jesuit priest should be more of a role model for kids everywhere. Let me close with something I found that he said to some high school students that made me get teary-eyed in finding a kindred spirit:

"Scientists start with an observation, then they think of it in terms of a bigger picture," he explained. "The hypothesis comes out of insight and inspiration. Their goal is to make a more beautiful picture. Elegance and insight are at the core of science."

In his modest opinion, Brother Consolmagno said science makes for a lousy religion.

"It's always changing, making new ideas which equals good art," he said. "The Bible is not a science textbook. Science textbooks are out of date every three years. The Big Bang Theory will be out of date some day. The Bible is not a book about science, it's a book about God. The church says evidence of evolution is overwhelming. That is not a hypothesis. Recognize that creation is an act of God, an act of love."

Another student asked what he hoped to gain from his work?

"I do science because, for me, it is fun," he answered. "Not superficially fun or every now and then. I get it. It is beautiful and harmonious. I feel that in some way I am shaking hands with God. Science is knowledge, truth and being close to the source of knowledge and truth."

Amen, Brother.

Just noted this now, thoughts on Moussaoui's sentence

Having missed my regular train and not having been able to get my media fix in for the evening, I just got confirmation of the life sentence for Mr. Moussaoui.

I am very pleased by this sentence. The man was an incompetent cowardly hanger-on to the real murderers of September 11th. Having been too incompetent to be allowed to take part in the attacks on 9/11, he clearly now wished to take the cowards way out by forcing the government to take his life.

By not giving him that option, the jury has done the right thing and struck a strong blow against radical terrorists who seek to have someone else make them into martyrs. They have shown that the rule of law and the wisdom of the regular american citizen will win out over those who seek to subvert our legal system as part of their cowardly recruiting efforts.

Book blog begun

It can be found using this this link.

Or by clicking on the "Books" link here

A Train Wreck worth Watching

For me, the hardest part about watching "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is the constant queasy feeling in my stomach watching Larry David's character talk himself into one humiliating situation after another. The tension of knowing that every encounter he has with anyone on his show will end badly, and if it doesn't do so initially, it will lead to an even more horrendous outcome later.

In sum, it's like watching a train slow approaching a washed out bridge: there's nothing you can do to stop it, you know people are about to get hurt, part of you can't really believe it's happening, and yet you can't avert your gaze either.

[Please note that Eliel, having never actually watched a real train careem of a washed out bridge, is merely speculating that this would be his reaction. Actual mileage may vary. We apologize for the interruption, the actual point of this posting will continue already in progress--Ed.]

That's the same feeling I felt this weekend while lying in my sick bed and watching Stephen Colbert's C-SPAN recorded White House Press Dinner performance. Hearing the AP president introduce him was like seeing the light of the train coming around the bend. You can't believe that they've invited him to speak at this event. Anyone with basic cable who has ever even watched a minute of the Colbert Report would know that he's not fan of the present administration, and yet the he is: sitting two seats away from POTUS, being introduced as the featured speaker of the evening.

You watch him stand up, you see him approach the podium, and you know that someone's going to get hurt: either Colbert will minimize himself and what he seems to stand for on his program (being a blistering critic of the age of pandering media and an out-of-touch president) or he's going to to be true to his roots and be escorted off stage by the Secret Service.

You watch as he starts out, doing the Stepen Colbert of the Colbert Report persona and are pleased. He's not letting the glitz of the occasion keep him from being himself. Good. But then, mere minutes into his performance, he goes straight for the jugular as the New York Times finally reports today:

And all this after Mr. Colbert tried, at the outset, to soften up the president by mocking his intelligence, saying that he and Mr. Bush were "not so different," by which he meant, he explained, "we're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol."

It's pretty much the same from then on. And it's hard to watch. As every bombshell issue under the sun is brought up, from NSA Wiretapping, to low approval ratings, to operating from the "No Truth Zone", Colbert does not play the role of the comic here, he plays the role of the satirist. And does it brilliantly.

Whether you support the current administration or not, the truth of the matter is that the nation is at a serious turning point. And, it seems, the only people who are willing to admit to that are those who work for Comedy Central. I wish some irony could be found in that. But it's just plain awful.

For those who would like to watch the full event, you can either go to C-SPAN, if you're left leaning, you can go to this site, and if you're right leaning, you can follow links from Andrew Sullivan's take on the weekend's show. Apparently, the full video is now available here as well.

Split Personality

The few readers of my blog might remember that when I started doing this back January, I said that one of the reasons for calling it Eliel's Random Musings is that my interests lie in so many disparate areas that confining myself to one subject area seemed untenable, so I might as well just lump it all under one roof.

It's come to my attention that there is one strong area of interest of mine that needs it's own platform: BOOKS.

I read.

A lot.

And I keep thinking of jotting down notes after I finish a book or when I stumble upon something pithy. Sounds a lot like a blog to me. So tonight, I'll embark on using the tools that Google gave me and create another blog to organize those book-related musing activities (10 points to whomever gets that reference).

There already is a "books" link on my home page, so that's where you'll be able to find these entries once I make the necessary changes.

Della 7/1989 to 3/29/2006

It has taken me a while to be able to post this. Della's passing, while a long time in coming, was still painful. She was the elderly stateswoman of our pack of dogs and she will be sorely missed.

We are all still getting used to her being gone. It was just this week that I stopped automatically looking for her in the morning when I let the other dogs out in the morning.

We have buried her body on the side of the hill behind our house, giving her mortal remains as beautiful a setting as we could. But really, though, she lives on. I think this poem says it best:

Where To Bury A Dog

"If you bury him in this spot, he will
come to you when you call -
come to you over the grim, dim frontier
of death, and down the well-remembered
path, and to your side again.

" And though you call a dozen living
dogs to heel, they shall not growl at
him, nor resent his coming,
for he belongs there.

" People may scoff at you, who see
no lightest blade of grass bent by his
footfall, who hear no whimper, people
who may never really have had a dog.
Smile at them, for you shall know
something that is hidden from them,
and which is well worth the knowing.

" The one best place to bury a good
dog is in the heart of his master."

By Ben Hur Lampman
from the Portland Oregonian Sept. 11, 1925

Degrees of Separation

For the last few weeks, the smallness of the world has been again made apparent to me.

Two Thursday's ago, I got to talking to the passenger next to me on the train as we approached Hudson, and found out that she was teaching this course at RPI. It sounded like something interesting to folks I know so I told her about my friend who teaches at Bard. It turns out that she'd heard of her work already so the world felt a little smaller.

Then our friend Kate was in from the UK and rode the train up to our house. During her ride, a person on the train recognized the handbag that she was carrying as being an Elizabeth Powell handbag. (She says it happens frequently, which is a testament to Elizabeth's unique design skill as she has less than 500 bags in circulation, but they are recognizable). The world is smaller again.

The Saturday following I went to a birthday part for our friends Jim & Corbett, and I met their friend John who owns a store in Hudson. I had mentioned Ms. Mazza's web site to them when I saw one of their gifts (a mini-knitting machine). It turns out that John's work is featured in a show with Ms. Mazza's work. (I am not sure exactly which one it is, but I think it's this one).

The earth as a shrinky-dink...

Then I saw Jackie this weekend and found out that some of her work will be exhibited in the same show as work from microrevolt.org this May.

Tiny globe. Very tiny.

This article has an interesting discusson on social networks and how they replicate the movements of particles in a vacuum. I think every time I meet someone who knows someone I know, I am going to make a point of saying "boing".

A short take on liberals and conservatives

This article was forwarded to me by Scarz the other day. It's an amusing piece on a (not-very-significant-but-interesting) study done a group of children that a social scientist had been following for several decades.

His conclusion was that children who had a hard time dealing with obstacles in their childhood and would cry and/or run to an authority figure when they had issues (the article calls them "whiny" but I am not sure if the meaning of the word whiny is fixed enough in our language to have it be clear enough, hence my more wordy description) ended up later in life being much more rigid in their world views and leaned towards the conservative end of the spectrum.

That made sense to me, as progressive thinking requires being able to think "outside the box" to a certain extent.

What I could not get over was that one of the studies harshest critics (another social psychologist: the University of Arizona's Jeff Greenberg) chose to provide the following example of why the study was wrong:

He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones.

Makes sense so far, being conservative or progressive really has nothing to do with whether you end up on the right or the left of the spectrum when it comes to the realpolitik of party affiliation in whatever country you hail from. You can be a conservative leftist unwilling to budge on your stance on issues just as easily as you can be a conservative right-winger who does the same. Or you can be progressive member of your party, one that's willing to be flexible and bend and consider opinions from other sources and how they fit into your objectives. Examples of these types of progressives are John McCain from the Republican corner, and Barak Obama from the Democratic party. (A good description of McCain's progressive pedigree can be found in this dated, but still accurate editorial from FORWARD. Obama's pedigree is well laid out in this Wikipedia entry)

But then he goes on to say this:

He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

And loses me just a little bit. He loses me because if he means by "those kinds of people" the ones who leaned left, then he's really confused about the correlation between one's conservative or progressive world view and one's party affiliations. Those who would more likely find the Communist Party a comforting place to call home are likely made of the same stuff that social conservatives in this country are made of. Yes, they are diametrically opposed in name and world view of their political parties, but in terms of hewing to the notion that "things are just fine just they way they are, thank you very much", they are twins separated at birth.

Maybe it's just bad paraphrasing on the part of the Star's writer. So I'll give Mr. Greenberg the benefit of the doubt and presume he was trying to get the point across that a conservative here in our capitalist democracy would likely end up a conservative in Communist China.

Music that makes me high

So when Elizabeth went away for her Survivor weekend, she came back with a copy of a CD to which all of the contestants were dancing around the fire after the group dinner. It's a collection of Brazilian club music. Most of it is based on dance hall hits from the mid-to-late 80's and nineties as well as some classic stuff from the 70's (can we say Planet Rock? Yum!)

What amazes me about the music is the sheer amount of energy that the performers bring to their work. There is a euphoria that results in this for me, having spent some time in college and after going out dancing with a group of friends every Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. This music reminds me of those days (however long ago they might be).

Pretty much, I think the endorphin production begins almost immediately when one of these works comes on the old iTunes. I've never been a user of mind-altering substances, and when I have music like this, I don't need it.

Tortured Reasoning

Andrew Sullivan's blog pointed me to an article in this weeks New Yorker that discusses the issue of detainee torture in Guantanamo Bay and the fight that was quietly fought by the Navy's General Counsel Alberto J. Mora against the policy until he recently retired.

The reasoning behind Mora's fight against this policy should ring true to anyone who has emigrated to the United States from a country ruled by an authoritarian or totalitarian government.

(Full Disclosure: I am one of those people. My parents left Haiti in search of freedom from the random violation of human rights that occurred there. To my parents, these were not isolated stories of unlawful detention, this was more up close and personal. My uncle was subjected to 7 years of confinement in prison for no other reason except for the fact that a member of the Tonton Macoute said he should be locked up.)

What Mora captures immediately upon being made aware that attorney's in the DOD had drafted a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself (also available from the New Yorker) which stated in sum that the kinds of methods to be employed by staff at Guantanamo Bay could exceed the bounds of actions normally proscribed by the US law and the Geneva conventions, and that essentially no one would ever prosecute those who performed those acts on the detainees,, was this fundamental fact: the American system of justice founded on the constitution of the united states falls apart when the inalienable rights of human beings begin to be watered down depending on their place of birth or their nationality. To wit:

Mora thinks that the media has focused too narrowly on allegations of U.S.-sanctioned torture. As he sees it, the authorization of cruelty is equally pernicious. "To my mind, there's no moral or practical distinction," he told me. "If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America--even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It's a transformative issue. [Emphasis mine]

I agree with him wholeheartedly, and only wish that there were more people like him at the Pentagon.

Now I am thoroughly depressed

I just watched an episode of the ABC show inJustice.

I am not a happy camper now. I figured I was tuning in for another ABC court-room drama in the model of Law & Order or The Practice. Instead, I get a realistic portrayal of what happens when a (fictional) set of Justice Project workers try to prevent an execution at the 11th hour.

I was thinking to myself "wow, they're running out of time, in real life, I bet the judge would not grant a stay 8 minutes before the person was to be executed after 2 previous motions were filed with wrong data."

Much to my surprise and dismay, I was right.

The show has the temerity to take us with the investigators as they prove that the wrong man is possibly going to be put to death. And then to show us how those discoveries, within the confines of the current way that states with death penalties handle the appellate process, don't amount to much.

It was a really great expose, the subject matter treated thoughtfully, the exposition was skillful. Having said all that, I don't think I can ever watch this program again. I am telling myself that it is because I don't want yet another program to be addicted to.

But in reality, I can't watch it again because I can't stop thinking that the man strapped to the gurney could one day be me. Or my son. I can't bear to imagine that again any time soon. Let alone next Friday night at 9PM...

So, it's cancer...

We got the biopsy results back on Claude.

Turns out the tumors they removed were malignant melanomas. This is not good. Reading up on the disease, it is apparently a killer.

At this point, we're taking it one day at a time and doing lots of research on our options. It's even more frustrating to read about how if the tumors had been found when they were smaller, the chances of recovery would have been greater.

It makes his suffering in silence even more painful to think about.

I can't say much more on the subject because it makes me so sad. Except that any of you with smaller male dogs should look your gift companions in the mouth frequently. Especially as they get older, and especially if they start to drool for no apparent reason.

And I will be reading...

Next on my to-read list is another Dean Koontz novel (The Taking ). I saw a sign in the bookstore the other day that said that one of the reasons that Dean Koontz readers keep coming back to him is that ultimately, no matter how horrible the situation he places his characters, in the final analysis it is those with a sense of hope and strength in the fact of adversity that prevail in his books.

I could not agree more with this. I started noticing that his best fiction revolved around life changing events that (in some cases literally as in From the Corner of His Eye) open character's eyes to what's really important in the world. I also noticed in that same book that perhaps Mr. Koontz is afraid that his base won't follow him down this path (what a critic from Publisher's Weekly calls "moral reflection", which I think is a good way to describe some of Koontz's latest works.

I will put up under a separate entry a review of From the Corner of His Eye, but suffice it to say that I think the book would have been better acknowledged by the literary types of Mr. Koontz had dropped the whole "crazed serial killer on the loose" subplot. It would have left him more time to focus on the core, no--the heart, of the book.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here... I'm supposed to be talking about The Taking, and how I ended up with it on my reading list. To be honest, I didn't even read the jacket of this book to see what it was about before I added it to the pile of books to be bought. It was on the cheap rack, it was by Dean Koontz, and I hadn't read it yet. That's all I needed to decide. Having imported it into ReaderWare (a program I love for keeping track of the books I have), and getting ready to write this, I have looked now at the publisher's description of the book and have an idea that I'm going to like it just fine.

I'll let you know.

Err, once I finish The book I'm reading now

Just finished reading....

Just finished reading Valentine's Rising, the latest installment of a series I've been reading called the Vampire Earth series. It's a pretty grim series, and, title notwithstanding, isn't really about vampires in the normal sense. It's more of a classic science fiction tale of invaders from another planet taking over the earth and humanities resistance to them. In many ways, the series has more in common with Robert Heinlein the works of Heinlein than Anne Rice. One of those similarities is to be found in the prose: it's clipped and to the point. Each chapter begins with a history-book like description of the state of the territory in which our intrepid hero (David Valentine) finds himself. Even with the rather direct writing style, the text is still littered with literate referents. It seems that the genre of military fiction is one that likes to acknowledge its deep roots (makes sense given that most of recorded history consists of descriptions of some war or another, I suppose) and constant acknowledgement of battles that have come before, and the teachings of warriors of bygone errors is a norm for this type of book. This particular writer has a knack for weaving in those references with a stock set of characters that David Valentine has met during the series. From the priest who raised him after his parents were killed (oops, stock plot element there) to his alien blood brother (oops again), platforms are provided for linking plots of the books to the bigger picture issues of what it means to be a soldier, what it means to resist an unjust occupation, and the real cost on the human soul of being someone whose profession consists mainly of taking lives. My bottom line on this series is that I found it by chance (Amazon recommended it based on other books I'd bought with Vampiric themes) and I find myself buying the new releases as they come out because the story is engaging enough to keep me coming back for more.

Suffering in Silence

Our dog Claude is 13 and was diagnosed last year with a fatty lymphoma. That ended up shrinking on its own after we took him to an oncology vet over in Oneonta after panicking from the initial diagnosis. He's been fine since then, but over the last few months we've noticed him slowing down somewhat. Last week Elizabeth took him out for a walk and he took some stumbles which surprised her, so she took him in on Saturday. The vet saw him and took a look at his legs and he seemed fine. The vet tried to take a look in his mouth (as standard operating procedure), but he couldn't get a good view because a) Claude was not happy about being probed in his proboscis and b) there was too much mucus in his mouth. So, they told us to bring him back and they'd take a look at him under sedation. The knocked him out and found a plum-sized tumor attached to his tongue. [Reason for excessive drooling and reduced appetite discovered!] Needless to say, it had to be removed right away, so they got our approval and went in. After they got the first one out, they discovered another smaller one behind it and took that one out too.

Elizabeth saw the photos of the larger one, but I am glad to say that I did not. The whole experience reminds me of how our beloved pets, no matter how clever they are, just simply cannot really communicate their issues to us. The vet told us he was surprised that Claude could breathe properly with the growth in his mouth. But he was a trooper and except for not eating as quickly as he used to, he seemed otherwise fine. We attributed his not being as active to just aging (his 13th birthday was in November).

It's heartbreaking because he must have been in a lot of pain, or at least uncomfortable for a long time. He's been drooling for a while and had been to the vet about that (the diagnosis there was that he had a chronic mouth infection that older dogs get and needed to have his mouth cleaned with an instant shampoo all the time--of course, now we know that wasn't the full story).

There's no real moral to this story: getting old and getting sick is part of the cycle of life. But I guess the trick to dealing with it is to remember that some of those you love can't ever tell you when they need your help.

Why blog?

Today Elizabeth asked me why I have a blog. It's a good question. I think part of the goal is to have a structured and public environment where I'm supposed to put my writings. I was talking to 'Scarz about this yesterday: Writing is one of the things I say I like to do, but I don't do enough of because I spend too much time laboring over finding the right words to express something and end up writing nothing.

It is tantamount to saying you like to exercise but only want to do it if you're wearing exactly the right outfit for the gym. Add to that equation the fact that you have a really large closet consisting of clothing from different eras and styles and my problem is described.

I have lots of interests ranging from scientific theory to literary. I read books by Physicists, Philosophers, and quasi-Pornographers.

Given that, I have a hard time deciding on what to write about. That's why I decided to call this site "Random Musings". That's what it will be. No more "but it's my literary theory site so I can't write about transgenic pigs here!", or "but it's my book review site, I can't write about transgenic pigs here!", or (and this the worst) "but it's my science site, and all I've got to write about is transgenic pigs again!".

So, this blog exists to keep me writing. Hopefully, along the way I'll write something good. But I make no promises. All I can promise is that I will be all over the place, since that's the kind of person I am.

p.s. I wasn't kidding about the transgenic pigs, either

The kindness of strangers

Tonight, the train was very cramped and I had to share a four-seater with another passenger. Turns out he was an Amtrak staffer (I know this because the conductor recognized him and asked him to tell her where the circuit breaker for the power strip on my side of the train was so she could reset it [I was her guinea pig to test the power since I had my laptop out already; it was working]). A hour or so into the trip, he stood up to get some stuff out of his bag, and tapped me on the shoulder to offer me a small bottle of water. After confirming that he carried extra, I accepted (I hope graciously) and we chatted a bit about the other thing he pulled out of his bag: a copy of Angels and Demons Dan Brown's “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code.

We are both keeping an open mind about the movie, but a little concerned about Tom Hanks being the star of the movie. As my fellow passenger said though, Tom is “very versatile” so maybe he'll surprise us.

Anyway, the whole thing made me realize that I need to get a little better about carrying stuff to share during my commute. This was a man's random act of kindness, and as someone who believes that those acts are what differentiate humans from lesser mammals, I realized I better get on the stick and start contributing my own random acts to society while I have the means to do so.
In the scale of things, a little thing of sharing water with me probably does more to improve my day than most things (that is, other than being with my family).
It's interesting too that this man's offer of water is on it's face a much kinder act than last Friday's offer of whiskey from one of the regular riders who had brought a bottle along to share. [For the record, I declined the offer]

A new beginning

I have succumbed to reality: I no longer have the time or patience to roll-my-own web solutions anymore. So I've signed up to let Blogger manage my blogspace for me. I will still host it on my own site, but it will be managed by the many instead of the one.

I hope to keep this more up-to-date this year, so watch this space.