From MoveOn

Standing before a room of oil company executives in June, John McCain flip-flopped and declared support for coastal oil drilling. Now the Washington Post is reporting that, within days, oil and gas execs ponied up nearly $1 million to elect McCain.1 It's another piece of evidence that in a McCain White House, oil companies will call the shots—just as they have with President Bush.

Fox News Poll

If this isn't a push poll, I don't know what is:

From FOX News:

Have you heard any of your friends and neighbors say there is something about Barack Obama that scares them?
Yes 49%
No 50%

Have you heard any of your friends and neighbors say there is something about John McCain that scares them?
Yes 36%
No 62%

Some people believe Barack Obama, despite his professed Christianity, is secretly a Muslim. Others say that is just a rumor and Obama really is a Christian as he says, and point out he's attended a Christian church for years. What do you believe -- is Obama a Muslim or a Christian?
Muslim 10%
Christian 57%

John McCain was held captive for five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. Do you think that experience would make McCain a better president or a worse president?
Better 49%
Worse 11%
No Difference (voluntary) 33%

Do you think Barack Obama's trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East is better described as a fact-finding trip or as a campaign event?
Fact-finding 19%
Campaign event 47%
Both (voluntary) 25%

Obama's 3 Pointer & McCain's geography lesson

Obama's Speech

I listened to the last half of Obama's speech during lunch. Brilliant speech, and he's gotten much better at the teleprompter. He clearly knows how to play to large audiences.

The speech itself was wonderful. Critics will say it is dreamy without substance. But the fact is that it is visionary, positive and hopeful in a way that McCain could never, on his most lucid day, pull off. And, of course, he says things that McCain would never say -- besides terrorism, he talked about Darfur, AIDS, global warming, nuclear weapons, poverty and justice in Africa, fair trade, human rights in Burma, freedom of religion, and trust among nations.


P.S. Part of me thinks that it is almost impossible for McCain to win. The bigger part of me realizes that McCain is still polling very well, because half of the voters in the country still live in an alternate universe from the one I occupy.

A Little Bit of Knowledge...

In last week's This American Life, they talked about knowledge.

In one segment, they talked about having a "little" bit of knowledge, just enough to get yourself into trouble. Like, everybody knows that trans fats are bad for you. But nobody knows why. So, when you encounter a person who waxes eloquent on the evils of trans fats, if you ask them, "why are they bad for you?" they will probably try to just make up some plausible story. There's a word for it, and it's called a "Modern Jackass."

I do this all the time with politics, of course. I know just enough about, for example, the latest debacle with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac to know that I don't like it, but not enough to have actually read the bill and be able to argue intelligently about it if someone asked me any kind of in-depth question about it. I am a "modern jackass."

The next segment was about beliefs we had growing up, into adulthood, that suddenly turned out to be wildly off-target and mistaken--and usually we find that out in some embarrassing situation. Like the woman who thought that the abbreviation "Xing" as in "Railroad Xing" was pronounced "zing". Or the one who thought that unicorns were an endangered species of a real animal. Or the one who grew up having only eaten chicken for lunch and dinner--ever--and thought everybody else did too.

I've had several of these mistaken beliefs too. Some that come immediately to mind are:

1) razor blades last forever.
I remember being a sophomore in college and complaining to my roommate that I hated shaving because it hurt so much. He asked me how long I'd been using my Bic razor blade, and I replied something like, "I don't know 2 years or so." He just stared at me for a while. Then he handed me a new razor blade and said, "try this." And it was glorious. It was actually shaving my beard instead of ripping it out. That was the first time I learned that a razor only lasts for a few shaves.

2) men get haircuts about every 6 -8 months.
I was into my 20s before I read, in a Men's Health magazine, that people are supposed to get a haircut about every month. I was utterly dumbfounded. Literally all my life until the age of 24 or so, I only ever got a haircut when my hair was so out of control (it curls into an afro), that I could not get my brush through my hair. My parents had never, EVER, taken me to get a haircut before I complained that I could not get my brush through my hair--which was about once every 6-8 months or so.

3) Never drain or rinse canned beans.
It has only been in the last 2 or 3 years that I have learned that when people cook with canned beans that they usually drain and rinse the beans before they use them. Wow! What a discovery! Growing up, we never drained or rinsed canned beans--which we ate almost every day of our lives-- and I thought that the nasty bitter taste of the "bean gravy" that I hated was just how beans tasted and was normal.

I'm sure I could think of more. So, what are your dumb discoveries?

Some brief notes...

...church meetings are not my favorite things...
...Obama has been doing pretty good overseas. A huge risk for him, but he doesn't seem to have made any big blunders (unlike McCain who has blundered just trying to criticize Obama).
...I hate the fact that the shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are getting bailed out. It isn't the mortgagees who are getting bailed out, they are still getting foreclosed on. No, just the rich investors who bought the lousy mortgages are getting bailed out. Man that sucks.

Here's a neat poem:


I Sit and Think

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall never see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

JRR Tolkien

Foreign Policy

So, exactly what the hell is going on with our foreign policy?

• Condi is meeting with the unspeakably evil N. Koreans for the first time?
• Bush is doing an abrupt 180 about-face with the even more evil Iran, going so far as opening informal diplomatic relations (which he formerly called "appeasement")?
• The latest intel report says that Iran stopped its nuclear program 3 YEARS ago?
• Bush wants to increase efforts in Afghanistan (instead of Iraq)?

What the hell??
First, it's all good.
So that makes me suspicious right away.
Second, why did they wait so long?
Third, are they really doing this to shore up McCain's campaign as some suggest? Won't that backfire? Won't that make the American people really focus on domestic policy, for which Obama CLEARLY has the edge?

P.S. Why exactly is Obama running away from debating McCain when McCain can't remember that Czechoslovakia hasn't existed since 1993? Twice?

On off-shore drilling

"It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil 10 years from now" -- Al Gore


I would also redirect you to the blog post I made some weeks ago where I pointed out that the oil industry ALREADY has millions of offshore locations that they are not bothering to drill in. Why? Nobody wants to. Drilling for oil is hard.

St Bonaventure

St. Bonaventure took Francis' intuitive genius and spelled it out into an entire philosophy.

God is "within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased."Bonaventure was the first to speak of God as one "whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity and order of all created things are the very "footprints" and "fingerprints" (vestigia) of God. Now that is quite a lovely and a very safe universe to live in. Welcome home!

--Richard Rohr, Hope Against Darkness

Gene Robinson

Gay episcopal bishop Gene Robinson is in the U.K. Here's a story about it:

Here's to you, Mr Robinson

The irony missed by Christian homophobes is that the gay US bishop is sustained by a faith you could call fundamentalist

All comments ()

Giles Fraser
guardian.co.uk,
Monday July 14, 2008

The emails have been coming in all day. My favourite begins: "Dear sodomite supporter, you are nothing but a dirty sodomite-loving ugly stain of a man who is a disgrace to humanity." It ends "Burn in hell, Mr K." Well, thank you for that, Mr K. I have had a fair number of letters and emails from people who think like you. One suggested that I ought to be executed at Tyburn. Another graphically described the details of fisting.

My crime had been to offer the Bishop of New Hampshire a pulpit to preach the word of God. I usually have the emotional hide of a rhino, but even I was upset by the unpleasantness of the reaction, hiding my hurt in a few too many vodkas at lunchtime. How on earth does Gene Robinson cope with the disgusting abuse to which he is subjected most days – the protester who interrupted his sermon in my church on Sunday being a pretty mild example? Day after day, buckets of spiritual shit are thrown at him, sometimes by fellow bishops, and he just keeps going.

Spending some time with him over the last few days, I have discovered how he does it. He is the real deal. He is a believer. Responding to attacks that he had a "homosexual agenda", he insisted: "Here and now, in St Mary's Church, Putney, I want to reveal to you the homosexual agenda. The homosexual agenda is: Jesus." He went on to preach a fiery, almost revivalist, sermon, calling on Anglicans to take Jesus into their heart and to allow Him to cast out their fear.

What makes this person so interesting is that he has lost any sense that he is able to support himself spiritually through his own effort alone. His recognition of his "failure" to cope is precisely his strength. The theology is pure Luther: only when you recognise that you are unable to make yourself acceptable to God under your own steam can you collapse back upon God as the sole source of salvation. Later in the sermon, he described going from a meeting of the US House of Bishops to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and being relieved that, at this second meeting, he could at last speak about God.

Forget what you think you know about Gene Robinson – his is Gospel Christianity of a very traditional kind. This is what Christianity looks like once it has got over its obsession with respectability.

Women Bishops

The Church of England on Monday voted to permit the ordination of women bishops. The Catholic church immediately issued a statement saying that it "regrets" that decision and that it creates a "rift" in the ongoing efforts at reconciliation.

The most-oft cited reason why women can't be bishops, as the article says, is that Jesus' apostles were all men, and therefore, Jesus only wanted men to be bishops.

What these traditionists don't think about is that Jesus only chose Jews to be apostles. So, why are gentile males permitted to be bishops in the Anglican church? By the same reasoning, they ought not to be.

Local Food

I have often wondered why it is so hard to find locally grown food in the middle of Kansas. Why, for example, our local grocery has almost no produce, and what they have is often old. Why, for example, our local meat market sells only beef, and only frozen. Why, for example, the Lawrence Farmer's Market is only open a couple of days a week. I have had some conversations with people about all the reasons, but this excerpt from an NPR story really helps to solidify what's going on:

Ira Flatow: You show an interesting illustration of the state of Iowa, which we all know is a great agricultural state, but the people buying the food there — none of it's local except maybe the corn.

Mr. Halweil: Right. The irony of the whole sort of center of the country, the Corn Belt, is that most of that corn and soybeans goes elsewhere, and those very productive agricultural counties end up importing most of their food. The folks at Iowa State University at the Leopold Center looked at a typical meal consumed in Iowa — some beef, some string beans, some carrots, some potatoes, berries for a pie, wheat for bread — and what they found is that most of those ingredients came from between 1,000 and 2,000 miles away, from as far away as Chile and mostly from California, even though Iowa is perfectly capable of raising all of those ingredients for the vast majority of the year.

And most importantly, what they found is that long-distance meal consumed 17 times as much energy in transportation as that same meal raised within 50 miles of the university itself.

So not only is it gobbling up a tremendous amount of money, but it's actually taking dollars out of the state, dollars that could be going to Iowa farmers.

Ira Flatow: And why isn't it grown there then? If you can do it, why not do it?

Mr. Halweil: Well, it gets back to this sort of economic calculus that defines global trade, that defines trade anywhere at this point. And that is, if a store in Iowa can find a sack of potatoes grown slightly cheaper than it would cost them to grow it in Iowa, they get it from wherever they can. And because fuel is relatively inexpensive or a relatively small part of that cost, we're willing to ship those potatoes from as far away as China.

And we don't really attach a lot of value right now to the fact that those potatoes might have been grown locally, which might mean that they're fresher and tastier. It also means that we're not causing all this pollution and congestion as a result of the energy use. And also means that we're keeping money in our local economy.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Wilkins, you write about fossil fuel consuming a huge portion of our food costs.

Dr. Wilkins: Well, it certainly does. Our food system is very fossil fuel-dependent and very heavily uses of fossil fuels. It's estimated that about 20 percent of our fossil fuel use is used in the entire food system, from production to getting food on our table.

For every calorie that we consume, about 10 calories of fossil fuel has been used to produce that.

Ira Flatow: You wrote an article in the Times-Union, the local newspaper in Albany, New York, saying food policies fail to spur good health. And you talk about something that sort of flies below the radar screen of most Americans, most politicians. And that is the legislation that sets up the farm bill. What goes on in the farm bill affects just about all kinds of things that we eat. Talk about what your concerns are.

Dr. Wilkins: Well — and this gets back to our concentration of supporting very few commodities, as opposed to supporting diversity and variety, which we promote in the dietary guidelines. So our dietary guidelines are very sound in what they're promoting in terms of eating a variety of fruits and vegetables and eating whole grains and, you know, a variety of different kinds of foods.

Yet our production system that we support with policy is very narrow in what it supports. And the Economic Research Service of the USDA has estimated that we would need to put in six million acres more in crop production to supply the kinds of foods, if people shifted to the dietary guidelines, and produce far fewer acres of corn and far fewer acres, about 10 million fewer acres of soybeans.

So we're producing foods that are then converted to being available as commodities to the food industry that then finds multiple uses for them. We have, you know — walk into a supermarket today and see nearly 40,000 items in the supermarket. Gives a really great impression of a lot of choice. But when you start really looking at the ingredients in a lot of the packaged foods and the highly processed foods that we have in the supermarket, you'll start seeing the same ingredients all over the place.

And high fructose corn syrup, which didn't exist before 1970, is now pervasive throughout our food system as is a lot of added fat from soybeans.

healthcare, poverty, justice

I have been involved in an online group that has been discussing health care, poverty, justice issues. Normally the people here are very enlightened, but on this issue, they are really out to lunch. Some refer to government-assisted health care as immoral "coercion." Others suggest that the Bible really doesn't have much to say about the poor. I doubt that most of them have ever gone hungry or been unable to get medical care for a day in their lives.

Well I'm done with it for a while. Weary. Need to recharge, so I'm separating myself from that group for a while.

McCain on Vietnam

McCain on Vietnam: we could have won if we kept fighting.

Scary.

FISA history

A good article on the history of FISA:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18650

The Little Things....

Lately I have read a lot of comments like this,

"Do you think God would waste his time caring about xxxxx? Don't you think he has more important things to worry about?"

Do the people who say this really think that God is running out of time?

I think that God cares about the little things. When I told a friend this a few months ago, he said, incredulously, "what, you think God cares about whether I had an egg mcmuffin instead of a fruit plate for breakfast?"

[sigh] When I say that God cares about the little things, I don't mean that God cares in a judgmental way about the little things. God is not looking down from the clouds with a frown ready to pronounce judgment on every action we take (or don't).

But I do think that God cares. God cares that my friend got to have breakfast that morning, and, indeed provided it. God cares that my friend got nourished, got a belly ache or not, that he noticed the taste of the bread, the smell of the orange juice. None of that is a "waste" of time for God. None of it is unworthy of God's care. God has all the time in the world to care about the little things. And God still has plenty of time left over to care about everybody else and hold the whole universe in God's hand. I guess that's why they call him God.