Living a Lie

I've known atheists who kept their disbelief to themselves, for fear of losing their business, their family, their friends - or maybe just because it would upset the in-laws. Plenty of people keep their disbelief a secret from parents, for fear of upsetting them. But I've also known parents who keep it hidden from their children, regularly attending church - and taking their children to Sunday School - because they think their kids will have it easier as part of the overwhelming majority in this country, though they may not believe a bit of it themselves.

This is probably difficult enough, but how much harder would it be for a pastor, a preacher, a priest who lost his faith? Admitting your disbelief would mean losing your job - no minor problem, especially when you have experience doing nothing else - and maybe your family, your friends, even your house.

Here's a study by Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola about Preachers who are not Believers. My quotes are from the study itself, though I learned about it from this post on Jerry A. Coyne's blog, Why Evolution Is True. Note that Coyne's comments are very perceptive (as usual), and illustrated with excerpts from the study. Plus, it's a lot shorter than the 28-page report (but the report is fascinating, if you've got the time to read it). Like Coyne, I was struck by this quote from a 50-year-old Southern Baptist minister:

“OK, this God created me. It’s a perfect God that knows everything; can do anything. And somehow it got messed up, and it’s my fault. So he had to send his son to die for me to fix it. And he does. And now I’m supposed to beat myself to death the rest of my life over it. It makes no sense to me. Don’t you think a God could come up with a better plan than that?”

“What kind of personality; what kind of being is this that had to create these other beings to worship and tell him how wonderful he is? That makes no sense, if this God is all-knowing and all-wise and all-wonderful. I can’t comprehend that that’s what kind of person God is.”

“Every church I’ve been in preached that the Jonah in the Whale story is literally true. And I’ve never believed that. You mean to tell me a human was in the belly of that whale? For three days? And then the whale spit him out on the shoreline? And, of course, their convenient logic is, ‘Well, God can do anything.’”

“Well, I think most Christians have to be in a state of denial to read the Bible and believe it. Because there are so many contradicting stories. You’re encouraged to be violent on one page, and you’re encouraged to give sacrificial love on another page. You’re encouraged to bash a baby’s head on one page, and there’s other pages that say, you know, give your brother your fair share of everything you have if they ask for it.”

Why do these people remain in the clergy? Well, sometimes they don't. But it's got to be terribly hard to give up the only job you've ever had, the only one you have any experience in or knowledge about. You risk losing your family, your friends, and often enough even your house. Would you like to start over - at the bottom - at 50, especially knowing that you'd likely lose your family and friends, too?

And it's clear that these people enjoy counseling others. They like providing comfort. No doubt, they tell themselves that they do a lot of good, despite the lies. And, well, it's probably nice having people listen to what you say, don't you think? It's a job, and a very good one, in many ways. That would be hard to give up.

From these interviews, it seems that some non-believing clergy don't think that their disbelief is all that important. So what if they don't believe in the mythology? It's just a metaphor, right? And the job gives them a chance to get involved in social issues. In other cases, I think that they just really wanted to believe. And what would be better for that purpose than joining the clergy? I sympathize with all of these people. It can't be easy.

I also see why so many religions try to keep their members - and especially their children - from hearing alternate views. If your faith is strong, then no reasoning, no logic should shake it, right? OK, maybe an ordinary believer might stray, but a clergyman? Their surprise is still evident in these quotes:

“Probably one of the most mind-opening things was listening to all these debates from top people of Christianity; or believers vs. non-believers. And I tried to do the same thing: be open and listen, and use my mind and reason, I guess. And almost undeniably, even being a believer and knowing the Christian claims and scripture, you know what? This guy won in the debate. He’s a non-believer. Why?”

“If God is God, he’s big enough; he can handle any questions I’ve got. Well, he didn’t. He didn’t measure up! And that sounds, you know, so funny, because if I heard somebody else saying that a year ago, I’d have thought, ‘You are such a sacrilegious person. God’s going to strike you dead by lightning or something!’ I’ve actually thought and tried to pin-point, but I can honestly say that intellectually, from within the first few weeks of my studies, I thought, ‘Wow! Could this be true?’

We all want meaning in our lives. We all want pretty much the same kinds of things in general. So I sympathize. It can't be easy when your life turns upside down like this. I never went through that, since I don't remember ever believing (I must have, when I was very little, but I don't remember it, though I clearly remember believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny). But I know how hard this must be.

Closure in Games

This started out as my reply to a comment by SJ to a previous post, Role-Playing Games Aren't Movies. But it just got too long for that (yeah, I'm pretty long-winded, aren't I?). You might want to read that post first.

I must admit that I rarely finish an RPG, so I don't ever worry about how they end. No doubt that's one reason why I'm willing to abandon the "story-telling" model entirely. But if so, it's only one reason. Still, I understand how players might want some closure to a game, some feeling of accomplishment when they finish it. It's nice to "win" a game, isn't it?

Of course, if you're telling a particular story, you need a good ending (or several, if you're also trying to be "nonlinear"). But to do that, you must make sure that the player actually follows the story. Story-telling is inherently linear, and compromises are just that. Any attempt to tell a story to the player is going to limit player freedom. There's no way around that.

In the games I mentioned previously - Dwarf Fortress, Aurora, etc. - you can't really "win" the game, but you can always lose it. In that way, it's like life. "Winning" at life is just having a good life, a life you can be proud of, and usually (though not always), living as long as possible. But we all "lose" the game of life eventually. Of course, our society - certainly our species - continues after we're dead. In real life, the characters change, but the story goes on (though not forever - even in that sense, you can lose, but you can't win, not ultimately).

A book or a movie may end with the hero riding off into the sunset (or, at least, proudly victorious, with the beautiful girl in his arms). I always wonder what happens after that. But that's the thing with a story - it ends. And unless it's a tragedy, it doesn't normally end in the protagonist's death. Well, stories are artificial. But so are games. And yes, I do understand the desire for closure. Still, to end a game like that, you must know where the player will end up. In a book or a movie, that's no problem. The author/director knows exactly what will happen. But a computer game is different. To unleash the full potential of computer games, you must give each player the freedom to be creative himself.

I do see a couple of ways around this dilemma. One might be to keep track of player accomplishments in the game. That wouldn't be easy to do when you don't know what the "quests" will be, but it's still possible. After all, many games already keep track of your character's reputation. Accomplishments, for good or ill, wouldn't be that big a problem. Then, the player could have the option of "retiring" (as opposed to just "quitting") at any time, which would end the game with a grand celebration or a eulogy - a review of his life, anyway. Closure.

An alternate way might be for the developer to set up, in the initial game conditions, one overarching, world-spanning situation (a "primary quest" sort of thing). This might be a war, an invasion, a super-villain of some kind, a devastating plague, or anything else likely to affect everyone in the world, at least eventually.

Unlike the main quest in a story-based game, this would continue realistically whether the player got directly involved or not. However, by the very nature of such events, it would be hard for the player to stay completely out of it. Like everyone else, he'd be affected by an invasion, for example, though he might try to avoid the actual fighting. Either way, the game developer could still set up certain conditions that would "complete" the game.

For example, if invaders conquered the capitol city and killed the king, that might end the game. Likewise, if the leader of the invaders was killed, and they were driven back to just a small proportion of the gameworld. Or if a peace treaty was signed. If wanted, you could have many different situations that would end the game (in addition to the death of the main character or the player just deciding to retire). These would all be situations which wouldn't occur on their own for some time, of course. But each of them could have an elaborate finish which would satisfy any need for closure.

Note, too, that the player would still have an effect on this world-spanning problem, whether or not he got directly involved. After all, helping a town with a bandit problem would strengthen the king's ability to fight, while joining the bandits would help the invaders, even though that wouldn't likely be the intent of the bandits. And as I say, it would be hard to stay completely out of this kind of thing. That's the whole point of "main quests" - they're usually important because they affect so many people. If you're in that world, you're going to be a part of the situation, one way or another.

Let me go to a second point now, how you "spark interest" in this kind of game. It's not that there wouldn't be a story in the game - in fact, there would be all sorts of stories. Just as there are "stories" in every household in real life, so too would there be "stories" everywhere in a gameworld. With or without a dangerous, world-spanning problem, there would still be conflict, still be disagreements, still be situations full of story potential.

In Dwarf Fortress, for example, thieves steal precious possessions (and even children). Bandits attack, wild animals are often deadly, and even accidents can kill. Individual dwarves grieve when their friends or family members, or even pets, are killed, and that affects their behavior, often leading to suicide or murder themselves. They can be heroic or timid or any number of different personality traits, which also affect the situation. The game is positively filled with stories (just not any particular story).

In a more traditional RPG (so far, "adventure mode" in Dwarf Fortress isn't anywhere close to this kind of thing), your character could find situations like this everywhere. You could decide who to help or hinder. Your actions, then, would affect everyone else, too, because every NPC would have friends, family, co-workers. And whatever you decided to do, the game could pull you into the situation, so that one thing would tend to follow from another.

For example, in Mount&Blade, your character starts out randomly in the gameworld, and at first, you tend to travel around. But as you acquire followers and get a reputation - both a general recognition of your growing fame and a more specific reputation within cities and among particular lords - you start to get invitations from kings. You can, of course, just bum around and continue to stay free of any entanglements. You can even become a bandit and prey on everyone. But the game is designed so that you'll probably, eventually, choose a realm to join.

Even then, you've still got the freedom to choose your own path. For example, you can betray your king to his rival, if you wish. Or you can switch realms entirely. But generally, there's a natural, logical progression here. It's all up to you, at every point, but if you want to get ahead, it's only reasonable that people expect things from you. If you pledge to a king, he might give you a village or even a fortress, but he'll also expect your support. Reasonably enough, if you fail him, he won't be happy. On the other hand, if you're particularly useful to him, you'll be rewarded.

The point is that everything, at every point, is always up to you. What to do is entirely your choice. But the game still draws you in. You're not just doing things at random. Because of the way the world works (and it's not at all unrealistic), you get sucked into a particular point of view and into a specific set of problems and opportunities. It's likely to be different every time you play the game, because it's always your choice, but actually, the developer is still providing plenty of direction. The direction is subtle, and it doesn't affect your freedom at all, but it's not just random, either.

In all of this, though, we're only at the very beginning of this kind of game development. We see hints of how the future might be, but that's all. As far as I know, we don't have the technology yet to make fully-realized gameworlds where NPCs all have their own AI and act like people. We're a long way from the point where a player's character has real freedom in deciding what to do and how to do it, in a fully destructible world where you can do things the developer never expected. But I'm convinced that's the future of gaming.

Why don't honest journalists take on Fox News?

Here's an interesting editorial by Howell Raines in The Washington Post asking why honest journalists don't take on Roger Ailes and Fox News.

Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.

Well, Raines explains the economics of the situation: Fox News is making money hand over fist, and this at a time of collapsing readership of print newspapers and declining audience share among the traditional TV networks. And he worries that "some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox's financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes's proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him."

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation.

Under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting, Fox has accomplished something that seemed impossible before Ailes imported to the news studio the tricks he learned in Richard Nixon's campaign think tank: He and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions -- whether on health-care reform or other issues -- they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting. I try not to believe that this kid-gloves handling amounts to self-censorship, but it's hard to ignore the evidence. News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer.

Is this true? Is this why journalists let Fox News get away with this? As a Journalism major in college long, long ago (though I never worked in the field), Fox News is particularly embarrassing to me. Well, as an American, too, I find Fox News horribly embarrassing. What has happened to us? How did we become so ignorant, so gullible, so cowardly?

Vaccines Don't Cause Autism

The federal "vaccines court" ruled again Friday, in three separate cases, that vaccines don't cause autism. Here's the article from the Los Angeles Times.

Special Master Denise K. Vowell wrote in one of the decisions that "petitioners propose effects from mercury in [vaccines] that do not resemble mercury's known effects in the brain, either behaviorally or at the cellular level. To prevail, they must show that the exquisitely small amounts of mercury in [vaccines] that reach the brain can produce devastating effects that far larger amounts experienced prenatally or postnatally from other sources do not."

She also dismissed claims that some groups of children are unusually susceptible to the effects of mercury. "The only evidence that these children are unusually sensitive is the fact of their [autism] itself."

In a separate ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings wrote: "This case . . . is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners' causation theories."

OK, so the hypothesis that vaccines and autism were somehow connected (other than that children get vaccines and are also, sometimes, diagnosed with autism) doesn't hold up. No big surprise there, especially since thimerosal was removed from vaccines in Denmark in 1992, without any effect on the continuing rise of autism diagnoses.

Graph from Science Magazine via Bad Astronomy

So how did the anti-vaccine movement take all this? Rationally? OK, it looks like we were wrong about this hypothesis, so it's time to take a good hard look at what else might be causing the rise in autism. Yeah, right.

No, according to the anti-vaxxers, this is all a giant conspiracy. All of these scientists must simply want their children to get autism. Because the alternative, that they were wrong to leap to a conclusion without evidence, is simply not acceptable to them. Actresses know better than scientists. Moms don't need evidence. They just automatically know what's causing their children's illnesses. (Funny how moms let their children die for generation after generation, blaming it on demons, witches, the "evil eye," since they all must have known that germs cause disease, right?)

If you think this way, what could possibly convince you that you were wrong? If scientific evidence won't do it, what would? Anything? Do you just think that you're infallible? In order to convince rational people that vaccines cause autism, you must have evidence to back up your beliefs. You don't. It's not even a close call.

I don't want to be flippant here, since this is a tragic business. I sincerely sympathize with parents of autistic children, in fact all parents worried about this scary situation. I even sympathize with parents who want to find someone to blame. That's just human nature. But you've got the wrong culprit here. Scientists have looked into this hypothesis and it proved to be wrong. Time to move on, to look elsewhere. No one will fault you for proposing a hypothesis that later turned out to be wrong. But you are at fault for clinging to a failed hypothesis after the evidence is in.

And meanwhile, you are killing children. You are scaring parents needlessly, which is causing vaccination rates to drop and putting children at risk. It's not just your children, either. We are losing the herd immunity that helps protect very young children, those who are too young to receive vaccinations. And children are dying because of this. Right now!

Trouble in the Catholic Church

I read a couple of things today that would seem to indicate big trouble for the Catholic Church. The first was in Susan Jacoby's column about a recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Her column wasn't particularly encouraging, but this part about Catholics struck me as being significant:

Just 17 percent of Catholics under 30--and only 15 percent over 30--believe that their own religion is the one true faith that leads to eternal life. For someone brought up as a Catholic in the 1950s, as I was, that last statistic is just staggering: It points to a negation of every absolute truth claim that the Catholic Church has made for centuries. If I were a Catholic bishop, the results of this poll would terrify me. If you've based most of your indoctrination on the idea that yours is the one true church, and 85 percent of those who still identify with Catholic tradition don't believe it, you're in trouble as an institution. 

Of course, most Catholics I know just ignore whatever church teachings they dislike (most notably, those about birth control). And maybe this is simply the general tolerance of other faiths - other Christian faiths, at least - in America. Whatever the church said in the 1950's, most Americans in my experience didn't seem to think that it mattered much which church you went to, as long as you went to one of them (and decent people, at least, extended that tolerance to Jews, as well).

Still, the child abuse scandal has no doubt hit the Catholic Church hard, and rightly so. It's not over yet, either. Now, after the recent horrible reports from Ireland (which themselves came too soon for us to forget about the sexual abuse of children in America - and the church cover-up here), we're also hearing scandals from Germany. And these seem to directly implicate Pope Benedict, in his previous position as cardinal.

Here's how Christopher Hitchens puts it in his latest column:

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble.

It's not surprising that Catholics are questioning their own faith (the Pew Report also indicates that 25% of American-born Catholics are no longer members of the church). This kind of thing might be particularly damaging in a religion that still accepts the old "divine right of kings" philosophy of the Middle Ages, whose leader is not chosen by the membership and is supposed to be infallible when it comes to church teachings. This doesn't give them a lot of wiggle room, does it?

And when priests, the very people who are supposed to teach you, guide you, and interpret God's will for you, are sexually abusing children - and when their superiors are covering it up, moving the abusers to new congregations elsewhere, and deciding that the real sin is reporting the crime, not the abuse itself - well, even the most diehard believer has got to start wondering, don't you think?

Sex Is Weird

Here's another fascinating post from Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science where he explains that, for birds, every single cell in their body is either male or female.

OK, that's interesting, but what's really weird, don't you think, is that it's not this way for mammals, including human beings? In us, it's our sex hormones that make us, physically, men or women. I don't know about you, but for me, the idea that something so fundamental to my self-image could so easily be entirely different is just... bizarre. Maybe I'd feel more comfortable if I were a chicken.

In an earlier post, Yong explained how silencing just one gene will turn ovaries into testes:

As embryos, our gonads aren't specific to either gender. Their default course is a female one, but they can be diverted through the action of a gene called SRY that sits on the Y chromosome. SRY activates another gene called Sox9, which sets off a chain reaction of flicked genetic switches. The result is that premature gonads develop into testes. Without SRY or Sox9, you get ovaries instead. 

But even that's not the weird thing. Apparently, this isn't just a matter of the developing embryo. Experiments have shown that silencing one particular gene even in adult mice will change ovaries into testes - within just three weeks. They won't actually produce sperm, but it's still really strange, don't you think?

The same genes may help to explain the frequent acts of gender-swapping among fish, reptiles and birds (no, Steve Connor, "one of the great dogmas of biology" is not that "gender is fixed from birth"). In these animals, oestrogens often cause males to change sex into females, and falling levels of oestrogen can trigger the reverse transformation. FOXL2 may also be involved. 

This is really fascinating, but when it comes to human beings, I don't know if I like the feeling that something so innate to my self-image could have been so easily subverted. Oh, sure, it's only chance that I got a y-chromosome anyway, but since I did, it's such a fundamental part of my entire being... (Of course, it still is, since my DNA is in every cell.) But y-chromosome or not, it would have taken just a very minor error to change me into a completely different person. Scary!

Sex is weird, isn't it?

Admirable

It's always admirable to change your mind when the evidence indicates that you were wrong. That's fundamental to the scientific method, and the whole point of evidence-based thinking in general. But with most people, it happens all too seldom. And I must say that I never expect it from right-wing ideologues (or from ideologues of any stripe, frankly).

But here's an article in the New York Times (registration required, though it's free) about Diane Ravitch, "the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators" who is "in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling."

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview. 

In a new book, Ravitch says that the "new thinking" (i.e. from the far right) sees "the public school system as obsolete, because it is controlled by the government." That's the knee-jerk reaction of these extremists today. Government is bad. Period.

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy. 

You'd think that would be obvious, wouldn't you? Our strong public school system is what brought American education to lead the world. It provided an opportunity to every child, not just the rich. As such, we developed a society where class was fluid and relatively unimportant. (To our misfortune, that wasn't the case with race, of course.) But with the constant refrain of tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, our education system these days does not lead the world, far from it.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.

“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

Personally, I'm a strong proponent of education, and public education in particular. (I might almost say that private schooling is fundamentally un-American, because it tends to segregate children by race, class, and especially religion. And don't get me started about home-schooling!) Nothing is more important in America than our public education system. Unfortunately, we've let way too many children down.

Well, I don't know all of the solutions to the crisis in education in our country. But I've got to respect anyone who can look at the evidence and change her mind like this. Very admirable!

The Final Frontier

I'm not a Trekkie, but this is still neat. It's the space ship Enterprise from Star Trek, fabricated in one-billionth scale. That's apparently about one-tenth the width of a human hair.

Thanks to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, where I got the link.

More Than Just Meat

Here's an article from The Washington Post (registration required, though it's free) that explains how scientists have recently learned that "the red grouper off Florida's east and west coasts and throughout the Gulf of Mexico have created entire ocean communities by digging large holes in the sea's sandy bottom. In the same way beavers construct dams, red grouper excavate and maintain distinct holes whose rocky surfaces provide a place for coral, sponges and other marine life to congregate."

Why is this important? Well, it helps us understand that fish live in ecosystems. As one person says, "We now see fish as living, breathing entities, not only as meat." The fact is, we've been despoiling the seas, and one reason for that is because we catch fish without considering the impact on their entire ecosystem.

By building complex, three-dimensional structures that expose the hard rock beneath the sand, Miller said, red grouper create an environment in which seaweed, coral and sponges can thrive. These communities then attract everything from cleaner fish to female grouper seeking a mate.

"It's just a very cool ecological story," Miller said. "They really have this tremendous ability in getting these diverse communities of organisms to exist in a place that otherwise wouldn't be there."

Steve Bortone, executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, said he and other managers need to consider the environmental impact of red grouper digging patterns when they set future commercial and recreational catch quotas for the species. "We need to take into account this community aspect, which I think has been neglected," Bortone said.

We've been destroying one species of sea life after another for decades now, and it's only getting worse. We decimated the whales long ago, but that same sort of thing continues still. We over-fish a desirable species until the population crashes, at which point we switch to another and do the same thing. (That's why we see formerly undesirable fish like slimeheads - renamed to "orange roughy" for obvious reasons - becoming popular for awhile, until their numbers also plummet.)

These species often don't recover, because their numbers just get too small, and removing them from the ecosystem causes too many changes. They're not just meat, they're living species. They live in a particular environment, and they also affect that environment. Through our greed, our extreme myopia, and our willful ignorance, we are decimating our planet, and nowhere worse than in the oceans. Well, maybe it's easier to overlook when it's underwater.

"If you remove that fish, it puts into motion a whole chain of events," said Don deMaria, who used to fish for red grouper near Key Largo, Fla., but no longer does. "There's a whole lot of other critters that are affected. I'm not saying you can't catch them. But you can't do it to the extent we've been doing for the last 20 years." 

That's just it. We must learn to fish sustainably. Otherwise, we are just raping the planet and stealing from our grandchildren. And we must look at ecosystems, not just individual species. If we don't wise up, the next species to crash might well be our own.

Edit: see also this post on Unsustainable Fishing.

Is the Filibuster Unconstitutional?

Here's an interesting, and very persuasive, editorial by Thomas Geoghegan which argues that the current filibuster rules in the U.S. Senate are unconstitutional. (To read it, registration at the New York Times is required, though it's free.)

For the record, nothing like Senate Rule 22 appears in the Constitution, nor was there unlimited debate until Vice President Aaron Burr presided over the Senate in the early 1800s. In 1917, after a century of chaos, the Senate put in the old Rule 22 to stop unlimited filibusters. Because it was about stopping real, often distressing, floor debate, one might have been able to defend that rule under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says, “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.”

As revised in 1975, Senate Rule 22 seemed to be an improvement: it required 60 senators, not 67, to stop floor debate. But there also came a significant change in de facto Senate practice: to maintain a filibuster, senators no longer had to keep talking. Nowadays, they don’t even have to start; they just say they will, and that’s enough. Senators need not be on the floor at all. They can be at home watching Jimmy Stewart on cable. Senate Rule 22 now exists to cut off what are ghost filibusters, disembodied debates.

As a result, the supermajority vote no longer deserves any protection under Article I, Section 5 — if it ever did at all. It is instead a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.

Here’s why. First, the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments. With so many lawyers among them, the founders knew and operated under the maxim “expressio unius est exclusio alterius” — the express mention of one thing excludes all others. But one need not leave it at a maxim. In the Federalist Papers, every time Alexander Hamilton or John Jay defends a particular supermajority rule, he does so at length and with an obvious sense of guilt over his departure from majority rule.

Second, Article I, Section 3, expressly says that the vice president as the presiding officer of the Senate should cast the deciding vote when senators are “equally divided.” The procedural filibuster does an end run around this constitutional requirement, which presumed that on the truly contested bills there would be ties. With supermajority voting, the Senate is never “equally divided” on the big, contested issues of our day, so that it is a rogue senator, and not the vice president, who casts the deciding vote.

The procedural filibuster effectively disenfranchises the vice president, eliminating as it does one of the office’s only two constitutional functions. Yet the founders very consciously intended for the vice president, as part of the checks and balances system, to play this tie-breaking role — that is why Federalist No. 68 so specifically argued against a sitting member of the Senate being the presiding officer in place of the vice president. 

I'm no lawyer, so I can't say any more than that this sounds very reasonable. And he's certainly right about the consequences:

So on the health care bill, as on so many other things, we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

However, I don't have his confidence in our Supreme Court - not the current Court, at least, which has been packed with far-right ideologues.

"Bound in Blood" by P.C. Hodgell

(cover from Amazon.com)

P.C. Hodgell's Kencyrath fantasy series began in 1982 with God Stalk, a bizarre, imaginative, unique work that reminded me, somehow, of very early, classic fantasy novels I used to read many years ago. I loved it.

Well, my biggest problem with modern fantasy is how imitative so much of it is. Unlike science fiction, where an author might actually have to know something, all you apparently need in fantasy is an imagination. But all too many fantasy authors seem to lack even that.

Unfortunately, Hodgell hasn't been very prolific (it probably hasn't helped that two of her publishers have gone out of business). The fifth book in the series, Bound in Blood, was just published, four years after the previous installment and a full 28 years since the first book. Before reading it, I had to re-read the previous book, To Ride a Rathorn, just to remember the characters and the other details of this complex story. Since that's still my favorite of the series, though, I can't really say that it was a chore.

God Stalk introduced us to Jame, a young girl chased by the dead and missing years of memories, as she arrives in Tai-tastigon, a strange city of multiple gods, a powerful thieves guild, and caring people. As I say, it was a great book, in an imaginative setting. (Oddly enough, we never see Tai-tastigon again after this book. The other books are imaginative, but maybe not quite this imaginative.)

In Dark of the Moon (1985), Jame leaves the city in search of her twin brother, Tori. The book alternates chapters between their individual points of view, which is also the format of the rest of the series. I have to admit that waiting for their meeting, at the very end of the book, got a bit old. It feels like Jame spends a long time traveling. The ending was very good, though.

Seeker's Mask, the next in the series, was finally published in 1994 (after I'd pretty much given up hope of a sequel). Jame has been placed in the Women's Halls, where she's being taught traditional obedience, which doesn't go at all well. She escapes after an attack by assassins and spends the book getting involved in a variety of adventures, ending in a giant weirdingstorm. All lots of fun.

Then I had to wait even longer, until 2006, for To Ride a Rathorn, which is, as I say, my favorite of the bunch. Having demonstrated that the Women's Halls were not at all suitable for her, Jame becomes a cadet at Tentir, the randon college, the first highborn woman to be admitted. She's unprepared, and almost no one wants her there, but she's determined to succeed (and to discover what happened to her father when he was a cadet). It's great fun.

So, after all this, I have to admit that Bound in Blood was a disappointment. It starts immediately where To Ride a Rathorn ended, and it seems like just a continuation of that story. It's much shorter than the previous novel, but that's not really a problem (it's still 300 pages long). The problem is that nothing new happens. Jame just continues at the randon college, as before.

Bound in Blood is an entertaining read, but what's the point of this book? If the author doesn't have anything new to say, I've got to see any new series book as just an economic proposition, a way to make a few bucks from established fans. And this is the kind of series which is clearly heading towards some kind of conclusion. After 28 years, can I be excused for wondering when (or even if) that might actually happen?

If you're a fan of the series, you'll want to read this one. But don't expect too much. It's easily the weakest of the series (not because the writing is bad, but just because there's nothing new happening). If you're not familiar with P.C. Hodgell, you can't start here. Find God Stalk, which has been republished at least three times in omnibus editions (Chronicles of the Kencyrath in 1987, Dark of the Gods in 2000, and The God Stalker Chronicles in 2009).

Vote for Murray Hill

Here's an article in The Washington Post (registration required, I think, though it's free) about a new kind of politician, " the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation's capital."

The catch? Murray Hill is a corporation.

After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office.

"Until now, corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington," the candidate, who was unavailable for an interview, said in a statement. "But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves."

William Klein, a "hired gun" who has been enlisted as Murray Hill's campaign manager, said the firm appears to be the first "corporate person" to run for office and is promising a spirited campaign that "puts people second, or even third." 

Here's their campaign ad at YouTube.

The ad makes a particularly passionate case for why it's necessary to have more direct corporate representation in Congress.

In a soothing voice, a narrator bemoans that "as much as corporate interests gave to politicians, we could never be absolutely sure they would do our bidding." The ad includes images of gleaming office towers and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and promises Murray Hill will bring "enlightened self-interest and corporate accounting" to Congress.

It concludes with a rousing call to action: "Vote for Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress -- for the best democracy money can buy." 

It's hardly necessary for me to comment about this (of course, that's never stopped me before), but it seems to be the logical next step for our dysfunctional Supreme Court, which overturned precedent in a 5-4 decision this January in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Well, it's a court packed with far-right extremists (almost everything is decided on a 5-4 vote these days) who apparently don't see any difference between corporations and human beings.

But I can't really blame the Supreme Court. This is our fault. More specifically, if you voted for George W. Bush in 2000 or 2004, or you couldn't be bothered to vote at all, this is your fault. We get the kind of government we deserve, and yes, that includes the kinds of Supreme Court justices.

More Lone Star Lunacy

Washington Battling the Secular Humanist Tiger While Crossing the Potomac?* (My apologies to the artist.)

Yes, conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in putting their own right-wing slant into history and economics textbooks (the following quotes are from that article). Not content with damaging science education - What, after all, do mere scientists know about science? Someone must stand up to the experts. - they've valiantly attacked social studies, too. And yes, Don McLeroy led this, despite losing his reelection bid.

But the changes passed on a strict party-line vote, 10 to 5. It is Texas, after all. And if you're not unfortunate enough to live there, why should you care? Well, Texas is a huge market for textbook publishers, so the textbooks your child uses in school will likely be modified to that state's requirements. Let's face it, even if a publisher cared more about your children's education than about profits, that business would likely lose to publishers with fewer ethical concerns.

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

But this is the whole point. Someone has to stand up to the experts! Why would historians know more about history than the average dimbulb redneck? Why would scientists know more about science? Experts are elitist. Just because they've got more education than we do, just because they've spent their professional lives specializing in a particular field, they think they're so smart! Well, look who's laughing now! (Not me, I assure you.)

There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

So Thomas Jefferson (who infamously coined the phrase - make sure your children are out of the room! - "separation of church and state") is out, and Phyllis Schlafly is in. Racism had nothing to do with interning Japanese-Americans in World War II. Joe McCarthy was right. (Joseph N. Welch, famous for his "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" rebuke of McCarthy in 1954, was a Republican himself. But he'd be driven out of the party these days, you can be sure of that.)

Certainly, we can't have any mention of the Treaty of Tripoli ("The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"), which was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797. But the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association? Oh, yeah, they're in.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.


It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

* (George Washington, of course, is also known for this famous quote: "Fox News cannot tell a lie. It was those socialist Democrats, traitors to these United Christian States of America, who chopped down that cherry tree.")

Flyover of Mars

If you're a space enthusiast, check out this video clip, a realistic flyover of Candor Chasma on Mars.

I must admit, as a game-player, that I wanted to see alien ruins there, and a human research colony - and be able to interact with both. Well, what can I say? I'm not ever going to get to Mars myself, and at this rate, I'll be unlikely to see manned exploration of the planet at all. But I can still use my imagination.

Shrew Toilets

Photo by Ch'ien C. Lee

Pitcher plants are generally carnivorous, capturing insects in deep, liquid-filled bowls. Well, like other carnivorous plants, they grow in mineral-poor areas, so this is how they get many of the nutrients they need. But here's an article about pitcher plants that have evolved to serve as a toilet for shrews.

Jerry A. Coyne explains it better than I could, but basically, the shrews don't deliberately defecate there. They're just attracted by a sweet substance on the "lid" of the bowl, which they can best reach by sitting on top of the bowl. So, when nature calls as they're licking away at their treat,... the bowl is perfectly positioned.

Neat, huh? I've always been fascinated by the wild variety of solutions that living things have evolved over so many millions of years.

"Fledgling" by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

(cover image from Amazon.com)

In the late 1980's, I discovered three paperback SF novels - sort of romantic space opera - by husband and wife co-authors Steve Miller and Sharon Lee. The beginning of the Liaden Universe series, they were entertaining adventures with appealing characters. Although each book was complete in itself, they were all part of a continuing story, and I was anxious to see where it would turn out.

But for a long time, I was disappointed. Apparently, the books didn't sell well enough to suit the publisher, or so the authors were told. So they shrugged and moved on with their lives. It wasn't until a decade or so later that they connected to the Internet and discovered a thriving community of fans who, just like me, were wondering what had happened. Lee and Miller found another publisher and started writing again.

Apparently, all was well until 2006, when that publisher went out of business. With their own finances hurting (the publisher still owned the rights to most of their work), they decided on a plan to write a "side book" in the Liaden Universe, posting each chapter online and asking for donations (which would also give donors the right to the published book, when completed). I didn't know anything about that at the time, but eventually, the book was completed and the authors found a new publisher, Baen Books.

This book is Fledgling (2009), and it focuses on Theo Waitley, daughter of Daav yos'Phelium (who goes by the alias of Jen Sar Kiladi throughout this book). Theo showed up just briefly, and unexpectedly, at the very end of I Dare (2002), the conclusion (apparently) of the mainline Liaden story. But this book is set before that, when she's a 14-year-old girl living on a different planet and knows nothing of her Liaden heritage.

That's both good and bad. It's very good for fans of the series, since the focus is on different planets with different customs. (When reading a series, I always expect the author to have something new to say. Otherwise, why write another book? Often, a change of focus is a big help in that respect.) But it's bad if you haven't read the previous books in the series. Yes, this is a side book to the mainline plot, but there's is a lot in this book that would be confusing if you didn't already know who Jen Sar Kiladi was. Fledgling was written for fans of the series, that's obvious.

So what about the book itself? Well, I loved it. It would be suitable for juveniles, since the protagonist is so young, but it's well worth reading for adults, too. As science fiction, it doesn't focus on technology, but on cultures. Delgado, Theo's home planet, has quite an interesting culture (or, rather, multiple cultures, since the university has a culture all its own). Then there's travel on a passenger liner, which broadens Theo's perspective a bit, and some time on another planet, which is quite different yet.

Richard McKenna used to claim, or so I've heard, that his 1962 bestseller, The Sand Pebbles, was science fiction, with the "science" being anthropology. Well, this book is definitely science fiction, and yes, the science here is anthropology. The focus is on people and on culture. I love this sort of thing.

Saltation, the sequel to Fledgling, is supposed to be published in April. I can't wait.

(Edit: Here's my review of the sequel.)

NASA "Uprising"

There's lots of talk these days criticizing Barack Obama's plans for NASA (for example, here and here - with my quotes taken from both articles).

Schmitt's harsh words are part of a furious blowback to the administration's new strategy for NASA. The administration has decided to kill NASA's Constellation program, crafted during the Bush administration with an ambitious goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020.

Of course, let's face it, there's not one single thing Barack Obama could do that wouldn't generate this kind of uproar. Not one.

And although Bush announced that glorious plan to return to the moon, he never once budgeted sufficient funds for it. (Kind of like his "Mission Accomplished" speech proclaiming the end to the Iraq War, don't you think?) And then he collapsed the economy.

So now, in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, the government is suddenly supposed to come up with vast new sums for the space program? Yeah, like that's going to happen, especially in this political climate. (And, of course, as far as people criticizing Obama, it wouldn't make the slightest difference, anyway.)

In fact, Obama's budget boosts NASA's funding by $6 billion over the next five years. The extra money is less than the $3 billion-a-year hike that a presidential advisory panel said would be necessary for a robust human space flight, but it's still an increase when many agencies are being squeezed. 

Yup. Funny, huh? Barack Obama is actually increasing NASA's budget. Just not enough to keep the Constellation program (which has been very controversial from the beginning). Well, we simply don't have the money these days. President Obama's blue-ribbon advisory committee "determined that under a realistic budget NASA probably wouldn't have a moon rocket until 2028, and still wouldn't have the hardware to land." Funny what happens during an economic collapse, isn't it?

Obama's move for a greater private sector role in space launches -- as he seeks to keep ballooning federal deficits in check -- has generated fears of job losses among thousands of NASA employees who provide an important economic base in Florida, a state usually crucial in presidential elections.

Well, duh! This is what really gets me. I don't care who's screaming the loudest about taxes ("read my lips") or the budget deficit, as soon as their own state is affected by any proposed cuts, they'll be screaming even louder about that. And in this, at least, the Democrats are no better than the Republicans.

Obama's 2011 budget request would nix Constellation's rocket and crew capsule, funnel billions of dollars to new spaceflight technologies, and outsource to commercial firms the task of ferrying astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

 

You'd think that conservatives would be praising Obama's move towards a greater role for the private sector in space launches, wouldn't you? Unless, of course, you had the slightest knowledge of U.S. politics. Heh, heh. Personally, I really like the idea of getting "routine" space launches into the private sector, with NASA focusing on science and more demanding tasks. After all, why should NASA be running a trucking service?

This means Americans would have to pay to ride on Russian rockets to get into orbit, a stark turn of events after the pivotal battle the United States and the Soviet Union fought to outdo each other in the space race.

 

True. But, of course, Barack Obama had nothing to do with that. This was decided by the Bush Administration years ago, and at this point, there's probably nothing we can do about it. We were never going to have a replacement for the shuttle ready in time, and extending the shuttle program would take money away from other NASA efforts and be unsafe, from what I hear. I never did like this idea, but it's far too late to complain about it now, don't you think?

The fact is, the money isn't there for everything we'd like to do. The money wasn't there even before the economic collapse - at least, it wasn't budgeted (instead, we decided that tax cuts for the rich were more important). And lest people forget, we're still in the middle of two wars (also unnecessary, but what can we do about that now?). Guess what? Spending money on wars and tax cuts means that there's less available for everything else. And that would be the case even if tax receipts hadn't plunged, and welfare costs risen, in the worst economic collapse since the 1930s.

Back when Obama's plans were first announced, I read some thoughtful commentary from real space enthusiasts (including these at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog), which concluded that this was not just the best we could expect, but also... not at all bad, anyway. As I say, encouraging the private sector to compete for relatively routine missions to near-earth orbit frees up NASA to focus on more important - or at least more challenging - things. The government should be concerned with basic scientific research and cutting edge technology, instead of just operating a trucking service.

Personally, I never thought much of the idea of returning to the Moon, since we were there 40 years ago and didn't see any reason to stay. Yeah, if we needed it as a stepping stone to Mars, fine. Or if we could find some other good reason to go back (and to stay, this time). But otherwise, it just seemed like a publicity stunt (the announcement being great politics, with no need to actually put sufficient money where Bush's mouth was). OK, sure, if we had all the money in the world, fine, go to the Moon again, along with everything else. But we don't.

Let's cut through all the crap here. America will never lead in space exploration without a strong economy. For decades now, we've been on the wrong path in this country. We've let our lead in education, and especially in science and technology, slip. We've favored tax cuts over educating our children, superstition over science, 'trickle-down' or 'voodoo' economics over strengthening the middle class. And as a nation, we've been too ignorant, too cowardly, too greedy, too short-sighted, too superstitious, too gullible, and too timid to even wean ourselves off of OPEC oil, let alone compete with China.

I'm pretty disgusted with my own countrymen these days. I'd hoped that would change after the Bush years, but it hasn't, or not very much. (I'm hearing talk about this being a great political year for Republicans. Really? After one year spent trying to dig ourselves out of all the messes the Republicans left us, we really want to invite them back to do even more damage? We've actually forgotten all that this soon?) Maybe my expectations were too high. Heck, maybe my expectations for my whole species were too high.

Dinosaurs!

Check out this video clip, which is supposed to be something of a demo of a new game (the setting, anyway). Neat, huh?

Unfortunately, I probably won't be interested in the game itself, which is supposed to be a multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS). Ugh! But I'd love to see a single-player survival game set in that world. Just drop one human being, or several - without advanced weapons or equipment - into a world full of dinosaurs. Object: survival.

You'd have to explore to gather food and find water, maybe even make some primitive weapons, but most often, you'd be the prey, not the predator. Grab some dinosaur eggs, if you could, but always be looking for an escape route. Scavenge from a dinosaur kill, when they were distracted by other scavengers. Find a secure place to sleep. Lots of possibilities.

Yes, but is it art?

I thought this was an interesting post by Massimo Pigliucci.

We often get into debates - even arguments - over definitions. Yes, we use language to communicate, so we must agree on common meanings for the words we use. But all too often, the entire debate ends up being about a word's definition. Agreeing on a common definition should be just the foundation for debate, not the debate itself.

And is an agreement on a common definition even necessary? In many cases, I'd say that it's not. Note my previous post about multiculturalism. It frustrates me when "multiculturalism" even comes up in a discussion, because people use the word in so many different ways. What's the point? In a case like this, just skip the word that's causing so much difficulty and tell me what you think about a specific issue, policy, circumstance, law, etc.

Pigliucci also links to this clever post by Eliezer Yudkowsky about "disguised queries." Words stand for something - sometimes things that are a bit vague or blurred around the edges. That's not necessarily bad (David Brin's second Uplift trilogy, which is excellent science fiction, showed how imprecision in language can be a positive benefit), but it really helps to know exactly why we're using a particular term.

What's the real point of using a term? Is it just political, to win a debate not from the quality of your arguments, but only by using a term with loaded connotations (like the constant repetition of "socialism" by the GOP)? Obviously, that's not valid. And what if it's not a debate at all, but a serious attempt to come to some agreement? In that case, it might be better to avoid terms in which both sides either disagree about the definition or already have a rigid, established position about it, and instead look at the details. What's really important about a particular question, and what's not?

What a difference a year makes!

A year ago, the U.S. stock market was at a 12-year low. President Barack Obama had just taken office, in the middle of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. At the time, there seemed to be no bottom to the disaster, and increasing numbers of people were losing their jobs every month. People were scared to spend, banks to lend, and businesses to invest.

Well, we're still in recession, and unemployment is still sky-high, so people aren't happy. But as far as I can tell, we couldn't have hoped for such a quick turnaround, not in our wildest dreams. Although health care reform is still stalled, President Obama got a stimulus package through Congress almost immediately. OK, I would have preferred fewer tax cuts and more spending on education, scientific research, and 21st Century infrastructure, but politics is the art of the possible.

From that low on March 9, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 61%. That's in one year! My own investments have increased 76%. (Luckily for me, I scraped together every bit of cash I could - not nearly enough - and invested it right at the bottom, just because I felt that panic had set in. As Warren Buffett says, "be greedy when others are fearful.") You can bet that I'm feeling better now than I was a year ago!

Unemployment is still very, very high, but that's a lagging economic indicator. It tends to be one of the last things to pick up when a recovery begins. (The stock market, on the other hand, is a leading indicator. It typically moves first.) When President Obama took office, we were losing more jobs every month than we had lost the month before. Unemployment was accelerating. Almost immediately, though, that turned around. We were still losing jobs, but fewer and fewer every month. That was really quite remarkable. It's not nearly enough, since stopping the hemorrhaging is never enough, but these things take time. This was a huge disaster, and we went into it with record-breaking deficits and two ongoing wars.

I've heard it claimed (by people who've recently proven they couldn't be trusted to manage a 4-year-old's piggy bank) that since most of the stimulus money hasn't yet been spent, we didn't need it. How dumb is that? People don't make economic decisions based entirely on current circumstances, but on their expectations for the future. If they'd dumped money out of helicopters a year ago, fearful people wouldn't have spent it all. They'd have saved as much as they could (just as they did with tax cuts). With the stimulus spread over a few years, businesses could be more confident of future earnings, not just a one-time windfall, so they'd be more likely to hire someone new, or at least not fire as many people as they would have otherwise.

Now it pains me to say anything good about the Bush Administration, but I've got to give credit where credit is due. The TARP program - the so-called bank "bailout" - was developed and pushed through Congress by the Bush Administration in 2008, before Barack Obama took office. OK, sure, it was the least they could do, after the mess they'd made of everything. And it could have been a lot better. However, it did keep our financial system from melting down entirely. Without that, we'd really be in a world of hurt today.

I know TARP is not very popular today. Heck, John McCain is even trying to pretend that he didn't know what it was when he voted for it! (Heh, heh. I don't know how he expects to look good from that admission, even if anyone is dumb enough to believe it.) Partly, I think that people are just confused about the whole thing. They keep hearing that the banks were "bailed out." Well, the stockholders - the owners of the banks - certainly weren't bailed out! But it's true that a lot of high-paid bankers got to keep their jobs, thanks to us,... and they certainly didn't deserve their good fortune!

However, I've never been in favor of cutting off my nose to spite my face. It wasn't fair, certainly not. By any standards of fairness, almost all of those bankers should be unemployed right now. But so what? We had to rescue our financial system, or we would have been back in the Great Depression again. Yeah, it's the same old story: capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich. It shouldn't be that way. But when faced with absolute catastrophe, you have to do what you have to do. Fair or not, it was necessary. We'd be better off now putting standards in place to prevent it from happening again, not whining about how unfair it all was. Yes, we all know it was unfair. Get over it!

As I say, that was the "loyal Bushies," and I've got to give them credit for it. They could have made it lots better, no doubt, but compared to everything else they attempted over eight years, pretty much all of which was an absolute, unmitigated disaster, you really have to think of the TARP program as their greatest achievement, their crowning glory, the one thing that was actually fairly OK - or, at least, necessary.

I don't know where we go from here. With the Tea Party loonies scaring the GOP out of what little wits and morals they've got (and the Democrats still with no spines), I'm less and less confident we'll move forward, certainly not in the bold ways we need to move forward. We've been on the wrong path for decades now, culminating in the eight disastrous years of the Bush Administration, the worst in U.S. history. We need major reform, and no matter what we do, it's going to take time. Frankly, I'm just worried that we Americans have simply become too dumb, too ignorant, too gullible, too short-sighted, and too cowardly to face the truth and do what is needed.

But all in all, this past year was encouraging. It could have gone a lot worse.