Spirituality in America - Take 2

Agent J is prone to emit a wail of dismay when yet another copy of Newsweek arrives with some religious theme on its cover. This week the headline story was "Spirituality in America". I have to confess I didn't bother reading it - I usually don't read Newsweek anyway, but actually I'm usually more likely to read it when its about religion. However later in the week I heard someone mention that the Newsweek story tells how diverse and very non-Christian the beliefs of America are, at least compared to what you might think they are. So I rescued the issue from the trash and gave it a butchers (look) last night.

It turns out the article is basically an interpretation by Jerry Adler, of statistics from a survey carried out by Newsweek and Beliefnet. A key point this article is trying to make is that religion is booming in the United States. Early on it points out that in 1966 Time Magazine famously published an issue with the cover asking "Is God Dead?". At that time apparently people felt that science had just about cleaned up and answered all those difficult "Why" and "How" and "What" questions that were usually left to religion. In the Newsweek article's conclusion it says:

"So, a generation after the question was posed, we can certainly answer that God seems very much alive in the hearts of those who seek him. We have come a long way, it would appear, from that dark year".

However reading what Newsweek says in between the start and end I don't see any evidence at all that "we have come a long way", quite to the contrary it seems to indicate a burgeoning dissatisfaction with mainstream religion, a youth that is increasingly atheist, and strong support for the idea that America just isn't as religious as its always purported to be.

Until recently the only statistic I heard or knew was that 85% of Americans believe in God. I've no idea where that statistic came from other than from the mouth of George Bush. Newsweek's statistic puts it 79% (their margin of error here is +-4%) - this is the figure they put in a big font so it grabs you. So only 1 in 5 don't believe in God you say. But then you see that they derived the figure to include those people who say that they are spiritual but not religious. If you exclude the 15% of only spiritual people you get their figure for people who are only religious but not spiritual, that figure is 64% which means fully one third of the American people do not consider themselves religious, only "spiritual" or atheist/agnostic. I'll call that one third number the "non-religious" Americans.

Now it so happens I know a good number of people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious - some of them definitely never go to a church, and some of them even call themselves atheists or agnostics. In fact to me "I'm an atheist but consider myself spiritual" seems a perfectly reasonable thing to say especially when you look at the definition of spiritual. Of the five definitions only two mention anything to do with God or religion, the others are all about the nature of the spirit, soul, or supernatural. These are things that interest even me, a staunch atheist (more accurately my position is that of a strict agnostic).

Unfortunately the statistics cited by Newsweek don't study at all what those people who are spiritual believe. From the answer to the question "What is your current religion?" it appears that only 13% said "Other non-Christian", atheist/agnostic/no religion or did not indicate their religion. Since they also said that 12% of all people are "Not spiritual/not religious or don't know" it would seem that a good number of people who are spiritual are identifying with a major religion but not calling themselves religious. Might it be that those people are just thinking "well I have Christian values" so I'm a Christian, or I was raised by a Jewish family so I'm Jewish even though they later identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious" ???

Also it turns out that fully one third of people surveyed think there is no heaven or hell which seems to further confirm the number of non-religious Americans. Their survey also finds that 45% of Americans say they attend worship services weekly, which they mention is virtually identical to the 44% figure Time cited in 1966. That strikes me as a pretty weak case for saying "we've come a long way from that dark year" in their conclusion. But they also say that 45% is probably wishful thinking and when you study actual church attendance figures you get a figure more like 20%. This ties in later data they give that puts shows that 55% of Americans belong to a house of worship (see below). In general religious people I know don't just pop into a church every week, if they worship regularly they find and join a specific one. Even then they probably don't go every week so I too find the 20% weekly attendance figure much more believable.

In a break down of religion by race they supply figures based on the groups don't know/refused, religious, somewhat religious, somewhat secular, and secular. What is interesting is that no racial group has more than 50% claiming to be religious, in fact in the majority "White" group only 37% of people did so. Based on the 2000 Census proportions of the various racial groups I calculated from Newsweek's figures that only 38% of the total adult population identifies themselves as religious. So fully 62% of Americans are in the class "somewhat religious", "somewhat secular", "secular" or a don't know/refused. Wow.

Again there is corroboration for this based on their chart of "What Americans call themselves and how they worship". It turns out that 19% of the estimated 29.5 million people practicing "no religion" belong to a house of worship (huh?), 49% of 7.7 million people practicing a non-Christian religion belong to one, and 63% of the 159 million people practicing Christian religions do. That adds up to about 200 million adults, of which only 55% belong to a house of worship - which is about one in two - exactly what I'd expect from people identifying themselves as religious vs. somewhat religious or something else. If you don't belong to any church you're probably not worshiping regularly, not in contact with people of your faith regularly and probably just doing your own sweet thing with your religion vs. following any particular heard mentality of religion. In fact I would guess such people are most likely to feel disenfranchised with mainstream religion, and are least likely to want to be identified with it or represented by it - hence the only "somewhat religious" answer.

Anyway I find what the Newsweek article tells us to be very interesting. To recap: one in three Americans identify themselves as not religious but spiritual or not religious at all, but fully 62% of Americans, the majority, identify themselves as only "somewhat religious" or even less religious than "somewhat".

These conclusions seem completely and alarmingly in contradiction to the usual inference that almost all Americans are strongly religious based on the commonly quoted "85% of Americans believe in God" figure. In a nation that is painted to be very religious, and is increasingly being ruled by leaders with a religious agenda, and by religious interpretations of its constitution and laws, just remind yourself that fully one in three Americans are don't consider themselves religious at all, and a clear majority of Americans identify themselves as being less than completely religious.

Finally, if you want a true view of where religion in America is going check Newsweek's statistics for the 18-39 age group vs the 40-59 age group. 9% of the former identified themselves as atheists, vs only 5% of the later (and 3% of 60+ Americans). And while 36% of the 40-59 group say they are evangelicals, only 28% of younger people do so. So across the demographic groups we see the trend that since 1966 (39 years ago) atheists have almost doubled their numbers while the percentage of evangelicals has declined by over 20%.

So to conclude, while there may be lies, damn lies and statistics the real problem is who is interpreting them and what you want your readers to believe. Isn't that just exactly the problem with religion throughout the ages - its always the interpretation that is the problem, and so often, the devil is to be found there, lurking in the details :-) So how about this, why don't you go look at the figures and draw your own conlcusions.

God to Bush: read the papers!

I couldn't believe my ears this morning when I heard a comment from Bush about Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing mayhem - "I don't believe anyone thought the levees would be breached", he said. Er, hello Mr President, were you just not keeping up with current events before the hurricane struck? I think that the risk of levees being breached was the one thing almost everyone heard about before Katrina struck. Except of course those who famously and by self confession pay little or no attention to the news. In fact here it is in black and white (and red for the benefit of Mr Bush), in a report from the National Weather Service a day before the hurricane struck:

COASTAL STORM SURGE FLOODING OF 18 TO 22 FEET ABOVE NORMAL TIDE LEVELS...LOCALLY AS HIGH AS 28 FEET...ALONG WITH LARGE AND DANGEROUS BATTERING WAVES...CAN BE EXPECTED NEAR AND TO THE EAST OF WHERE THE CENTER MAKES LANDFALL. SOME LEVEES IN THE GREATER NEW ORLEANS AREA COULD BE OVERTOPPED.

One of the most telling video clips from New Orleans I've seen since Monday was a woman being dropped off at the Superdome after being rescued. The reporter asked her how she felt after being rescued and she said, "I just feel so dumb!". The surprised reporter retorted, as if puzzled, "Dumb? Why is that?", to which she replied, "Because I stayed at home when we were told to leave and I put my and my kids lives at risk and almost died". I think this whole episode highlights the generational kind of memory society has. No one seemed to remember how bad the last major hurricane in New Orleans was, if they were alive then at all. They've survived a few lesser ones, so they just assume with all our technology and such they can safely ignore warnings and stay at home, and when it sucks as badly as predicted, well someone will be right around to rescue them right? All I can say is just thank goodness it wasn't actually a category 5 storm when it hit land.

And I'm pleased to see that while some people are raising the "global warming" card (and still others are raising the "fist of God" card) as the reason for Katrina, some are focusing on the failure of systems to protect the city which full well knew this event could happen any day. Alternet's story Why the Levee Broke" cites:

The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Hardly surprisingly the Democrats and opponents of the "war on terror" will find this an excellent opportunity to point out that Homeland Security begins, well, at home. If you have over extended yourself to the point where you can't even fund basic protections of your people at home from known, predictable threats what hope do you have of protecting them from intangible unpredictable threats? Events like Katrina highlight in sharp relief a core role of government - spend money on systems to protect the people that no corporation would spend money on because there's no profit to be made on prevention (on the contrary, disasters are usually accounted for as positive economic events), and maintain law and order at all times.

In this case I think the government should have provided free evacuation of everyone since economic reasons were frequently cited as reason not to leave. Furthermore because of what happened afterwards the evacuation should have been mandatory - by force if necessary. The government should have fully funded projects to protect the city which you can bet your life will suddenly find full funding afterwards. And after the event it should have immediately provided a rapid and massive response to ensure that law and order is maintained. What a shock it is, that just like in Iraq, after a major catastrophe (in their case invasion) suddenly the general populace is going crazy in the streets, looting everything that isn't tied down, and the government is dumb struck taking days to react and realize its all going out of control fast.

Lest you think I'm being somewhat cold hearted about this event, well I guess that I confess I am. To me it seems that to a great extent the loss of life, and perhaps even of property could have been a significantly less. Furthermore there are times when people are just, as the woman so eloquently put it "so dumb". At those times it is really unfortunate that people then have to put their lives at risk to rescue their dumb and stubborn asses when they suddenly no longer want to live with the consequences of saying "I'll die before I leave my property for a little old storm!". One can only hope they will learn from the mistake and never make it again. And if not? To those I say, "Fist of God? Pah! 'Tis the Fist of Darwin! Back to the oceans with you unbelievers!"^*

^* Yes that was intentionally inflamatory

El Predicto strikes

For a while now I've been wondering how long it will be before we see $100 a barrel oil. My bet is before the end of 2006 and certainly well within Bush's final term. Along with it we can expect gas pump prices of around $4 a gallon (or more like $4.50 to $5 if you're in California!) how about that? I think those prices will be pretty psychologically damaging for many people - they'll be looking at around $40-$50 to fill even a modest sized car with gas. For larger SUVs you'll be approaching $100 a fill up.

The question is, even without an inspired vision from the other white party (that's the Democrats) will people get the message that something is wrong with our level of oil consumption? Or will they swallow some stupid story about how drilling in Alaska will save us and is the right thing to do? Or will the Republicans suddenly pump up the volume on their story of hydrogen power conveniently forgetting that without local renewable energy sources to produce the hydrogen its all just a hand-waving fantasy, or even worse a nightmare?

My bet is that somehow electric-diesel hybrids cars with 100+ mpg range and optional plug-in capability will (fingers crossed) win the day until such time as pure electric cars become feasible for both every day and extended use. In the mean time the Canadians and Venezuelans will both get insanely wealthy mining their oil-sand deposits - the two largest and mostly untapped oil reserves left on the planet.

While it's unlikely we'll ever invade Canada stay tuned for further US intervention in Venezuela (remember that country whose president Pat Robinson wants to the US assasinate) in the name of "democracy". The aim will be to install a pro-USA government which will let us install lots of US corporation in their country to export shit-loads of oil north as opposed to letting it go elsewhere. In the mean time US oil contractors (i.e. Haliburton and the like) will get stinking rich extracting the oil, US oil companies will get stinking rich refining and selling it, and the Venezuelans will remain poor inspite of their vast oil resources.

Think about it: Venezuela and Canada have more oil than the Saudis, Iraqis and Russians put together - so with skyrocketing gas prices and dwindling gas reserves elsewhere shouldn't they all end up as rich as Saudi princes? Its anyone's guess what that kind of wealth will do in Venezuela - you could end up with as much inequity and corruption as in Saudi Arabia, however my bet is the Canadians will find a way to spend that kind of coin wisely (assuming that is they don't have to spend it all on a wall to keep out the Americans). Goodness knows since they also have large and underpopulated windy and sunny tracts of land to exploit they might even invest it in an oil independent future!

Another losing strategy from the left

It just fills me with sadness that the left (if the Democrats can still call themselves that) has nothing better to say about soaring gas prices than "unleash the strategic petroleum reserves", but that's exactly what they are saying:

"Skyrocketing gas prices have tipped consumers upside down this summer and to protect our economy, the president should act immediately to tap the SPR," Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said.

What is more it is clear they are going to use energy costs as their number two weapon against Bush come next election time, number two next to the war on Iraq that is. What is worse is they don't even have a good story on Iraq either - they didn't have one last election ("more of the same but we'll do it better") and they sure haven't expressed one this time around. Much as the majority of Americans now seem to think Bush is doing poorly in Iraq I reckon when the question is posed "Should we pull out of Iraq" the majority will still say no. Lets face it, the stigma of America being labeled a bunch of quitters or losers will just sting too bad. Even if you think that's not how such a move would be seen by any other than the insurgents in Iraq then you can bet that is how the Republicans will frame the argument, it'll go something like this:

Do you want to America to be seen as a nation of quitters? A nation of people who can't finish a job? Do you want to lose the war on terrorism? Do you want to admit all those lives were lost in vain and all those billions of your money just went down the drain? Do you want to explain this to your children? How you were part of generation Q, Q for quitters? If so then go ahead, vote for the Democrats.

Which leads me back to the number two argument against the Republicans. Instead of some pathetic call to unleash the strategic petroleum reserves the need to just come clean - Americas addiction to oil, our foreign policies, our entire lifestyle has put us at the mercy of foreign powers, to the point where they say "Boo" and we jump out of our seats and run for our guns. They need to tell it like it is, oil is Americas Achilles heel that is destabilizing the entire planet both politically and environmentally. Until America decides to come clean, kick the habit and win the war on energy independence nothing will change for the better in our lifetimes or our children's lifetimes.

Damnit, Democrats just have to give America a vision for a better future - one with energy independence. A future where you can flip a light switch, travel to work and put food on the table without worrying about where the oil to make it all happen is coming from. I mean come on, this huge nation, with massive natural resources - enough wind energy in the Dakotas alone to power us twice over, massive areas of land with virtually constant sunshine for solar power, and massive over production of grains from farms that could be busy producing bio-mass fuels. Just what is our problem? Have we no guts for making the switch, have we no taste for the glory of energy independence, are we afraid of failing, are we too soft, too bloated, too lazy to bother trying?

All the Democrats have to do is stand up and make a JFK "We choose to go to the moon" style proclamation" and get on with it. Of course it wont happen "by the end of this decade" but there's no reason why it couldn't happen within our (genX-ers) lifetimes, and certainly by the end of next decade. If you're going to blow $200 billion on something don't piss it away killing people overseas, burning oil overseas, blowing things up overseas - spend it on industries at home, giving people jobs at home, giving people hope for the future. Just that announcement alone will probably knock a few bucks of the price of gas as all the oil investors start panicking and dumping their long term gas futures. Democrats need to demonstrate that it takes more to be a world leader than to just carry a big stick and say "We are the world leaders!". You actually need to lead - lead by example and that means we have to get off our asses and just do it.

But you know what, I don't think it will happen that way. The Democrats are still basically slaves to corporate America just as the Republicans are their love child. Corporate America just doesn't want us in control of our own destiny, it wants to control it even though economics says that we should be in control of them. No its actually more convenient to rule from the position where we the people (consumers) are weak and afraid, and the government is there to protect us. If everyone had their own power at home and we didn't have troops all over the world defending oil under someone else's desserts then what would we need that huge military and oil centric economy for? Wouldn't the government have to get on with real business like solving issues of poverty, crime and actually educating its people? Perish the thought, that's much too hard! After all the Europeans have spent the last fifty years working on those issues and still can't get it right - fighting wars against the boogie man you can't see is so much easier.

Another wimpy corporate fraud sentance

So another CFO involved in massive corporate fraud walks away with a few months of jail time and an $11,000 fine instead of up to 30 years. Apparently this was because he spilled the beans on the rest of the HealthSouth execs who had their fingers in the pie. Time off for cooperation is a nice incentive to get tongues to wag, but just what kind of message does that send when you're a CFO, know of billions of fraud, do nothing until caught and only get a few months in jail? Bascially it seems to endorse the notion that ignoring massive corporate fraud when its your job not to is okay so long as you're not the top dog, just capitulate after the event and you'll get off completely or with a light sentence - if you're caught at all.

I say if this guy was eligible for 30 years in jail then give him half off for cooperation, not 99% off! After all insurance companies put the value on someones life at about $1.5 to 2 million - so $4 billion is a couple of thousand lifetimes of corporate fraud, yes think about it: money down the drain due to fraud is lifetimes of human effort down the drain. If this guy was even 1% responsible for this fraud happening (and arguably as CFO with full knowledge of it he was 100% responsible right?) he should sacrifice at least 0.01*2000 = 20 years of his lifetime as punishment. I think that kind of sentancing for corporate fraud might raise a few eyebrows and raise a few bars for people thinking of participating in or hiding it.

Espresso exposed!

No blog is complete without mentioning porn right? Just think how many more hits you get if you do mention it - anyway, for the benefit of some of my readers who probably don't read Newsweek (Agent J reads it for me anyway), you might want to check out the Espresso Porn. It's a fringe foodie (or is that drinkie?) photo blog full of images of dripping and ozing "naked portafilters", a specialty diagnostic or training accessory available online.

Strangely no one seems to have registered teaporn.com - yet.

Over to you weasel eyes

Well I certainly look forward to seeing how this one pans out. My prediction is that old weasel eyes in the White House breaks out his teflon suit and busts out some break dancing moves to avoid ever condemning Robinson's call for assassination of Chavez.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I once said it would have been a whole lot cheaper to put a price tag of a few billion on Saddam's head (or Osama's for that matter) than getting into the quagmire we now have in Iraq. But that assumed Bush ever really cared about whether Saddam was dead or alive - as a matter of fact at various times he completely blew off the importance of finding either Saddam or bin Laden alive. Which belies a much dark purpose to the invasion of Iraq, only no one seemed to have been listening at the time or paying attention to the significance of such a major flip-flop by Mister "no U-turn" (but watch me take a right and a right and make a wrong anyway).

It also pre-supposed that America was actually capable of pulling off such an intervention overseas. To date they seem to have a piss-poor record of succeeding - how many atempts on Castro have they made? For all we know they continue to make them and still fail. In fact so miserable has the record been that the usual modus-operandi for US foreign intervention is funding insurgents, or creating guerilla armies out of slush funds - something that also would have been a whole lot cheaper in Iraq. However although such things have a better rate of success they also seem to end up in installation of even worse people than the ones they are designed to remove.

Anyway, when an armchair proletariat politician like me broaches assassination its hardly a serious threat or even a serious suggestion. When a bona-fide wing-nut like Robertson with a million plus people watching his TV channel starts preaching it (pun intended) that's a whole different ball game, one that requires a comment from the very top. So far the only official response was from Rumsfeld who's basic message was that the US would do something like that because it was illegal. Well hello, when was pre-premptive invasion of another country legal? When was torturing prisoners legal? Even detaining "enemy combatants" indefinitely at Guantanamo has been ruled to be illegal, but that never stopped the USA doing whatever it wanted to before, and certainly wont again. Hell no, if the USA isn't answering Robertson's call to assassinate Chavez you can bet its not because of a question of legality.

In fact Robertson has probably just done the US government a huge disservice - because if they were working on an act of "extreme prejudice" against Chavez, the bar for doing so without causing the finger of blame to point towards the USA has just been raised very significantly. More to the point Robertson has now put Bush in the awkward place of either condemning what he said and getting roasted by the religious extremists following Robertson, or ignoring him and being roasted by the media both at home and world wide. For my part I certainly hope that other world leaders are quick to condemn Robertson's comments and hence put Bush in an even hotter seat that he is already in.

But my faith in Bush's ability to dodge bullets and don his teflon suit (and probably asbestos underpants) is rarely dented. The only significant change in his defensive dressing since been elected is he now has to hide his earpiece receiver well and truly up where the sun don't shine.

Bows and arrows on planes?

After a recent bout of flying I find the story that the TSA may be relaxing its restrictions on small knives, razor blades and bows and arrows very interesting. I'll be the first to admit I find all the shenanigans they put us through before flying to be a total farce, and like many I've often found myself on the plane in possession of a banned item due to pure accident. Even when bags are searched for items there is almost never a really thorough effort to explore all its cavities, and I've never once seen anyone rip apart a laptop. Anyone with half a brain could devise a way to put box cutters, large knives, or even explosives inside a laptop and get them on a plane.

But really, now TSA wants to allow a bow an arrow on a plane? What is the thinking there - they are trying to appease great white hunters who are tired of having to shoot Bambi instead of impale him with a pointy stick? I agree it seems unlikely anyone could really hold up a plane with a bow and arrow, could someone really kill more than one person with it before being stomped by a dozen angry passengers determined not to smacked into the ground? Yes, much of the change in inflight safety has come from passengers realizing that not all hijackers are intent to take their passengers along for a safe ride to the next airport. But really, did anyone think that a few guys armed with nothing more than box cutters could hold up a plane?

Also think about that pilot locked in the cabin with his gun. If a bow and arrow is aimed at a flight attendant or the boys in biz-class don't you think he'd be tempted to come out to take some pot shots? And after that the rest is history, hijackers storm the cockpit (because it doesn't have double doors to allow secure entry and exit) and the plane and probably the only gun on board is theirs.

I still stick with my radical theory of inflight security - everyone goes armed to the teeth (guns for all!), or they go buck naked, or they go chemically sedated. I can even imagine airlines specializing in such security policies might actually gain some very loyal supporters.

Lighten up

Sometimes advertising doesn't just suck life from your soul and money from your wallet. Sometimes its pure entertainment or art. Here is an example of the latter.

Not what you want to see at the airport...

I'm sitting here in a restaurant at Toronto airport mouching off some free wifi from the executive lounge when people start rushing by my table to look at the TV. I don't normally pay attention to TVs at airports but this time I look. And then I look again... a plane has crashed at Toronto airport. I look over my shoulder... Its a plane on fire.

A few seconds of sanity check - my family who I just waved goodbye to on their trip back to London aren't flying for another hour or so which means they must be safe. Breath...

Firetrucks are arriving now as the big black cloud starts spreading. The TV continues to blare and people stare. Pilots and other flight crew start appearing looking anxious. I can't imagine how they feel, its something anyone wants to hear about, let alone see.

The cloud is getting bigger and spreads down the runway covering buildings and the foreground. Still no news if anyone is injured but the TV says 200 on board and the plane is an Air France 737 flight 358 that crashed on landing.

I phone my girlfriend and let her know its not my family on board, this will be all over the news any minute now. Then I phone my brother who is waiting to leave but I can't reach him so I leave a message. What are you supposed to say? The have a safe trip I wished them all an hour ago probably rings hollow now, but I repeat it anyway. Try to put it out of your minds I say, everything will be okay.

The plane is engulfed in a huge white cloud now, lots of water is being sprayed onto it and the cloud is rolling towards the terminal. Ambulances are roaring by. A big crowd of people in departures is calmly watching the TV and a rumour starts that the airport is being shut down.

I take out my camera and take a photo. I feel kind of guilty but also feel like I have some weird right to take it. It could easily have been my folks on that plane. Does that give me a right to take a photo? What if it had been my folks on that plane... I guess I wouldn't have taken it. But a hundred journalists would have taken it, no second thought.

A waitress brings drinks to the table next to me and mentions that six people have been rescued and I silently contemplate what that probably means.

I think I'll stop now and try to call my brother again. I want to wish him and the rest of my family a safe flight agian...

Technical interlude: now faster, stronger, longer

As of today instead of being hosted on my server at home with its piddly 600kbps upstream link, this blog is now hosted with a company called DreamHost. So hopefully you should find pages loading much faster and thanks to a 140GB per month bandwidth quota there is less reason to fear the coming of the great SlashDot because that's about 4,000,000 page loads of your average 30k blog entry. If I ever get that many page hits in a month the Google ad revenue should more than compensate for the bandwidth overages. Finally with over 2Gb of storage I should be able to keep blogging from a long, long, time...

I heard about DreamHost through a friend and although their management UI is a little funky they do have some great features, especially an automated backup system that makes it easy to recover your files. Combined with their base package including 3 domains and much more bandwidth and storage than comparably priced hosting I'm pretty pleased so far. The only thing I'll ding them on is spam filtering for email - it doesn't seem to be that configurable and just doesn't work the way I like it (I'm a realtime blackhole list kind of guy if you must know). However, since no one ever sends me email at this domain I don't really care, and I'm going to assume it will get better in the future because ultimately every hosting company finds that spam is their problem to solve as it eats up their bandwidth and profits.

The never ending lies

Wow, I just did a check and discovered that the Plame/Novak/??? story has been going almost as long as this blog - I first wrote about it in October 2003 following a tip-off from Chicken Or Beef?. Back then, from day one I flamed:

... Bush got Novak to do it himself personally, and Novak will never have the balls to incriminate Bush while he is still in power. You can bet your life as soon as Bush is out of the White House Novak will be fessing up, or writing a book about it, or maybe collecting a handy payoff somehow for keeping his mouth shut.

So I'm pleased to hear that the evidence pointing to the liar-in-Chief is really mounting up. Thom Hartmann wrote yesterday in his TreasonGate piece that the file about Plame was on Air Force One with Bush and Powell and likely as not the leak of the info to Novak or Rove came directly from the top. Now that phone logs from Air Force One have been subpoenaed perhaps it's only a matter of time before something happens. Even better the information about Plame was definitely marked secret (Hartmann says "Top Secret").

Will Bush weasel out of this simply by declaring some vital, incriminating piece of information "top secret" on the grounds of national security? After all, incriminating the President would surely damage the US reputation... well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way would be to say "at last, they've realized that guy is no good and will find someone knew". But of course that someone would be Cheney. Could it be that this was some insane NeoCon game all along - Bush has become too useless, too much of an embarrassment, so we'll just get him out and get our blood brother Cheney in in his place?

The alternative is they'll find a way to draw this out for another two years after which election '08 will be well under way and the spotlights will be focusing on the next batch of Presidential nominees. With their famously short spanned and frivilously focused attentions, that'll be the death of the issue in the mainstream. But that's a long two years for old draft dodger in chief to continue to dodge the impeachment bullet with his name on it.

Yo!

Well of course I had to go and Google open source religion only to find that according to Wikipedia since 1998 a group of people calling themselves Yoans have been working on the concept. I have to say, after a cursory inspection of their website I'm generally in tune with their concepts.

I'm not sure I really like the way they have co-opted (perhaps recycled is a better description) terminology like god (it's us stupid), heaven (only to be found on earth if we can make it happen) and saints (Saint Albert and Saint Issac to name a few). I assume the intention is to use terms that are instantly familiar to a wider audience making Yoism easier to get your head around. Too some it may smack of Republican co-opting of phrases like "clear skies" and "healthy forests" and "no child left behind" to be something completely contrary to the usual interpretation. That's not entirely fair since the Yoan versions of God and heaven are more like a distant cousins to the mainstream ones than the antithesis.

But I do think they carry the Christian analogies a little too far at times, such as in their "Book of Yo" where the section Reclaiming GOD "A story of creation" reads more like a parody of the bible, which is somewhat disingenuous. Actually I'm pretty sure it is supposed to read like a parody of the bible but it'll take a pretty enlightened non-Yoan mind to see the humor clearly for what it is. None the less reading that would probably alienate Christian readers who would find it blasphemous - if they hadn't already written off the concept of Yo as worshiping a false idol.

Actually when I can get my head around the terminology it actually makes a whole lot of sense as a way of life and of rationalizing my vestiges of early Christian (well Anglican Church of England which is about as wishy-washy non-committal Christian as you can make it) and then later scientific upbringing at the Church of Physics (aka Oxford University School of Science). Is that useful to me? To have a "religion" (as opposed to "faith") to identify with? Well as Agent J found out yesterday sometimes people are just too damned nosy about what religion you are and what church you go to. To say I'm Yoan would at the very least solve that problem although I might hazard a guess it would generate more questions than it answers.

As best I can tell the Yoans are not up to much these days. They got some publicity at the start of 2004 but there's been very little activity from them since. However another group called the Universalists Movement seems to be getting some weight behind it, a write up in the New York Times certainly helped. Universalists put ones personally discovered truths first, believing that only you can interpret the truths you discover in life. Their main goal is the pursuit of truths through personal experience. You are free to believe in God with a capital 'G' so long as you are doing so based on your own the truths, not simply because you have faith that God exists, i.e. that someone just told you so.

So while Universalism can encompass people who believe in God and describe themselves as a "religion" its on quite strict terms. Outside of those terms they quite clearly declare themselves as anti-faith, and hence find it abhorrent that faith is being used via government to define and control personal freedoms of the populace at large. The Universalists don't declare themselves as Democrats in the US political arena - they believe that many libertarians and hence many Republicans should support their goal of opposing faith based religions and its influence on the populace at large.

I'll be interested to see if the Universalists just fizzle out like the Yoans, or if they can actually find themselves attracting disenchanted people of faith. Both these religions, without the promise of afterlife or the belief in some omnipotent but essentially good supreme being, they face an uphill battle for winning the hearts and minds of mainstream believers. They have little to ofer those that would traditional use a religion as a catch-all comforter for those spritually cold and bleak days when you just want to curl up and be kept warm by the thought that God is good and God is right there up on his cloud looking out for you^*.

^* Even if he did just smite your car, your home, your health, or your family

Copycat bombings?

Hearing early this morning about more bombings in my home country this morning I was waiting to find out how bad it was. So far there has not been a single report of casualties which is a relief. But the more I read about this new spate of chaos in London the more its sounding like some group of wannabe terrorists who got together to cause some chaos with copycat bombings. I wouldn't even be surprised if this was totally unrelated to any known terrorist groups at all and the explosives were more of the homebrew fertilizer bomb variety planted by a bunch of out of control pranksters.

Why would anyone do such a thing? Well, just to stroke their egos and fuel their delusions of power, and most likely to stirr the pot a bit and increase East-West tensions - just like in Northern Ireland where the IRA eventually found themselves competing with all kinds of thugs (on both sides) determined to keep the choas going and divisive climate of hatred alive.

Da Vinci Code and open source religion

I was reading the blog of someone I was having a business meeting with and he mentioned he generally doesn't read books less than 50 years old based on the theory that anything really good will still be well known and widely read in 50 years. For this reason he eschews popular shelf busters like "The Da Vinci Code". I guess if he lives to be eighty something he may yet get to read it - it'll be interesting to see what makes the cut as popular literature of the early 21st.

I have also not read the D.V.C. and probably never will, but last night I discovered that I may well be able to get away with just seeing the movie. I think the news that it is being made into a movie is quite old now, I vaguely recall it. However going into see "Charlie and the chocolate factory" (two thumbs up by the way) I wasn't expecting to see a poster for Da Vinci Code proudly pronoucing its roll out in May 2006, in fact I note they even already have a trailer for it online! Isn't 10 months in advance just a little early to be lauching a publicity campaign for a flick that is surely going to be plenty controversial and an instant hit in its own right?

And I do relish that controversy - I'm sure there will be scads of people trying to boycott the movie and remind people that its all just a story. But (if my smattering of information about the books plot and central premise is correct) it will be a great opportunity to spread some skepticism about how squeaky clean the early history of the church is, and will maybe lead a few more people to question, just a little bit, how far organized religion has come from the central premise of Jesus' teachings - be nice to each other and enjoy your life on this hunk of oh-so-pretty rock while you still have it. After all isn't that a concept (of being nice to each other) that should be freely available, freely practiced and also free as in beer? And aren't many of the mainstream churches just organizations that want to restrict you, and tithe you, to practice their particular interpretation of that concept, one that Jesus basically gave away for nothing, no strings attached?

So in my interpretation Jesus was the original free software kind of guy for religion where the source code "be nice to each other" was made free as in free speech, and also free as in beer. That clearly pissed a lot of people and extant organizations who previously off, they previously had a monopoly on such things and were damned if they were going to let people doing their own thang for free. Hence they spent the next 2000 years trying to clear up the problem and stamp out any remaining bastions of free and self-driven religiosity that came out of the original free religion foundation (aka Christianity) such as gnositicism. Religion, they belived, just like air, water, and pleasure were surely things that were ripe for monopolizing and certainly shouldn't be left un-monetized.

At this point if my scant knowledge of the Da Vinci Code is way off then that will all sound like a ridiculously off-topic rant - in which case I guess I can just wait to see the movie and find out what it is really all about. However I hope my concept of Jesus as an open source kind of guy reinventing religion as something to be freely available and free to practice in the face of entrenched and fiercely protective monopolies of power, and belief systems at least makes some sense. And we all know what the result of the struggle was - a few heavily commercialized brands constantly waging a war of publicity and recruitment against each other, something like Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia while their practitioners are for the most part "enjoying" a never ending downward spiral - which doesn't bode at all well for today's free software movement if that is also their destiny.

Put your money where your marriage is...

There's and interesting piece over at Alternet about a new book on the instituition of marriage. From the description it seems there are two main pointsl. Firstly that marriage as it is being sold today is a relatively new concept and many of the supposed "anti-marriage" concepts are also very old ones. Secondly that apart from all its pro-marriage rhetoric, the stupid white men dejour (aka the Republic party) area doing little, if anything to actually support the institution of marriage.

In fact, by my reading, the inference is that the massive decrease in marriage longevity (with divorce rates averaging 50% or more) has more to do with the increasing financial strains on the "economically challenged" majority, than with a decline in moral values or lack of faith in marriage as a fine institution. The author points out that up until 200 years ago marriage is most frequently entirely arranged, and more to the point arranged for maintainence, or acquisition of financial status. Now today with people in the west choosing partners for the most part on a free will basis, quite often with partial or even no support of either family network the financial strains of every day throw those of married life into harsh reality. Indeed isn't it said that one, if not the, most important factor in causing marital strain is money issues?

So in today's society where there is more often than not no free childcare from the grandparents, both partners are going out to work to earn a crust to keep their heads above the water and maybe a roof over their heads, and increasingly one or both partners is also trying to support children from another marriage - well is it any wonder divorce rates are through the roof? Yes, if anyone really wanted to put their support for marriage is then they should really be providing free childcare, fixing the heinous situation that has lead to 45 million Americans without any health insurance (thank you WalMart), and generally getting back to the situation where a family - even if its just the two of you - means something more than "a combined economic shopping entity united by credit card debt and cellphone bill".

Polling in the USA

Matt Taibbi takes and infuriated look at polling in the United States. In it he makes an interesting discovery - that before the invasion of Iraq only 40% said they strongly supported it, another 40% supported it "either out of deference to the president or a sense of patriotism." Now after the invasion has gone horribly, horribly wrong 53% think it was "a mistake", which means 47% still think it was a good idea. As Matt points out, you can probably assume that means the 40% who thought it was a great idea before, still think its a great idea, and only 7% of the lemmings are still supporting the war. This really pisses him off. To cite his best words on the issue:

Which invites the question: If these people can't handle a few bad headlines, what exactly was their level of commitment to begin with? Pre-war polls, confined to the standard Coke-Pepsi either-or formula, didn't tell us much about that.

Maybe if the polls back then had been conducted differently, we might have had different results. Imagine a March 2003 poll that posed the following questions:

• Would you yank your son out of college and send him to die for this bullshit?
• Would you yourself be willing to give your life for this cause? If yes, grab your shit; there's a bus outside.

Those should be the only kinds of polls we allow, when it comes to questions of war. I mean, who the hell are these people who changed their minds once the news started to turn sour? There are only two explanations: They're either unbelievable cowards, or they didn't think it through. In either case, if there were any justice, they would all be rounded up and dumped buck-naked on the streets of Fallujah.

So basically he's making the point that people made up their minds about war as if they were voting for their favourite soda, or something equally banal. When it became clear that a war might actually have some consequences for them a lot of those 40% ended up flip-flopping. Concluding Matt writes:

But for all the poll respondent's smug airs, he only talks tough when he's in a crowd, and shielded by anonymity, identified only by his number. I've seen this myself as a journalist. Interview someone on the street, and he loves to hold forth and waste your time giving you his great opinion. But ask for his name for the record, and he runs away like a bitch.

A nation that indulges in anonymous casual cruelties like The Swan should not be consulted in the same manner before a war. In matters of life and death, stand up and be counted -- by name, swearing on the blood of your children. What kind of country goes to war whispering "yes" into a telephone?

I couldn't agree more!

Exxon, the externalizing machine

Did you know that sixteen years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill Exxon has still not paid up any of their $5 billion in damages? Alternet's story The True Price of Oil tells how Exxon is saving itself $400 million every year it delays even though its being charged 6 percent annual interest on the judgement. Not paying earns Exxon an estimated 14 percent return on capital, so they choose to delay as long as possible - the cummulative effect is to have saved them enough money to pay the entire $5 billion judgement.

The Alternet article also tells of how fines for oil spills are just a cost of doing business, and not paying those fines is just a way to avoid paying any of those costs while all the time external entities (the environment and the surrounding society) bare the cost. This is the perfect definition of externalizing your costs and makes Exxon a king of externalizing. If everyone paid the true cost of oil at the pump we'd never fill up - estimates of these subsidies go over $1000 per driver per year, around $20 per week, and that was before the Iraq war started which has probably increased that figure by 50% or more.

And while I'm on the subject of oil - I read last week that Toyota had been telling all the owners of its electric RAV4 SUV that their cars would be taken back and crushed at their end of current leases. They claim they cannot afford the cost of liability for the cars and maintaining spares inventories. The State of California has apparently twisted their arms asking them to offer California leasers the opportunity to retain their vehicles in return for a release of liability and spares supply commitments. This phenomenom of crushing electric cars is apparently rife - there's even a DontCrush.com web site with letters from owners wanting to save their cars, and photos of crushed electric cars.

I have previously heard a different theory of why car manufacturers are so eager to avoid pure electric cars on the road. Contrary to their claims they have turned out to be extremely reliable. Powered by electric motors their have far fewer moving parts and need very little maintenance. The knock on effect is less money for the manufacturers in supply spares, and far less money for dealers servicing cars. No oil changes are needed to drag buyers back to the money pit forcing dealers to sell and forget, or pray the car goes wrong. But ask yourself - how often do you service your washing machine - maybe once every few years, or even less? Electic motors just last and last - all you ever need to replace is the brushes which are inexpensive items. Thanks to regenerative braking you'll also put a lot less wear and tear on the brake pads. Really all you have to do with an electric car is replace the tyres once in a while and wash it - they are effectively like a razor with an everlasting blade, or an inkjet printer with bottomless ink cartridges. Is it any wonder car companies want them off the road?

Can anyone say "dot com" over again?

A recent Chrisitian Science Monitor article pretty much sums up how insane the real estate market is getting in the USA, and perhaps even globally. When people are using chocolate clad women in bikinis to sell unbuilt condos there must surely be something up. I mean, as far as end of the bubble omens go that really has to beat getting stock tips from shoe shine boys, right? The only thing this over-hyped and over-here bubble lacks is a catchy monica. How about "brick com", or even "brick con"? However if overseas investors keep pouring their bucks into this country (and then sucking them out later) it may just keep the pot boiling for a few more years.

I begin to wonder how much the real-estate boom is fueling the "economic recovery" in the USA? I'll bet its quite a significant factor - some friends of my who are appraisers said this month they've seen a record number of people getting foreclosed because they re-fied their properties to the max and spent all the money on household goods like home entertainment systems and new cars - all stuff that depreciated faster than it becomes obsolete.

Also being surrounded by new condo developments under construction I'd love to see some statistics on how many housing units are lying empty now, compared to during the stock market boom days. Certainly back then it seemed you couldn't buy or rent property for love nor money. However now there seems to be a real surfiet of rental property at well below the cost of paying the mortgage on the same space if you bought it. That leads me to believe their must be a lot of vaccant properties that have been bought as investments with the owners banking on increasing prices that will cover the money they are sinking into mortgage interest payments.

In California and other areas people make the case that the hottest markets are those where land is scarce and the population is growing. In these places the law of supply and demand will ensure that prices keep going, going, up! However the point is that prices are going up faster than wages and sooner or later pretty much everyone will get to the point where they can no longer afford to move anywhere but out of the State, into a smaller property (why bother?) or just not buy anywhere at all and start renting until prices fall again, or wages rise to exceed prices.

Template tidy up and introducing shameless advertising by Google

In a fit of idleness I spent a bit of time today tidying up the template for this blog, I even added a logo - like it? I also went down the list of links and noted that a good third of the blogs I'd been linking too seem to have vanished. I'm always amazed at how many people who have blogged away for some significant amount of time then just let their site die completely. I wonder if these people have actually been required to remove their sites or maybe they ceased to be and the hosting and domain registration fees no longer got paid? For my own part I intend to keep this site up, even if I stop blogging for an extended period. But that begs the question - even if I could prepay hosting for, say a hundred years, just how far into the future will a web site remain accessible? What is the longevity of the HTTP protocol and today's HTML formats?

You may also note some Google ads down the left side - yes in the long dark tea-time of the soul anything is possible, even selling your soul to shameless advertising. What better way to plumb the depths of darkness? As it happens this venture is largely to justify paying for some of the aforementioned "professional" hosting so that hopefully any time soon LDTT will be available at much greater download speeds. Also I will no longer have to live in fear of a time called "the coming of the great SlashDot". No word yet on how long this will be, but it could be "real soon now".

Actually it's been kind of interesting to see what ads Google does spew into the left margin, and rather gratifying that when it has nothing better it falls back on Hitch-hikers Guide stuff which hopefully with end up, by the fundamental interconnectedness of things, putting a few pennies into the estate of the late, great Douglas Adams. And remember, even if you think advertising sucks our souls and wastes our money (by adding an intangebile "marketing" mark-up to everything we buy) don't forget that it only sucks your soul if you actually click on something and buy it. It remains to be seen when some bright spark will get the idea of creating a massively prolific virus that turns millions of PCs into ad-clickers and makes someone, or everyone, richer than sin - or at least richer than most advertising executives. Perhaps then the advertising industry will then see the folly of web advertising and give it a rest, or... more like the consequence of such a virus would be to force you to supply a biometric identity verification every time you click on an advert. I wonder just how popular that will be?

In the mean time if you want a completely ad-free Tea-Time experience just use one of the many feed readers such as Bloglines to subscribe to it. If you regularly read more than one blog its really the only way to keep up and will save you from visiting a whole bunch of web sites every day to see if they have been updated. Judging from the site statistics it looks like most of the 50 or so people visiting this web site every day (as opposed to reading the feed) are arriving here from Google searches anyway, so it wont be a big impact on anyone.

Finally, if you're feeling really benevolent then go ahead, make my day (or at least pay for my tea) and click on a few of the advertising links, even better do a search and then click on some links - that seems to be even more lucrative. I promise all revenues will be ploughed back into keeping this blog and me alive.