Mouse Manners & Other Droppings

You probably never noticed two mice considering a piece of cheese in a mouse trap, one brighter than the other. "After you, my dear."

That song, "They asked me how I knew my true love was true ..." was a setup. "They" were already sleeping with the guy's true love.

"Our father who art in heaven..." made sense only for Jesus.

Marie Antoinette probably thought the fools had cake.

Henry the Eighth set an example for how high church Anglicans are supposed to behave. No schlepping around on doctrine. If the broad don't lay male child eggs, bury her in two pieces.

A line from one of the Lethal Weapon flicks, [the Danny Glover character to Mel Gibson] ... "Did you ever meet a man you didn't kill?"

One version of the Book of Mark (no doubt a forgery) makes Jesus out as a homosexual (or a switcher at best). [Google "Clement Mar Saba."]

Two mud-splattered dogs chasing another on a godawful day. One of the chasers says to the other, "It's a bitch ain't it." Other replies: "It better be."

La Gioconda smile was brought on when the lady finally caught on to an off-color joke Leonardo had just told her and was trying to hide that fact.

George W. Bush actually flew 55 combat missions in Vietnam. He spread that National Guard story out of modesty.

Based on the only written records we have of them, neither Tom Sawyer nor Huckleberry Finn ever peed.

All politics is local horseshit.

And in a reverse vein: "One could do worse than be a swinger."

Mouseworld -- Three

Yesterday I tried to say something brilliant about the causes of war ... and failed. Why did I fail? Because I committed one of the sneakiest of logical errors. I was explaining "war" as if all wars were the same, and because I traced the causes of war to non-specific concepts, specifically to the words "emotion" and "reason," as if all people were driven by the same mixture of those two abstractions. True, I did give an example that got down to cases, but in wrapping up my argument, by explaining the decision to go to war in Iraq as a failure to think, I never quite got inside the heads of the people who actually did the failing. I made only a half-vast attempt -- Newtonian inertia -- to explain the processes, when it was probably obvious to most of you (and certainly was to a young student) that there's more going on in our heads than can be explained by the laws of mechanics.

There is, though, a sense in which all wars are the same. They all are caused by human action. If that were not so, we could study war the way we study the weather, with equally marginal results. We may learn everything there is to know about typhoons and tornadoes without ever being able to do anything to prevent them. They are not caused by human action, so no amount of human action can change them. Leaning on the fact that all things that are caused by human action can be changed, I could say -- and did -- that war is certainly not inevitable. But that statement, true as it might be, says nothing about the processes of human thought which are, after all, the "intrapersonal structures" that lead us to do everything we do, both the stupid things and the wise things.

I briefly alluded yesterday to the dual aspects of human thought. Here's a bit more detail.

There exists for every idea, whether emotional or reasoned, a concomitant physical structure. If I think to run like hell when I see a hungry lion, the idea to run is accompanied by a bevy of neuronal and hormonal actions, all of which can (potentially) be explained by neurological and chemical analysis. Everything I do to escape the threat -- my running, my screaming for help, everything I might be observed to do -- can be understood by an analysis of the physical causes involved. But my desire to survive what I imagine to be a dangerous threat cannot be explained by any sort of physical analysis. My feelings of fear or of desperation certainly have counterparts in my physical structure, but the experiences themselves, the feelings, cannot be understood by an examination of my physical processes. Hence, Spinoza's two related claims, one, that the "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things," and two, that the causes of things cannot be explained by reference to ideas, nor the causes of ideas by reference to things. Our ideas make sense only in the context of other ideas. The actions of the brain make sense only in relation to other physical causes.

We are physical beings, but our actions in the world are mediated by meaning. Said another way, we can explain every observed thing that happens by looking at the laws of physics and chemistry, but to understand human action we have to examine the world of meanings. Said still another way, human motivation is determined by what humans bring to the table. We do not act simply because we are physically compelled to act. We act because we, in our dual capacity as thinking bodies, determine ourselves to act. That is, we choose to do this or that, something or nothing, as physical beings who are motivated by meaning.

We are, thus, simultaneously engulfed by two disparate but related streams of causation. Those streams limit our ability to comprehend ourselves as meaning makers. Our physical selves set limits on our mental selves, and our mental selves are restricted by the paradoxes that crop up in our making of meaning. We are capable in our physical selves to do whatever is not denied by the laws of physics and chemistry, but those laws leave us with a finite set of possibilities. We are capable in our mental selves of thinking anything for which we can make up a word or an image or a feeling, but some of our words contradict themselves, some of our images cannot be translated into real physical things, and some of our feelings would have us destroy ourselves. We are, in a word, finitely limited beings. We cannot bootstrap ourselves out of our selves.

Philosophers of the materialist persuasion, focused on the physicality of the universe and of ourselves, have come to the conclusion that we are absolutely determined, that is, that human freedom is an illusion. Philosophers of a radical idealist bent have convinced themselves (here I use Schopenhauer's words) that "the world is my idea," or (Nietzsche) "all is determined by a will to power," or (Hegel) "men are driven by a quest for recognition." As true as any of these ideas may seem, they all derive their "truth" by attending to one or the other of the dual aspects of human nature. The reason none of them completely satisfies traces to the very point at which their proponents began to think. Starting with the physical world as the all-in-all of existence, the materialist finally finds it impossible to explain his own thoughts. Beginning with the mind (and disregarding the physical brain) the idealist reaches a point at which nothing is actually real as anything other than an idea.

The dual aspect way of thinking about the world doesn't necessarily satisfy us either. We're still stuck with what we have come to call "the human condition." But this particular brand of stuck-ness has going for it that it is not forced to deny reality. The mind and the body are both real. We can at least understand why the human condition is such a messy affair. Our minds and bodies limit each other. Because the dual aspect theory seems to be describing things as they actually are, it provides us a way to intellectualize (i.e., to know) the nature of our limits. Out of that knowing we can begin to act with more power (i.e., more freedom) than we would were we restricted to one or the other of the aspects of our being. We can begin to run our lives on the basis of what my other favorite philosopher (Bernard Lonergan) calls "transcendent being." Because we know the struggling nature of the processes going on in our selves, we can act as if we were standing outside our selves. We can look at our "reasons" as proposals for action, rather than as settled affairs. We can assess our motives as "questions to be answered." We can see ourselves as whole beings -- as minds and bodies -- rather than as robotic "things" driven by impulses of one or the other.

As transcendent beings we will, of course, not have been satisfied with a mere awareness of the data, or the "facts." (That's what motivates dumb animals. They see, they react.) Nor will we be satisfied with the first sense we make of the data. (That's what fools do. They believe everything they think.) We will instead have asked of our selves if in studying our ideas we have considered all possible interpretations of the data, and we will have continued the process until we have run out of questions to ask ourselves. Then, and only then, can we act responsibly, since that's what being responsible means. It means to know why we are doing what we're doing. It means to be transcendentally honest with ourselves and others about our actions in the world. We can do that because we will have no reason to be ashamed of what we're doing, since we have performed at the highest level of which a human being is capable.

Will we always succeed? No. Why not? because we are not God. We do not know all that we can know, we know only what we do know. But because we have acted responsibly, because from our transcendent position we have treated our ideas as if they were actually someone else's, we can with virtual certainty say we have done all that was humanly possible.

So there are now at least two ways to fail. We can fail because we have not acted transcendentally, or we can fail because we did and were incapable of doing better than what we did.

Mostly, we fail for the first reason. We have acted impulsively. We've seen the data, and like any animal have acted without thinking. We have made sense of the data, and acted without asking if that sense can stand up to the scrutiny of responsible inquiry. We have asked questions, but have stopped short of asking questions we know we should ask. We have acted as self-limiting beings, ending our quest for true responsibility at what may well be a comfortable place. We have not acted as powerfully or as freely as we might have. We have acted as prisoners of one or the other of the ways we are.

This way of understanding ourselves does not assure that we will act responsibly. We must still act, and knowing is not acting. But because we now can claim to understand what it means to act responsibly, we are better able to understand why the world is such a messy place. We can confess that we have not acted as responsible beings, and thereby put to rest any concern for why it is that bad things happen to nice people, and worse things to a world that could be better. We can take blame for the way it is, and perhaps out of a sense of conviction, begin to take responsibility.

Mouseworld -- Two

Yesterday I half-heartedly promised that I would write a followup to that day's blog, the subject of which was, "why do bad things happen to nice people." The focus yesterday was, however, not specifically on the nice people that the bad things happen to, but rather upon the general structure of causes and effects. I fully intended to write today about the intrapersonal structure of causes, how it is that human beings, while nevertheless trapped in a macroscopic universe of causes and effects, still seem to possess the ability to change the world. But I was having some difficulty finding a good lead sentence and so procrastinated on beginning at all.

But then I mouse-clicked over to Miss Fairhope's blog and read some of the comments her readers had posted, one comment in particular. Miss Fairhope had written forcefully (and well) of her feelings about war, not just the war in Iraq, but all wars, and 'lowed as how she couldn't figure why it was that human beings could be so stupid. A commenter had this to say:

[Y]our blog of today was written through a sense of confessed naiveté, and as such was failing to understand the reality of things. One thing is what we'd like things to be and the other is how things are -the reality-, and that is especially true when it comes to the reality of man and the wars, little or large, he conducts.

Now, a logician might immediately cast aside the commenter's argument on the ground that it is circular. He (or she), trying to make a case (I suppose) for the inevitability of war, says that "the reality" is that we engage in war. Well, yes, we do, and that's the problem Miss Fairhope saw with our behavior. To merely admit the reality of war is not to justify or explain war. It is simply to restate the problem.

Well, as I say. That's how a logician might respond if his aim was merely to put down a vacuous argument. But in taking that path the logician would have made no headway in answering Miss Fairhope or in seeking the real causes of war. So, I decided to defer until another day the analysis of how personal freedom emerges from an ineluctable structure of causes and effects and take a look at one large class of effects, war, or to be more specific, why those who see war as an inevitable product of human nature are mistaken. That is, I want to see how the structure of causes and effects might work to produce results in which war would be the exception and not the rule.

First, the reality of the way the human mind works involves us in making decisions out of two great bodies of cause, reason and emotion. Between these two, we may find many differences but I want to concentrate on one of them. Reason is reflective. Emotion is impulsive. It is altogether fortunate that we can reason upon some things, and equally fortunate that we can be impulsive about others. Facing immediate and sudden danger, we would be foolish to reflect on the matter before acting. But if the situations we face do not necessarily involve immediate danger, if in fact we have available to us the time and means to weigh and marshal evidence before taking action, we would be more than foolish to "act without thinking."

Generally, the dangers for which war is the solution are of the second sort. In fact, a nation that goes to war without thinking would be almost certain to be unprepared. Typically, but not always, the decision to go to war takes place after a studied deliberation. So we can with reasonable assurance say that the activity we call war is of the reflective sort. We have the time and the means to consider the alternatives before actually loosing "the dogs of war."

Consider the example of the war in Iraq. [I will here assume that the reason given for that war was the real reason, the possibility that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, the means to produce more, and the will to use them.] First, a few facts.

(1) We were already fighting a limited police action in Afghanistan, seeking to bring to justice the criminal who had conspired to perpetrate a capital crime.

(2) In November 2002, at our insistence, the UN had deployed and empowered two teams of inspectors into Iraq, to determine the truth or falsehood of the WMD claims being made by the intelligence services in the US and Great Britain.

(3) The US, taking stock of its armed forces and noting their limitations, could also have legitimately concluded that it would be better to finish the work in Afghanistan before opening hostilities with Iraq.

With those three facts in mind, the administration might have decided -- key word, decided -- to ask the UN to increase the number of inspectors in Iraq and to extend the length of their mission. Behind that decision would have been the logical belief that with the inspectors in Iraq, looking over Saddam's shoulder, he would be relatively incapable of producing more weapons or of using the ones he allegedly possessed. If that policy were implemented in the UN then the US and its allies fighting in Afghanistan would have much more time and many more resources to bring the criminals to justice. Simple common sense....

Now this example shows clearly that there was nothing inevitable about going to war in Iraq. So why did we? Answer: because we failed to exercise an available option. We made a decision on the basis of something other than reason. We acted on the basis of what was either a reason other than the WMD threat, or we acted for reasons that could not be justified by reason.

Yesterday I used the example of a man who died for "evil" reasons, either incompetence, ignorance, or administrative failure. In each of the three chains of cause and effect I analyzed we saw that the problem was that the people involved had not used an available cure of which they were ignorant. The "evil" that killed the man was thus not inevitable in terms of what might have been. The cure might very well have been known if the doctors had been better educated. In the example of Iraq, we see a similar pattern. A "cure" was available. It was simply not used. The evil that followed -- war -- was thus a product of the failure of a few men to exercise simple human judgment.

The commenter might reply to this by pointing out that this is exactly what he meant by "what we'd like things to be." The "reality" is that the intelligent choice was not made. But if he meant by his comment that war is inevitable, then he must be saying that it is inevitable that men will always fail to use their minds reasonably, that they will inevitably be controlled by their emotions, that they will act on impulse, and not on reflective judgment. That this is not the case -- nor need it be -- is evidenced by the countless times throughout history in which men of wisdom and (yes!) virtue have acted on the basis of reason. We are as free to be reasonable as emotional.

But one thing explains -- but does not justify -- our failure to always be reasonable in cases where reason is possible (i.e., where the danger in not immediate and sudden). To act spontaneously on the basis of emotion is easier than to act reflectively out of reason. We must make a conscious effort to pause and reflect, and every effort requires energy. And if it is so that for every idea there exists a concatenated physical counterpart, then it is inevitable that the laws of inertia will assert themselves into our physico-mental efforts. We are thus prone to not-think rather than to-think.

But this does not mean or imply that reflective judgment is impossible or that the failure to judge is inevitable. Nor does it imply that evils such as war are natural. It means simply that war, like every other evil, is caused by a failure to exercise those qualities of our being that make us truly human. Wars may certainly happen, even when we judge correctly, but wars such as the one we are fighting in Iraq would never take place if we were ruled by reason.

Consider, for instance, that the inspection effort would finally have concluded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no factories to produce them, and consequently no will to use them. Perhaps we would by now have brought Osama bin Laden to justice, managed with the help of our allies to talk sense into the leader of Iraq, and brought about something like stability in the middle-east. And perhaps if the policy outlined above had been implemented, George W. Bush might have gone down in history as one of our greater presidents rather than as an abject failure.

Mouseworld -- One

We continue to wonder why bad things happen to nice people, and for serious-minded folks, this wondering might translate to, what kind of God permits evil? The quick answer might be, the God we've got, because it certainly does appear that if there is a God, she's decided to let bad things happen to nice people. The far-right religionist might counter by explaining that there's no such thing as a completely nice person and that God has chosen to make an example of the marginally nice just to show what she meant by those ten commandments (or to show what a piss ant she can be ... on occasion).

Questions of this sort have come up here before -- or maybe it was over on Miss Fairhope's blog. In any case, the answers we got were nowhere near satisfactory. Which is not surprising since there's never going to be a totally satisfying explanation of why God would permit such things as World War I, typhus, and crop failures, not to mention the particular bad thing that popped into your mind when the question was asked. We've been trained, conditioned, or whipped into believing that for God to really be God she has to be on the lookout for the human race. It ought to be fairly clear that the question of why God permits evil would not come up if we had not been taught to think we're "the creator's pets." We still might wonder why bad stuff happens, but we wouldn't have the option of thinking that God had fallen down on the job. Maybe then we'd have a better chance of finding the real causes of evil.

Now, the key word here is "causes." Once we catch on that everything that happens has a cause we could begin to see things more rationally. We'd perhaps, first, modify our idea of what God is. Instead of thinking of her as a potentate or king or ruler of any kind, we might start thinking of her as the ultimate understanding of everything that is. Which is not to say that it is humanly possible to understand everything, but that there really is an intelligibility to everything, and that if God had a mind like ours it would contain a complete understanding of that intelligibility.
But for anything to be intelligible there must be some sort of regularity to it. That is, it must obey something like what we call the laws of nature, especially the law that demands that every effect have an intelligible cause. You can see that if that law were not true, there could never be said to be anything understandable, not even to God. She might understand a thing today, but if there were no assurance that the same causes would produce the same effects tomorrow then it wouldn't be right to say that God -- or anyone -- understands anything. If nature were truly random, then the claim that the universe is intelligible would be a lie.

Follow that trail just a little ways and you see that the way to understand why evil things happen is to seek to understand the causes that led them to happen. Take the case of a good man's dying of what might be a curable disease. Let's say he received treatment from a public health clinic and because the clinic made a wrong diagnosis or administered an ineffective medication, the man died. Well, why would God have permitted that to happen? Why didn't God make the doctors smarter? Well, it's obvious that by blaming God we're looking in an altogether wrong direction. We ought to be asking questions of the doctors themselves, or of the schools that trained them, or perhaps of the state that may not have provided enough funds to hire well-trained doctors. Looking in those directions, we might eventually come up with an explanation for why the bad thing happened to the man. We might find an intelligible series of causes and effects that led to the bad thing's happening.

In the process of examining this series of causes and effects we might get an insight into the nature of evil. We might see that in addition to the series of positive causes that led to the man's death -- bad diagnosis, wrong medication, improper funding -- there was also a series of negative causes, things not done. Because I started this by saying the man died of a curable disease, it's clear that he was killed by a series of bad choices. A cure existed but it was overlooked. The people involved in any of the three series of suggested causes may indeed have done something positive (but deadly), but at the same time they failed to do another positive (and therapeutic) right thing.

Now this may seem so obvious that one may wonder why I even chose to write it. But backing off from the view of the situation as a medical question, and taking a look at it as a theological question, we see that in addressing evil just this way we have answered one of the most basic questions theologians have had to deal with. If God is all powerful, if God is the creator of all that is, then (as we have asked above) why does God permit evil? How do we equate an all-powerful God with the fact of evil?

By regarding evil as the effect of a failure to do the right thing, we have removed God from the chain of causes and effects that have led to evil things happening. It was not God who failed. It was us. For some reason -- which is bound to be ultimately intelligible -- we have failed to do something we might have done to avoid evil. The responsibility for evil rests squarely on human shoulders. Speaking positively, we see that there's a strong connection between the things we do and the things that happen to us. But speaking negatively, we see that there's an even stronger connection between the things we did not do and the things that happen to us. When we act at our best, we act positively on the basis of what we know to be the right thing to do, but in many, many cases, our best is not good enough. And it is not merely that we do not know the right thing, but that we think we do know the right thing.

But there is hope in this way of viewing God -- especially the all-knowing contents of her mind. If there exists an ultimate intelligibility, and if we identify that existence with the abstraction we have named "God," then it follows that the purpose of our religious commitment ought and must be to seek to know what God knows. The Jesuit philosopher/theologian Bernard Lonergan spoke eloquently (and exhaustively) of this commitment to God in his masterpiece, Insight. He found that not only does the intelligibility I spoke of exist but that humankind appears to be consciously self-compelled, by what he called an unrestricted desire to know, to seek God, that is to seek the same understanding of reality that exists in God's mind. He makes the claim that we are religious by nature, and that the object of our religious persuasion is to learn the will of God.

This seems a neat place to end this first excursion into "Mouseworld." Perhaps the spirit will move tomorrow upon the Mouse's watery brain and lead him to make a further statement about the transcendent nature of the human soul.

[Hmmm. You say you didn't think that's what I was talking about? Well, surely you didn't think God was dictating this stuff.]

The Mendacious "October Surprise"

With the November 7 election date less than three weeks away and significant Democratic gains in the House, Senate, and state governor races a distinct possibility, the nation's voters are on edge waiting for the illustrious Karl Rove to spring a last minute, last ditch surprise. They may be waiting in vain. In saying this, I mean to take nothing away from Rove. He has in the past proven his abilities as an election strategist, using frightening symbols and horrifying words to manipulate the minds of the American people. In 2004 he let loose a pack of bare-toothed hungry wolves upon the fragile psyches of the voters, and managed, with the help of a somewhat bent election mechanism in Ohio, to pull off victory. He has already sent a new ad to a few small market areas featuring none other than our old friend Osama bin Laden, still shouldering an automatic weapon and threatening us with devastation worse than "what happened before." But this ad, blatant in its attempt to create fear, is only a stalking horse, a teaser Rove has sent out to test the water. He wants to see if the same old tactic still has legs.

It hasn't. The television media rolled over to Rove in 2004 (probably because they were anxious to sell air time and didn't wish to offend the would-be purchaser), but this time, they're acting differently. Every reputable news channel ("not you Fox") ran clips of the new scare commercial and had their commentators identify it as nothing but what it was, a redeployment of an old tactic that has worn out its usefulness. Rove got his answer: This time the scare maneuver will not work.

At first, before I came to an even darker conclusion, I -- like everyone else -- thought Rove would finally come up with a tactic just as effective as the wolf pack. My favorite was a scheme in which Rove would have Cheney fake a heart attack and resign as VP. The current occupant of the White House would immediately appoint John McCain as Cheney's replacement, and off we would go to at least two more years of Fascist rule.

It didn't take me long to see that scam as a bit too risky even for Karl Rove. If the trick had failed and the Dems managed to win a majority in the House, and with McCain and not Cheney as the heir apparent, impeachment would be sure to follow. Cheney's presence as VP has served better than the Secret Service to keep the CO healthy.

So, with terror a dead issue and the war in Iraq an issue that would best be kept quiet; and with so-called family values having been scuttled by the well-publicized misdeeds of several Republican Congressmen, where could Rove look for an issue that would have even a bare chance of success? Taxes? Better not bring that up. The Dems will counter with the $7 billion a week of "your taxes, my fellow Americans" the mis-administration is squandering in Iraq. Can't run on the record either. There ain't nothing to brag about. Oh dear, what can we do?

The answer is obvious. Nothing. Let the Dems have the House and maybe a bare majority in the Senate. The person serving as president, and the remaining neocon Fascists in the House and Senate will still have enough power to make sure that the quagmire the current occupant has created will get even deeper during the next two years of "Democratic rule." (Watch for that, sports fans; that will be the keyword in the Fascist propaganda program over the next two years: "Democratic rule.")

The guys running the swamp at the present time didn't get there by being altogether stupid. After all, they're the ones who invested their hard-earned money in think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Group. Those organizations are peopled by scholars who are quite capable of seeing two years into the future. "OK, they reason," as any smart mouse would, "the world is a screwed-up mess, and quite frankly, we don't think the Dems can clean it up in two years, especially with only bare majorities in the Congress and a puppet Fascist in the White House. Let the Dems try ... and then empty the whole bag of shit at their feet in 2008."

Far fetched? I don't think so. A strategy of that ilk is at least within the visionary capabilities of the bright folks running the think tanks. And the Fascists who funded them have clearly demonstrated their ability to think long term. They started funding the think tanks and enrolling the religious right 30 years ago. Two years of hapless Democratic rule may be the final nail in the coffin of the form of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers and documented in the Constitution. Complete victory for the Fascists would finally be won, not by the usual tactic of stuffing ballot boxes with fraudulent votes and the heads of the voters with deceitful emotions. It would be won by giving the opposition an impossible task. How better to explain away even the fiascoes of the last six years than by handing the responsibility to "those loud mouth liberals who pretended to have all the answers"?

Far fetched? We shall see.

[Oh, my Lord! I just thought of another possible surprise the Fascists may engineer. I won't describe it in detail, but say only this: "Secret Service, be on your toes. The current occupant's life is in great danger.]

Mouse Tells the Mendacious Current Occupant of the White House What He Should Say to North Korea's Leader

"I acknowledge that you have the right to defend yourself against your enemies. And I stipulate that in naming you as one of the three members of an 'Axis of Evil' I have openly declared that I am your enemy. I also completely understand, given our actions in Iraq and our belligerent attitude toward Iran, how you might feel threatened by us, by me in particular. In a word, you as the leader of a sovereign nation are completely within your right in taking the steps you have taken.

"But there is an alternative. By asking yourself how I came to think of North Korea as an evil state, you might then try to find a way to remove or change the behaviors that led me to that conclusion. That's one way people might act when they see that they are doing something offensive to their friends. You might ask yourself whether there is another way to raise revenue for your nation other than by selling missiles and other military hardware to my enemies and the enemies of my friends. You might ask yourself whether it is wise to spend nearly all of your nation's income on the maintenance of armies rather than on feeding your people. You might wonder whether it would be better to sit down with me in a friendly discussion of these and other issues rather than spending yourself further and further into debt.

"I have asked myself these very same questions in regard to what I have been doing in Iraq, and I venture to tell you that the answers I have been giving myself are just as distasteful to me as I imagine yours would be to you. I clearly made a mistake by arbitrarily naming you as an evil nation without first trying to settle our differences. I have clearly made a mistake by going to war with Iraq. I see now that my concerns for Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction might have better been resolved by other means, the UN's inspection teams being one of them. I see now that many -- perhaps most -- of the world's problems could be resolved if you and I and other national leaders were to act more like human beings than petulant children. I see that I have been as guilty as you have in not seeking peaceful solutions to the aches and pains of nationhood.

"You may wonder how I came to this sudden change of heart. It happened quite suddenly, and came about from a conversation I was having with one of my daughters. I don't recall exactly how the subject came up but my daughter had wondered why our history books were so filled with the exploits of people like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte when, as she said, 'those guys were not much more than empire building killers.' I know she didn't mean her question to have the effect it had -- at least, I don't think she did -- but I couldn't help but see that history might record me the same way, as an 'empire building killer.'

"That started me to thinking. I asked myself, 'Why did those historical figures do what they did?' I'm not a historian but I knew enough to realize that one of them, Alexander the Great, and maybe all of them were acting probably the only way they thought they could act. Alexander was born at a time when the Greek city states were constantly at each others' throats. It must have seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to conclude that it's either kill or be killed. He might easily have concluded that he had no choice but to go to war if he was to protect his people from certain death.

"It was not hard for me to see that in today's word it's not city states but nation states that are engaged in this constant state of war. Nor was it hard for me to see myself as just another man like Alexander. It was as I say easy because by that identification I could have have created for myself a measure of justification for the things I have been doing since taking office. But as you may know, I am also a Christian, and we Christians sometimes when we're in a quandary ask ourselves, 'What would Jesus do?' I got an answer that went something like what I am proposing to you. Jesus would ask us -- you and me -- to make sure that we put our love for humanity and for life itself at the forefront of all our relationships. He would advise us not merely to say that war is a 'last resort,' but actually to behave as if we honestly and completely believed what we were saying. He would ask us to find a way to live together in peace.

"When I heard those answers, I knew right then that I had not done enough to do God's will. I had acted in the way of a barbarian, a man who had never heard Jesus's message of love. And I committed myself -- then and there -- to speak to you as I am speaking at this moment. And yes, as you might imagine, I have told my advisers and other interested people what I was going to say to you, and as you might also imagine, they were adamantly opposed. 'Haven't we already tried to meet them halfway? Haven't we exhausted all possible means to avoid direct conflict?' I answered them as I am answering you: 'Have you ever heard me say to Kim Jung Il anything like the words I have told you I intend to say?' They could only shake their heads, and that told me -- and them -- that we had not exhausted all possibilities. We have not spoken as human beings who know the difference between right and wrong. We have, as I said earlier, acted as petulant children.

"Jesus, you see, had seen what Alexander had not been able to see. Jesus saw things as God might see them. He saw that we human beings are capable of behaving out of a deeper caring for humanity than we had at any time in history. He saw that we are in fact capable of acting in a manner reflecting a care for all of humankind and not for ourselves alone. I suppose, human minds beings what they are, he had no illusions that it would be easy. But you may be assured that, in speaking to you as I am, I am doing one of the easiest things I have ever done. I am speaking the unguarded and absolute truth and, as Jesus said it would, this truth has set me free. I am more of a man at this moment than I have ever been before, and if you take me at my word, if you agree with me that there is nothing in this world that we cannot accomplish if we apply our hearts, minds and souls to the task at hand. If we do that, I am confident we can find a way to live together as loving brothers.

"I pledge to you that these words are the truest I have ever spoken. They are the best I have within me. I pray their meaning will find a comfortable place in your heart and that you and I can henceforth set an example to all the world of how people might behave when they truly accept responsibility for themselves and for all of humankind.

"Thank you, and good evening."

The Mendacities of Democracy

A commenter to the previous entry here pointed to a rather sophisticated blog that (with a large dollop of irony) suggested that the Foley scandal was an act of God. The theory embedded in that facetious suggestion was that the American people are so busy working and watching The Simpsons they have no time to get themselves informed about political matters. Because God has made us addicted to work and trivia we need something like a soap opera to get our attention, hence God, recognizing the flaw he designed into us, has intervened on our behalf. By exposing Congressman Foley’s flirtations, God sent us a wake-up call.

Now I will confess that the previous blog was written more in anger than by thought, but now that I have asked myself the important question, “Who were you pissed-off at, Frankie?” I see that, even when driven by emotion, the Mouse gets closer to the truth than “sophisticated bloggers” do when they think. I was angry at the so-called religious right, flabbergasted that they needed a bit of salacious trivia to call their attention to the political debauchery of the current administration. I suppose Glenn Greenwald, the “sophisticated blogger,” was making the same point, but he never comes right out and says where the fault lies. He never admits that the fault lies in the existential fact – recognized by Plato and James Madison – that pure democracy has a deadly flaw built into it: the (presumed) stupidity of the masses. It was in recognition of that fact that the Founding Fathers labored to form a government sheltered from the direct control of the people. They founded a republic, not a democracy. Laws were not to be enacted by the people, but by respected men who were presumably of nobler character and, thus, less likely to be swayed by selfish concerns.

In theory, that idea works. Even Madison’s opponents in the Constitution Convention of 1787 agreed with him that direct rule by the people would be folly. No subject so completely commanded the attention of the convention as that one: how to assure that the best among us would be elected. The Fathers finally concluded that, while risks would still exist – not all noble men are as noble as they seem – they were far less than would be the case in a pure democracy.

One of the risks given short shrift in 1787 has become a major problem in the 21st century. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, the authors of The Federalist Papers, acknowledged that the people’s elected representatives in the Senate – particularly the representatives of the smaller states – might form alliances among themselves and thus create circumstances in which the minority would rule the majority. They saw this danger, likened it to the power then held by the British House of Lords, and decided. nevertheless, to accept the risk as the lesser of two evils. But none of the Founders could possibly have foreseen the emergence – crossing all the branches of government, even the judiciary – of the great alliances we know as political parties. Nor could they have foreseen the technological advances that would permit the parties to communicate their ideas almost directly into the minds of the people, nor the extent to which the means of communication would become, as it were, a tool in the hands of the parties, a tool they would use to shape the people’s thinking. The problem has become, not that a minority of the people might rule, but that the majority might be conditioned to accept bad rule as good.

A more optimistic Mouse might acknowledge these three facts – political parties, better communications, and the ignorance of the masses – and yet see in them the possibility that the first two could be the salvation of the last. But for that to happen the political parties must be presumed to have the education of the masses as their objective, and that is not the case. The parties seek to have the people adopt the parties’ objectives of their own. They do not wish to make the people think; they wish to make them believe.

From this observation much philosophical meander might follow, but perhaps one or two simpler illustrations might stand-in for a better and boring analysis. (It’s too early for a nap.) Take the words “Democrat” and “Republican.” If a candidate running as a Democrat can make the voters believe that all people deserve, by natural right, to have a college education, a good job, and the best health care money can buy (appealing ideas), and if these ideas can be instilled as the hard rock truth, then the word “democrat” may be made to seem a synonym for education, full employment, and good health. To achieve this desirable form of vocabulary, the Democratic politician would never speak of these halcyon benefits as things that must be paid for, but as things that are “yours by natural right, and anyone who would deny them to you is an enemy of the people.” The Republican, on the other hand, might speak of fiscal responsibility, or the right to life, or the death tax, and would do what he could to make his opponents seem spendthrifts, abortionists, and “tax-and-spenders.” Neither, if they were masters of the game, would ever make the mistake of presenting both sides of any of these issues. They would draw the world in two colors, black and white, and condemn as ninnies anyone who would see it differently. If I may be permitted one tiny excursion into philosophical thought, they would try to create a set of axioms from which the only logical conclusions make them seem like angels and their opponents like devils.

In a word, the Founding Fathers could never have imagined a world in which major alliances of elected officials would adopt as a means to their ends, making the ignorant masses even more ignorant. They could not have imagined that whole industries would emerge whose only product would be the shaping of human minds. They could not have imagined the nation as it has become.

Oh, we hear it said everyday that “the country is going to hell in a hand basket,” but the phrase always comes in the context of “it’s them that are carrying the basket, so trust us!!” We never hear it said that the problem lies exactly where Plato and Madison always knew it was, in the people, the ignorant people who can be bamboozled into swallowing the murder of a hundred thousand, while choking on the mote of a single perverted Congressman. True, as Greenwald suggests, the mote has forced the people to wake up a bit to the frauds and deceits of the current administration, but I wonder if anything will ever convince the people to lay the blame for their blindness where it belongs, squarely on themselves.

Yeah, sure, let’s say it’s a fact that the people all have to work and have to entertain themselves. But let’s also say it’s a fact that, in saying that, we have identified the fundamental problem of our nation. The belief that we lack the time to know the truth may work very well as an excuse, but it cannot justify our ignorance. In fact, nothing can, not even Plato’s wisdom or Madison’s fears. We may have needed God’s intervention to wake us up, but we are not by our nature – those two worthies notwithstanding – essentially uneducable. We have simply misaligned our priorities. You see, there’s always time to do what we want to do. We just, so far, have not wanted to take responsibility for the condition of the world. We have chosen to be entertained rather than to be informed, and to be informed rather than to question what we are told. And I seriously doubt that God's wakeup call will change that. The writers of The Simpsons are just too good at doing what they do. (Shit. I bet they think of themselves as part of the solution.)

As The Mouse Sees It

Altogether too much is being made of that shitass Congressman who wrote "suggestive" emails to 16 year old boys. I hear that the so-called religious-right is having "second thoughts" about their allegiances, that because of this "incident" they're actually beginning to question the ethics of the sorry shits they have alligned themselves with. Pisses me off.

Since that "story" broke, over 500 Iraqi men, women, and children have been slaughtered in the streets of their homeland -- over 100,000 since the boob in the White House lied us into the murderous adventure he calls "the war on terrorism."

And the religious-right is having second thoughts because of the actions of one perverted pipsqueak? Holy shit.

A Sideways Way of Teaching

...not exactly mendacious.

We were taught to sing an old song ... for a hidden reason ... for several hidden reasons....

Flow gently sweet Afton among thy green braes
Flow gently I'll sing thee a song to thy praise.
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream
Flow gently sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

I didn't know at that time -- I was maybe 10 or 11 -- what a love song was, but I somehow knew that this song was not a meaningless string of words. I suspect my classmates knew it, too. We were told that the words were written by a famous Scotsman, a poet, who had the same first name as one of my best friends. Perhaps we got our first clue about the song's importance from the word our teacher used to describe the poet: We understood fame.

We didn't understand love, or why a man would write a love song. Oh, I knew already about how love feels. I was deeply -- and silently -- in love with Gloria Brown, but I didn't have a name for what I felt. I just had the passion without the poetry.

When we finally mastered the melody, it seemed everyday after that, when the time came for music lessons, someone in the class would suggest that we sing Flow Gently Sweet Afton. Apparently I wasn't the only one who had found in that melody a sound to match his or her feeling. At that stage of our lives, we must all have been experiencing, for the first time, the strangeness of love.

The people who put together the fifth grade curriculum probably gave us that song to sing for the very purpose of letting us know that love was not something to be ashamed of, that even a famous poet had been in love. I'm not sure the lesson took. I don't recall that my classmates and I were suddenly transformed into troubadours pleading our love in song and word. The outward expressions came a few years later. So did our realization of the other lessons hidden in Robert Burns's poem. We could never have known at 10 or 11 how it is that love and death both get the deepest part of their meaning from each other. We did not understand the depth of Burns's love because we did not truly understand that Mary was dead.

I still have a hard time believing that our teachers sought to teach us that complex lesson. But on good days, when I'm able to break through the barriers of disillusionment raised by the realities of war and deceit, I can manage to imagine that our teachers, whether they intended it or not, were teaching us a lesson they already knew. For after all, our teachers were older. Listening to the beautiful sound we made with our unchanged voices, they must have heard in their own hearts the reverent pathos Burns had written. They knew of death. They knew of their own childhood loves. They knew, as we all know now, the painful contradiction of life's ending and love's permanence.

Oh, we were probably supposed to ask, "What's a brae?" and to wonder whether Mary would someday awaken from her dream. But the lady sitting there at the head of the class, moving her hands as if to conduct us as a choir, would have heard in our voices a more plaintive cry. All the teachers who have listened with their adult hearts to the gently flowing voices of childhood, would -- when their souls were awake -- have heard not simply the beginning of love as a sounded passion, but the unending joy of their first, last and always loves, and the knell of the certain end of life -- the murmuring harmony of passion and fear.

And those of my classmates who still exist must feel something of what this one feels ... abiding lessons, perhaps never meant to be taught, and yet, never forgotten.

The Mendacity "Factor"

Bill O'Reilly has quite a following among the far-right wing of the Republican Party. His program, amusingly called, "The Factor," is the highest rated cable "news" show in the 8 PM (eastern) time slot.

I had (admittedly, not too often) wondered how he had managed that. By way of an answer, I had assumed that a large segment of the American listening public was in tune with O'Reilly's agenda, that being, essentially, that everything the current occupant of the White House and his cronies say is true, and anyone who disagrees is a traitor. But as it has turned out, that was an undeserved put-down of the American people.

I had read Al Franken's book -- I forget the name -- in which he claimed to have broken the Factor's code; he could tell when O'Reilly was lying and when he wasn't -- if his mouth was moving he was lying. But I put Franken's claim down to petty envy. O'Reilly, by being nothing more than a bullying nincompoop had obtained more success than Franken had with his barbed, and sometimes barbarous wit.

I have to confess that until last evening my opinion of O'Reilly was formed on only one actual viewing of his performance. He was interviewing the Commissioner of the IRS, trying to get to the bottom of some issue that was enjoying its 15 minutes in the spotlight. O'Reilly had an opinion that differed from the Commissioner's, and the way he managed to "win" the ensuing debate bordered upon brilliance. He would pose a question to the Commish and then let him answer ... after a fashion. If the first five or six words sounded like the Commissioner was going to make a point negative to O'Reilly's position, the Factor would loudly interrupt, supported no doubt by the technicians who were in control of the volume mixer backstage. If the Commissioner was about to say something mealy-mouthed and indecisive, O'Reilly would let him talk and then hop in to repeat the man's mealiest and most meaningless words, just to make sure, don't you see, the audience had heard correctly. It was theater of the absurd at its best. Nothing made sense, and wasn't supposed to.

But last evening I watched The Factor again, lured by what the program trailers claimed was to be an interview with Bob Woodward in which O'Reilly would put the quietus to the distortions of Woodward's latest book, State of Denial. For those of you who have been camped out in the inaccessible reaches of the Blue Ridge for the past week, let me explain. Woodward, God forbid, had claimed that the current occupant of the White House and his accomplices had from the beginning been in a "state of denial" regarding the lack of progress of the war in Iraq. Instead of telling us the truth, the CO et al had been spinning the war as a success story. This, of course, was a theme that would be absolute anathema to O'Reilly and his highest-rated followers. The ads pimping the show had repeatedly used the word "spin" in referring to Woodward's book. That fit well with The Factor's subtitle, which is something like, "the no-spin place" -- the exact words elude me.

O'Reilly started out by asking Woodward, "What would be the headline of your book?" Woodward answered, without so much as a blink of an eye, "The title says it, the administration is in a state of denial." O'Reilly seemed to roll a bit with the answer, but took it like a man with a purpose. He switched to his main argument. After getting Woodward to admit that the war hasn't yet been lost -- we're still there fighting -- O'Reilly then claimed that there are people "out there" who want to see us lose, and [State of Denial] is aiding and abetting these (he didn't say, but meant) traitors.

And that was the worst possible tack O'Reilly could have taken. Throughout the remainder of the interview, Woodward pounded home the point that the American people do not like being lied to, finally asking O'Reilly himself to answer a question: "Why doesn't he [the current occupant] just tell us straight-out that things are going badly?" O'Reilly answered: "He can't do that," elaborating by explaining that the [CO] cannot seem to be defeatist, that he must, in essence, serve as a cheerleader for the war effort.

Woodward pounced. "If he would make a speech in which he repeated his 9/11 strength, that it's going to be rough but we will prevail, if he would tell the American people the truth [he didn't say, for a change, but should have] his ratings would soar." O'Reilly muttered an unintelligible reply, and then signed off to interview none other than Miss Ann Coulter, a part of the show I missed (seeing as how I had switched to a cartoon channel).

O'Reilly's interview with Woodward finally revealed to me that Al Franken got it right right. The secret of O'Reilly's success rests firmly upon his ability to lie, and the most egregious lie of all is the one bleated in his sub-title, "the no-spin zone" (maybe that's the right wording). He had, in defending the CO's repeated lies to the American people, said straight-out that the CO cannot tell the truth about the war, that he must "spin" the truth into a pep talk. This not only undercut O'Reilly's primary lie -- "no spin here" -- but cast the CO in a role so unpresidential we ought, out of justice to real presidents, ask for a refund of the salary we have been paying the current occupant for the past five-going-on-six years.

Oh, and yes, we ought also to change the rating scheme we've applied to O'Reilly's show. Make it the highest rated cable farce in the 8 PM (eastern) time slot.

Mendacity Becomes Treasonous

“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

" ‘What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,’ Rice said.”

Yes, Miss Rice, I also find that incomprehensible. And yet, the two people who made that report to you – Tenet and the CIA’s top counter-terrorist official Cofer Black -- are both quite sure that they not only made the report but that you seemed to brush them off. In other words, the report was in fact made to you, my dear, and for some reason you are now claiming that it wasn’t. Let me suggest a reason.

Not only did you hear the report, but you were sufficiently convinced of its credibility that you reported it to the current occupant of the White House. Long discussions ensued with, not only the CO and his political advisor, but with VP Cheney as well. The conclusion of the meeting was that, if true, the attack would finally provide the “another Pearl Harbor” the administration had been longing for so that it could open hostilities with Iraq.

Yes, dear lady, it is absolutely inconceivable that you would not have recalled the report, or that you would not have reported it to the White House. More inconceivable to me – but obviously not to you – is that the report would have been considered good news, but that is the only conclusion I have been able to reach given the inconceivability of your not remembering.

Mouse Versus the Volcano

The case for global warming rests on indisputable evidence: (1) Actual temperature measurements, and (2) Visible effects, e.g., glacial melting.

The question of whether human activities contribute to global warming ought to be just as easily resolved, but that question is still debated. The case for human causation is grounded in four facts: (1) That carbon dioxide (CO2) causes so-called greenhouse effects, (2) That human activities add more CO2 to the atmosphere than would be the case if humans still lived in caves, (3) That the natural system of CO2 balancing – primarily photosynthesis – has itself been reduced by human-caused deforestation, and (4) That in any case, human processes add CO2 to the atmosphere at a faster rate than the natural systems can handle. None of the facts has been seriously disputed. Click here for a graphic overview of the global warming problem.

Nevertheless, the case for human causation is still debated. This would not be so surprising if the objectors were evenly spread across the political spectrum, but they are not. Politicians in America who call themselves liberals are almost 100% in agreement that human activities contribute to global warming, while a high proportion of those who call themselves conservatives disagree. Given that the facts involved in deciding the issue are essentially scientific in nature, it is difficult to understand how and why a split along political lines has occurred.

As I blogged yesterday, it is understandable why corporations that would be adversely affected by remedial actions are among the objectors. They are and necessarily must be in business to make profits. That they have funded conservative leaning think tank organizations to make a case against human involvement naturally follows. One of the early presentations of the case-against appeared in 1997 shortly after the liberal president had declared a desire to enter into an international treaty agreement to combat global warming. [The points made in that broadside have since been refuted, but the assault continues.]

The anomaly, though, does not lie in the fact that corporations would seek to prevent their ox from being gored, but lies rather in why the conservative political wing would appear to have joined their effort. Ultra-partisan liberals may argue that the conservatives are “bought-and-paid-for” cronies of the oil industry, but let me suggest that their behavior can better be explained without such rancorous accusations. They are philosophical true believers in the libertarian teachings of Adam Smith, arguably the most important economist who ever lived. The following is an excerpt from my blog of July 17, 2006.

“His classic book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, has rightfully been acknowledged as the most fundamental of the intellectual building blocks that undergird the capitalist system. The most famous quotation from that book has become to the capitalist what the first commandment of the Decalogue was to the Jewish people. In a single sentence, Smith defined the guiding principle that has ever since guided capitalist theory.

" ‘By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he [the industrialist] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’ [Book IV, chapter 2]”

The unintended “end” Smith referred to was – and note this well – the maximization of industrial output. The case has been conclusively made that no system of central planning can come close to matching the efficiency of the capitalist system in achieving that end. To debate the point would be folly. But a similarly effective case has also been made pointing up the difference between maximizing industrial output and maximizing the “general welfare.” If, for instance, a subset of the industrial base were engaged in the manufacture of harmful products, e.g., tobacco, the more efficient the industry, the worse off will be the people.

An analytical case can also be made between the ideal of human freedom and the underlying principles of laissez faire capitalism. If men ought to be free then they ought to be left alone to conduct their legal business affairs without government interference. As compelling as this argument seems to be it hinges upon a definition of “freedom” that does not square with the most fundamental lesson of American history. In our republic we are free to determine the laws by which we shall be governed. And given that every law infringes someone’s freedom, it is fundamental to the American system that we have engaged ourselves in government primarily for the purpose of infringing our freedom. If individuals were left to their own devices, we can be assured that society would be a much more dangerous place. It would perhaps not be absolutely out of control because human beings still possess a natural desire to survive that could be trusted to provide a semblance of order to their lives even without formal government, but in view of the disagreements that persist, even with government, life would still be a messy affair.

When, however, the desire to survive is seen to apply to corporations as well as to flesh and blood humanity, the achievement of even minimal order cannot be so easily trusted. Legally speaking, corporations are persons, but they differ from real persons in one significant respect: corporations have no conscience. I do not say this maliciously, but simply as a statement of fact. Conscience-stricken human beings will occasionally act in ways that can only be interpreted as for the common good. That is, we may lay aside our own immediate best interest in exchange for an indirect socially desirable benefit. But as Adam Smith said, not exactly in these words, the enterprise that works for the good of society acts in a suicidal manner. So we may safely observe that when Exxon/Mobil and Phillip Morris seek to influence the people to believe that their products are not harmful, they act exactly as good corporations should act. They act in an absolutely selfish manner. They desire to survive.

The conservative movement in America has become, on one of its political sides, committed to Smithian economic principles, and on the other, to what should be (if words possess meanings) a diametrically opposed set of ideas, the Christian religion. On the first side they have overlooked the difference between maximum production and maximum happiness. They have in that regard catered to and promoted the consumerist attitude that pervades American society, that having more equates to having happiness. With that idea firmly implanted in the public’s mind, it follows that the unquestionable benefits of Smithian economics ought to appeal to politicians of both the liberal and conservative stripe. But it has been only the conservatives who have permitted themselves to be wholly committed to the idea that what’s good for big oil is good for America. They have bought into Smith’s invisible hand as if it were a panacea to all social ills. They have overlooked that the hand is sometimes balled into a fist.

With the Smithian mindset firmly imprinted on their thinking, it is no small wonder that the conservatives are more prone to believe the propaganda being doled out by the oil and coal industries. Even though both parties have succumbed to the consumerist persuasion, the liberals seem at least capable of listening to the arguments for and against human involvement in global warming without becoming embroiled in true believer-like reactions. They are perhaps not totally unselfish in this regard, their constituencies being more environmentally conscious, but that observation merely pushes the concern one level deeper: why are environmentally conscious people better listeners?

The case finally comes to this question: Has the conservative mindset been so infected by Smithian economic dogma that it is now incapable of thinking outside that box?

I mentioned yesterday a subcommittee hearing that I witnessed on C-Span. For the better part of four hours the congressmen threw questions (and speeches) at six panelists, three of whom were advocates of the “hockey stick” view of global warming, and three of whom had questioned the statistical methods of the other three. Apparently, none of the six panelists disagreed on the larger question. When a young liberal congressman from Washington state asked the panelists to raise their hands if they had any doubts about human involvement in global warming, no hands were raised. The congressman then, in a few words, pointed out that one of the oil companies had decided to get on board with the environmental movement and its global warming concerns. The company had done several things, which the congressman summarized, and having done so, actually found that they had cut their costs by $300 million. Within a matter of less than five minutes later, the conservative chairman of the main committee spoke up. And what did he say. “It’s going to cost too much.” He had been sitting right there, and unless he had fallen asleep, had heard the young congressman point out that by doing the right thing, one company had actually saved money, and yet ….

Well, you get the picture. We may add to the oil company’s experience the fact that many of the things home owners can do – such as using compact fluorescent light bulbs in lieu of normal incandescent bulbs – will produce savings while reducing power consumption. And as Steve Brown said Friday evening, here in Virginia, when we use electricity in our homes we’re actually burning coal, the worst CO2 offender.

Finally, if it turns out that global warming does involve human action, we ought to be thankful. We can do something about human activities. But if the global warming we’re experiencing is entirely natural, then we had better hope and pray that the predicted effects are grossly exaggerated, because if they’re not, then the human race is in for a terrible future.