Told You . . .

. . . that "Stuff You Should Know" was going to generate blog entries. For it's there that I found out about this website at Animal Planet. It is all about parasites, specifically the kind that prey on us, human beings. It is perfectly fair to say that these are not good things. I'm sure there are benign parasites, in fact I know there are--all kinds of bacteria that our bodies host. And some of these are also necessary to our survival, as I understand. But the others. Well, they make us shiver and we'd just as soon not be reminded about them.

Fair disclosure: the subject is gross, the video clips are gross, and the whole thing is scary as hell. You definitely won't want to be looking at this stuff while you're eating. But if, like me, you're interested in almost everything, then this is just another subject, albeit one that is pretty disturbing. I was left with the question about one kind of biologist decides that these repulsive creatures are what he or she wants to spend their life studying. No matter what is is, somebody is fascinated with it.

Here's a promise. I'm not going to inflict another ghastly subject like this upon you for a long time. Cannot promise I never will again, though. Who could make a promise like that?

Related articles

• Your Cat And Its Parasites May Actually Be Making You Crazy (blisstree.com)
• You have parasites (sarchasm2.wordpress.com)

Not a Way to Go

I had lunch with my daughter and Susan yesterday and was pleased to introduce her to a podcast I had recently discovered called "Stuff You Should Know." In the two weeks or so since I found out about this podcast, I've listened to 8-19 back episodes and now I'm downloading them the iPod regularly. This is the home web site. Guaranteed that this site, which covers fascinating subject matter all the time will become a rich source of blog material.

Case in point: 10 bizarre deaths. It turns out, as was discussed on the podcasts, that most human beings have a somewhat morbid curiosity about death. Which for me doesn't seem all that unusual. It's a place we're all going, no exceptions. Something as universal as this is bound to make people curious. I've had a saying for years: "There's only one way into this world, but there are a million ways out of it." It turns out most of us are interested in finding out about the million ways.

So I'm assuming that many of you--well, not that many because not that many read this blog regularly--are going to click on the link to find out about these 10 bizarre ways to die. So I won't be be a spoiler. But I will titillate you with some descriptive phrases. Death by beard, by storm drain, deodorant, hungry sheep, molasses, and more.

Strained Gnats

It's difficult for me--well, it's actually impossible in this instance--not to share this this timely message from Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest I've spoken about several times before. Especially with the absurd rise to prominence of what in my opinion is the very worst kind of advertisement for the Catholic Church. I'm speaking, of course, of former senator Rich Santorum.This guy is a crazy Catholic fanatic of the furthest right. A puckered-butt moralist who has a problem, as he says, with the separation of Church and state. And he's running for the Republican nomination for president.

This little piece is just for people like Santorum.

In recent elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead—and largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at all. The Creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge sacred story. When you lose the mystical level, you always become moralistic as a cheap substitute.

Jesus is clearly much more concerned about issues of pride, injustice, hypocrisy, blindness, and what I have often called “The Three Ps” of power, prestige, and possessions, which are probably 95% of Jesus’ written teaching. We conveniently ignore this 95% to concentrate on a morality that usually has to do with human embodiment. That’s where people get righteous, judgmental, and upset, for some reason. The body seems to be where we carry our sense of shame and inferiority, and early-stage religion has never gotten much beyond these “pelvic” issues. As Jesus put it, “You ignore the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and good faith . . . and instead you strain out gnats and swallow camels” (Matthew 23:23-24). We worry about what people are doing in bed much more than making sure everybody has a bed to begin with. There certainly is a need for a life-giving sexual morality, but one could question whether Christian nations have found it yet.

Christianity will regain its moral authority when it starts emphasizing social sin in equal measure with individual (read “body-based”) sin and weaves them both into a seamless garment of love and truth.

I Needed This

So one of the side benefits of the 30-minute walk is 30 uninterrupted moments to listen to podcasts. I just added one to my usual complement of "This American Life" and "Planet Money" podcasts. This one is called "Stuff You Should Know." I'm a sucker for these kinds of things. Little 15-20 lessons--discussions between two knowledgeable guys (usually, because I encountered one with a gal and a guy) about all kinds of stuff that either you should know or that you're pretty curious about. So over the past couple of days I've listened to I've found out about:

• how altruism works--a philosophical question, really, about whether anybody can actually perform a totally unselfish act
• is there a worst way to die?--most would say immolation is worst, and drowning is up there, too. And did you know 25 percent of people say they are not afraid to die. But they concluded if you're in a plane going down from, say, 35,000 feet . . . well, the fear would doubtless be universal. Worst case for most people is dying alone.
• will we soon be extinct? Possibly. Just about everything that's ever been on the planet went extinct before us.
• how living off the grid works? Did you know some people have arranged to live so they don't ever pay utility bills?
• how habeas corpus works

I'm just getting into how corporate personhood works, and I have about 15 more episodes to listen to before I'm caught up. I really needed this extra thing to catch my interest. I'll get caught up on "Stuff You Should Know" and then I'll be behind on the other two. Not to mention NPR's Live Concerts and KEBX's Song of the day.

Here's the hook for the Stuff You Should Know podcast:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/podcasts/stuff-you-should-know.rss

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Better Than I

The writer of this piece, Robert C. Koehler, is a Chicago reporter long connected with the movement to wake people up to the madness that is our militarized country, the insanity that is our military budget in the face of so many crying human wants on this suffering globe. The White House, certainly as mad as the rest of the government, has recently come out with what it calls an "austerity budget." Koehler skewers this falsehood far more eloquently than I could .

First of all, the grotesque insult of "austerity" in the shadow of limitless military spending is destroying our national sanity. And the proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, mental health services, environmental cleanup, National Parks programs and even, yeah, Saturday mail delivery are miniscule compared to the unmet social needs we haven't yet begun to address in this country, in education, renewable energy and so much more. But we're spending with reckless abandon to arm ourselves and our allies and provoke our enemies, and sometimes arm them as well, creating the sort of world no one (almost no one) wants: a world of endless war.

The official 2012 Defense budget of $530 billion, and just a shade under that for 2013, leaves out an enormous amount of defense-related government spending. According to a recent piece in The Atlantic, when you add in, oh, the cost of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, our spending on nuclear weapons development (relegated to the Department of Energy budget), Homeland Security, veterans' medical care (inadequate as it is, but rising), military aid to allies ($3 billion to Israel, for instance), and interest on the military's portion of the debt (projected to be $63.7 billion in 2013), our defense spending almost doubles, to $986.1 billion in 2012 and $994.3 billion in 2013. 

These numbers are simply mind-boggling. What we're talking about here, brothers and sisters, are sums just shy of one trillion dollars for "defense." This is insanity. There is no possible threat to our peace and security as dangerous as this colossal annual drain on our country's lifeblood. Is it not obvious that we have collectively taken leave of our senses? War is publicly justified and celebrated every single day of our lives in this country. When's the last day you can remember where you didn't see, hear, or read about the grave threats to our peace and security--i.e., terrorists, drug smugglers, internal plots, Taliban, China's rising power--that supposedly justify this unconscionable expense?

Moloch, the Insatiable

I can't remember the last day this didn't happen. Can you? Rest assured we're not going to see an end to this madness. There's too much fear, too much money to be made, habits of mind too ingrained in our national psyche to alter. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that anything short of our own destruction will change in our state of permanent war. (I have to disagree with Mr. Koehler on this point. We are already in a state of perpetual war.) People in desperate  need, the countless, numberless will continue to be sacrificed into the flaming maw of Moloch. But he is an insatiable fiend. He won't be satisfied till he's devoured us all.    

Related articles

• The Scope of U.S. Defense Spending (antiwar.com)
• Decoding the Pentagon's Budget Numbers (counterpunch.org)
• The Real US Military Budget: $1 Trillion (antiwar.com)
• The Pentagon's amnesia-inducing propaganda (salon.com)

Whoops!

Well, it could have happened anywhere, I guess. But South Carolina seems like the appropriate place for an off-duty deputy conducting a concealed weapons class to accidentally shoot one of his students, a woman and the wife of another deputy, at that. The classes are being conducted because the sheriff has encouraged women to pack a gun after a recent rape. “Our form of justice is not making it,” he said at the time. “Carry a concealed weapon. That’ll fix it.”

It almost fixed this lady. Don't worry she's going to be okay, bullet went through her arm and into her side, but it's not fatal. She was having trouble with the grip on the weapon apparently and he, gallant that he is, went over to help. And uh oh!!! The damned thing went off. He hadn't thought to check to see if the gun was loaded.

His boss said "it was just a mistake." Ya think? (Source)

What Difference Will It Make?

Really. So what if the country installs Barack Obama back in the White House for another four years? How much different would a Republican president be than him? I would submit to you that despite the constant screeching and hollering the Republicans have done ever since Obama took office, that big business couldn't have a much bigger friend than that sham "progressive" who occupies the White House. What has happened on his watch that has not benefited our corporate overlords? Think about it. And now we read, that Obama is going to propose to Congress that the corporate income tax rate be dropped from its current 35 percent to 28. Here's the blurb:

The Obama administration will propose today reducing the U.S. corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent along with removing tax breaks for companies to help offset lost revenue, an administration official said.

The plan would eliminate dozens of tax breaks and reshape the current manufacturing deduction to reduce the tax rate on manufacturing to 25 percent, according to the official, who outlined the proposal on condition of anonymity because it hadn’t been released. The restructured tax code would still include incentives for research and development and renewable energy.

The second paragraph is the key . . .  do you seriously think this will happen? What victories over big business lobbies can the administration point to? . . . None that I can think of. So here's what I think will happen. The Republicans in Congress will refuse to pass anything the administration proposes along these lines--along any lines, really--because they refuse to give the president anything. Especially, especially in this an election year. I don't know how good the proposal is, but I do know this. I don't like the sound of lowering taxes on businesses with the promise of offsets that aren't just automatic, just on principle. Give the corporate interests half a chance and they will gut the hell out of anything worthwhile in this proposal.

Drums in the Distance

They are not as faint as they used to be. Those war drums just over the horizon. You can hear them more clearly. Those drumbeats for war with Iran. You don't have to go any further than CNN. That's CNN. I didn't say Fox--which, and this is a total aside, it totally confounds me every time I hear confirmed once again that this right-wing propaganda machine, this organ of Rupert Murdock, is the top news source in this country. What does that tell you about this country? Anyway, have a look at this jeremiad by what Matt Taibbi calls "CNN's resident blockhead." "You can just feel it." he writes, "many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms." (Source) This is very scary stuff, brothers and sisters. Does anybody recall that this is just the sort of media campaign that proceeded our catastrophic preemptive war against Iraq?



Danny Schecther at "The Smirking Chimp" delivers more really bad news: "Officials in key parts of the Obama administration are increasingly convinced that sanctions will not deter Tehran from pursuing its [alleged] nuclear program, and believe that the US will be left with no option but to launch an attack on Iran or watch Israel do so." (This article which mostly bemoans the state of the corporate state media is worth your time.)

So gird yourselves. We're on an increasingly gloomy downward slope. I, for one, don't think there is anything to arrest our slide.

Related articles

• In din over Iran, echoes of Iraq war (mercurynews.com)
• Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran -- Now (chris-floyd.com)
• In Din Over Iran, Rattling Sabers Echo - New York Times (nytimes.com)
• Hardhitting, Dissenting Journalism -- Without the Hardhitting, Dissenting Part (powerofnarrative.blogspot.com)

Indexing

I don't know what people who do this for a living get paid for doing, but whatever it is, it probably is not enough. I've encountered, as I'm sure you have too, book indexes that are simply worse than useless. (The only thing I can think of worse is a book that's not indexed at all.) There's nothing more frustrating to someone seeking information between two covers of a book who cannot do it because a good tool has not been provided to help him. That's what the index is. There's no sense in having one at all if it's crappy. The only kind acceptable is one that's complete and accurate. I've been working on building one now for several days. And I've got several days more to go.

Some observations. First, it is damned tedious and hard work doing this. You must comb every page of your galley proofs to find items that should appear in the index. You're constantly having to make decisions. Does this belong in the index? Does it have to be cross-referenced? Which category identifies it? Are there other words or phrases that should be indexed under this entry? And so on and on. Nobody gives much thought to the fact that somebody has to make these decisions, and the quality of the finished index is directly related to the quality of countless decisions like this. Second, electronic indexing until we have real AI is never going to be in the same league and good ole human brainpower. Finally, thankfully we have some electronic tools that ease the burden somewhat. The page proofs I'm working with are both hard copy and an electronic .pdf file. A free .pdf file reader called Foxit will search the entire manuscript for certain words or phrases and give you a list. So at least you don't have to work entirely with hard copy, like I had to do years ago with book on Stephens.

But this is a hell of a lot of work no matter how you do it.

Surely You Jest

Well, you betcha. I have to report that Infinite Jest, the magnum opus of the late lamented David Foster Wallace is simply terrific. I'm well into it now. Approaching page 200 (which still leaves a long, long way to go), but I have to tell you, I've laughed out loud several times. Several. A couple of times, I found it difficult to stifle the laughter. The Boston terrier, unused to such behavior from me, gets up in my face and licks. I guess she thinks something's the matter with me.

A quick check with my daughter, who's reading, and with a nephew cousin who has read the book, confirm that this is indeed a book that invokes belly laughter. It's apparent that the book is going to be a hell of a lot of fun. I've decided that it is going to remain ridiculous the rest of the way. Oh boy! And I'm in total awe of this guy's creativity and talent. Amazing.