on the use of the word "war"

I am getting tired of the use of the word "war" as it has been used by the current and previous Republican administrations. We have a "war on drugs" that has been used to hassle other countries and to curtail the freedoms of people who prefer to misuse something besides alcohol. We also have a "war on terror" which is no more a war than the war we didn't conduct against the Mafia and the Cosa Nostra. The "war on drugs" never was a war. It was an action against criminals and it has backfired on us in that we still seem to have as many drugs as ever (looking at the most recent busts) and those who deal in them make higher profits than the tobacco and alcohol industries (except when alcohol was prohibited).

And then we have the "war on terror." It, too, is not a war. We had a war in Afghanistan and may be having another since we didn't finish the job the first time and we had a war in Iraq that ended after our invasion squashed the army of Saddam and toppled his government. That was war. What we have now is the aftermath of our failure to perceive how we would be greeted by the Iraqis and the insurgency that would follow. What we now have is a training ground for terrorists and an effort to create a country as we would like it, including privatizing its oil so Exxon Mobile and its cohots will get 80% of the profits from Iraq's oil rather than the government and the people of Iraq. That's part of our "conditions" that the Iraqis haven't fallen for and most people in this country don't realize. Iraq had no ties to those who created 9-11 and no WMDs. It apparently had not violated the U.N. resolutions, either, although it hadn't admitted that. What I really can't understand is the mindset of those in the beltway who didn't know that there were no WMDs in Iraq in the first place. It was obvious from this distance. Anyway, the point is that the only thing that makes it a "war" in Iraq is that we are using soldiers instead of policemen to track down criminals.

on losing our freedoms

A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Seattle for a weekend and came to the conclusion that those who think that fear is not curtailing our freedoms are just plain out to lunch. At both ends, we had to take off our shoes and empty all our pockets. I had to take my night breathing machine out of my carry-one (I don't check it for the same reason I don't check my medications) so they could wand it, going over it with some device in such a way that it looked as if they were putting a magic spell on it. I had to empty my pockets, take my belt off and hold up my pants with one hand while taking my watch off, and walk across a dirty floor in my stocking feet. Maybe I left some athlete's foot fungus on the floor for the people following. It was much more complicated than the last time I flew. That is fear caused by the possibility that a terrorist will get on a plane and bring it down, killing me and all the others on board. Did it make me feel safer? No, it didn't. Airplanes crash and much more frequently than terrorism brings them down. I'm also used to the fear of being killed on the highway or by the food I eat. Being killed by food, on the highway or by a fault in an airplane or a pilot probably has lower odds than being killed by terrorist activity. I realize of course that it is always a massacre to the person who is killed, but what is this wiilling surrender of freedoms for a fear of something that has killed a very small number of American citizens. We've had more people killed by other means in a year than we had die on 9/11. Before you say I have no empathy, let me tell you I feel the terror that the people who died on that day and the pain of their survivors. I also remember Oklahoma City where about a tenth of the same number, many of them children, were killed by home grown terrorist. But it is not rational to let our leaders curtail our freedoms, that we have held dear for more than 200 years, because of our fears that we will die in something much rarer than the risk we take each day when someone runs a stopsign or a stoplight, or drinks and drives. We are not very good risk calculaters.

on the dumbing of Tom McGillvary

I just received the second mailing this go-round of Tom McGillvary, who claims to represent my district in the Montana Legislature. I say "claims" because I can't believe my neighbors are as far out to lunch as he is. In this latest mailing he says he doesn't believe humans are to blame for global warming, despite the vast number of scientists who say it is. He must be quoting Exxon Mobile, the biggest liars on this issue in the country. They are in bed tactically with the tobacco manurfacturers who lied to us for so long on the cancer issue. I wonder what his sources are? Then he puts in a survey that is full of loaded questions. Do you want more taxes? Do you want to pay 100% or more for clean energy? What a brain floating in a mass of jello.

Just a couple of other things: He said in his first mailing that he wanted to be a mover for good feelings and positive approaches to the legislative process, but in last sessions Special Session he voted against a compromise. Unfortunately, he doesn't read blogs which might really help him understand what is going on in the state. But then he doesn't really care. He's an ideologue. Hey, Tom, let's tax churches.

on stimulations

A few years ago we all received an advance payment on our income rebate that was intended to stimulate an economy during the first Baby Bush recession (funny how all his tax cuts and other "outstanding" economic moves have led to two recessions in eight years, although I would suggest that the "people's" economy, as I've heard it referred to has only had one for most of the past eight years. But we'll have another excuse to cut taxes for the well off and coupon clippers while giving the rest of us an illusion of having money that will create an upward bulge in the economy that will disappear as fast as the last one. And our dear Sen. Baucus, while having the guts to come up with a plan that will help those of us on Social Security with no other earnings and veterans, wants to lower the amount we get and let it go to people with much higher incomes than most of us.
The higher incomes will probably just bury the money in their IRAs and the economy will go flat again. If we need economic help, and we do, let's put a freeze on home foreclosures, bring the troops and our money home from the near east, and put that some money into bridges, sewers, highways, etc. I have supported Max since his first statewide race for the Senate, but I think he's off base and thinking election-year here rather than the country's economic needs.

on this changing world

As I start to cull out some of the older books in my north side library, I've been reading some of them that I bought for my wife years ago and never got time until now to do so. It is startling to think how many of those books are now outdated, not just because many of them deal with the now-defunct Cold War. Many of the lead characters and other good people in those novels smoke, chain-wise. There are no cell phones. Where today's heroes get calls all the time on cell phones and use computers without heistation, those of 15 to 20 years ago had to find pay phones on corners to answer their pagers and were computer confused in some cases. The web wasn't around. We were still talking about single data bases, if that, and there had been no thought of terrorists in most cases. It really was a different world, even then, although not as different as the world I was born into back in the 14th (it seems) Century. What kind of values must we develop in this new world that calls for a re-evaluation of many of the things that an agricultural and then an industrial world had to believe in?

on the Turkish involvement

Back in 1991 a number of us believed that if the U.S. invaded Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein we would destablize the whole Middle East, including bringing on a war involving the Kurds and the Turks. Some of us also made the same predictions when the U.S. planned to invade Iraq in 2003 when it was obvious there were no WMDs and no threat to us from that place. So we been involving the Saudis, the Sryians, the Iranians, the Lebanese and the Isrealis in a general hot porridge in that area now (admittedly, the Isrealis and their neighbors were involved before the invasion) involving the Saudis (to some extent), the Iranians (to a larger extent), the Pakistanis (to a much larger extent) and the Afghans. We took on the defense of our country by attacking Afghanistan. Then we withdrew most of our troops from the punishment detail (that should have been only a quick strike taking out the Al Quaida camps and maintaining a continuing pressure on the group) to put them iinto an Iraq which has led to more and more destablisation in the entire area. And now, with the Turks crossing Iraq's northern border to take on the Kurds, the final domino may be falling. How soon will the Kurds in the former SSR and in the north western Iran begin to get involved in this new aspect to war? What bothers me the most is that no one seems to take in the context that we are involved in a war that started in August 1914 and has remodeled the entire world we live in. How soon will we begin to realize that the world of 1913 is not one we can find a home in anymore? That world is as gone as the medieval times. When will we ever learn?

on "justice thomas"

Here it is October and I haven't posted anything since August and now I have two thoughts brimming over. One I've just posted. The other has to do with the great justice thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. I lower case his name because that's the respect I think he deserves. From the reviews I've seen that the few comments of his interview on 60 minutes that i saw last night, I think it has to be the most self-serving piece of cow manure to come out of Washington lately, and there have been large numbers of cow pies around that city in recent. From his decisions, whether they are in the majority, or most likely in the minority, thomas is so strict a constructionist that he apparently does not believe that the Constitution should ever have been amended, although he might give a passing approval to certain of the Bill of Rights. But he obviously opposes those changes that outlawed slavery and that made the Bill of Rights pertain to the actions of states as well as those of the federal government. He seems to think that state governments should still be allowed to have a state religion even though the Constitution denies it to any government. And his statement that he made his own way is as much crap when he says it as when anyone says it. Any person who makes it in this society does so because the society makes it possible for him or her to do so. Most people who deny the role that society plays in creating the adult them are whistling in the wind. Until professional sports got to be so pupular that they enabled the payment of huge salaries, the type of people who gain the most from them last played a major role in society during the days of yore when knights were bold. And it wasn't clarence thomas who got trashed in those confirmation hearings; it was Anita Hill.

on Tarzan and Jane

Ed Kemmick, of the Billings Gazette, wrote a delightful column about the efforts in Austria to get a chimpanzee considered as a human. But it also contained one of the great canards of modern "literature." He said that Tarzan and wife Jane had a common law relationship. Heaven forbit that her father, a Methodist minister, would have allowed that. Unfortunately, what most people who think about Tarzan today may know is what was in the series of rather bad, Z movies made in the thirties and forties, that never showed the origin of Tarzan. As someone who read the books something a gazillion years ago before I had quite reached puberty, it is my proud awareness that Jane's father married them on the station platform as a small town in Wisconsin just before they boarded the train to begin the return to Africa. It is the final scene in the book, "The Return of Tarzan," the sequel to "Tarzan of the Apes." Their son, Jack, then was the star of the third book, "Son of Tarzan." And you thought the constant sequels of today were something new. Then Burroughs turned to the stock effect of turning out pot-boiler adventures for his ape man and that was a different sort of thing. Incidentally, he also had a series that started with John Carter of Mars and went on for a number of books that were much more in the way of a continuing series than the Tarzan books. He also did a series based on Venus that were never quite as popular and don't seem to be on the horizon of most science fiction fans of today, although you may be able to find them in book stores in paperback. Sorry, Ed, but it was a good, entertaining column, even if you misspelled Cheetah.

on scary God's Warriors

CNN aired a three-part series last week by Christiane Amanpour called "God's Warriors." It dealt with the religious fanataics of the three major western religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It was downright scary. Believe it, there are people in this world who believe that every one must accept their approach to life without exception and they will kill to achieve that goal. The first segment, two of the six hours, dealt with God" Jewish Warriors. Amanpour talked and researched citizens of Isreal who claim that the West Bank, one of the territories disputed by the Israelis and Palestinians, was promised by God to the Jews and they are right to claim it. They are hard-liners and their desires will keep the sores open in that nation. It has led, she said, to the death of at least one Israeli prime minister at the hands of one of the warriors.

The second two-hour segment covered the God's Muslim Warriors. It was much scarier than the first segment, because it made it plain that the Muslims will be content only when the entire world is wrapped in Muslim extremism. But it did give some of the history behind the Shiite-Sunni differences, although both of them have warriors based on their faith (Al Queda is an extreme view of the Sunni side). The Shia want the rule of Sharia, the very strict religious rule of the Koran that includes stoning of women involved in adultery or pre-marital sex. And even one of the prominent women of Iran seems to believe that stone of young women is fine if it is called for in the Koran. More importantly for us in the west, the people she interviewed who were hard-line religious fanatics of both groups attacked the culture of the west and called for the much more stringent code of the Muslims, which is something similar to the 19th Century western code (which didn't have stoning, but did have ostracism of women who transgressed). What the segment made plain, was the for many of the common Muslims, it is western values that they resent. However, I would suggest that if we weren't over in the Middle East our values would not be causing so much dissent.

The final segment was on the Christian right in this country: God's Christian Warriors. They weren't the same in that they don't go out and, except in small ways such as attacks on abortion clinics, bomb and kill people. But in that way, they are even scarier. They are trying to use our own civilized methods to bring us down and create a state of fanatics. What I don't understand about them is that they seem impervious to facts and to reason. They cannot see that the book they get their faith from has to be interpreted in the context of its times and that it is, perhaps, a spiritual history and folklore of a people, but it is not a factual history. They claim that any deviation from belief in the Bible negates their concept of God, which cannot be allowed. They don't realize that a fundamental belief in the Bible as fact is but a fragile support for their beliefs. But they are trying to make the rest of us accept and adhere to their systems and their ways of the world, which are rather realistic. One of the persons Christiane interviewed extensively was Jerry Falwell before he died. He was frightening. And the only good thing about him was that, at least in one poll I saw, more people thought he had a bad influence on this country than those who praised him. Robert Heinlein in one of his earlier books, wrote about a religious dictatorship set in about the year 2000, about the spying that went on between neighbors and the repressive rule. It didn't work among us because we are two set in our freedom loving ways and the dictatorship was overthrown. Heinlein set the story at the time of the revolution because he said that writing the first part of the history was too depressing.

I come down to one final thought: What kind of thinking makes other people think that they have the right to make us follow their beliefs, which we don't share? Why do they feel that they must force the rest of us to believe the way they do? If their car is going to be empty (bumper sticker I saw) when the Rapture comes, what difference does it make to them that ours will not?

on some people's education

I've been spending a lot of time lately on other websites, most notably those of the Billings Gazette. Some thinking is really starting to get me down. I wonder where some people picked up what little science they know and why they believe what they do about a category of knowledge that has led to the world which we know: computers, smart phones, electronic date books, digital television, and a host of other things. With the reactions to such thing as global warming, they seem to indicate just how ignorant they are about the processes of science. Let's take evolution for instance. Science calls it a theory. So people say, with a shrug: "it's just a theory." And that's correct. But they don't understand that a theory in science is something with a heavy weight of discovery and thinking behind it. A theory is one step from being a law, but science now recognizes that there are so few conditions in the universe without some exceptions that they don't offer many laws. Even the so-called Law of Gravity only is a law in very limited circumstances. Outside of something as limited as the solar system, gravity seems to take on all kinds of not well understood aspects.

Then, let's look at global warming. Yes, there are some heretics out there who seem to think that humans flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses don't play a significant role in global warming. One cited by Discover Magazine a few months ago blames changes in the sun. Yet, the vast majority of scientists have come to a conclusion that we are facing extensive changes in our world with the warming trend, no matter what's causing it. And if greenhouse gasses are playing a role, even a minor one, we need to do what we can to curtail their production and exhaustion into the atmosphere. How are you and I going to react when the people of countries like Bangladesh and China and India and Florida and California begin to move away by the millions from their flooding homelands? Do you want to own beach front property in southern Montana?

Creationists and IDers particularly say about evolution teaching in schools: Let's teach the argument! That's echoed to some extent in slightly different terms not having to do with the schools by Exxon and other global warming antis. What they don't seem to recognize is that there is no SCIENTIFIC argument in either case, particularly evolution. The evolution argument is about the political aspects, not the scientific ones. Without an understanding of evolution, all science collapses. The arguments about global warming also seem to be mostly political, although people always want to toss in the economic aspects and talk about a balance between saving the earth and saving jobs. And that particular argument is discussion apples and oranges. If there is not earth, there are no jobs! Money does not count in the global warming situation. And so-called free markets or free enterprise answers won't work either.

on compensating ranchers

I was looking at the poll numbers on the Gazette web-site and became amazed at the number of people who don't believe ranchers whose herds are "depopulated" because of brucellosis should be compensated. They obviously don't understand the cause of the depopulation in the first place. This was not a rancher-friendly activity. Back in the days when it started, ranchers were not happy with it. They could take the loss of a heifer's first calf better than eliminating an entire herd. That's probably true today. The whole battle over brucellosis began as a public health measure, not a cattle health measure. The disease in cattle is that same as undulant fever in humans which is one of the milk fevers that used to prevent so many infants from making it to their first birthday. It also carried off a few of us older folks. And it cost the meatpackers a bundle so that those workers on the killing floor of the packing plants were compensated against their chances of getting the disease. It is an intra-cellular disease, as I understand it, that acts somewhat like malaria in that it hides for quite a while and periodically recurs. Modern medicines can treat the outbreaks to some extent, but they can't prevent the recurrences. It seems to me that we pay for modern public health services, such as the outbreaks of tb that occur, but don't give a thought to diseases that are "old" fashioned because we have dealt with them to some extent (pasteurization of milk prevents limits most of the occurrences of the disease to vets and others who deal with the reproductive systems of cattle.) It's as if there was still some wild smallpox out there, but it was so limited that we didn't get vaccinated until an outbreak had already killed a number of people. Brucellosis (undulant fever) is still out there; it still has the possibility of killing babies who come in contact with brucella bacteria; it is still a public health menace, although not as great as it once was. The effort to eliminate it is a public health effort, so cattlemen should be compensated for losing their herds. And the Park Service should make an effort to control it in bison and the forest service should make the effort to get a handle on it in elk.

on the "war on terror"

Scary news on television tonight. The intelligence community (one of the spokesman shown on the screen was from the CIA) issued a report saying that Al Qu'aida (that's how they spelled it) is stronger now than it has been since 9/11 and that it really wishes to pull off a major attack on us. I thought the idea of the Afghanistan invasion was to go after the Al Qu'aida bunch and destroy them. Wasn't what our baby president told us? So what has happened? Oh, yeah, efforts to destroy the terrorists got side tracked into Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11.

on global warming arguments

I've been looking at the comments on the Gazette website following the Bill Ballard anti-global warming guest editorial the other day. It seems to me that the arguments over there are mostly the same old conspiracy and paranoid theories. The Gazette has a rating system in and some of the most reasoned and calm comments get the worst ratings.

I have a lot of objections to the Gazette comments. The biggest one is that they let people attack other people rather than talk about the issues. The regulars get on and bloviate on their particular political pet horse and when someone posts something rational, they do their best to attack the person, not the issue. On global warming, it is pretty obvious that those who have read the least on it have the strongest opinions for some conspiracy bringing it on. They cite "a lot of scientists" without giving who they are, their qualifications or saying where they've published.

They attack the number of years of knowledge we have on climate without realizing that the ice core samples from Greenland, Antarctica and Siberia all seem to agree that this is the worst warming problem in thousands of years. Some posters there even state that it's a big government conspiracy without realizing that the biggest government we've ever had, this administration, has fought curtailing greenhouse gases from day 1. They also argue about the big gun right now on global warming, Al Gore, and claim he's making tons of money and advantage out of it. If Al Gore is a hypocrite, and I don't believe for one minute that he is, that has nothing to say about about whether his facts are straight on warming.

I also think that people need to follow the money. Who benefits if we refuse to take any efforts and let the warming get away from us? First, if no one acts to stop the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, then the big oil companies, auto companies, and their ilk benefit and continue to rack up super profits. If the effects of global warming occur as scientists think they will, but we don't take any steps to prepare for it and limit it, then the big corporations will also benefit because they will be the ones who will be receiving aid from governments to help people who have to move away from rising seas, like the natives in Alaska. We know how our money is being spent in Iraq and in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I urge people, if they have doubts about who's doing things on global warming out of altruism or out of greed, follow the money.

on species

I've been wondering as I look at the world if species, like individuals, go through the stages of growth sort of like the seven roles of man that Shakespeare listed? We know, for instance, that although the dinosaurs lasted for millions of years as a group, the individual species changed and developed and died out. Are the present species of this earth of ours doing the same thing? We've seen species that have died out for one reason or another: climate changes, they begin to decline and humans killed them off (mammoths and giant sloths), they were superseded by environmental conditions such as the increase in forests in Ireland that destroyed the huge antlered red deer of that island. I wonder, however, if species don't start out young and lively, become more sedate in a kind of middle age and then slowly fade out into the sunset like the sabre toothed tiger and the dire wolf. If that does happen, what does it mean for us? I sometimes think that we humans as a species are in either late childhood or early adolescence with not fully developed inhibiting centers in our brains. It would explain our need for gods (parents) and our inability to get along on the playground.

on the 7 wonders of the world

In case you missed it, the new list of seven architectural wonders of the world was announced in Sunday's Gazette and, I imagine, in other news sources that I missed. They included Rome's Colosseum; the Great Wall of China; India's Taj Majal: Peru's Machu Picchu, the long hidden last city of the Incas; Brazil's Statue of Christ the Redeemer that reigns above Rio; Jordan's ancient stone city of Petra; and Mexico's Chitchen Itza pyramid. It seems to me that most of this list is invalid. Although it was voted on by over 100,000 people there seems to have been little concern for how the items are now used and how old they are. The only ones on the list that have anything but tourist use today are the Rio statue. When the Egyptian pyramids, Babylon's Hanging Gardens, the Colossus of Rhodes, Alexandria's lighthouse, the great Mausoleum, and the others (two of which I can't remember off hand) were listed as ancient wonders, they were still in business. The ones reported yesterday are mostly non-functional. So I suggest a really modern list, leaving in the Rio statue, but including the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney, Australia, opera house, perhaps the J Paul Getty Museum, the magnificent tower that's currently the world's tallest in Bangkok(?), maybe the Sears tower in Chicago, perhaps the Space Needle in Seattle, Westminster Cathedral, New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine or St. Patricks, or Notre Dame. In other words, make a list of the seven great architectural wonders still in active use and relatively new today, not something that was built 1,000+ years ago and is now a ruin. (And then this evening I stumbled on the full list of the original seven and the two I had forgotten where the temple of Diana at Ephesus and the great statute of Zeus which was recently in the science news with an article on the temple itself and where he sat.)

on Iraq...again

I think I keep repeating myself on this subject time and again, but here I go still again. We are not fighting a "war" in Iraq. A war is between two uniformed armies facing each other on a battlefield or in the air. We had that kind of war when we invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein and closed out his army. Since then it has been an insurgency that has turned into a civil war fought by terrorists. However, the definition of terrorists does not seem to fit some of the people we see on television who do wear a form of uniform and thus are soldiers by definition. But they do not seem to be fighting us as much as they are fighting each other. I think our involvement in a war is over. We are basically trying to keep peace between warring factions, some of whom we basically seem to support (with exceptions) and some we don't. Thus Al Sadr keeps his army except when it sticks its head out a little too far in our direction and so do some of the Shias in the government and some of the Sunni sheiks who are on our side. In Vietnam we kept dealing with people who knew that the U.S. and ROK troops owned the day and the VC and the North owned the night. So there was a real day and night difference. In Iraq it seems to be that we own the time we spend in the various neighborhoods when we're there and the other side owns them after we're gone. So I don't think this is a war on our part, although it seems to be a mixture of covert civil war and terrorist activities (defined as actions done by those who are not part of a uniformed army).

The other thing I don't think that we realize is a nation is that we are essentially dealing with the 93rd year of a 100 Years War. We admit that we have few people in the military in Iraq who know the history of the country and, more importantly, speak the language. We here at home are even more ignorant. A year or so ago, I read for the first time (somehow I missed it when it came out), Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, a history of August, 1914, the first month of WWI. In hindsight, it is possible to read into what she relates the international history of the world for the remainder of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. In that month of August 1914, the Russians broke up the Balkan empire of Austria-Hungary; the Germans defeated and stymied the Russian advances leading to a stagnation that brought down the Tsar and led to the rise of Soviet Union and the Cold War; the French and English stopped the German drive to capture France and thus led to the treaty of Versailles and resultant depression in Germany that led to the rise of Hitler; and brought the Ottoman Turks into the war on Germany's side and led to the rigid control that empire exerted on the Middle East and led to today's mishmash of tribal and religious unhappiness.

What does that bode for the future? In her other most famous book, A Distant Mirror, Tuchman actually wrote a history of the 100 years war and she pointed out that it led to the breakdown of the feudal system and the beginnings of mercantilism, the rise of the middle class and the beginning of capitalism as well as the Enlightenment that brought new demands for the rights of individuals in a society in which rigid castes evolved and most people lived in slavery or near slavery. I would suggest at this point that the current many-years war has brought us to another transition point in the history of the world. Even in the less than a century that I have been alive, the world has gone from simple radio and no computers or television to a place where a popular writer claims the world is flat and to where I carry more computing power in my pocket daily than existed in the entire world the day I was born. My father in law was born in 1900. The year he was four, bank robbers fleeing his home town put a bullet through the door of his family home as they went out of town on their buckboard. If we go back farther in time, it was only about 200 years ago that manufacturing began and the nuclear family became the cornerstone of society. Today we are facing a variety of computer driven choices. I carried my first computer of 24 years ago out of the basement the other day. It was so heavy I damn near dropped it. I'm typing this on a computer that I can carry under my arm. We have seen a tremendous number of changes. A few years ago the cell phone came on line so we could talk to each other without having a solid, cable connection. Now we have the Iphone that seems to be combining photography, calculating, teletype, voice and I don't know what else. What's next. The point of this whole paragraph is that the last 100 years have changed earth and its societies so the our founding fathers would not recognize the United States that they put together. Nor would our great-great grandfathers recognize our homes as the same types of shelter as theirs. Our lives have gone topsy turvy in the last century particularly. Taking them back will, I suspect, require new arrangments of society, new forms of thought and new aspects of living (even the prospect of extending an individual's life span). We must talk about the future, not the past and come to a new agreement so that we may continue to meet the changes that we have lived through and that we will see ahead.

on anger in the country

As I read the comments on the Gazette stories and on other web sites, I am struck by the anger shown in this country toward those of opposite points of view, most strikingly by those on the right, but also, though less so, by those on the issues on the right. It seems to me dangerous. It isn't the firm positions, but rather the way in which people attack others and hurl names and other perjoratives at those who disagree with them. It isn't over issues as much as it is distrust. And I wonder what the situation is that creates such anger; surely those who call others names must realize that they have indicated they have lost the argument so they resort to personal attacks.

More importantly, where does all the anger come from? People seem to hate many things: social changes, people different than they are, caring about the welfare of the society in which they live, paying for the society in which they live, believing in the things this nation was built upon and numerous other things. It mystifies me, yet I can see the source of some of it, I think. One thing strikes me first: a lot of the anger is a politicians and is based, I think, on the idea that you vote for the person not the party. What people don't seem to realize is that there is strength in community, weakness in going solo. This lack of understanding on the part of people in the strength of community efforts is what has led directly to the passage of good jobs out of this country to minimum wage workers in other parts of the world. The unions may have overreached themselves, but they also got this country the highest wages in the world.

In the current political arena, there are constant calls for a new party because the two parties we now have are so closely related. This, I think, is a false conclusion. Yes, they have similar goals in certain areas such as free trade and borders open to goods from other countries. But on the issue of human rights and humanity, they are far apart. I think most people see the ties to the corporations that both parties have and look at that rather than the human issues. When people vote the party, they mostly vote for their own pocketbook and their own survival. When they vote the nominee, they don't know what they are getting. In this world of political double speak, I may use the same words on education, or war in Iraq, or economic health as the politician coming to my front door. But because we use the same words does not mean we are saying the same thing. How do we plan to reach those goals? I told Roy Brown a few elections ago that I wanted education fully funded. As an incumbent he said they had done so. I knew better. The kindest thing I can think of is that we were saying the same thing but meaning something entirely different.

A new party won't change anything. In Great Britain, at one time in the 20th Century, they had three parties: Tory (Conservative), Liberal, and a very weak Labour party. The Liberals had some of the early prime ministers of the century. But it began to fade and the Labour party to grow, particularly after WWII and the Liberal party has virtually disappeared in the interplay of that nation's politics. No matter how often people claim there are many choices we can make, most of us come in a bi-lateral form and that carries over to our choices. We don't see the third choice as viable. More than two parties may be good in a parliamentary system, although Great Britain's example may negate that. But in this country, we have almost always (except at the beginning) had two strong parties. In some cases, the Independent, the Free Silver, the Know Nothings, the Anti-Masons, the Progressives may have had an effect on elections, but they haven't lasted beyond one or two votes.

Is there an answer to what we feel about our political system? I think so. It is to get involved. If we are to make changes in the political parties each of us must get involved in making changes within them. Right now we have conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Maybe the liberals should be in one party and the Conservatives in the other. And the religious wrong shouldn't be in any of them.

on Montana Law Review

I just came across an on-line copy of the Montana Law Review published by the Montana School of Journalism (winter 2007) edition and I'm steaming. The lead articles proclaimed "Intelligent Design Will Survive" by three members of the Creationist-founded Discovery Institute and it attacked the just in the Dover, Pennsylvania, court case in which the judge threw out ID as a viable scientific endeavor. The three centered their attack on things they claim the judge omitted but should have been left in. One of their major arguments was that the judge should have not ignored the scientific "peer reviewed" papers of Discovery institute "scientists" most of which were reviewed by and published in the Institute's own publications. Not what I would call a proper peer review at all. They also proclaimed that the judge didn't need to rule on whether ID was science; all he had to do was to find that the attempt to teach it in the Dover schools was not constitutional. But as Peter Irons said in his rebuttal, he had to find ID not scientific but religious in order to make it illegal to teach it in science classes. Let's face it, the ID advocates have never been able to put forth any creditable evidence that they are scientific. The vast majority of the scientific community has rejected it. ID proponents suggest that there has to have been a designer in creating the universe and humans because there is too much that looks like design and something that's designed always has to have a designer. They point to the idea of a Boeing 737 arising out of a junkyard struck by a windstorm. But they forget to mention that a Boeing 737 is not capable of reproducing others like it which living creatures can do.

But to get back to my gripe: Why does the Montana Law Review accept for publication articles like these? To compound it, the edition also includes an article by the lawyer who once ran for governor in Montana, Rob Natelson. Since he's an instructor for these students, I'll bet his article is not selected on its merits.