I havent seen this noted but i think the reason for the commutation is that a pardon would mean that Libby was no longer exposed to criminal sanctions and thus had no Fifth Amendment privilege. As it stands he has a fine and probation at stake during the pendency of the appeal which inulates him ( and Bush and Cheney) from havaing to answer questions before Congress.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Pardon Me?
From Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshal
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Like a Snake Eating its Tail
OK . This is really interesting:
Are the really bad guys in Iraq going to fight the merely bad guys in Iran? Is the US attempt to forge alliances with the local Iraqi sheiks and tribes by focusing on local interests starting to put the squeeze on the Al Qaeda types. Was Tip O'Neill right, that all politics, even in Iraq, is local? And will local politics and interests trump the call for Al Qaeda-led jihad? Are we seeing the faintest glimmer of success in Iraq?
Al-Qaida leader in Iraq threatens Iran
Group will wage war unless Iran stops supporting Shiites
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:36 p.m. ET July 8, 2007
CAIRO, Egypt - The leader of an al-Qaida umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shiites in Iraq within two months, according to an audiotape released Sunday.
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads the group Islamic State in Iraq, said his Sunni fighters have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Shiite-dominated Iran.
“We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention ... otherwise a severe war is waiting for you,” he said in the 50-minute audiotape. The tape, which could not be independently verified, was posted on a Web site commonly used by insurgent groups.
Iraq’s Shiite-led government is backed by the U.S. but closely allied to Iran. The United States accuses Iran of arming and financing Shiite militias in Iraq — charges Tehran denies.
In the recording, al-Baghdadi also gave Sunnis and Arab countries doing business in Iran or with Iranians a two-month deadline to cease their ties.
“We advise and warn every Sunni businessman inside Iran or in Arab countries especially in the Gulf not to take partnership with any Shiite Iranian businessman — this is part of the two-month period,” he said.
Al-Baghdadi said his group was responsible for two suicide truck bomb attacks in May in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. He said the attacks in Irbil and Makhmur showed the “Islamic jihad,” or holy war, was progressing in the Kurdish areas.
At least 14 people were killed when a suicide truck bomb struck a government building in Irbil, Kurdistan’s capital, on May 9. Four days later in Makhmur, another suicide truck bomb tore through the offices of a Kurdish political party, killing 50 people.
In the recording, the Islamic State of Iraq leader did not mention Saturday’s deadly truck bomb in Armili, a Shiite town north of Baghdad, which killed more than 100 people. The attack was among the deadliest this year in Iraq and reinforced suspicions that al-Qaida extremists were moving north to less protected regions beyond the U.S. security crackdown in Baghdad.
Al-Baghdadi criticized Kurdish leaders for their alliance with Shiites in Iraq’s government and accused them encouraging unsavory morals.
“The leaders of apostasy ... have impeded the march of Islam in Muslim Kurdistan and helped communism and secularism to spread. ... They insulted the religious scholars ... encouraged vices and women without veils,” he said.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19667464/from/RS.1/
Are the really bad guys in Iraq going to fight the merely bad guys in Iran? Is the US attempt to forge alliances with the local Iraqi sheiks and tribes by focusing on local interests starting to put the squeeze on the Al Qaeda types. Was Tip O'Neill right, that all politics, even in Iraq, is local? And will local politics and interests trump the call for Al Qaeda-led jihad? Are we seeing the faintest glimmer of success in Iraq?
On Iraq, the NY Times, Fantasy, and Reality
The New York Times editorial of Sunday July 8 calls for setting a near-term date for leaving Iraq. This editorial is a mish-mosh of wishful thinking and naivete.
Without doubt, Iraq is a bloody mess, caused by the Bush administration's unnecessary war, fought incompetently. But picking up our marbles and going home is not the route to any type of sane conclusion to this mess. The Times itself states:
Let's look around the region. The BBC reports
At the same time, Iraq's Anbar province may have turned a corner, with Sunni sheiks deciding that Al Qaeda is more of a threat to their safety than the United States.See this report in the Sunday Times's Week in Review.
Finally, Sadr City , the Shiite slum, seems to be calm after the initial American push into that area:
The entity we know as Iraq resulted from some lines drawn on a map by Winston Churchill after World War 1 when the former Ottoman Empire land was given to England to administer as a mandate. Churchill's map making did not take into account the various tribal conflicts that existed in the area, even as Lloyd George congratulated Churchill for having turned "a mere collection of tribes into a nation" in Iraq.( Take a look at this interesting sidebar I found at winstonchurchill.org. ) In fact, "Iraq" has existed as a nation only as a result of power residing in a strongman, such as Saddam Hussein, who could keep all of the various factions from breaking apart.
The Iraqis have been fighting their religious and tribal wars for 1200 years. It could only be a drug induced fantasy to try to impose on the Iraqis our American ideal-myth of both a unified democratic country and ethnic melting pot.
Therefore, the time may be ripe for American policy-makers to heed the words of Andrew Jackson to "elevate them guns a little lower" and allow Iraq to break up into its natural component states, specifically, separate Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite republics, each with their own separate and distinct populations and territories. Some might perceive horror in the voluntary relocation of families from the mixed ethnic areas where they currently live; however, such relocation has already taken place, with millions of Iraqis fleeing the country, or fleeing into Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish areas to be with their co-religionists.
An example of such a relocation took place after Indian independence when that country's Muslims and Hindus found that they could not live in peace with each other. As a result, two independent Muslim states, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively) were split off from India.
The three separate former Iraqi regions may decide initially to form a loose confederation to efficiently exploit oil and other natural resources. If confidence building experiences develop between those regions, those micro states might evolve into a geographically larger and politically more unified federal form of government. Such evolution in government is not unusual. After all, the United States began as a loose confederation (remember our "Articles of Confederation" from high school?) before the nation's fathers found that to be unworkable and they enacted our current constitution and our federal government.
Years ago, Colin Powell warned Bush of what he called the "Pottery Barn" theory of Iraq, "If we break it, we own it." We broke it. U.S forces will be needed for years to make sense of the pieces of the shattered Iraq and to stabilize this region.
Without doubt, Iraq is a bloody mess, caused by the Bush administration's unnecessary war, fought incompetently. But picking up our marbles and going home is not the route to any type of sane conclusion to this mess. The Times itself states:
Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide
Let's look around the region. The BBC reports
Compared with most other parts of Iraq, the Kurds in the north of the country are doing very well for themselves, enjoying greater security and relative prosperity than most other places.
At the same time, Iraq's Anbar province may have turned a corner, with Sunni sheiks deciding that Al Qaeda is more of a threat to their safety than the United States.See this report in the Sunday Times's Week in Review.
SUNNI merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence.
“America good! Al Qaeda bad!” he said in halting English, flashing a thumb’s-up in the direction of America’s second-ranking commander in Iraq.
Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq’s most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.
Finally, Sadr City , the Shiite slum, seems to be calm after the initial American push into that area:
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi troops conducted door-to-door searches in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City on Sunday, marking a critical step in the new Baghdad security plan.
More than 600 U.S. troops and 550 Iraqi soldiers cleared out safe houses and searched for militants and weapons, according to a U.S. military statement. They met no major resistance.
The troops seek to establish a permanent security outpost in Sadr City, home to the powerful Mahdi Army militia. The operation marks a major shift in strategy by Iraq's Shiite-led government, which blocked several attempts last year by U.S. troops to enter the area.
"Many people felt we would never go into Sadr City because that was the prime minister's power base," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "It's just another example of the political will that the prime minister and council of representatives are exerting to make this work."
The entity we know as Iraq resulted from some lines drawn on a map by Winston Churchill after World War 1 when the former Ottoman Empire land was given to England to administer as a mandate. Churchill's map making did not take into account the various tribal conflicts that existed in the area, even as Lloyd George congratulated Churchill for having turned "a mere collection of tribes into a nation" in Iraq.( Take a look at this interesting sidebar I found at winstonchurchill.org. ) In fact, "Iraq" has existed as a nation only as a result of power residing in a strongman, such as Saddam Hussein, who could keep all of the various factions from breaking apart.
The Iraqis have been fighting their religious and tribal wars for 1200 years. It could only be a drug induced fantasy to try to impose on the Iraqis our American ideal-myth of both a unified democratic country and ethnic melting pot.
Therefore, the time may be ripe for American policy-makers to heed the words of Andrew Jackson to "elevate them guns a little lower" and allow Iraq to break up into its natural component states, specifically, separate Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite republics, each with their own separate and distinct populations and territories. Some might perceive horror in the voluntary relocation of families from the mixed ethnic areas where they currently live; however, such relocation has already taken place, with millions of Iraqis fleeing the country, or fleeing into Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish areas to be with their co-religionists.
An example of such a relocation took place after Indian independence when that country's Muslims and Hindus found that they could not live in peace with each other. As a result, two independent Muslim states, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively) were split off from India.
The three separate former Iraqi regions may decide initially to form a loose confederation to efficiently exploit oil and other natural resources. If confidence building experiences develop between those regions, those micro states might evolve into a geographically larger and politically more unified federal form of government. Such evolution in government is not unusual. After all, the United States began as a loose confederation (remember our "Articles of Confederation" from high school?) before the nation's fathers found that to be unworkable and they enacted our current constitution and our federal government.
Years ago, Colin Powell warned Bush of what he called the "Pottery Barn" theory of Iraq, "If we break it, we own it." We broke it. U.S forces will be needed for years to make sense of the pieces of the shattered Iraq and to stabilize this region.
Scooter Skates
Here is this from Newsweek on line.
Those of you who had trouble with the Libby commutation might like to focus on these two sentences:
Remember when Bush stated that he would take appropriate action if anyone in his administration was found guilty of criminal activity in this case? Is this what he meant?
A pardon is a done deal, gang. Bet the house on it.
Those of you who had trouble with the Libby commutation might like to focus on these two sentences:
Bush's choice of words rankled Libby's supporters, since it seemed to make it harder for Bush to grant a full pardon. (The next day, Bush said he wouldn't "rule out" a pardon.)
Remember when Bush stated that he would take appropriate action if anyone in his administration was found guilty of criminal activity in this case? Is this what he meant?
A pardon is a done deal, gang. Bet the house on it.
Constitutional Crisis? What Constitution???
Then there is this little item that keeps raising its ugly head:
And you thought the issue of the US attorney firings was going to disappear? Nope.
Once again the White House hides behind "executive privilege". Don't get me wrong, "executive privilege" might very well be a necessary and tenable position. However, the situation changes when "executive privilege" is always used as a cover-up for executive malfeasance. This administration has absolutely no credibility to assert any privilege, real or imagined, which prevents the thorough examination of its actions.
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is urging a former White House political director to ignore a subpoena and not testify before Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors, her lawyer says.
The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to hear from Sara Taylor at its hearing Wednesday and she is willing to talk. Testifying, however, would defy the wishes of the president, “a person whom she admires and for whom she has worked tirelessly for years,” lawyer W. Neil Eggleston said.
Eggleston stated, in a letter this weekend to committee leaders and White House counsel Fred Fielding, that Taylor expects a letter from Fielding asking her not to comply with the subpoena.
And you thought the issue of the US attorney firings was going to disappear? Nope.
Once again the White House hides behind "executive privilege". Don't get me wrong, "executive privilege" might very well be a necessary and tenable position. However, the situation changes when "executive privilege" is always used as a cover-up for executive malfeasance. This administration has absolutely no credibility to assert any privilege, real or imagined, which prevents the thorough examination of its actions.
Impeachment Follies
A friend recently sent me this little left wing screed:
I think this administration may, in fact, be guilty of actionable offenses; however a razor thin Democratic majority will never convict. We do not need to embroil the country in impeachment follies through the end of the Bush term. Further, any move to impeach will just convince some fence-sitters that the Democrats are controlled by the whacky left, are untrustworthy with the controls of government, and probably again vote for a Republican in the next elections.
But I wonder if charges can be brought after these guys leave office?
Subject: Last Chance for IMPEACH Cheney Caps, Greenwald Video and More
Dear Impeachment Movement Heros,
We are participating in a national coordinated emailing to promote the new Robert Greenwald Impeach Cheney video, and we reproduce the text of that alert in the next section just below. So for those of you who are looking for yet more things to do, this is another.
But first we want you to know that to meet YOUR demand we have already bumped the first run of "IMPEACH CHENEY?" caps from 2,500 to 3,500, and this coming Tuesday (when we start taking delivery) we will tell the manufacturer how many MORE we need to make sure that every one of you who wants one gets one So if you have not yet requested your very own custom embroidered cap, to get more people to ASK themselves "Should Vice President Cheney be Impeached?", remember we will send you one for no charge. If you can ALSO make a donation to help finance the enormous cost of getting all these caps sewn and shipped, please consider chipping in for that too. Either way just submit this request form:
LAST CHANCE FIRST RUN IMPEACHMENT CAP REQUESTS: http://www.usalone.com/impeach_cheney_cap.php
New video: Impeach Dick Cheney from Robert Greenwald
That's right, we said the "I" word. And you should be saying it too -- to your family, your friends, your neighbors, your pets and the hearty 26% of Americans who somehow still believe the Bush/Cheney team more worthy of sitting in the Oval Office than an undisclosed location stripped of all authority to further damage the country we love.
You'll want to say it even more after watching our video with the evidence for impeachment right there: http://impeachcheney.org/
Dick Cheney has been a malevolent force on the checks and balances of American government for over six years. He has subverted government processes to lead us into this tragedy in Iraq, and is now seeking to do the same with Iran. Two countries, mind you, he did business with while CEO of Halliburton.
We are at an important moment in American history. For if we don't take action in light of the High Crimes and Misdemeanors committed by one Richard Cheney, we might as well throw the word away. Because there will never be a time when it is more justified.
Sign the petition: http://impeachcheney.org/petition.php
14 representatives already support H. Res 333, the articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney. Your signatures will be used to get other House members to to sign on. We are working with a substantial and growing coalition led by Democrats.com and AfterDowningStreet.org.
Let's make this travesty a turning point in our history. Please join us in restoring democratic principles to our government by IMPEACHING DICK CHENEY.
Sincerely,
Robert, Cliff, Paris, Jim G and the entire Brave New Films team
I think this administration may, in fact, be guilty of actionable offenses; however a razor thin Democratic majority will never convict. We do not need to embroil the country in impeachment follies through the end of the Bush term. Further, any move to impeach will just convince some fence-sitters that the Democrats are controlled by the whacky left, are untrustworthy with the controls of government, and probably again vote for a Republican in the next elections.
But I wonder if charges can be brought after these guys leave office?
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Bush Clueless
Check this breaking story in the New York Times which reports that a 2005 a military operation to "snatch and grab" high ranking Al Qaeda terrorists was called off by then SecDef Rumsfeld.
Say what you will about the relative merits of the operation, this is the sentence that really caught my eye:
So here's the deal: top level US officials are contemplating an operation into a sovereign state, Pakistan- to capture some bad guys AND W IS KEPT IN THE DARK BY HIS OWN PEOPLE.
I remember when the military tried to pull of that rescue operation of our hostages in Iran. Totally FUBAR'd, but Jimmy Carter stood up and took the weight. As they say in college courses, "compare and contrast this with W's behavior".
How many people in America are making a short-timers chain for this administration?
Say what you will about the relative merits of the operation, this is the sentence that really caught my eye:
It is unclear whether President Bush was informed about the planned operation.
So here's the deal: top level US officials are contemplating an operation into a sovereign state, Pakistan- to capture some bad guys AND W IS KEPT IN THE DARK BY HIS OWN PEOPLE.
I remember when the military tried to pull of that rescue operation of our hostages in Iran. Totally FUBAR'd, but Jimmy Carter stood up and took the weight. As they say in college courses, "compare and contrast this with W's behavior".
How many people in America are making a short-timers chain for this administration?
A Letter from Michael
Michael writes:
Thanks for the latest on the blog. It seems like every time you take
a break you come back even better and more energetic.
One item - I can't believe you haven't mentioned the commuted
sentence of iScooter (not the new Steve Jobs device).
As much as I try to support our President, even I shake my head at
this one. This one ranks up there with his nominating
his legal counsel to the Supreme Court.
Again, keep up the good work.
Michael,
You are surprised about the Scooter Libby deal? WHY? Everyone could see this one coming from miles away. Don't shocked when the full pardon comes down before W leaves office.
I can understand honorable people wanting to support the president, but W has done absolutely nothing over his two terms in office to earn the support of any rational American, irrespective of political philosophy. Nothing. W's incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance are a toxic brew.
Thanks so much for your kind words. As I said when I started this endeavor, I have a day job so I don't spend my days sitting in my underwear at my computer. Matt Drudge pretty much has that gig. I blog for fun as I define it, and since it's my blog, I can pretty much define it as I want. I tend to do my better work when I am in high dudgeon. And sometimes there just isn't a hell of a lot that I find intriguing. I feel no compulsion to write daily if nothing grabs me . I don't have an editor sitting on my shoulder demanding 800 words by deadline. I have been in the journalism business, and while working against a tight deadline can be a rush, it can also be a pain in the ass.
Again, thanks for your kind words and please pass along this website to those who might appreciate it.
TRM
Thanks for the latest on the blog. It seems like every time you take
a break you come back even better and more energetic.
One item - I can't believe you haven't mentioned the commuted
sentence of iScooter (not the new Steve Jobs device).
As much as I try to support our President, even I shake my head at
this one. This one ranks up there with his nominating
his legal counsel to the Supreme Court.
Again, keep up the good work.
Michael,
You are surprised about the Scooter Libby deal? WHY? Everyone could see this one coming from miles away. Don't shocked when the full pardon comes down before W leaves office.
I can understand honorable people wanting to support the president, but W has done absolutely nothing over his two terms in office to earn the support of any rational American, irrespective of political philosophy. Nothing. W's incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance are a toxic brew.
Thanks so much for your kind words. As I said when I started this endeavor, I have a day job so I don't spend my days sitting in my underwear at my computer. Matt Drudge pretty much has that gig. I blog for fun as I define it, and since it's my blog, I can pretty much define it as I want. I tend to do my better work when I am in high dudgeon. And sometimes there just isn't a hell of a lot that I find intriguing. I feel no compulsion to write daily if nothing grabs me . I don't have an editor sitting on my shoulder demanding 800 words by deadline. I have been in the journalism business, and while working against a tight deadline can be a rush, it can also be a pain in the ass.
Again, thanks for your kind words and please pass along this website to those who might appreciate it.
TRM
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Brian Writes...
Thanks so much for reprinting the Declaration of Independence on your blog.
It is amazing, reading through the grievances of our forefathers against King George III, the horrifying parallels of crimes that our sitting President is inflicting upon our citizenry.
I can only hope & pray that common sense returns to the Body Collective soon and justice once again reigns supreme.
Brian
Brian, it seems that "Common Sense" is not so common anymore.(Where is Tom Paine when you really need him?!)
All I am trying to achieve is to create a place where rational discourse can take place. Real conservatives have something valuable to say. Liberals have something valuable to say. But those high profile crypto-(and not so crypto) fascists of the right, and the jackals of the media who have created the so-called " freak-show" have so poisoned the political atmosphere that rational discourse is almost impossible.
As I said, it is my tradition to read the Declaration of Independence each year to remind me, and those around me, what those framers struggled to bring forth. It was an earth shattering concept in government. That precious heritage belongs to all of us, not just those who grandly wrap themselves in the flag and declare all who disagree with them to be traitors. Thats why I fight my fight.
So, friend Brian, thanks for dropping by and adding your words.
TRM
PS Great movie to watch on a rainy Independence Day-- 1776 - starring William Daniels, Ken Howard, and Howard da Silva
It is amazing, reading through the grievances of our forefathers against King George III, the horrifying parallels of crimes that our sitting President is inflicting upon our citizenry.
I can only hope & pray that common sense returns to the Body Collective soon and justice once again reigns supreme.
Brian
Brian, it seems that "Common Sense" is not so common anymore.(Where is Tom Paine when you really need him?!)
All I am trying to achieve is to create a place where rational discourse can take place. Real conservatives have something valuable to say. Liberals have something valuable to say. But those high profile crypto-(and not so crypto) fascists of the right, and the jackals of the media who have created the so-called " freak-show" have so poisoned the political atmosphere that rational discourse is almost impossible.
As I said, it is my tradition to read the Declaration of Independence each year to remind me, and those around me, what those framers struggled to bring forth. It was an earth shattering concept in government. That precious heritage belongs to all of us, not just those who grandly wrap themselves in the flag and declare all who disagree with them to be traitors. Thats why I fight my fight.
So, friend Brian, thanks for dropping by and adding your words.
TRM
PS Great movie to watch on a rainy Independence Day-- 1776 - starring William Daniels, Ken Howard, and Howard da Silva
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
A Sublime Intersection
Ah , yes, science and food. World famous food scientist Harold McGee on potato chips.
Why We Eat
July 4th is a day for cook-outs, fireworks, sales and other forms of entertainment. But never forget the real reason this holiday exists.
It is my tradition to read aloud to those assembled the Declaration of Independence.
Please join me.
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
Presented by the Indiana University School of Law—Bloomington
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows:
New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
For additional information about the Declaration of Independence, see these sites:
* National Archives and Records Administration: Declaration of Independence
* Library of Congress: About the Declaration of Independence
It is my tradition to read aloud to those assembled the Declaration of Independence.
Please join me.
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
Presented by the Indiana University School of Law—Bloomington
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows:
New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
For additional information about the Declaration of Independence, see these sites:
* National Archives and Records Administration: Declaration of Independence
* Library of Congress: About the Declaration of Independence
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Just Say Know -II
I came across this item in Eric Alterman's Altercation Blog on MediaMatters.com. I thought you would enjoy it.
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We are pleased and proud here at Altercation to present, for your patriotic enjoyment and edification this Independence Day, the premiere publication of the following speech by the charming and handsome E.L. Doctorow:
Remarks on the theme of The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society, at a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, The Library of Congress, April 28, 2007:
What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts, and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if -- five hundred years into the Enlightenment and two hundred and thirty-some years into the life of this republic -- it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe ... how does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?
For some time now we have been confronted by a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East that advertises its values by suicidal bombings, civilian massacres, and the execution of arbitrarily selected victims by the sawing off of their heads. However educated and well-to-do and politically motivated the leaders of this conspiracy may be, they have invoked an extreme fundamentalist reading of their sacred text to mentally transport their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking life-contemptuous jihad.
So that history, as we look to that part of the world, seems to be running backwards, as if civilization is in reverse, as if time is a loop.
And here? The scientists this evening may have to correct me as I invoke the term quantum nonlocality. As I understand the term and make metaphorical use of it, electrons shot from an atom will mirror each other no matter how far apart they are driven, a mile, ten miles, a hemisphere apart -- you look at one and you have a reflection of the other --- a kind of weird subatomic dance in celebration of the mimetic proclivities of everything in the universe, is quantum nonlocality.
This is not to suggest that our water-board and sensory deprivation torture techniques, that Abu Ghraib and the incarceration in perpetuity without trial of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, is the moral equivalent of 9/11. Only that a declared enemy with the mindset of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts.
Apart from this uncanny synchronous spin, the domestic political fantasy life of these past seven years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making -- in this country, quite on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good but as something suspect, dubious, or even ungodly, as it was, e.g., in Italy in 1633 when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth is in orbit around the sun.
I am not a scientist and don't deal in formulas, but as a writer I would, in the words of Henry James, "take to [myself] the faintest hints of life and convert the very pulses of the air into revelations." That surely provides me with a line to unreason. And so when I read that the president of Iran denies the historical truth of the Holocaust, and when I hear the President of the United States rejecting the scientific truth of global warming, I recognize that no matter whatever distance they would keep between them, and whatever their confrontational stance, they are fellow travelers in the nether world.
Two things must be said about knowledge-deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.
But, you may say, am I not narrowing this issue, politicizing it by speaking of our president? In this discussion of knowledge as a foundation for a democratic society, am I not misusing this forum to broadcast a partisan point of view? Albert Einstein once said that even the most perfectly planned democratic institutions are no better than the people whose instruments they are. I would translate his remark this way: The president we get is the country we get. With each elected president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.
From those fundamentalist leaders who proclaimed 9/11 as our just deserts for our secular humanism, our civil libertarianism, our feminists, our gay and lesbian citizens, our abortion providers, and in so doing honored the foreign killers of nearly three thousand Americans as agents of God's justice ... to the creationists, the biblical literalists, the anti-Darwinian school boards, the right-to-lifer anti-abortionist activists, the shrill media ideologues whose jingoist patriotism and ad hominem ranting serves for public discourse -- all of it in degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows -- these phenomena are summoned up, and enshrined by the policies of this president. At the same time, he has set the national legislative program to run in reverse as he rescinds, deregulates, dismantles or otherwise degrades enlightened legislation in the public interest, so that in sum we find ourselves living in a social and psychic structure of the ghostly past, with our great national needs -- health care, public education, disaster relief -- going unmet. The president may speak of the nation in idealistic terms but his actions demonstrate that he has no real concept of national community. His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.
It will take more than the recent congressional elections and revelations of an inveterately corrupt administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. With our once upright democratic posture bent and misshapen, what rough beast are we as we slouch toward Bethlehem? What are we become in the hands of this president with his relentless subversion of our right to know -- his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war, his signing away of laws passed by Congress that he doesn't like, his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records, and email, his dicta time and time again in presumption total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government, his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state, his obsessive secrecy, his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified, his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access of documents to investigatory bodies, his use of the justice department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand ... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded, and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.
Now I realize that with these remarks I may be violating the linguistic proprieties of an academic convocation. I realize, in the tenor of these times, that anyone who speaks of the broad front of failure and mendacity and carelessness of human life in so much of our public policy, in terms any louder than muted regret, is usually marginalized as some sort of radical -- that is, as someone so "out of the mainstream" as not to be taken seriously.
But I believe what I have described so far is an accurate and informed account of the present state of the Union.
We must ask if this rage to deconstruct the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has any connection with the prevalence of God in the mind of this worshipful president. We must ask to what extent, and at however unconscious a level, a conflict arises in the pious political mind when it is sworn to uphold the civil religion of the Constitution.
The idea of the United States may have had its sources in the European Enlightenment, but it was the actions taken by self declared Americans that brought it into focus and established it as an entity. America is a society evolved from words written down on paper by ordinary mortals, however extraordinary they happened to be as human beings. When constitutional scholars speak of the American civil religion, they recognize that along with its separation of church and state, our Constitution and its amendments establishes as civil law ethical presumptions common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But if you have extracted the basic ethics of religious invention and found the mechanism for installing them in the statues of the secular civic order, but have consigned all the doctrine and rite and ritual, all the symbols and traditional practices to the precincts of private life, you are saying there is no one proven path to salvation, there are only traditions. If you relegate the old stories to the personal choices of private worship, you admit the ineffable is ineffable, and in terms of a possible theological triumphalism, everything is up for grabs.
Our pluralism cannot be entirely comfortable to someone of evangelical faith. But to the extreme fundamentalist -- that member of the evangelical community militant in his belief, an absolutist intolerant of all forms of belief but his own, all stories but his own. -- our pluralism has to be a profound offense. I speak of the so-called "political base" with which our president has bonded. In our raucous democracy fundamentalist religious belief has organized itself with political acumen to promulgate law that would undermine just those secular humanist principles that encourage it flourish in freedom. Of course there has rarely been a period in our history when God has not been called upon to march. Northern abolitionists and southern slave owners both claimed biblical endorsement. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement drew its strength from prayer and examples of Christian fortitude, while the Ku Klux Klan invoked Jesus as a sponsor of their racism. But there is a crucial difference between these traditional invocations and the politically astute and well funded activists of today's Christian Right who do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith.
Fundamentalism really cannot help itself -- it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy.
Now I value the point of view of Professor Mark Noll, who speaks of the "historical American merger of the forces of traditional Christianity with the forces of Enlightenment." It is a serious misreading of American history, he says, "to portray the tangled cultural and political conflicts of our time as pitting the pre-critical hordes of religion against the hyper-critical avatars of science." Historically, there has tended to be a religious accommodation of science, according to Professor Noll: In the 19th century, America theological conservatives could also be Darwinists. And even in the strident debates of today, fundamentalists still proclaim their allegiance to facts as loudly as their opponents. And theories such as intelligent design and creation science implicitly accept the modern scientific consensus on evolution while maintaining a confident belief in a traditional deity.
But all contrarian movements, like revolutions, devolve to their extremist expression, do they not? The theorists of creation science and intelligent design have marching on their right flank, with or without their approval, if not pre-critical hordes of religion, a militantly censorious well funded political movement that a president of the united states has tapped into for his and their benefit. I am not aware that American history invoked by Professor Noll has a precedent for this. Nor am I aware that the hyper-critical avatars of the secular scientific method have an equivalent hard-nosed political organization behind them. They don't even have a marching band.
The president has said the war with terrorists will last for decades and is a confrontation between "good and evil." Whether he means the evil of specific terrorist organizations or the culture from which they spring, he vision is necessarily Manichean. There is immense political power in such religiously inspired reductionism. Thus, no matter how he lies about the reason for his invasion of Iraq, or how badly it has gone, bumblingly and tragically ruinous, with so many lives destroyed, and no matter how many thousands of terrorists it has brought into being, to criticize his policy or the architects of it is said to aid the enemy. The president's inner circle of advisers, who conspire in this Manichean world view, have the unnatural vividness of personality of Shakespearean plotters. While the original think tank theorists and proponents of the war have quietly and understandably withdrawn from public view, the vice president and the president's chief policy adviser stand tall -- the first contemptuous of his critics, his denials of reality and obfuscations delivered in the dour tones of unquestionable authority, the second too clever by half, and because he has spent his years developing a theocratic constituency and wearing such blinders as an exclusive concern with party power has attached to him, most clearly has a future in the culture of anti-democracy he has so deviously and unwisely nurtured.
A Manichean politics reduces the relevance of knowledge and degrades the truth which knowledge discovers. The past seven years of American political life are an uncanny cycle we've slipped into, or slid into, that foresees the democratic traditions of this country as too much of a luxury to be maintained. We see, since the last election, the struggle now for the legislative branches to regain some of their constitutional prerogatives. They struggle not only with a recalcitrant president and vice president who impugns their motives but against the precedents of the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, each of whom added another conservative shock to the principle of separation of powers. Many of the executive practices today -- the blatant cronyism, the political uses of the justice department, the evisceration of regulatory agencies, and so on -- are empowered by these precedents. And so we have marched along from the imperial presidency, through four years of a one-party faux democracy, to plutocracy, to the borders of authoritarianism.
To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America, the metaphysical risks that are the heritage of the enlightenment, and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.
Melville in Moby Dick speaks of "reality outracing apprehension." Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet, but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesome complex white whale in our quantumized wave/particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.
What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water- wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy, and the righteous priorities of wealth.
I summon up the year 1787 when the Constitutional Convention had done its work and the drafted Constitution was sent out to the states for ratification. The public's excitement was palpable. Extended and vigorous statehouse debates echoed through the towns and villages, and as one by one the states voted to ratify, church bells rang, cheers went up from the public houses, and in the major cities the people turned out to parade with a fresh new sense of themselves as a nation. Everyone marched -- tradespeople, workingmen, soldiers, women, and clergy. They had floats in those days too -- most often a wagon-size ship of state called the Union, rolling through the streets with children waving from the scuppers. Philadelphia came up with a float called the New Roof, a dome supported by thirteen pillars and ornamented with stars. It was drawn by ten white horses and at the top was a handsome cupola surmounted by a figure of Plenty bearing her cornucopia. The ratification parades were sacramental -- symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society.
And with good reason: The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.
When the ancient Hebrews broke their covenant they suffered a loss of identity and brought disaster on themselves. Our burden too is covenantal. We may point to our two hundred some years of national survival as an open society, constitutionally sworn to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we may regard ourselves a an exceptionalist, historically self-correcting nation whose democratic values locate us just as surely as our geography....and yet we know at the same time that all through our history we have brutally excluded vast numbers of us from the shelter of the New Roof, we have broken our covenant again and again with a virtuosity verging on damnation and have been saved only by the sacrificial efforts of Constitution-reverencing patriots in and our of government -- presidents, senators, justices, self impoverishing lawyers, abolitionists, muckrakers, third-party candidates, suffragists, union organizers, striking workers, civil rights martyrs.
Because this president's subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone on before, and as it has created large social constituencies ready to support the flag waving ideals of an incremental fascism, we're called upon to step forward to reaffirm our covenant like these exemplars from the past.
The philosopher Richard Rorty has suggested in his book Achieving Our Country that the metaphysic of America's civil religion is pragmatism and its prophets are Walt Whitman and John Dewey "The most striking feature of their redescription of our country is its thorough-going secularism," says Rorty. "The moral they draw from the European past, and in particular from Christianity, is not instruction about the authority under which we should live but suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been."
To temporize human affairs, to look no up for some applied celestial accreditation, but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey, to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought, suppression of knowledge that is the public good --- is the essence of our civil religion.
It is Whitman, our great poet and pragmatic philosopher, who advises us not to be curious about God but to affix our curiosity to our own lives and the earth we live on, and then perhaps as far as we can see into the universe with our telescopes. This was the charge he gave himself, and it is the source of all the attentive love in his poetry. If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge, that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.
Portions of the above are drawn from Reporting the Universe (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) copyright, E.L. Doctorow. For the complete lectures, please go here.
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We are pleased and proud here at Altercation to present, for your patriotic enjoyment and edification this Independence Day, the premiere publication of the following speech by the charming and handsome E.L. Doctorow:
Remarks on the theme of The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society, at a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, The Library of Congress, April 28, 2007:
What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts, and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if -- five hundred years into the Enlightenment and two hundred and thirty-some years into the life of this republic -- it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe ... how does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?
For some time now we have been confronted by a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East that advertises its values by suicidal bombings, civilian massacres, and the execution of arbitrarily selected victims by the sawing off of their heads. However educated and well-to-do and politically motivated the leaders of this conspiracy may be, they have invoked an extreme fundamentalist reading of their sacred text to mentally transport their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking life-contemptuous jihad.
So that history, as we look to that part of the world, seems to be running backwards, as if civilization is in reverse, as if time is a loop.
And here? The scientists this evening may have to correct me as I invoke the term quantum nonlocality. As I understand the term and make metaphorical use of it, electrons shot from an atom will mirror each other no matter how far apart they are driven, a mile, ten miles, a hemisphere apart -- you look at one and you have a reflection of the other --- a kind of weird subatomic dance in celebration of the mimetic proclivities of everything in the universe, is quantum nonlocality.
This is not to suggest that our water-board and sensory deprivation torture techniques, that Abu Ghraib and the incarceration in perpetuity without trial of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, is the moral equivalent of 9/11. Only that a declared enemy with the mindset of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts.
Apart from this uncanny synchronous spin, the domestic political fantasy life of these past seven years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making -- in this country, quite on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good but as something suspect, dubious, or even ungodly, as it was, e.g., in Italy in 1633 when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth is in orbit around the sun.
I am not a scientist and don't deal in formulas, but as a writer I would, in the words of Henry James, "take to [myself] the faintest hints of life and convert the very pulses of the air into revelations." That surely provides me with a line to unreason. And so when I read that the president of Iran denies the historical truth of the Holocaust, and when I hear the President of the United States rejecting the scientific truth of global warming, I recognize that no matter whatever distance they would keep between them, and whatever their confrontational stance, they are fellow travelers in the nether world.
Two things must be said about knowledge-deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.
But, you may say, am I not narrowing this issue, politicizing it by speaking of our president? In this discussion of knowledge as a foundation for a democratic society, am I not misusing this forum to broadcast a partisan point of view? Albert Einstein once said that even the most perfectly planned democratic institutions are no better than the people whose instruments they are. I would translate his remark this way: The president we get is the country we get. With each elected president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.
From those fundamentalist leaders who proclaimed 9/11 as our just deserts for our secular humanism, our civil libertarianism, our feminists, our gay and lesbian citizens, our abortion providers, and in so doing honored the foreign killers of nearly three thousand Americans as agents of God's justice ... to the creationists, the biblical literalists, the anti-Darwinian school boards, the right-to-lifer anti-abortionist activists, the shrill media ideologues whose jingoist patriotism and ad hominem ranting serves for public discourse -- all of it in degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows -- these phenomena are summoned up, and enshrined by the policies of this president. At the same time, he has set the national legislative program to run in reverse as he rescinds, deregulates, dismantles or otherwise degrades enlightened legislation in the public interest, so that in sum we find ourselves living in a social and psychic structure of the ghostly past, with our great national needs -- health care, public education, disaster relief -- going unmet. The president may speak of the nation in idealistic terms but his actions demonstrate that he has no real concept of national community. His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.
It will take more than the recent congressional elections and revelations of an inveterately corrupt administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. With our once upright democratic posture bent and misshapen, what rough beast are we as we slouch toward Bethlehem? What are we become in the hands of this president with his relentless subversion of our right to know -- his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war, his signing away of laws passed by Congress that he doesn't like, his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records, and email, his dicta time and time again in presumption total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government, his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state, his obsessive secrecy, his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified, his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access of documents to investigatory bodies, his use of the justice department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand ... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded, and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.
Now I realize that with these remarks I may be violating the linguistic proprieties of an academic convocation. I realize, in the tenor of these times, that anyone who speaks of the broad front of failure and mendacity and carelessness of human life in so much of our public policy, in terms any louder than muted regret, is usually marginalized as some sort of radical -- that is, as someone so "out of the mainstream" as not to be taken seriously.
But I believe what I have described so far is an accurate and informed account of the present state of the Union.
We must ask if this rage to deconstruct the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has any connection with the prevalence of God in the mind of this worshipful president. We must ask to what extent, and at however unconscious a level, a conflict arises in the pious political mind when it is sworn to uphold the civil religion of the Constitution.
The idea of the United States may have had its sources in the European Enlightenment, but it was the actions taken by self declared Americans that brought it into focus and established it as an entity. America is a society evolved from words written down on paper by ordinary mortals, however extraordinary they happened to be as human beings. When constitutional scholars speak of the American civil religion, they recognize that along with its separation of church and state, our Constitution and its amendments establishes as civil law ethical presumptions common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But if you have extracted the basic ethics of religious invention and found the mechanism for installing them in the statues of the secular civic order, but have consigned all the doctrine and rite and ritual, all the symbols and traditional practices to the precincts of private life, you are saying there is no one proven path to salvation, there are only traditions. If you relegate the old stories to the personal choices of private worship, you admit the ineffable is ineffable, and in terms of a possible theological triumphalism, everything is up for grabs.
Our pluralism cannot be entirely comfortable to someone of evangelical faith. But to the extreme fundamentalist -- that member of the evangelical community militant in his belief, an absolutist intolerant of all forms of belief but his own, all stories but his own. -- our pluralism has to be a profound offense. I speak of the so-called "political base" with which our president has bonded. In our raucous democracy fundamentalist religious belief has organized itself with political acumen to promulgate law that would undermine just those secular humanist principles that encourage it flourish in freedom. Of course there has rarely been a period in our history when God has not been called upon to march. Northern abolitionists and southern slave owners both claimed biblical endorsement. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement drew its strength from prayer and examples of Christian fortitude, while the Ku Klux Klan invoked Jesus as a sponsor of their racism. But there is a crucial difference between these traditional invocations and the politically astute and well funded activists of today's Christian Right who do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith.
Fundamentalism really cannot help itself -- it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy.
Now I value the point of view of Professor Mark Noll, who speaks of the "historical American merger of the forces of traditional Christianity with the forces of Enlightenment." It is a serious misreading of American history, he says, "to portray the tangled cultural and political conflicts of our time as pitting the pre-critical hordes of religion against the hyper-critical avatars of science." Historically, there has tended to be a religious accommodation of science, according to Professor Noll: In the 19th century, America theological conservatives could also be Darwinists. And even in the strident debates of today, fundamentalists still proclaim their allegiance to facts as loudly as their opponents. And theories such as intelligent design and creation science implicitly accept the modern scientific consensus on evolution while maintaining a confident belief in a traditional deity.
But all contrarian movements, like revolutions, devolve to their extremist expression, do they not? The theorists of creation science and intelligent design have marching on their right flank, with or without their approval, if not pre-critical hordes of religion, a militantly censorious well funded political movement that a president of the united states has tapped into for his and their benefit. I am not aware that American history invoked by Professor Noll has a precedent for this. Nor am I aware that the hyper-critical avatars of the secular scientific method have an equivalent hard-nosed political organization behind them. They don't even have a marching band.
The president has said the war with terrorists will last for decades and is a confrontation between "good and evil." Whether he means the evil of specific terrorist organizations or the culture from which they spring, he vision is necessarily Manichean. There is immense political power in such religiously inspired reductionism. Thus, no matter how he lies about the reason for his invasion of Iraq, or how badly it has gone, bumblingly and tragically ruinous, with so many lives destroyed, and no matter how many thousands of terrorists it has brought into being, to criticize his policy or the architects of it is said to aid the enemy. The president's inner circle of advisers, who conspire in this Manichean world view, have the unnatural vividness of personality of Shakespearean plotters. While the original think tank theorists and proponents of the war have quietly and understandably withdrawn from public view, the vice president and the president's chief policy adviser stand tall -- the first contemptuous of his critics, his denials of reality and obfuscations delivered in the dour tones of unquestionable authority, the second too clever by half, and because he has spent his years developing a theocratic constituency and wearing such blinders as an exclusive concern with party power has attached to him, most clearly has a future in the culture of anti-democracy he has so deviously and unwisely nurtured.
A Manichean politics reduces the relevance of knowledge and degrades the truth which knowledge discovers. The past seven years of American political life are an uncanny cycle we've slipped into, or slid into, that foresees the democratic traditions of this country as too much of a luxury to be maintained. We see, since the last election, the struggle now for the legislative branches to regain some of their constitutional prerogatives. They struggle not only with a recalcitrant president and vice president who impugns their motives but against the precedents of the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, each of whom added another conservative shock to the principle of separation of powers. Many of the executive practices today -- the blatant cronyism, the political uses of the justice department, the evisceration of regulatory agencies, and so on -- are empowered by these precedents. And so we have marched along from the imperial presidency, through four years of a one-party faux democracy, to plutocracy, to the borders of authoritarianism.
To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America, the metaphysical risks that are the heritage of the enlightenment, and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.
Melville in Moby Dick speaks of "reality outracing apprehension." Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet, but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesome complex white whale in our quantumized wave/particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.
What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water- wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy, and the righteous priorities of wealth.
I summon up the year 1787 when the Constitutional Convention had done its work and the drafted Constitution was sent out to the states for ratification. The public's excitement was palpable. Extended and vigorous statehouse debates echoed through the towns and villages, and as one by one the states voted to ratify, church bells rang, cheers went up from the public houses, and in the major cities the people turned out to parade with a fresh new sense of themselves as a nation. Everyone marched -- tradespeople, workingmen, soldiers, women, and clergy. They had floats in those days too -- most often a wagon-size ship of state called the Union, rolling through the streets with children waving from the scuppers. Philadelphia came up with a float called the New Roof, a dome supported by thirteen pillars and ornamented with stars. It was drawn by ten white horses and at the top was a handsome cupola surmounted by a figure of Plenty bearing her cornucopia. The ratification parades were sacramental -- symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society.
And with good reason: The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.
When the ancient Hebrews broke their covenant they suffered a loss of identity and brought disaster on themselves. Our burden too is covenantal. We may point to our two hundred some years of national survival as an open society, constitutionally sworn to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we may regard ourselves a an exceptionalist, historically self-correcting nation whose democratic values locate us just as surely as our geography....and yet we know at the same time that all through our history we have brutally excluded vast numbers of us from the shelter of the New Roof, we have broken our covenant again and again with a virtuosity verging on damnation and have been saved only by the sacrificial efforts of Constitution-reverencing patriots in and our of government -- presidents, senators, justices, self impoverishing lawyers, abolitionists, muckrakers, third-party candidates, suffragists, union organizers, striking workers, civil rights martyrs.
Because this president's subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone on before, and as it has created large social constituencies ready to support the flag waving ideals of an incremental fascism, we're called upon to step forward to reaffirm our covenant like these exemplars from the past.
The philosopher Richard Rorty has suggested in his book Achieving Our Country that the metaphysic of America's civil religion is pragmatism and its prophets are Walt Whitman and John Dewey "The most striking feature of their redescription of our country is its thorough-going secularism," says Rorty. "The moral they draw from the European past, and in particular from Christianity, is not instruction about the authority under which we should live but suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been."
To temporize human affairs, to look no up for some applied celestial accreditation, but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey, to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought, suppression of knowledge that is the public good --- is the essence of our civil religion.
It is Whitman, our great poet and pragmatic philosopher, who advises us not to be curious about God but to affix our curiosity to our own lives and the earth we live on, and then perhaps as far as we can see into the universe with our telescopes. This was the charge he gave himself, and it is the source of all the attentive love in his poetry. If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge, that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.
Portions of the above are drawn from Reporting the Universe (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) copyright, E.L. Doctorow. For the complete lectures, please go here.
Just Say "Know"-I
A friend forwarded the following to me:
The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin
By John Timmer | Published: June 29, 2007 - 12:49PM CT
Back around the early 1900s, the universe was a fairly simple place. It was static, had always been there, and largely consisted of our own galaxy and a few neighboring bits of matter. Over the course of the 20th century, that view collapsed. Many sources of light were revealed not be stars, but rather galaxies like (and, in many cases, unlike) our own. Distant galaxies were found to be rocketing away from us, propelled by the unfolding of the universe itself, which has accelerated since the big bang. Modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation.
According to a paper that will appear in October (arXiv link), we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. The authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology.
The 100-billion-year figure was chosen because that's expected to be the lifespan of the longest-lived stars. By that time, only clusters of galaxies will be bound together strongly enough to resist the Hubble expansion. In our case, that means the Milky Way, Andromeda, and a number of smaller globular clusters in our neighborhood. By that time, we'll have collided and merged with Andromeda, making the local group one big galaxy. By then, however, everything else we can see will have been pushed so far away by the universe's expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them. All matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible, and our view of the universe will look suspiciously like it did in the pre-Hubble days.
The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise—the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin.
Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe. By 100 billion years from now, however, much of the deuterium will have been burned in stars, with lots of helium produced in the process, erasing this evidence of our history. Worse still, we currently measure early deuterium levels by checking its absorbence of light from distant quasars. In the future, those quasars will have vanished.
Observers would still be able to piece together the age of our local cluster, based on a combination of knowledge about how elements are produced in stars and measuring their current abundance. But, in the end, the rest of the universe will vanish, taking with it any evidence of the Big Bang and some of its fundamental properties, such as dark energy.
The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that's got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there's another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle because we came along at the right time. Too much earlier, and we wouldn't be able to detect that the universe is in a new inflationary era, which tells us that it's dominated by dark energy. Too much later, and we wouldn't be able to know that there's a universe at all. As the authors put it, "we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe: the time at which we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!"
Dear Friend:
I have read and re-read your submission of John Timmer’s article “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin.”
Thanks for the fun read.
It may very well be true that we live at a point of confluence between our ability to construct instruments to measure the data of the universe, our ability to interpret such data, and the availability of this data to be collected, measured and interpreted.
However, our understanding of the universe is, and perhaps always will be limited. We view the universe through what can only be a narrow slit of the perceptual spectrum of both our devices and our selves. That being said, what is possible today was not possible years ago as our spectrum has expanded over time. As our appreciation of the universe changed at the beginning of the 20th century, it will change and change again as our understanding, knowledge and techniques improve.
So if part of the universe redshifts away, and if deuterium will burn with the stars, perhaps we will still be around in one form or another, with some device or another, to continue our exploration.
Perhaps the better title for Mr. Timmer’s article is “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin as we perceive it today.”
Thanks for the intriguing article.
TRM
The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin
By John Timmer | Published: June 29, 2007 - 12:49PM CT
Back around the early 1900s, the universe was a fairly simple place. It was static, had always been there, and largely consisted of our own galaxy and a few neighboring bits of matter. Over the course of the 20th century, that view collapsed. Many sources of light were revealed not be stars, but rather galaxies like (and, in many cases, unlike) our own. Distant galaxies were found to be rocketing away from us, propelled by the unfolding of the universe itself, which has accelerated since the big bang. Modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation.
According to a paper that will appear in October (arXiv link), we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. The authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology.
The 100-billion-year figure was chosen because that's expected to be the lifespan of the longest-lived stars. By that time, only clusters of galaxies will be bound together strongly enough to resist the Hubble expansion. In our case, that means the Milky Way, Andromeda, and a number of smaller globular clusters in our neighborhood. By that time, we'll have collided and merged with Andromeda, making the local group one big galaxy. By then, however, everything else we can see will have been pushed so far away by the universe's expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them. All matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible, and our view of the universe will look suspiciously like it did in the pre-Hubble days.
The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise—the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin.
Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe. By 100 billion years from now, however, much of the deuterium will have been burned in stars, with lots of helium produced in the process, erasing this evidence of our history. Worse still, we currently measure early deuterium levels by checking its absorbence of light from distant quasars. In the future, those quasars will have vanished.
Observers would still be able to piece together the age of our local cluster, based on a combination of knowledge about how elements are produced in stars and measuring their current abundance. But, in the end, the rest of the universe will vanish, taking with it any evidence of the Big Bang and some of its fundamental properties, such as dark energy.
The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that's got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there's another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle because we came along at the right time. Too much earlier, and we wouldn't be able to detect that the universe is in a new inflationary era, which tells us that it's dominated by dark energy. Too much later, and we wouldn't be able to know that there's a universe at all. As the authors put it, "we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe: the time at which we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!"
Dear Friend:
I have read and re-read your submission of John Timmer’s article “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin.”
Thanks for the fun read.
It may very well be true that we live at a point of confluence between our ability to construct instruments to measure the data of the universe, our ability to interpret such data, and the availability of this data to be collected, measured and interpreted.
However, our understanding of the universe is, and perhaps always will be limited. We view the universe through what can only be a narrow slit of the perceptual spectrum of both our devices and our selves. That being said, what is possible today was not possible years ago as our spectrum has expanded over time. As our appreciation of the universe changed at the beginning of the 20th century, it will change and change again as our understanding, knowledge and techniques improve.
So if part of the universe redshifts away, and if deuterium will burn with the stars, perhaps we will still be around in one form or another, with some device or another, to continue our exploration.
Perhaps the better title for Mr. Timmer’s article is “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin as we perceive it today.”
Thanks for the intriguing article.
TRM
Monday, July 2, 2007
NYCLib Writes Again..
For accuracy sake- here's Senator Clinton's Sudan response~~
SEN. CLINTON: There are three things we have to do immediately. Move the peacekeepers that finally the United Nations and the African Union have agreed to into Sudan as soon as possible. In order for them to be effective, there has to be airlift and logistical support, and that can only come either unilaterally from the United States or from NATO. I prefer NATO. And finally, we should have a no-fly zone over Sudan because the Sudanese governments bomb the villages before and after the Janjawid come. And we should make it very clear to the government in Khartoum we’re putting up a no-fly zone; if they fly into it, we will shoot down their planes. Is the only way to get their attention. (Applause.)
SEN. CLINTON: There are three things we have to do immediately. Move the peacekeepers that finally the United Nations and the African Union have agreed to into Sudan as soon as possible. In order for them to be effective, there has to be airlift and logistical support, and that can only come either unilaterally from the United States or from NATO. I prefer NATO. And finally, we should have a no-fly zone over Sudan because the Sudanese governments bomb the villages before and after the Janjawid come. And we should make it very clear to the government in Khartoum we’re putting up a no-fly zone; if they fly into it, we will shoot down their planes. Is the only way to get their attention. (Applause.)
Sunday, July 1, 2007
"A Mighty Heart" Meets Hecules
I had a strange experience on Saturday. I went to Times Square to see the movie “A Mighty Heart”. I got to the “Crossroads of the World” in time to see a police surge, an event in operation Hercules, where NYPD sends scores if not hundreds of police cars to one area, just to shake things up. I admit I was pretty shaken by the site of all these police cars parked on the sidewalk at 90 degrees to the street, all lights flashing. I hope potential terrorists had the same reaction that I did.
It made sense of NYPD to do this in the aftermath of the attempted Piccadilly bombings. MSNBC reports on NYPD’s assessment.
I believe that a great sense of my unease lies in the fact that should something happen I would be totally defenseless. I was but two blocks from the World Trade center on September 11th, and I remember my reactions: shock, rage, and yes, feeling defenseless. There was absolutely noting I could do in the immediate aftermath of that horrible event. I wished there was something that I could do to get back at those bastards. Until this day, I have this fantasy: Osama bin Laden has been captured, tried and convicted. I win a national lottery that gives an ordinary citizen the right to execute bin laden in whichever way he or she feels appropriate. I wonder whether I would go for something slow and painful or quick.
I suppose it is a way to make up for my sense of vulnerability. I ride the subways every day. I go through Grand Central Terminal everyday. I have no doubt that I am a target.
BONUS MOVIE REVIEW
I thought “A Mighty Heart” was a vehicle to show that Angelina Jolie was a “serious” actress. The center of the movie was Jolie, as reporter Daniel Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who waits while Pakistani police try to find her husband before terrorists murder him. While Jolie performed admirably, I thought the movie itself lacked focus and led the viewer to the forced conclusion that we are all evil, but others might be just a little more evil.
I give “A Mighty Heart” 3.5 stars out of four.
It made sense of NYPD to do this in the aftermath of the attempted Piccadilly bombings. MSNBC reports on NYPD’s assessment.
I believe that a great sense of my unease lies in the fact that should something happen I would be totally defenseless. I was but two blocks from the World Trade center on September 11th, and I remember my reactions: shock, rage, and yes, feeling defenseless. There was absolutely noting I could do in the immediate aftermath of that horrible event. I wished there was something that I could do to get back at those bastards. Until this day, I have this fantasy: Osama bin Laden has been captured, tried and convicted. I win a national lottery that gives an ordinary citizen the right to execute bin laden in whichever way he or she feels appropriate. I wonder whether I would go for something slow and painful or quick.
I suppose it is a way to make up for my sense of vulnerability. I ride the subways every day. I go through Grand Central Terminal everyday. I have no doubt that I am a target.
BONUS MOVIE REVIEW
I thought “A Mighty Heart” was a vehicle to show that Angelina Jolie was a “serious” actress. The center of the movie was Jolie, as reporter Daniel Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who waits while Pakistani police try to find her husband before terrorists murder him. While Jolie performed admirably, I thought the movie itself lacked focus and led the viewer to the forced conclusion that we are all evil, but others might be just a little more evil.
I give “A Mighty Heart” 3.5 stars out of four.
NYC Liberal writes...
Here is his comment:
NYCLiberal said...
Well perhaps you should have set your alarm clock for the debate a few days ago. While nothing earth shattering occurred, there were some interesting moments. At least some topics not previously 'debated' in the primary season came up. (New Orleans recovery/Katrina, Sudan, trade agreements, health care, school integration/last week's Supreme Court decisions) My favorite 'handled' moment was when Clinton put forward a 'no-fly' zone concept for the Sudan and, if that didn't work, she would bomb. I thought she hit a home run with that--tough woman who would do battle in Africa for human rights!
Sure, Lib, but where would she get the troops and forces to do this? And where is all the talk about forming coalitions and not acting unilaterally? I don't believe a word she says.
TRM
NYCLiberal said...
Well perhaps you should have set your alarm clock for the debate a few days ago. While nothing earth shattering occurred, there were some interesting moments. At least some topics not previously 'debated' in the primary season came up. (New Orleans recovery/Katrina, Sudan, trade agreements, health care, school integration/last week's Supreme Court decisions) My favorite 'handled' moment was when Clinton put forward a 'no-fly' zone concept for the Sudan and, if that didn't work, she would bomb. I thought she hit a home run with that--tough woman who would do battle in Africa for human rights!
Sure, Lib, but where would she get the troops and forces to do this? And where is all the talk about forming coalitions and not acting unilaterally? I don't believe a word she says.
TRM
Money For Nothing
Let’s be honest, things are pretty boring right now. As the presidential campaign meanders onward, the only significant news lies in numbers.
The democratic candidates released their campaign contribution numbers today and the big surprise came from barrack Obama’s camp, which announced that the candidate had raised a record $32.5 million dollars for the second quarter. This is an astonishing figure in both an absolute sense and in because he beat the so-called front runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who raised $27 million dollars. Is Hillary fatigue starting to set in?
John Edwards had a poor showing at $9 million, while New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is staring to show surprising strength relative to the other second tier candidates, raising $7 million. Richardson may be in the process of breaking into so-called top tier of candidates, at least on a dollar basis.
One note on the national polls: FORGET THEM. The only national poll that really means anything happens on Election Day, and even then, it is less significant than many people think since their electoral college representatives actually cast the votes that matter.
The primary system is a series of hurdles that must be jumped one at a time. Therefore, it is more instructive to look at the individual state polls in the order of their primaries. The standings will change once the process starts in earnest (sort of like the baseball season) but let’s look at Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, in that order. (Results are aggregated by the Votemaster at http://www.electoral-vote.com/ . This is an incredibly valuable site for poll analysis)
In Iowa a Mason-Dixon poll conducted on June 16 shows Hillary and John Edwards in a statistical dead heat:
Clinton 22% Obama 18% Edwards 21%
Giuliani 15% McCain 6% Romney 25%
The polls recorded by the Votemaster since January show considerable strength for Edwards since the beginning of 2007. As MSNBC reported:
On the republican side, you can put a fork in McCain; he’s done! Unless of course Mitt Romney does something stupid, and we have never seen a politician do anything stupid, have we?
I still believe Giuliani’s numbers will evaporate once his total record comes under proper scrutiny. As I have said many times, he was mayor for eight years and a great mayor for eight weeks.
Obviously, the winner in Iowa will start to see more money flowing his or her way. But has Clinton tapped out her big money raisers? Has Obama tapped out the little guy?
Move from Iowa to the next state in the primary hurdles, New Hampshire. Clinton has shown consistent strength. In a Suffolk University poll of June 24th:
Clinton 37% Obama 19% Edwards 9%
Giuliani 22% McCain 13% Romney 26%
These numbers can become very fluid coming out of Iowa.
Finally, Lets look at June 15 South Carolina poll conducted by Mason-Dixon:
Clinton 25% Obama 34% Edwards 12%
Giuliani 21% McCain 7% Romney 11%
While Clinton has led, Obama has taken a strong lead in the last poll. On the Republican side, Giuliani shows strength.
What does this all mean? For the Democrats, Clinton has reasons to worry. Hillary Clinton will not be the shoo-in that she wants everyone to believe. Edwards leads her in Iowa, Obama leads her in South Carolina. Her support is not firm in important individual states. Her money raising machine may be running out of steam. Meanwhile, the unannounced Al Gore continues to upstage the others with great publicity and an op-ed article in the NY Times that tackles global warming. Is Gore running just by acting presidential?
On the Republican side Romney and Giuliani both show strength. But Fred Thompson might upset those apple carts once he announces.
So continue the snooze fest until the end of summer.
The democratic candidates released their campaign contribution numbers today and the big surprise came from barrack Obama’s camp, which announced that the candidate had raised a record $32.5 million dollars for the second quarter. This is an astonishing figure in both an absolute sense and in because he beat the so-called front runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who raised $27 million dollars. Is Hillary fatigue starting to set in?
John Edwards had a poor showing at $9 million, while New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is staring to show surprising strength relative to the other second tier candidates, raising $7 million. Richardson may be in the process of breaking into so-called top tier of candidates, at least on a dollar basis.
One note on the national polls: FORGET THEM. The only national poll that really means anything happens on Election Day, and even then, it is less significant than many people think since their electoral college representatives actually cast the votes that matter.
The primary system is a series of hurdles that must be jumped one at a time. Therefore, it is more instructive to look at the individual state polls in the order of their primaries. The standings will change once the process starts in earnest (sort of like the baseball season) but let’s look at Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, in that order. (Results are aggregated by the Votemaster at http://www.electoral-vote.com/ . This is an incredibly valuable site for poll analysis)
In Iowa a Mason-Dixon poll conducted on June 16 shows Hillary and John Edwards in a statistical dead heat:
Clinton 22% Obama 18% Edwards 21%
Giuliani 15% McCain 6% Romney 25%
The polls recorded by the Votemaster since January show considerable strength for Edwards since the beginning of 2007. As MSNBC reported:
A new Mason-Dixon poll shows that Clinton, Edwards, and Obama are all in a dead heat in Iowa. But the actual leader in the survey is someone who isn't even running -- and isn't even a person: It's "undecided".
In the poll -- which was taken of 400 likely Democratic caucus-goers from June 13-16, and which has a margin of error of +/- 5% -- Clinton is at 22%, Edwards is at 21%, and Obama is at 18%. Richardson comes in fourth at 6%, and Biden gets 4%; no other Dem gets more than 2%. But a whopping 27% say they are undecided.
On the republican side, you can put a fork in McCain; he’s done! Unless of course Mitt Romney does something stupid, and we have never seen a politician do anything stupid, have we?
I still believe Giuliani’s numbers will evaporate once his total record comes under proper scrutiny. As I have said many times, he was mayor for eight years and a great mayor for eight weeks.
Obviously, the winner in Iowa will start to see more money flowing his or her way. But has Clinton tapped out her big money raisers? Has Obama tapped out the little guy?
Move from Iowa to the next state in the primary hurdles, New Hampshire. Clinton has shown consistent strength. In a Suffolk University poll of June 24th:
Clinton 37% Obama 19% Edwards 9%
Giuliani 22% McCain 13% Romney 26%
These numbers can become very fluid coming out of Iowa.
Finally, Lets look at June 15 South Carolina poll conducted by Mason-Dixon:
Clinton 25% Obama 34% Edwards 12%
Giuliani 21% McCain 7% Romney 11%
While Clinton has led, Obama has taken a strong lead in the last poll. On the Republican side, Giuliani shows strength.
What does this all mean? For the Democrats, Clinton has reasons to worry. Hillary Clinton will not be the shoo-in that she wants everyone to believe. Edwards leads her in Iowa, Obama leads her in South Carolina. Her support is not firm in important individual states. Her money raising machine may be running out of steam. Meanwhile, the unannounced Al Gore continues to upstage the others with great publicity and an op-ed article in the NY Times that tackles global warming. Is Gore running just by acting presidential?
On the Republican side Romney and Giuliani both show strength. But Fred Thompson might upset those apple carts once he announces.
So continue the snooze fest until the end of summer.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
On Lute
And I am still trying to figure out why a smart guy like Gen. Lute took the job as "war czar". Unless of course he either has a strong masochistic streak or an ego larger than his supposedly immense IQ.
He took the job even though he disagreed with the president's methods and objectives.
Other than that, he seems a perfect candidate to carry out the administration's plan
Read this latest:
He took the job even though he disagreed with the president's methods and objectives.
Other than that, he seems a perfect candidate to carry out the administration's plan
Read this latest:
War Adviser Was Skeptical of Strategy
Jun 6 05:39 PM US/Eastern
By ANNE FLAHERTY
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, picked by President Bush as his White House war adviser, said Wednesday he had been skeptical of Bush's decision to send thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq.
In a written response to questions by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lute confirmed news reports that he had voiced doubts during a White House-led policy review that led to Bush's Jan. 10 announcement that 21,500 more combat troops would go to Baghdad and Anbar province.
The buildup was hotly contested in Congress, including among several Republicans who favored greater pressure on Iraqi security forces to take over combat.
"During the review, I registered concerns that a military 'surge' would likely have only temporary and localized effects unless it were accompanied by counterpart 'surges' by the Iraqi government and the other, nonmilitary agencies of the U.S. government," Lute wrote in a document obtained by The Associated Press.
"I also noted that our enemies in Iraq have, in effect, 'a vote' and should be expected to take specific steps to counter from our efforts," he added. "The new policy took such concerns into account. It is too soon to tell the outcome."
Lute was scheduled to testify in public for the first time Thursday since being picked for the position.
If confirmed by the Senate, Lute would hold the title of deputy national security adviser. He would report directly to the president—briefing Bush daily—and work with other government agencies, including the Pentagon and the State Department.
White House officials said Lute's challenge would be to cut through bureaucracy and deliver fast responses when requests come in from military commanders and ambassadors.
"In practical terms, this will mean taking a sober view of where we are now and focusing fully on the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan, even though there is a full range of competing global commitments," Lute wrote committee members.
Several senators were expected to question whether putting a three- star general at the White House now amounts to too little, too late to salvage a deeply unpopular war.
"I think there's a lot of questions that need to be answered as far as what his role is" and his relationship to other administration officials, said the committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. "Where does he fit in precisely?"
The position was difficult to fill, given the unpopularity of a war in its fifth year and uncertainty surrounding the clout that the war coordinator would have.
The search was complicated given Democrats' demands that Bush bring U.S. troops home from Iraq and Republican's skepticism over the troop buildup. The White House tried for weeks to fill the position and approached numerous candidates—including retired four-star generals who turned the job down—before settling on Lute.
At the confirmation hearing, Lute was expected to tell senators that early results of the troop buildup have been mixed.
"No one is satisfied with the status quo: not the Iraqis, not key regional partners, not the U.S. government, and not the American public," according to his prepared remarks.
Lute noted that "conditions on the ground are deeply complex and are likely to continue to evolve—meaning that we must constantly adapt."
Lute has meet in private with committee members. While Lute's position has drawn questions, lawmakers said his character has not.
"He has a lot of stature," said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. "This is a very good general."
When asked whether he thinks Lute could make a difference in the war effort, Levin indicated he had his doubts.
"Look, the policy is set by the president," the chairman told a reporter shortly before meeting with Lute.
Another concern is whether Lute would be exempt from testifying before Congress in future hearings on Iraq because of his role as a presidential adviser. White House officials have not guaranteed the war adviser will be made available, claiming executive privilege.
Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., "believes this is a position that has a strong role in this war ... and that the people's representatives ought to have the ability to talk to and ask questions" of the individual, said Byrd's spokesman Tom Gavin.
Lute has been director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff since September. Before that, he served for more than two years as director of operations at U.S. Central Command, during which he helped oversee combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last month, when Bush announced that Lute was his choice, the president described him as an "accomplished military leader who understands war and government and knows how to get things done."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Apologies
As i said when i started this endeavor, i have a real life which sometimes must take precedence over my beloved blog. For the past few weeks I have been unable to post new material. Face it, the political world right now is in the equivalent of the "phony war" (look it up). The Iraq situation is just more depressing. I am looking for signs of hope in the fact that US and Iranian diplomats have and are talking, and the fact that nutty Iran president Ahmanijad seems to be on a short lease, held closely in check by his real masters. Oh , he will bark now and then when the clerics who run Iran want to stir up the population with patriotic and nationalistic rantings, but so far, he is pretty quiet.
More later.
More later.
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