By: Dana Blankenhorn

It’s a tough question that grew more urgent to me yesterday, when I watched George W. Bush comparing Iraq to World War II while New Orleans sank under Lake Pontchartrain.

If you look at the article on the syndrome posted at About.Com, the answer would have to be “no.” The article states tha the “dry drunk” has never gotten through the grieving process in the loss of alcohol, and recommends several steps toward recovery, which Bush seems to have engaged in:

Develop a hobby.

Get healthy.

Improve your mind.

Spend time with your family.

But in his book “Bush on the Couch,” Dr. Justin Frank insists he is just that, and more. He blames his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, calling her emotionally distant, and says the death of his sister Robin triggered things.

David Isenberg post a comment on Bush on his isen.blog.

And Dana Blankenhorn has posted this about The Big One on his Corante blog.

More as they come in.

Thanks,

Jock

Daniel C. Dennett’s “Show me the Science” op-ed, published in the August 28th edition of the NY Times, perfectly defines evolution as a powerful, goal seeking [heuristic], approach to life: life, not death. Contrast this with the item about getting advice on living from the web site of Ayatollah Sistani: a very rigid rule-based [algorithmic] approach to living. But, to give the West its due, there are many examples of rules dominated approaches to life that enshrine hierarchy and privilege in a the West’s top-down, hub and spoke organizational model.

The clash of these two basic world views, rules vs goals, is tectonic in nature. The goal seeking I talk about only has principles that describe a general means towards an abstract objective, such as justice as fairness, but does not specify one right answer.

The real problem is rule-based solutions, because the rules encode the possibility of a one right answer approach. See for, example, how the FCC’s algorithmic approach to spectrum management compares to the goal seeking approach in Open Spectrum and cognitive SDRs [Software Defined Radios].

It’s the applications enabled by the connection’s quality

Not everything can be photographed in natural light. In photography, you can set up a camera in a very dark room and leave the lens wide open for ever and get zero exposure on the negative if the number of photons falling on the film per unit of time is below some threshold. This has a fancy name: Reciprocity Failure – which describes certain non-linear aspects of film’s response to light levels.

Well wireless bits are just electromagnetic photons. So, by analogy, if not enough bits are available per unit of time, some things are simply impossible. The “exposure” is never realized and is meaningless.

Consider, if you will, the situation in the Pacific island Kingdom of Tonga. On Tonga it costs a local ISP about $13K per month for a link that provides 2 Mbps down and 1 mbps up – with the increased latency of a geosynchronous satellite connection as opposed to a terrestrial connection. An islander will pay about $2,500 per month US for 512 Kbps down/128 Kbps up. With this very limited capacity, how realistic is it to expect that people living on Tonga will find it “normal” to work with applications that use large files, such as the Democracy Now files mentioned below? The flow of bits as electromagnetic photons, combined with their substantial latency, is such that it prevents the islanders from benefiting from modern applications running on high capacity, high quality connections.

The unravelling of Bush world is gathering momentum.

President George W. Bush’s 36% approval rating in the most recent, August 22, American Research Group, Inc. polls, is lower than President Nixon’s 39% rating at the time of Watergate! Yet this is NOT being covered by the Main Stream Media.

Clearly the tide is turning against Bush. The great and patient American people are showing that they no longer approve of Bush and his polices. Most interestingly, he has lost the undecided voters:

Among Independents (28% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 21% approve and 72% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

The first really big lie after the Civil War was in 1886. As Thom Hartman writes in his book Unequal Protection:

Because of a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court reporter’s notes in an 1886 railroad tax case, corporations are now legally considered “persons,” equal to humans and entitled to many of the same protections guaranteed only to humans by the Bill of Rights – a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founders of the United States. The results of this “corporate personhood” have been:

* Unequal taxes
* Unequal privacy
* Unequal wealth
* Unequal trade
* Unequal media
* Unequal regulation
* Unequal responsibility for crime
* Unequal protection from risk
* Unequal citizenship and access to the commons

Oddly enough, this corporate personhood had been sought by the rail roads for many years. Unsurprisingly, the court reporter who inserted the big lie into the record was a former rail road baron.

This lie was the product of greed and a blindness to what Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin saw as an essential condition for a successful modern society: the integration of our inherent drives for community with our inherent drive to individual achievement into something far greater than the sum of the parts. Franklin’s strong belief in this can be deduced from his creation of the Junto Club in 1727 and from the fact that he intentionally did not patent his inventions of the bifocal, the metal stove, nor the lightning rod.

Cross posted from Project Censored:

The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election

By Dennis Loo, Ph.D.
Cal Poly Pomona
ddloo@csupomona.edu

“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (Through the Looking Glass)

In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1)

The post then goes on to list 18 items that are in fact completely unbelievable. And then continues with:

By: Dana Blankenhorn

Cindy Sheehan has been able to demonstrate just how naked the Emperor is, and how naked the Empire is.

No one else could, because everyone else was afraid. Howard Dean said “we broke it, we own it.” John Kerry supported it and couldn’t back away from it.

This is how Democrats felt forced to respond, because they’d been stuck into a political wilderness for a generation by Vietnam. They were afraid to equate Iraq with Vietnam, fearing political wilderness, fearing the chains that had bound liberalism and the cause of human rights for a generation.

Well, Cindy Sheehan broke through that fear. She lost her son. It transformed her. (It didn’t transform her husband or her other kids, but everyone’s journey is different.)

By putting that transformation in our face, and in the face of George W. Bush, she is making a change in us. Damn the past, damn the present, our kids are dying. The Emperor and Empire really are naked.

There is no way at this point for the Emperor to appear clothed again, and his supporters know it.

Texan Jon Lebkowsky has a fine post over on his blog:

August 16, 2005
Cindy Sheehan, War, and Denial

Politicos and activists working overtime were unsuccessful in penetrating national denial about the nature and causes of the war in Iraq, but a single determined mother, driven by grief and a growing sense that something’s not right, seems to be having an effect, despite attempts by (I’ll say this tactfully) her critics to undermine her credibility. What Christopher Hitchens refers to as dreary sentimental nonsense is interpreted differently by Sheehan’s many supporters, perhaps as an awakening of American conscience. Almost 1500 Americans have died in combat since the war begin in March 2003. The war was actually an American invasion of another country, which should have been shocking in itself, and it was justified by a lie (Sadaam’s weapons of mass destruction), which definitely should have been shocking… and some were indeed shocked, a few asked hard questions about the war, but it seemed to fade into the background noise behind more compelling issues… whether Scott Peterson killed his wife Laci, whether Michael Jackson molested children at Neverland Ranch, whether athletes were pumping steroids, whether Brad left Jennifer for Angelina….

Snip ——–

The 70th anniversary of Social Security is fast upon us. I recommend that you go to the link below to NPR’s On Point radio show for a very interesting segment on the origins of Social Security. Click on “Closing Segment” Then scroll down to the Closing Segment to listen to Francis Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member, in a 1935 talk on the need for cooperation and mutuality to protect all of us from the unknown vagaries of the market.

The history, the context, of her achievement is fascinating.

Today’s political leaders appear to be leading the forces that reject cooperation and mutuality as an organic part of American culture [Social Security, Social safety nets, etc].