is what i do

This is way worse than 9-11. It seems likely that New Orleans is history, at least as a major city; it may remain as a name on a map, but no one will live there who has the resources to move somewhere else. Venice can survive; Amsterdam can survive. But no coastal city below sea level can survive in the hurricane corridor. Not in our present era of global warming climate change. (What new euphemism will they come up with to deny what’s happening, now that Katrina has revealed the truth behind that one?)

Here are some links that I’ve found useful:

Boing Boing has a fascinating story about how our perceptions are shaped by the media. Two pictures, each of a person wading waist-deep in the flood waters, dragging a large plastic bag or box behind.

Sad.

Halley Suitt links the looting to this story on Yahoo News.

Sheila Lennon’s Subterranean Homepage News is maintaining good coverage of the disaster from a media perspective.

The Times-Picayune has been positively heroic. It’s only available online now, with staff working out of the LSU Journalism building.

Eric Berger’s SciGuy Science Blog has been an incredibly up-to-date source of accurate news about what, exactly, is happening since several days before the hurricane landed.

Doc Searls takes the broadcast media to task for their overwhelmingly dumb response to the tragedy:

And he lists four things we want to see on our sets:

The New York Times (free registration required) has finally, this morning, caught up with the disaster, in an issue that’s full of excellent reporting. Thy’ve also addressed the first of Doc’s points with an excellent map of the city, showing how the floodwaters are affecting different parts of it.

CNN has been the only mainstream news organization that’s stayed consistently on top of the story in their web coverage. Well-written stories, useful links. And I expect that if you’re able to view the video clips (I’m not, for some reason that I don’t currently have the time or inclination to debug), I suspect that it’s even better.

The only area in which I can see CNN falling down is in their Advertising Links. The screenshot to the right was taken this morning, just an hour or so ago. (As I am writing this, I checked their site again, and it seems that the advertising links are now a bit more appropriate.)

Finally, here is another picture, also taken today (August 31st, 2005, for you history buffs). Thanks to the Daily Kos.

My friend Suhith Wickrema sent me the following analysis of the position two leading candidates for Mayor of Cincinnati have taken regarding crime. His is a cogent analysis. I find it persuasive.

Thanks, Suhith!

My friend Paul points out that the term “believing in God� represents an unusual idiom. In most other situations in which it is used, the phrase “believe in� means something slightly but importantly different from what it means when someone says that she “believes in� God.

If Emily’s husband is accused of philandering, Emily might say that she believes in her husband, and everyone would understand her meaning. Just so, when Colin Powell says that he believes in his President, or when a businessman states his belief in the free market, or a comrade at the barricades says that he believes in Communism, or even when a fan believes in the Yankees or the Mets. In each of those cases, “believing inâ€? is an assertion that the believed-in entity is trustworthy. In no case is it an assertion that the entity actually exists, as it is when someone asserts a “belief in” God. There is never any doubt that Emily’s husband exists, as does the POTUS, Communism, free market capitalism, and the Yankees.

I have no doubt that God exists, in exactly the same way that Communism exists, and the Yankees, and the Office of the President of the United States. God’s existence is validated by the same process that validates the existence of those other entities: people “believe in” Him, in the same way that people believe in Communism and the Yankees. That is, they believe that those entities are what their promotional literature and their apologists claim them to be; they have those particular powers and virtues; they’ve won those victories, defeated those enemies, rewarded, in just those ways, their particular friends and supporters. Indeed, it is more than simple validation at work here. The belief is what makes the existence real. Without believers, similar entities—the Easter Bunny, Almighty Jove, the Gold Standard, the Divine Right of Kings, the Mudville Nine—enter the realm of fairy tale and legend.

Continue Reading »

Eric Berger’s SciGuy science blog has the best ongoing coverage of Katrina, which is shaping up to be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Although the latest news gives a little hope that it won’t be as bad as it looked like it might be earlier today. From Eric’s latest post:

Latest reports are that the three-lane highways north out of New Orleans are at a standstill, and that there are no hotel rooms between Biloxi and Mobile. If I were a praying man, my prayers would be with you.

Update 5:20 PM EDT:

WikiNews has a page up which seems likely to be receiving pretty timely updates.

And while you’re there, support the WikiMedia Foundation.

Over on Joshua Micah Mitchell’s Talking Points Memo, Steve Clemons has written a fine commentary on Juan Coles’ equally fine 10-point plan to deal with Iraq. There’s something in these two posts to anger almost everyone. Both writers understand that the Iraqis need to take control sooner, rather than later, and that they will need, not only our help, but the help of other nations, mainly those who were our close allies until our arrogance forced them to distance themselves from us. Clemons is especially clear on that last point:

But both writers also make the forceful point that simply withdrawing from Iraq would be an abandonment of responsibility and would lead to many more deaths than the on-going insurgency actions are causing. Coles is concise and lucid on the likely results of a quick and unqualified U.S. withdrawal:

The 10-point plan he suggests is pragmatic and convincing, involving quick U.S. withdrawal from urban areas, followed by withdrawal of most ground troops. Those troop withdrawals would be accompanied by continuing U.S. air support of Iraqi military and security forces in firefights with guerilla units, protection of key Iraqi military leaders from assassination attempts, and material support for the Iraqi’s development of a strong armor corps. As a quid pro quo for that military assistance, the U.S. should demand district elections that would insure Sunni Arab participation in the Iraqi parliament, along with amnesty for former Baath Party members who have not been proven to have committed serious crimes, and the reinstatement of those who have been fired from the schools and the civil bureaucracy. With regard to reconstruction, Coles calls on Congress to rewrite the laws requiring that reconstruction funds must be spent with U.S. companies; those funds, he says, should go to Iraqi firms, to help rebuild the economy. Finally, he calls on the U.S. to participate in regular top-level meetings with the foreign ministers of Iraq’s neighbors, along with Russia, “to help put Iraq back on its feet through diplomacy and multilateral aid.”

This is all good sense. It is not strident, and it is not political jockeying for position. It deals with the situation that exists, here, there, and now. If the Democrats were serious about presenting us with alternatives to the demonstrably flawed policies of the Bush Administration, instead of simply wringing their hands and counting on Cindy Sheehan to deliver the electorate, they’d take something like Coles’ 10-point plan and make it into a plank. It’s certainly one that someone should be running on.

Wired Magazine reports on a fascinating study by a couple of vision researchers, who measured eye movements in American, Japanese and Chinese college students while looking at photographs. The Americans latched onto the foreground object in the scene and focused on that, while the Asian students spent much more time scanning the background, taking in the whole scene. The researchers believe they are seeing cultural differences:

I think that these folks are definitely onto something—something that may explain a lot of different things, including the fiasco of the Vietnamese war, the miraculous recovery of Japan after the Second World War, the current rapid decline in US technological superiority, and the likelihood that China will emerge as the dominant nation in the world much more quickly than anyone here expects.

The fact is, that we have lost sight completely of the many virtues inherent in harmony; all we see when we look at a nation working in harmony is a coercive force at the top enforcing conformity. If we look for that in any harmonious society, of course, we will see it. But that’s not all there is to it. And our focus on the foreground prevents us from seeing the equally dangerous and dehumanizing dynamics enforcing conformity in our own society; we think of ourselves as rugged individualists, and of the Chinese and Japanese as herd-mentality communitarians, but that’s a false picture.

I hope that this research continues and extends to other cultures. I’d love to see, for example, how those photos are viewed by people raised in a tribal culture, or by people who have grown up in a traditional Islamic society.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Unfortunately, Bill, there’s nothing quick about Buddhism. And, while there are certainly some parallels between the teachings of Jesus and those of Siddhartha Gautama*, the Buddha, there are very few similarities between Buddhism and Christianity. I’m going to take a stab at giving you an overview, of the similarities and of the differences (always with the understanding that this is as I see it, and I would hesitate to call myself a Buddhist; rather, I am one who finds the teachings of the Buddha more complete and truer than those of any other sage I know.)

There are three things, I think, that most clearly distinguish the Buddhist teachings from the Christian scriptures: the authenticity and coherence of the scriptural documents, the differing natures of Jesus and the Buddha, and the vast differences in the core doctrines. I’ll take these one at a time.
Continue Reading »

Kamma and rebirth

Over at Faith Commons, last week, I made a flippant comment in response to a post by Bill questioning the relationship between the organized Church and the teachings of Jesus, and he challenged my flippancy with a serious request for “a quick list of parallels” between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the Buddha. I’ve been working on a response to that challenge, which I will post here and there very shortly. But in the course of writing that, what began as a footnote glossing the Buddhist concept of rebirth has turned into something way too long for a footnote, so I’ve made it into a post of its own, and here it goes.

This one is the sticking point for a lot of people. They may find Buddhism appealing for its rationality, its common sense. But then they come to the concept of rebirth and they balk. I did. It took me a lot of study, and a lot of thinking, to come to terms with an idea that I found so improbable, so difficult to reconcile with a doctrine that was in other regards so clear and persuasive. I came to realize that my problem with the Buddhist notion of rebirth was based, as so many of my problems are, on unexamined preconceptions derived from the popular culture in which I’ve grown up. When I heard the term “rebirth”, what filled my mind was more Shirley MacLaine than the Buddha; I associated the concept with all sorts of New Age nonsense, with Doonesbury’s Boopsie channeling Hunk Ra, with Mehitabel’s insistence that she is a reincarnation of Cleopatra. And that, of course, is not what it’s about, at all.
Continue Reading »

Cenk Uygur, in his article in The Huffington Post, is uncommonly clear-eyed and persuasive in making his point that we are not engaged in a War Against Terror, but, rather, in a War Against Fundamentalism. He points out that we cannot win a war if we don’t know who the enemy is, and the fact that we don’t know the enemy in the “War Against Terror” is becoming more and more clear each day. Uygur argues that it’s pointless to fight George Bush for starting this misguided war, and that the administration’s concept of a War Against Terror is meaningless; and he asks, “What are we really fighting against?”

The point that we have fundamentalists in this country, and that they are in power, is the important point that Uygur makes.

We need to understand that the fundamentalist in the White House is no different, in his basic craziness, than the fundamentalist in the pulpit or the fundamentalist in the synagogue or the fundamentalist in the mosque. They are all crazy, and they are collaborating (although they don’t see it that way and would deny it) in bringing about the apocolypse they all crave.

Uygur thinks that our failure to engage them is rooted in our politeness: you don’t criticize another man’s beliefs. But we have to engage them; our civilization depends on it.

Well said, Cent Uygur. Your war is one in which I will enlist, gladly.

Om Malik, at Business 2.0, presents a very persuasive argument that Google is preparing to blanket major cities with free wi-fi. He covers both how—Google has, over the past year, been buying up miles of “dark fiber” (unused fiber optic cable) at bargain prices from a telecom industry plagued by bankruptcies—and why—Google could save millions of dollars per month by cutting out the middlemen who charge transit fees for data sent in response to searches.

And then there’s the business proposition. In April, Google sponsored a free wi-fi hotspot in San Francisco’s Union Square, working with a local startup called Feeva.

That would work for me.