How can any lover of liberty not find this frightening?

“ …[S]ince 2001, the judges [of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which grants warrants under FISA] have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004 - the most recent years for which public records are available. “[1]

Thus, only 3.171% of all warrant requests were modified (rounding up).

“The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years - the first outright rejection in the court's history.”[2]

That’s right.  The US government lost 0.11% of its requests (again, rounding up).

Let’s indulge in a bit of math, shall we?  Counting each warrant granted “as is” as a full point, each modified warrant as a half point, and each rejected request as a zero, what’s the US government’s success rate?

5,549.5 out of 5,645 is…. 98.31%

You understand correctly.  A process which gave the Bush Administration exactly what it wanted 98.31% of the time was deemed so soft, so unreliable by that those same guardians of the law broke the law. 

The implication is obvious, but since many of the Administration’s defenders seem to miss it, let me spell it out:  Bush and the US government want what they want 100% of the time.  A government that seeks 100% compliance to its will is a tyranny. A government that ignores laws is a tyranny.   A government that ignores the courts that enforce the law is a tyranny.  What part of this is unclear to them?

 

 

"Things got so weird that when the NHL canceled its season, Canada didn't seem to mind. I don't know what it takes to get some passion out of those people. I'm guessing it involves being mistaken for an American."
Joel Stein, LA Times, "The Year of the Clueless"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein27dec27,0,2433229.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

On a bit of a tangent, an interesting book on Lewis is The Question of God : C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Dr. Armand Nicoli, (Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital).   The author chooses to examine the existence or non-existence of God by contrasting the lives and philosophies of Lewis, one of the best-known Christians, and Freud, one of the best-known atheists.    In effect, he has them debate each other.  And, critiques below aside, it is well worth a read (or a listen: there is an excellent unabridged audiobook version).

It is a fascinating book, but one which cants too much towards accepting the Lewist / believer school.  This is especially noticeable as one soon realizes that Nicoli’s has a noticeable “default setting” towards faith.  This greatly hampers the neutrality and objectivity which he seems to be striving towards.   One notices it most on issues where there, on a point at issue, a solid argument in favour of the deist view generated what can call a “Win” before Nicoli the judge.  It is analogous to the old feminist saying that a woman can’t be as good as a man to be taken seriously, but rather she has to be twice as good: so it is for an atheist argument before Nicoli.   This bias problem aside, the book is a bit of a rigged game in and of itself, for four central reasons.

First, Nicoli examines, as a part of his evaluation, the role and impact of belief on Lewis and non-belief on the choice of *these* two men.  This is an unfair comparison.  Lewis was man of faith who drew tremendous strength, peace and happiness from his relationship to his God.  Freud, however, was a deeply unhappy man who had little which brought him peace or contentment in any context.  Nicoli concludes (often indirectly, and with other examples) that faith seems to bring inner peace and lack thereof inner turmoil.  A first year logic student could blow a huge hole in this: If X, living in Austin, is unhappy, and Y, living in Boston is happy, it does not necessarily follow that living in Austin makes you unhappy and living in Boston makes you happy.  Such a silly argument seems to carry weight with Nicoli, though, which is odd: there are vast numbers of miserable believers and quite cheery atheists.  (One could go further and point out that even if one were to accept the premise that having faith gives you peace, that peace may be the calm of letting others accept responsibility.  A person of deep faith always has a security net: God will make things better, and if He doesn’t then he will in the Next Life.  An atheist is left with the more brutal and unhappy task of seeing to making things better himself: no deity is going to make him or his world better or happier, so he has to shoulder the entire burden, and has only a pathetically short time to do so.  [I know that such an argument is open to counterattack, and I do not advance it as determinative, only to show that Nicoli often glides by such basic concepts if they do not suit his purpose.])

As a supplement to that thought, let’s not forget that Lewis was a Christian in a country where Christianity was accepted and central at best, and benign at worst.  Freud was a Jew in one of the most anti-Semitic parts of Europe.  To give Nicoli his deserved due, he provides excellent perspective on how both the excesses (and weaknesses) of both Judaism and its persecutors as experienced by Freud would have perhaps inevitably tainted the doctor’s view of religion.  Lewis may have had some unhappy experiences with religion as a child, but he was never in social purgatory and possible risk of death because of simply being a Christian.  That is not something a Jew could say, even before the Holocaust.

Second, let’s not forget the basic dates, shall we?   Freud died in 1939, and had little or no knowledge of CS  Lewis and his views and arguments.  Lewis on the other hand, died in 1963 and was quite conversant with Freud and with his arguments, and often addressed them directly.  How fair can a debate be if only one side knows the other’s views?  Take it further:  how fair can a debate be if only one side even knows that a debate is in progress? 

Third, Lewis was “centred” on faith: it was a – if not the central pillar of his existence.  Lewis can be seen as a man of two foci: literature and God, with a great deal of overlap in his time spent addressing them.  With Freud, on the other hand, faith was only one thing amongst countless things that he addressed.  It was an interesting and important mental disorder, in his view, but not the only one.  Lewis is in the position of a specialist having a debate with a generalist on the specialist’s area of expertise.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, and certainly most grotesquely, in taking the two as representative of their positions, Nicoli gives a ludicrous advantage to Lewis.  CS Lewis, in making arguments for a theist viewpoint, stood on the shoulders of thousands of years of philosophy and theological disputation, argument and counterargument.   He was, if you will passed a baton that had already been carried by others for almost the entire length of the race.  Freud, by way of contrast, was a pathfinder, an explorer and explainer of new uncharted areas of humanity’s inner and outer existence.  Like all explorers he was frequently and often ludicrously wrong.  Such is the price of going where no other person has thought of going, or even dared to tread.  To argue by analogy: am I a better navigator that Captain James Cook because he stumbled around the Pacific in a leaky boat for years, bumping into things,  whereas I can hop onto a jet and smoothly arrive in Australia in less than a day?  Such an argument is obviously arrant nonsense: I am only able to do this because others invented and improved the airplane, built the airport, (etc.), and, for that matter, discovered Australia.  Lewis, in going where two millennia of thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas and the like have gone is not to be considered the winner of a straight-up debate.  Like Newton, if he is able to see far it is because he has stood on the shoulders of giants, staring out at from the topmost point of a tower built over hundreds of years.  Freud had to build his vistas from scratch and frequently singlehandedly.

With having said what I have said here, It may seem odd to have me conclude with the notion that Nicoli’s book is well worth reading, yet I do.  It challenges you to think, to feel, to examine your preconceived notions and wonder at the questions of the infinite.  And in a world where people of faith often challenge not your intellect, but rather your very rights and humanity, and even whether you are even allowed to exist, such a warm embrace and invitation to reason’s home is to be grasped with both hands.

 

My god, do things get less effetely cautious and more scathingly funny than this?   I will, no doubt, blog on this later, but until then, watch it!

It was just past midnight, and I couldn't sleep.  I strolled through my flat, back and forth with only a light on here and there.

I have, after a year here, finished many of the "touches" that I wanted.  Quite a lot, actually.  Yet despite this, I look at it, and my mind says, "incomplete".

Ah yes, says another part of the mind.  Maybe so.  But is the flat incomplete, or is it just you?

"Valid philosophical point", I say to myself.  "And you may be right.  But it still needs a nice small couch."

My late father, Maurice, "Sandy" during the War, but it wasn't a nickname that lasted after hostilities.  A cockney, born in Camberwell, south London, he joined the RAF at age 18.  Trained with by the Commonwealth Air Training Program over 'ere, he went into combat aircrew as a rear gunner in a Lancaster.  He survived sixteen raids over Germany, when many rear gunners only lasted four or so.

And avoided talking about it all as much as he could.

The elegant and respected Ms. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times has jumped on the MSM bandwagon savaging the current Bush administration for its ethical lapses: “Dick at the Heart of Darkness”, October 26, 2005, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102605M.shtml.

 

What is it about the American media’s People Who Go To The Right Parties And Interview Each Other which leads them from pack-cowardice to pack-swarmings?  Ahhhh, I remember now.  Moral independence results in possible alienation from the In Groups.  The salon invitations dry up and you are forced to (shudder) actually fight for your principles rather than find an elegantly tailored way of expressing the ones of those around you.  (The other guests, that is.  People like the waiters aren’t noticed or important.)  I suppose that’s why decent Yank op-ed reporters spend so much time out of the country (like Nick Kristof) or actually working hard on facts that no-one else will cover (like Bob Herbert). 

 

Actually, I know little about Ms. Dowd and could care less about her social life.  For all I know she never goes to those sort of soirées.  But she certainly writes like she does: fashionably.  If it waddles and quacks I am willing to call it a duck, even if it isn’t one.

 

For those of you who haven’t followed the link and read the article, let me summarize it for you.  Bill Clinton dishonoured the White House with his grotty little tryst.  [True.  It was also a tactically foolish mistake, which was, of course, the worse Presidential Sin.]  But the current bunch are downright evil scoundrels who have dishonoured the place in a far, far worse fashion, creating mayhem and death in their wake.  [Also true.  How nice of you to notice, Ms. Dowd…. years too late.]

 

However, the lady’s criticisms are done in the fervent hope that her readers are amnesiacs.   During the Ken Starr years Dowd’s talented pen crafted harsh commentary on President Clinton’s private misdeeds.  It is too late and too hypocritical for her to now say that “[a]t least it was only a little pantry - and a little panting”.  Back then Ms. Dowd was a distinguished part of the chorus who convinced many in the public that Mr. Clinton’s private dishonour was a matter of governmental significance.  It wasn’t, and to have sung in that chorus was to have effectively said Mr. Clinton’s vulgarity was more deserving of the public censure than was the judicial-prosecutorial attack on him.  In missing that crucial point years ago she lent herself to the service of those who skillfully convinced the American public that Clinton’s personal sexual immorality was more repellent than those who had corrupted the morality and integrity of the system itself.

 

Put in the form of a metaphor, Ms. Dowd disapproved of someone’s improper bit of oral sex and subsequent alleged fibbing about it.  She disapproved so much that she repeatedly sang the same song as the howling mob and corrupt cops who tried to jail the miscreant on trumped up charges, and was incapable of noticing at the time that media lynching and dirty cops and judges were a lot scarier than marital infidelity.  That raises being obtuse to a startling height, especially for a woman of Dowd’s intelligence.

 

Part of the problem may lie not in Ms. Dowd, but in the rather odd semantic game that Americans play around the word “morality”.  In MSM and right-wing / Christian discourse, the word is taken to mean, almost exclusively, sexual morality.  Improper Sex = Immoral; Immoral = Improper Sex.  A closed loop.  The notion of “morality” – both as a word and as an objective – having a wider and more noble definition escapes them.  What would such a wider definition be?  A reasonable working start might be this: the proper, dignified personal, political and economic treatment of one’s fellow humans. 

 

You see, of course, the problem for simplistic-types in such a definition:  If one accepts that the wider definition of “moral” is valid, then one must naturally compare the results of the wider immorality with the results of the narrower kind.  Thus, one is faced with questions like, “What is more immoral?

·                     (a) sexual infidelity, or (b) subverting a democracy’s judicial and legislative system?

·                     (a) sex you don’t approve of, or (b) your neighbour not having enough food to feed her kids?

·                     (a) twisting words to avoid admitting a ludicrous tryst, or (b) twisting facts in order to launch a war that can’t move forward without those lies?”

 

The end result of such an inquiry leads (unless you are a psychiatric-help-needed sexual obsessive) to answering “b” each time.  And that leads to you opposing the people who want to subvert your democracy, starve your neighbour or kill foreigners in the guise of ideological or sexual purity.  So what’s a good, moral person to do?  Well, if you are Maureen Dowd, you pretend not to notice “b”, because “a” is better copy.  Then, when “b” becomes better copy years later, you write about that and hope that people don’t notice your – yes, the word is apt – immorality in having done so.

 

I do not know whether Ms. Dowd’s hypocrisy is one of forgetfulness, cognitive dissonance or brazen dissembling.  I do know that she is ill-placed to complain about the presence of what she didn’t notice – or pretended not to notice – some years ago.  And, like her colleague Judy Miller (who Ms.Dowd savaged some days ago) she ought to be ashamed of herself.

 

Oh, I forgot.  “Shame” only extends to sex unless it’s safe and fashionable to lay it elsewhere.  I’m sure that she’d want me to remember that.  She certainly does.

And so the site is up, but not yet actually *set* up.  Stay tuned.

But in the meantime, can someone please explain to me why I found these people in my yard this morning?