Café Philos: an internet café

I've heard models described as vacuous airheads, but that doesn't describe Suzanne unless someone can be both a vacuous airhead and an intelligent, creative, buoyant, and artistic woman.

I believe she was all of 14 years old when she first modeled lingerie for Victoria's Secrets, the catalog and store company. She couldn't have been much older because I met her when she was 16 and she was no longer modeling by then.

Over the years, Suzanne has revealed a persistent talent for getting fired from employments, so I strongly suspect she was no longer modeling by the time we met because Secrets had refused anything more to do with her. She's not a vacuous airhead, but she is dysfunctional.

The story I'm prepared to tell you today concerns Suzanne, Victoria's Secrets, and her abusive boyfriend. I've already introduced Suzanne and Victoria's Secrets, so I'll turn now to the boyfriend.

Meet Jeff.

He's one of those males who prey on women much younger than themselves. Jeff is 20 years older than Suzanne, and very few women his own age have ever sustained an interest in him. Jeff can be charming. He can be witty. He can be exciting. He can sweep a naive and inexperienced girl off her feet. Yet, most women see the looser in him. So Jeff has learned to specialize in the young, naive and inexperienced women he has some chance of getting.

Once he gets them, he doesn't know what to do with them. He turns the affair into a drama, the drama into a tragedy, the tragedy into a nightmare. When you take some fish out of the water, their colors at first fascinate, then fade. Latter, the fish begin to stink. Any girl who lands Jeff sooner or later learns that in a relationship, he's a fish out of water.

Young people almost invariably overestimate the odds in their favor of significantly changing someone, and especially they overestimate their odds of changing a lover. Maybe that's because they are always being told by their parents, preachers, and teachers to change themselves, and so they assume it actually works when you tell people to change themselves.

In truth, the only person likely to change someone is the person themselves. And even then, seldom, if ever, is a person capable of a fundamental change: It's not in the nature of water to become stone, nor of stone to become air.

In the few years Jeff and Suzanne were together, Suzanne wanted two things, both absurd. She wanted to change Jeff against his nature. And she wanted her own nature to bloom. The latter was absurd because Jeff had her under his thumb and was abusing her emotionally, psychologically, and physically. No one blooms under those conditions. At best, they merely endure.

If you yourself have seen a few abusive relationships, you know they are all alike, except for the details. The only detail of the relationship between Jeff and Suzanne that surprised me was that Jeff apparently never tried to keep Suzanne from seeing me.

I'm clueless why he didn't. It's a classic pattern of abuse that the abuser tries to prevent his victim from having any friends who are outside of his influence or control. But through out the time she was with Jeff, Suzanne saw me almost daily. It's true she seldom associated with me in Jeff's presence, but we spent hours together while he was at work or off somewhere else. That sort of thing normally doesn't happen in an abusive relationship.

Suzanne would look me up almost every day. We'd then go to a coffee shop, a movie, the mall, "The Well" -- which was her favorite nudist resort -- or we'd go hiking, or drive around Colorado for a few hours. Whatever amused us.

Once, we even went to Victoria's Secrets. That was three or so years into Suzanne's relationship with Jeff. That day, we'd gone to the mall.

When we were passing the Victoria's Secrets store, Suzanne wanted to go in. The racks, of course, were full of lingerie, and Suzanne excitedly asked me to choose three sets for her to try on. She then took me back to a dressing room where she stripped and modeled the sets for me.

Christmas was a month off, so I asked her a lot of questions about each of the three sets, including which one felt the most comfortable -- if I'm going to give lingerie to a woman, it damn well better be comfortable, especially at Victoria's prices.

Looking at a young nude woman is at least as fascinating to me as watching a beautiful sunrise. Yet, I'm not attracted to most young women's sexuality, and especially not to Suzanne's. Their sexuality is more likely to depress me than to stimulate me, although I'm not quite sure why. At any rate, I certainly do not make a point of telling young women they aren't sexy -- I have my life to protect! So that day I told Suzanne, "This is a lot of fun for me -- watching you model that sexy lingerie. If I'm having so much fun, think of how much fun it would be for Jeff! Why don't you bring him out here?"

Suzanne didn't answer immediately. When she did answer, her voice had gone strange. There was a tone in it I'd never heard before. In a way, it was a little girl's voice. But perhaps it only sounded like a little girl's voice because she was having difficulty controlling it. She said, "Jeff wouldn't like it. If I did this with him, he'd call me a slut."

We fell into silence. Then she began taking off the last set of lingerie in order to get back into her own clothes, but she was trembling.

When you abuse a woman, you prevent her from being true to herself. At it's core, that's what abuse really is -- it's preventing someone from being true to themselves.

Sometimes it comes out in ways that are large enough and important enough to easily describe. Like the woman whose husband prevents her from developing her musical genius so that the world looses a classical pianist. But much more often, abuse comes out in ways that are harder to see, such as when a woman trembles in a dressing room because her lover will not, or cannot, accept her sexuality whole and complete, just as it is, without condemning it.

Those harder to see ways are as criminal as the other. You don't need to beat a woman to abuse her. You can just as well kill a person's sense of themselves, their self-esteem, their self direction -- by a thousand tiny cuts.

By the time I met Suzanne I was too old and had seen too much wickedness to harbor any fantasy that I could reason with her into leaving Jeff. I knew she was confused beyond reason, frightened into uncertainty, blinded by her feelings, and emotionally dependent on him. So, I did the only things I thought I could do, which were never that great nor enough.

For the most part, that amounted to just accepting her for herself.

It's got to be the worse movie review of the decade to date. If there's one that's worse than it, I don't want to read it for fear my eyeballs will explode.

The review is of Beowulf and here's a sample insight from the review: "Beowulf the movie, based on the epic poem of the same name, is quite probably the most heinous culprit for stealing childhood from children ever made."

The review is done by a professed Christian who actually goes so far as to make up facts about the Bible in order to damn the movie for its nudity. Are you feeling up to full strength this morning? Then you can read the review here. There's also a lively commentary on the review itself here.

Many thanks to DOF for alerting me to this atrocity.

The 11th Humanist Symposium is up at Greenbelt and it looks like a good one. Check it out here.

"Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art."

- Stanislaw Lec

I blame my mother for teaching me three truths about youth.

The first of her truths is that all girls are pretty and all boys are handsome. I used to hate being taught that one by her.

She taught it to me throughout my childhood and adolescence. She did it simply: Merely by praising the beauty of myself and my young friends. I hated it when she did that because it sounded false to my naive ears. Especially during adolescence, I couldn't believe she was anything but a lunatic when it came to beauty, because I had a markedly different standard of beauty than hers.

I had internalized the standards of my peers. Among ourselves, we had no sense of the universal beauty of youth. We didn't see that truth. One of us might be beautiful, but certainly not all of us. Certainly not our classes' ugliest girl nor most homely boy. So I would shrink in fright each time my mother pronounced that one or another of my classes' "less attractive" boys or girls was beautiful. I'd think, "Has anyone overheard her besides me? I'll die if they discover my Mom is an idiot! "

Roughly around 40, I discovered for myself the universal beauty of youth. That is, I finally saw what my mother had been talking about all those years. The beauty of youth transcends whatever happens to be fashionable beauty. It is timeless and universal.

The second truth my mother taught me was how transparent a youth is to an adult.

Mostly she did that by instantly seeing through my every pretension. Many times when we're growing up, we want to put on a front, we want to have pretensions, and we especially do not want our mothers to see through those pretensions. Instead, we want the sense of privacy that comes with imagining no one else knows we're bluffing.

Yet, just as a six year old is transparent to a 16 year old, so is a 16 year old transparent to a full adult. To this day, I have mixed feelings about that truth.

On the one hand, I've learned over the years that it is basic human nature to play at being something before one becomes something. Like all mammals, humans in most cases learn best through play. If you want to be a charitable person, first "play pretend" you are a charitable person. If you want to be a good lover, first "play pretend" you are a good lover. Playing/pretending kicks in whatever gears there are in our brains that allow us to learn very complex behaviors. So, to the extent we put on fronts as part of that learning process, it's not all that helpful when your mother tells you to "quit pretending to be something you're not."

On the other hand, when your mother tells you to "quit pretending", it can be a great lesson in the futility of living inauthentically. The trick is whether your mother knows you well enough to steer you away from trying to become something untrue to your nature, and instead tries to steer you towards becoming things true to your nature. That's largely what my mother did, and today I'm grateful to her for it.

She allowed and even encouraged me to play pretend at things that developed my natural talents into skills. She discouraged me from playing pretending at things I had little or no natural talent for, or which were anti-social. She was able to do that because she was some 39 years older than me and my own true nature was transparent to her.

At 37, I moved to Colorado. Through a strange set of circumstances it happened the first 200 or so people I met here were mostly kids. Some of them attached themselves to me, and I used to wonder why they willingly attached themselves to a man two decades their senior.

One day the answer came to me: I was doing for them what my mother had done for me. I was encouraging them to be true to themselves in the same persistent and often subtle ways my mother had encouraged me to be true to myself. That's what they wanted and even needed from a man two decades their senior -- someone who could see through their insecure fronts, and encourage their true selves.

The final truth my mother taught me about youth is the tragedy of wasted potential. This was something she taught through her comments on people. As I was growing up, she would occasionally point out how this or that person had wasted their talents. She never made a big deal of it, and her comments were always more or less in passing, but her point nevertheless sank in.

Is some part of youth's universal beauty the almost tangible sense of potential that young people exude? I don't know. But I know potential is thick on youth. I know that youth is a time when crucial steps are taken -- or at least should be taken -- to realize that potential. And I know that a thousand pitfalls await youth which will prevent all but a minority of them from ever fully realizing their genuine potential. That last strikes me as an especially poignant tragedy, and I think the reason the tragedy of wasted potential affects me as deeply as it does is in part because of my mother's teachings.

Again, this is something I saw most clearly in my late 30s and 40s, and if you have kindly read this essay, you will know by now that's a pattern with how I've absorbed my mother's teachings about youth. In each case, she pointed me to look. But in each case, I either didn't look, or perhaps couldn't look, at what she pointed until I was middle-aged. Yet, once I looked, I saw clearly what she had been all those years talking about.

Now, if I add all three of those lessons together to make a sum, then I get something like this: My mother prepared me through her teachings to clearly see, once I was older, how beautiful youth is, how important it is that youth learns to be true to itself, and how tragic it is when it doesn't.

All in all, I think those are some pretty profound lessons.

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I had a pleasant surprise. A friend I hadn't seen in over two years showed up on my doorstep, healthy and happy.

The healthy and happy bit was very much part of the surprise. Suzanne has suffered over many of her 28 years from a nearly debilitating emotional disorder. But yesterday she was quite happy and seemed healthier than I remember as being usual for her.

So far as I know, Suzanne is the world's only former Victoria Secrets model to join a traveling circus.

She lasted a year in the circus job, which is a long time for her to last in any job. She's energetic, exceptionally intelligent, and hard working. But then there's that emotional disorder thing. It impairs her judgment, and she tends to screw things up with the result that she's had very little stability in her life.

She was 16, I was 39, when we first met at a coffee shop. It's been a dozen years now, and that circus stint is still the longest she's held onto a job. She says she's known me longer than nearly anyone else in her life outside of family, and I believe her. I've lost count of the number of apartments and rental homes she's had. It's as if Suzanne repels stability.

Like so many people with an emotional disorder, Suzanne has been in a protracted abusive relationship. He was twenty years her senior and the sort of man who habitually preyed on much younger women. Quite charming at first.

She had two sons by him. She finally left him when he began to abuse her sons, too.

I've always admired Suzanne's buoyancy. No matter what else that emotional disorder has done to her, it hasn't taken her resilience. She always bounces back. And maybe her buoyancy has something to do with the fact she and I can laugh together at even the worse of her misadventures. Yesterday, during her visit, we laughed so hard recalling her miscalculations and misjudgments that I had to wipe my eyes -- several times.

I don't recall who started it, but there's a running joke between us. It's a bit crude, and she's a bit more likely to express herself crudely than I am, so maybe she started it. At any rate, each time I bail her out of some distress she's gotten herself into, she swears she owes me a blow job for it. In return, I tell her that I'm not feeling like one at the moment, and so I'll put it on her tab. Yesterday, she reminded me that she now "owes" me 53 blow jobs for the number of times I've bailed her out of some mess since we started that joke years ago.

In truth, Suzanne has taught me a great deal about giving. Even before I met her, I had learned to give without most strings attached, without most expectation, or most hope, of gaining anything in return. But there was something I hadn't yet learned. There was something I still expected to come from my generosity.

I expected improvement.

Without being consciously aware of my expectations, I hoped when giving to someone that they would learn from their mistake -- from whatever mistake put them in a position to need a hand out -- and that they would improve themselves. I even unconsciously considered a gift wasted if the person did not learn from their mistakes.

Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. That's a pretty good insight into what a severe emotional disorder can do to a person's judgment. Suzanne is like that.

Suzanne will repeat a mistake again and again, without being aware that she is doing the same thing over and over with only insignificant variations. Her disorder is a cruel one.

At first that frustrated me. When I examined my frustration, I saw it was because I expected her to improve. When I thought about my hope she would improve, I discovered my hope for her was a string I was attaching to my gifts to her. And then I was struck by how unrealistic and unfair to her it was of me to do that.

It was through giving to her I learned to give without even that expectation of any reward for my generosity.

If you yourself make a practice of giving without strings, then you know how liberating it is to do so. And because I myself know that feeling of liberation, and value it, I am grateful to Suzanne for helping me realize it. Perhaps that's her greatest gift to me. If so, it's a good one.

She has many fine qualities, and there's nothing genuinely evil or humanly indecent about her. If life were a child's fantasies of life, then life would be fair; and if life were fair, the Suzannes of this world would never be afflicted with cruel emotional disorders. For someone with her talents and abilities could accomplish a lot of good, both for herself and others -- if only she were healthy and not such an habitual screw up.

Happy Thanksgiving!

May your day be blessed with happiness.

D.H. Lawrence somewhere says that youth should not be misled into believing that it must rebel against authority and tradition in order to achieve freedom. Lawrence asserts that those battles have already been fought and won. Youth is largely free to do as it pleases today, and so it is misleading youth to tell them that they should be battling against authority and tradition.

On the other hand, Lawrence points out that the real revolution youth must accomplish is "to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door." That is, to find and exploit the aspects of life that youth does not even as yet suspect are part of life. Doing so will bring about a greater revolution in youth than will battling against authority and tradition.

What do you think of this? Is the real job of youth to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door, or is it to battle against tradition and authority? Which brings greater freedom? Which is more revolutionary?

We tried a little house on Kenyon.
You bought curtains, some furniture,
And had me nothing to do
But take the garbage out.
It was all you could stand,
You said, "In a male".

I suppose I wanted
To stack up blocks like sane people:
House and car, flowers and work;
As if ever I could pile those blocks
Somewhere up
Beyond crazy for us.

I wonder now
How I thought that was my place.

That last night, I noticed the lunatic moon
Didn't really stop at the door, and astonished,
As if I'd forgotten something three times repeated,
Left Kenyon Road.

I like the red
the red of the Z-Teca sign
the Z-Teca sign
the Z-teca sign outside
outside in the sunlight
outside in the sunlight
now.

I remember
Laughing under summer skies --
Would have thought we could fly --
And the winds pass on by.

I remember
Holding hands while the river flowed --
Came a time to let you go --
And the waters pass on by.


Now for all that I know
You have a good life
Filled with the stars
And the trees.

But all that I do know --
It's the life you should have,
So beautiful
You were to me.

On a forum I frequent is a person who wants to be your guru. He's had some mystical experiences (He claims they are beyond counting), and has reached firm conclusions about the nature of god, the self, and the universe.

Whoever doesn't agree with him is a fool, he says, because he has had so many more profound experiences than they. Better yet, he's even brighter than they are too. How can you beat such reasonable qualifications?

Some of the people on the forum are even impressed by this man. He's witty in his put-downs, you know. A sure sign he's the Buddha.

Some years ago, I did a stint as a firefighter. In the ready room, the room where we waited for the calls, the men would bullshit. "Captain, what do you think of abortion?"

"Simple! Abortion is always wrong."

"Lieutenant, what do you think of abortion?

"It's murder, plain and simple."

"Anderson, what do you think of abortion?"

"There's no two ways about it: A woman has a right to choose."

The men would bullshit like that until a call came in.

Then they'd get real.

A fire does not favor firm conclusions. Fighting a fire is a game of odds. A game of probabilities. You cannot be certain what the fire is going to do. You can't bullshit a fire.

In a fire, you calculate the odds, take your best chance, and go with it. You don't look for absolute truth. There is none. You don't reach absolute conclusions because you're not a fool. You stay alert. You remain open to the changing reality.

Reality is always changing. It's just that most of our time is spent in the ready room where we don't notice it changing. So, we relax and bullshit. We speak with absolute conviction. We even call that kind of talk, "being serious". But it's light years from being serious. It's light years from reality.

I suppose it's possible that "seeing god" somehow leaves a person with absolute convictions about god, the self, and the universe.

But if I had to bet on that, I'd bet those absolute convictions are simple, fundamental misinterpretations of what he or she experienced. I'd bet what they really experienced was just as uncertain as dancing with fire.



(Photo courtesy of Ernest von Rosen, www.amgmedia.com)

I once lived with a woman who took sharp offense if my opinion did not agree with hers. Among other things, the experience taught me few domestic arrangements are more disagreeable to me than living with someone who demands agreement.

I think of erotic art and porn as being two different but similar things.

To me, porn is something that reduces its subject to no more than his or her sexuality. In doing that it degrades the person in much the same way that reducing anyone to just one thing degrades them.

For instance: If you reduce a person to no more than the fact they are Black, Jewish, Mormon, a particular nationality, or a member of this or that political party, then in some sense you are degrading them. Likewise, if you reduce a person to no more than his or her sexuality you are degrading them.

Yet, I think erotic art is distinct from porn in the sense that erotic art, as I use the term, reveals someone's sexuality without entirely reducing them to their sexuality, just as you can acknowledge someone's race without entirely reducing them to their race.

It interests me that those who would reduce people to just one thing also -- perhaps almost invariably -- distort that one aspect of them. So, for instance, when the Nazis reduced Jews to "just Jews" they also characterized Jews in unrealistic and lying ways. Again, when the KKK reduces Blacks to "just Blacks" they also lie about what it means to be Black. And when the porn industry reduces a man or woman to just their sexuality, it almost invariably ascribes to them an unrealistic sexuality.

Those two things so often go hand in hand: First, reducing someone to just one aspect of themselves, and second distorting what that aspect means.

I don't think it can be denied that the human tendency to reduce others to no more than one thing and then distort that thing is a cause of much misery in this world.

Having said all that, I would much rather put up with porn -- or even racism, etc. -- than with censorship. I think the proper way to take on such evils is through debate in the free market of ideas, rather than through government censorship.

Am I onto something here, or should I drink some more coffee this morning, wake up, and try again?


See also Chanson's essay on porn -- which inspired this one.

Well, I didn't get around to reading as many blogs this week as I usually do. Instead, I found myself wrapped up in less pleasurable things. But here's what I managed to discover nevertheless:

Mo writes about two things that improve brain performance -- physical exercise and socializing.

You might want to take a look at the rather daunting air pollution in Beijing, China, where the Olympics will be held. James Fallows posts three photos of Beijing at noon here.

Chris Hedges writes extensively about the near take over of the US military by the Religious Right. Very scary stuff.

Time for some romance? Here's a short, passionate piece by Rambodoc. Some of the commentators love it, some think it's cliche. Since I don't read much romance fiction, it was all fresh to me -- and thought provoking too!

Anyone who's seen his work knows Steve is an outstanding photographer. In this article, he divulges for the first time the single most important tip he ever received on how to get great photos -- and it's a tip anyone can use!

Looks like the US Catholic Bishops are raising hell this election season. DOF gives 'em some hell in return.

Zeno's true life story of an event that happened in his math class spun my irony meter until the needle broke off and impaled my chest.

I loved this post on a flawless act of kindness written by Marylin.

I think anyone who appreciates Ed's science writing -- and that's probably pretty much anyone who reads his science writing -- should nominate an article or two of his for the Open Lab 2007 Award. He deserves it. His writing deserves it. And you'll feel good for having done it.

Ordinary Girl writes poignantly about the almost estranged relationship she has with her family here. This is so worth reading because it is not only true for so many families, but it's forceful and honest too.

Here's a general link to Robin's site, which in my opinion contains some of the most poetic photography that I've come across on the net.

Mike O'Risal blogs about the Governor of Georgia praying for rain. Nothing like violating the Constitutional separation of church and state to pander to the Medieval mindset.

Chanson has the next installment of her novel up here. In my opinion, her characters are just as alive as my neighbors.

Nita analyzes the root causes of child labor and finds that the causes are not just poverty.

Debra Haffner blogs about a strange case in which a mother was arrested for discussing her sex life with her kids.

A catastrophic cyclone has made landfall in Bangladesh with winds up to 150 mph (240 kph). The storm has so far prevented any accurate accounting of its devastation, but the potential is for many tens of thousands of people to drown.

BBC report.

Associated Press report.

Courtesy of Married to the Sea

Now and then, I run across someone who wishes to ban all religion. Yet, as many people know, that's impossible. It doesn't matter how bad it gets. Even if religion were identified as the sole cause of a thousand wars, a hundred thousand famines, a billion murders and a zillion cruelties -- and even if everyone knew religion was the sole cause of those horrible things -- religion would never be rejected by the vast majority of people.

At best, people would soundly reject the use of religion to justify wars, famines, murders, and cruelties. But the large majority would not reject religion itself. And that's not because people are stupid. Instead, it's because there are at least two reasons why most of the world's population is religious, and neither reason has much to do with people being stupid.

To understand those two reasons, let's imagine for a moment that some future world wide society idealistically decides to do away with all religion. And to make this a little bit interesting, let's say everyone in the world -- without exception -- agrees that religion should be done away with. Furthermore, they agree the best first step to doing away with all religion is to abolish the core belief of so many religions: God.

Everyone fully cooperates in this program to abolish god. They quite talking about god. Then they zealously search out every reference to deity in the world's literature and censor those references out of existence. They tear down all the holy houses around the world. They burn and blow up all the holy art. Finally, there is not a single reference to a deity in all the world, and moreover, not even one person in all the world is left who will talk about deity.

If all that could happen, the notion of god would still be reborn within the next generation.

The first and most powerful reason that would happen is humans are innately wired with the basic concept of deity. God is in our genes. That's not to say any particular god is in our genes. We certainly are not genetically programed to believe in the god of the Bible. Nor the god of the Gita. Nor the god of the Qur'an. But, as Scott Atran points out, we are genetically programed to view the world in certain ways -- ways which easily predispose us to a belief in deity. Unless we humans genetically engineer that way of viewing the world out of our nature, the concept of deity will be reborn with each generation.

While the first reason affects nearly all of us, the second reason affects only some of us. It seems some people experience god. More precisely, they have experiences they interpret as experiences of a god. Quite often, people who "experience god" come to believe their experience is proof that deity exists. So, even if you eliminated in a single generation all references to deity, there would still be in the next generation some people who experienced deity and concluded that deity exists.

There will always be people who wish to ban religion, but if only for those two reasons, the task is impossible, unless people somehow change human nature.

Are there any lessons to be drawn from this?

Perhaps the single most important lesson that might be drawn from the above is that trying to convert believers into non-believers is probably less likely to succeed than trying to convert irresponsible believers into responsible believers. You need not abolish religion to ameliorate all or most of its negative effects. So far as I know, there is little evidence the European Enlightenment significantly reduced the number of people who believed in deity. But it certainly reduced the number of people who believed in burning heretics at the stake.

What other lessons, if any, might be drawn from all this?

"The search for someone to blame is always successful."

- Robert Half

"Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers."

- Robert Half

When Bob Dylan sings the words, "He's not busy being born is busy dying", he offers us an important insight into human psychology. Namely, if we ever are so foolish as to refuse rebirth and renewal, then we are "busy dying". For the only way a human can stay alive spiritually, or psychologically, is to be reborn -- again and again and again.

I am often reminded of that truth these days because of a friend of mine. He has reached old age and, unfortunately, ceased being reborn.

Even on a relatively superficial level -- the level of one's opinions -- my friend has turned to stone. The opinions he has today are substantially no different than the opinions he held a decade ago. His intellectual curiosity has evaporated. He merely repeats himself.

Somewhat more profoundly, he has come to isolate himself as much as possible from new experiences. His routine is set. His day contains few challenges. He no longer wishes to be bothered with the new, the novel, the unexplored.

Old age can do that to us; it can be merciless. I do not point to him in order to blame him for what so many of us experience -- or will experience -- if we live long enough. Instead, I merely wish to illustrate how "He's not busy being born is busy dying".

Yet, we need not look to old age alone to illustrate in what ways Dylan's observation might be true. Society in many ways puts a great deal of pressure on all of us to be as unchanging, as constant, as ossified, as possible. Nor does one have to look far to see great and small examples of that pressure. Didn't society teach you the only valuable love is unchanging? Didn't it teach you any love which comes and goes is "mere infatuation"?

Or, look at class distinctions in so many societies -- the social sanctions that are leveled like canon against anyone who dares to break out of the social class they were born into.

Again, take even the most trivial example: How often have you heard someone called a "flip-flopper", a "waffler"? How often have you heard it said changing your opinions shows a lack of firmness and character? Demanding that someone never change their opinions is tantamount to demanding they learn nothing from one day to the next. Yet, society generally values the person who learns nothing during the course of a day over the person who learns something new.

I cannot begin to cover here the myriad ways society tries to pressure people into remaining constant. Yet, remaining constant is not at all the same thing as being true to ourselves.

"He's not busy being born is busy dying". How else can you stay genuinely true to yourself without being reborn -- again and again and again? For the self is always changing.

I think that becomes obvious once you give up trying to be a self and instead just observe yourself day to day. When you have learned to observe yourself like a scientist would observe a fruit fly -- as dispassionately as that -- you see how much you change. But to clearly observe yourself, I think you must neither condemn nor praise what you observe. A dispassionate scientist would neither condemn nor praise a fruit fly -- why should we think we need to condemn or praise ourselves? Condemnation and praise seem to be mere ways of escaping from clear observation.

I do not believe it is necessary -- and I believe it can even be detrimental -- to set for ourselves a goal of change or renewal.

Instead, once we learn how to dispassionately observe ourselves, we will understand ourselves -- and with that understanding comes change. But if we set a goal of renewal, we will only achieve a little change -- far short of a rebirth -- and then backslide. Everyone has seen that happen to those people who pray fervently to become better people, go for two weeks or two months, and then backslide. It's even true some people spend their whole lives doing that without ever catching on to how worthless it is. Yet, merely learn how to dispassionately observe ourselves and the rest will come naturally.

D. H. Lawrence somewhere writes beautifully of another reason we should avoid setting a predetermined goal for how we want to change. Speaking to young people, he reminds them they have often been told that the challenge of youth is to throw off the chains that oppress them. He then explains how they have been misled by that, and how throwing off the chains that oppress them is by no means the primary challenge of youth. Instead, he tells them their job is to "discover the unexpected door" to their lives. Why is that true?

I think it is true because, as Heraclitus long ago said, "No man steps into the same river twice, because either the river has changed, or the man has changed, or both." Now, if that's a simple fact, then how can anyone stay true to themselves without being reborn -- without "discovering the unexpected door"? Perhaps when we set a predetermined goal to how we want to change, we close off that unexpected door, and with it, our chance for genuine rebirth.

Dear Café Philos,

I devotedly wish to support International Nude Blogging Days, but I have a question. A while back, my dear husband made it abundantly clear that he believes it is entirely inappropriate for me to blog stark naked nude.

As you can see from the accompanying photo, I have compromised by assiduously blogging while fan dancing. My question is: Is fan dancing while blogging a good way to support the International Nude Blogging Movement?

Respectfully yours,

Sally "Flaming Feathers" Smith



Dear Flaming Feathers,

Blogging while fan dancing is a perfectly appropriate way to support the International Nude Blogging Movement. After all, the purpose of the Movement is to protest against prudes who foolishly equate any state of undress with rampant immorality. Since fan dancing involves a state of undress, it is highly likely to scandalize prudes, and is therefore a good thing. Carry on!

Yours in Undress,

Café Philos

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the net is how the net makes it easy to meet and know exceptional people.

I am not talking about famous people here.

Frankly, all but a few of the world's most famous people cause me to despair of humanity. Really, is there anything about a Bush, a Putin, or a Musharraf that makes you want to celebrate humanity? Is there anything about a James Dobson, a Britney Spears, or a Bill O'Reilly that makes you want to cheer? Have you ever praised The Cosmic Weirdness for gifting you with a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? I strongly suspect most of the world's most famous people became famous because they were driven to covet fame, power, or money above all else in their lives. In other words, because they were shallow.

When you turn away from the most famous and instead surf the net for the much less famous, though, you seem to turn away from some of the worse people humanity has to offer and turn towards some of the best it has to offer. That has been the great discovery I've made about the internet -- it allows you to meet and know people who lack fame, but who are genuinely exceptional.

That point tends to pop up in my mind each time I surf blogs. If all I knew of humanity were the world's most famous people, I would become a cynic. I could not believe in humanity. I would despair of it.

Yet, so very many of the people I've met on the net have proven themselves kind, gifted and even wise. That's not to say everyone I've met is those things. Yet, I'd rather take my chances of meeting a very decent person on the net, than take my chances of meeting a very decent person at a White House dinner.

On the net, I have met people who are not famous, but who are world class writers, poets, or photographers. I have met people who are extraordinarily intelligent or exceptionally wise. I have met people who are better informed and more intellectually honest than most of the world's famous pundits. I have met people who I suspect have an unrivaled capacity for kindness. I have even met people who have either the luck or the talent to lead quite interesting lives. In short, I have met dozens of people who should be world famous if that sort of fame was based solely on one's human merit. Largely because of these people, I do not despair of humanity.

So, what effect can meeting so many great, but largely unknown, people have on us? Perhaps I can only speak for myself here, but one effect all of this has on me is to create a longing to become -- not merely a good American, not even merely a good Westerner -- but a good citizen of the world.

This is coming from someone who does not consider himself sentimental about humanity. I know humanity can be ugly. I know we are the least sane of the Great Apes. I am aware we are destroying the only world we have, and I recognize it's a long shot the world will ever come together in a sustainable peace. Yet, I still wish to become a good citizen of the world. It seems to me the sanest course in an insane world. What hope I have for such sanity comes to me in some large part from having met so many wonderful people on the net.

If the world is ever to be a decent place for most of us to live, it won't be because of the Bushes and Cheneys, the Dobsons and Spears, the politicians, pundits and preachers, but because of the common people.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez shares with his friend Fidel Castro a fondness for inflicting marathon speeches on his audiences. But when the Venezuelan was motormouthing his audience at a recent summit of Latin leaders, "Juan Carlos, the Spanish monarch, could take no more. He flashed a withering look at the president and uttered five words likely to go down in diplomatic history: 'Why don't you shut up?'"

The stunning breach of protocol, did shut up the socialist revolutionary. For about two seconds. Then he regained his voice.

Chávez's detractors at home and abroad have gone wild over the event, playing it and replaying it, sending each other high-fives, and in general seeing it as a long overdue comeuppance.

It's not entirely clear, however, whether the King was most put off by Chávez's long windedness or by Chávez's repeated references to a former Spanish Prime Minister as a "fascist".

I wonder if the Spanish would be willing to lease out their king to attend a Cheney speech?


Reference:

'Shut up!' Spanish King Tells Chávez

From "Married to the Sea"

According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy:

Despite a one-third decline since the early 1990s, the United States still has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and birth among comparable countries. In 2004, the U.S. teen birth rate was 41.1 births per 1,000 teens aged 15-19. By way of comparison, the U.S. teen birth rate is one and a half times higher than the teen birth rate in the United Kingdom (26.8 per 1,000) which has the highest teen birth rate in Europe, more than twice as high as the teen birth rate in Canada (14.5 per 1,000), seven times higher than the teen birth rate in Japan (5.6 per 1,000), Denmark (5.7 per 1,000) and Sweden (5.9 per 1,000).

Why does America lead the industrialized world in teen pregnancies? Let me suggest the reason might have something to do with the willful stupidity of American policy makers.

The nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (NCPTUP) released on Wednesday a comprehensive review of research into teen sexual behavior. The review utterly damns America's cherished "abstinence only" sex education programs. Abstinence only sex education programs are programs that teach kids only one way to deal with their sexual feelings -- and that's by abstaining from sex.

The NCPTUP review failed to find even a single abstinence only program anywhere in the country that works -- despite that they looked at a total of 115 studies. They couldn't find one program that delays the initiation of sex. They couldn't find one program that hastens the return to abstinence. And they couldn't find one program that reduces the number of sexual partners. In any sane country, policy makers would study the NCPTUP report and abandon all support for abstinence only sex education.

This not a sane country.

Instead of abandoning abstinence only sex education, the Federal Government is about to increase the funding for it. Just a few days ago, the Democrat controlled Congress agreed to Bush's demand for an additional $28 million to fund abstinence only sex ed. That brings the annual funding for the Federal CBAE program to $141 million -- more than enough to wreck a few teens' lives. Can anything be more willfully stupid than that?

The CBAE program even requires those it funds to lie to kids about their sexuality. "For example, any program that receives CBAE funds has to teach [kids] that 'sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.'" Yet, if a kid is so young or fragile they are going to experience "harmful psychological and physical effects" from sex, marriage isn't going to make much difference.

In stark contrast to abstinence only sexuality education, the NCPTUP report found that, "Two-thirds of the 48 comprehensive programs that supported both abstinence and the use of condoms and contraceptives for sexually active teens had positive behavior effect." Comprehensive sex ed programs do not fail to teach abstinence. Instead, they teach abstinence as the preferred behavior and the use of condoms and contraceptives as the second, fall back behavior. The "positive behavior effect" of comprehensive programs included delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.

Opponents of comprehensive sex ed have often promoted myths about it. One thing that makes this NCPTUP report especially interesting is that it confronts the lies told about comprehensive sex ed by its opponents:

The study, conducted by Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates, also sought to debunk what the report called "myths propagated by abstinence-only advocates" including: that comprehensive sex education promotes promiscuity, hastens the initiative of sex or increases its frequency, and sends a confusing message to adolescents.

None of these was found to be accurate, Kirby wrote.

Instead, he wrote, such programs improved teens' knowledge about the risks and consequences of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and gave them greater "confidence in their ability to say 'no' to unwanted sex."

So, there you have it. Not only does abstinence only sex ed utterly fail, but comprehensive sex ed succeeds more times than not. Yet, abstinence only sex ed is Federally funded while comprehensive sex ed receives not a penny in Federal funds. Small wonder the US leads the industrial nations in teen pregnancies.


References:

Emerging Answers 2007: Report of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

Report: Abstinence Programs Don't Work

One More Time: Abstinence Only Programs Don't Work, Comprehensive Programs Do

Just Say No To Increases In Abstinence Funds

Indian Ocean, my new musical obsession.

I have a confession to make. I have long felt I could vastly improve my prose style. I have wanted from the beginning of this blog to discuss complex ideas in a very easy to read and understand manner. And I thought I was making some progress towards that goal until... until I took the test. You see the results of the test: This blog has a college level reading level. Yikes!

Naturally, I blame the condom commercial. Obviously, the condom commercial skewed the results. After all, it can't be me. I've worked way too hard cleaning up my prose for it to be me. Damn that condom commercial!

The irony here is it took me six tries to figure out what I was doing wrong to get the very simple, user friendly "reading level program" to work -- yet supposedly, I've somehow managed to write at a college level despite that I cannot for the life of me get a very simple, user friendly program to work on the first try.

I'll sue the makers of the condom commercial. That's what I'll do. Yes, I'll sue them.

At first glance, this public service video from India is insufferably cute. But that's only at first glance. It's actually quite informative -- packing a huge amount of information into a cheesy but fun format. I only wish there were equally informative condom ads in the States.

By the way, that light-hearted tune is now stuck in my head and will probably be there all day -- evidence of how effective it is.

"When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image."

- Meister Eckhart

Marissa is a 13 year old soccer star who wants to be a doctor. She started a blog a while back to showcase her poetry, but hardly anyone noticed her poetry, which is sad. She's got some pretty good stuff for her age -- albeit mostly angst ridden love poems. Check out one of her best here. And don't forget to post a compliment if you feel she deserves one!

Last week, I linked to someone who predicted the Religious Right in America was on the wane. This week, I'm linking to Ed, who says predictions of that sort are premature. Find it here.

Amuirin has a short post up about Chris Jordan, and artist who makes environmental statistics concrete and visual. Here you go.

Just in time for Thanksgiving -- a new theory of the universe. Specifically, a theory that states time is cyclical rather than linear, and hence the universe is cyclical rather than linear. Interesting reading here.

Trinifar has put up a post that I think is useful and important for understanding the overall role of science and technology in solving environmental problems.

Digby asks a disturbing question about the ability of scientists to communicate their side of the creationism/evolution debate here. At least, it's a disturbing question if you're on the side of science in that debate -- if you favor creationism, you might be dancing a jig after reading Digby.

Ms Ti looks aghast at some of the ingredients in the world's highly processed fast food meals here. Some of the things she finds make Chinese lead paint sound appetizing.

Pr3rna raises a lot of questions about both the role of the state in child rearing and the over involvement of modern parents here.

Oemar fearlessly tackles one of the most difficult questions in aesthetics: When is something porn, and when is something art? The article is here.

Ready for an outrage? Read how some high school students in Illinois were severely punished for exercising their rights as citizens. The story's over at Webs place.

I cannot recall reading a more clear and concise description of the psychological states that can occur through meditation than Mystic Wing's description of them here.

David writes beautifully about the nature of human strengths and weaknesses here.

Traveller analyzes the relationship between loss and our ability to experience empathy here. Although this is an old post, it's withstood the test of time.

I love this photo from Steve. I want it. I covet it. I need it. But when I went to download it for my personal photo files, a mean little sign popped up calling me "Cheeky" and I couldn't download it. Visit Steve's site and make him give it to me! Please! I'll be good and brush my teeth for a whole year if you do.

I have never in real life seen the gorgeous species of ducks Loren captures in these photos.

In a brazen attempt to get more Google hits, Rambodoc offers up many quaint and interesting facts about the human penis here. Little does he suspect, however, that as far back as March, I blogged on a fossilized 425 million year old penis belonging to an extinct species of water flea and I've been getting Google hits off of that one ever since.

AOS thoughtfully discusses the serial killer in fiction and film here, and identifies some interesting trends.

This is an old post, but if you haven't seen it, you haven't lived a full life yet. It's "The Mean Kitty Song" put up by Bibliomom, and it's funny, entertaining, and so witty it's probably illegal in seven countries.

Gary writes about his classes' field trip to an art museum here. The true life story has some nice twists to it, well worth a read.

Harlequinn has put up a personal memoir of how she first got an office job in the Ohio porn industry and then became a political activist because of it -- all without having much love or use for porn.

Chanson has been publishing a novel on her blog in installments. It's a fascinating read, and one place to start is here. But be warned! It's addictive! You can really get into her characters.

Theraaa surprised me with his views on the reunification of Germany. Apparently, Germany is still in many ways divided more than a decade after its political reunification. Read about it on Theraaa's blog before Time Magazine picks up the story.

Brendan posts a well written and comprehensive analysis of the abortion debate here.

Priyank's blog seems to be working this week, something that's not always the case, so jump on this chance to check out his travelogs! But hurry! His blog has a way of going down at times.

In life, it is far more important to develop your strengths than to compensate for your weaknesses.

This morning I was surfing blogs. One link led to another and I found myself on a site devoted to "mysticism". But as I read the site's introduction, I was struck by the author's insistence that God exists ontologically:

"Basically all religions teach the same basic truth: man's existence has a metaphysical basis, to which man wants to relink his life. This metaphysical basis is usually referred to as God, Brahman, Allah etc. But it is the same in every man. This magnificent and unspeakable source of life and happiness will here be called the God/Brahman, but you can give it any name you want, according to your own convictions."

Man's existence has a metaphysical basis? I doubt anyone wisely begins a study of mysticism by assuming god exists ontologically, as some kind of metaphysical entity. That's like preparing to shop for groceries by assuming you already have enough food in your house: It's a foolish assumption that will retard your progress until you discard it.

The spirit and substance of mysticism is to discover whatever there is to discover through one's own experience. Mysticism is not theology, and, unlike theology, it is not fundamentally speculative, nor is it hearsay. Instead, mysticism is grounded in direct experience, in personal discovery.

Personal experience is open ended and uncertain. Hence, mysticism is open ended and uncertain. I cannot today tell you with absolute certainty how I will feel tomorrow. Perhaps I will bounce out of bed feeling like a new man. Perhaps I will wake up with a cold. If I cannot even tell you with absolute certainty how I will feel tomorrow, how much of a fool must I be to pretend it is absolutely certain God is an ontologically existing metaphysical entity?

A young couple I know were arguing the other night about love. Specifically, one of them held the position that love ends at divorce, while the other was equally insistent that love didn't need to end at divorce.

The point hardly seems worth arguing for the truth is obvious: It's certain some couples who divorce are not in love, while other couples who divorce are in love yet somehow incompatible (the whole notion that you can be in love yet still not be compatible doesn't seem to occur to most young people -- I think you need a few more years and to have seen it a few times to realize it's quite common). So, why were they arguing it?

I might speculate it's because our society -- actually, our popular culture -- has such a narrow view of love and relationships. From Hollywood we learn that a couple who love each other never divorce unless they are going to remarry by the film's end. We also learn true love overcomes all difficulties, life is meant to be lived for love, and no one is better off single than in a relationship. Popular music and romance novels pretty much tell us the same things. If that's all you've been taught to expect of love and relationships, it is small wonder you might argue over whether love ends at divorce.

Real life is much richer than the cartoons of love and relationships presented to us by popular culture. So, I thought I would list a few scenarios that are not typically portrayed in popular culture:

• You can love someone you're incompatible with, and many people do.
• Most often, there's no reason or explanation for why you love someone: You just do.
• So very often lovers part because they cannot overcome some difficulty having little or nothing to do with love or even with psychological compatibility, such as a difference between them of race, age, lifestyle, or religion.
• People can and do love more than one person.
• There is no guarantee the greatest love of your life will marry you.
• People in love with each other can prefer to live apart.
• Divorced people can still love each other, and yet not wish to remarry.
• Not all love is constant -- many times love comes, goes, and returns like a breeze.
• The most significant thing about love is surely not how long it lasts, and merely how long a relationship lasts proves nothing in itself about the quality of love in that relationship: After all, mere co-dependencies tend to last forever.
• Most people, at one time or another, will confuse love with emotional dependency.
• Some people can be much happier single than married.
• Not everyone who loves, loves well, nor ever learns how to love well.
• The intensity of one's feelings does not necessarily indicate the quality of one's love. Just because you love intensely does not mean you love well.

So, what other scenarios that aren't typically found in popular culture have I forgotten here?

According to some historians, during the thousand year long Middle Ages in Europe there was on average one peasant revolt per year. All of them failed.

There are several reasons for the failure of the peasantry to successfully revolt against the elites of the Middle Ages, but I'll mention only one reason to illustrate the difficulty the peasants faced. Before the advent of the hand-held firearm, it required years of training to produce someone highly competent in the best weapons of the Middle Ages. Most peasants didn't train in those weapons, and as a consequence, were usually over-matched when they revolted. Sickles against lances, hammers against swords.

But why did the peasants so frequently revolt in the first place? The most usual reason seems to have been famine. During most of the middle ages, transportation was so poor that it was almost unheard of to ship food in bulk for any distance. So, if the crops failed in one locality, that locality could experience famine even though there might be a surplus of food a mere 30 miles away. When famine struck a locality, the elites had custom, law and force all on their side -- they got what food there was, despite that the peasants produced the food. That left the peasants starving and prone to revolt.

Broadly speaking, at least three things came together to end the thousand year landscape of the Middle Ages. The first was the rise of capitalism, which can be traced back to very early beginnings around 900 A.D. The second was the British Agricultural Revolution -- a remarkable increase in agricultural productivity -- that can be traced back to around 1500 A.D. And the third was the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1700 A.D.

Those three factors, working together, created Europe's most successful peasant revolt. For, while all the revolts of the Middle Ages failed, capitalism, the British Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution eventually brought not only wealth and long lifespans to the peasantry, but arguably contributed to their political liberation.

It seems odd to me that nowadays so many of us have come to resent those three developments. We see the many serious problems they have created and we sometimes imagine it would be a good thing if we were rid of capitalism, industrialization, and even large scale agriculture. Yet, to get rid of those things would surely plunge us back into an age when most people lived a short life of scarcity and want. So, I think the real problem is not to get rid of the very things that have lifted societies out of poverty, but to "update" them. We do not need, for instance, to abolish capitalism so much as we need a newer, more useful version of it with the most pressing bugs worked out.

A final consideration here is my gripe against ideologies. Not just any ideology, but all ideologies suffer from the fact they are either impossible or cumbersome to change. The world moves on, but the world's ideologies merely turn into retarded and retarding dogmas. I have never met an ideology that didn't turn to stone all it touched. If a software company were ever to adopt an ideology of software, you can bet they would go out of business -- because they would never update their product in any meaningful or useful way. Version 2.0 would have the same bugs as version 1.0 -- and only the marketing department would say it was better than 1.0. If we are ever so unwise as to leave the future of capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions entirely to ideologists, we will surely get the disasters we deserve for our folly.

After all, it wasn't Christianity, the ideology of the day, that brought about Europe's most successful peasant revolt. Nor should we expect the ideologies of our day to bring about a successful social and economic future for humanity.

Is it just my imagination or has anyone else noticed that when teenage girls talk about having "spiritual yearnings" it means they're horny?

I don't mean to put down teenage girls here. They face a lot of challenges and don't need to be dumped on. Yet, at the same time, I believe I've noticed on many occasions how the word "spiritual" can seem almost synonymous with the word "horny" as it's used by teenage girls. Not always, but often enough to be noticeable.

I even have a theory about it (why, of course I do!). My theory is that most of us, when we enter puberty, don't make an instant connection between the new feelings we experience and horniness. In both boys and girls, feelings of horniness are created by the hormone testosterone. But those feelings don't come labeled "horniness". Instead, we must learn to interpret them as horniness. And while we are learning to properly interpret them as horniness, we often interpret them as something else, such as a "spiritual yearning".

What are the feelings produced by testosterone? Well, one of the most common feelings is sometimes described as "a desire or longing to hit the road". You can see how easily that feeling could be interpreted as spiritual if you listen to Led Zeppelin's famous "Stairway to Heaven" while Plant sings, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving."

Testosterone also produces a feeling very akin to "emptiness" -- and I've long noticed that when adolescent girls talk about their spirituality, they often talk about it in terms of feelings of longing and emptiness.

I speculate it might be a little harder for girls to make the connection between the feelings produced by testosterone and sexual yearning because girls don't come equipped with an appendage that frequently rises up and points out the connection to them. Boys do. But perhaps a bigger reason it might be more difficult for girls to make the connection is that society expects and accepts that boys will get horny, while at the same time, society more or less still frowns on girls getting horny. Therefore, there might be some pressure on girls to find a more socially acceptable label for their testosterone induced feelings than "horniness". What could be more socially acceptable than a "spiritual yearning"?

None of this is meant to discount the genuine spiritual needs of adolescent girls. I merely wish to point out my impression that girls (more often than boys) sometimes confuse horniness with "spiritual yearning". Adolescence is usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with spiritual matters. It is also usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with sexual matters. Since both concerns are in many ways new and unfamiliar to us, it seems possible that we might at times confuse the two.

If so, I wonder how often an exceptionally fervent teenage interest in religion is due to good, old fashioned horniness?

I wonder if Americans will ever get tired of trailer park politics? Will they someday decide that demonizing your opposition, seeing the world in black and white, slandering your opponents, and allowing your ideology to do your thinking for you are no way to run a household, let alone a nation? Or will the disease of trailer park politics continue indefinitely?

Politics has always been a dirty business, yet there are times when it's a dirtier business than usual. We seem to be living through one of those times.

What do you think? Do you see any signs that the trend towards trailer park politics is abating? Or are things just likely to get worse?

"What we cannot do, can never do, is change who we are as a people. We are an open, welcoming nation. So let's not be afraid, America. Let's stand tall, welcome the rest of the world, and show terrorism what democracy and freedom is all about."

- Colin Powell

"It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better."

- Ella Maillart

"Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users."

- Ralf Nader

There's some great reading over at Chanson's site, "Letters From A Broad" -- the 10th Humanist Symposium is up! Chanson has done an excellent job bringing together a diverse and fascinating collection of articles for the 10th Symposium, despite the fact she included one of my articles in the selection. Please check out the Humanist Symposium here.

The above photo was taken in the late afternoon at a park close to where I live in Colorado.

Via Evolutionary Middleman

Objective reality -- that's any reality one objects to, right?

"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

- Plutarch

Some of the articles I found on the net this time around are a week or two old, but I think they're good articles and still interesting.

Rambodoc posted an award winning design for an environmentally friendly city car of the future here. The car has details you won't believe possible -- but the technology is entirely feasible.

Susan blogs on an American school that has banned hugs here. The school apparently can't distinguish between a hug and sexual harassment.

Nita writes here about the tendency in India to wedge children into the sciences even when the kids have no aptitude for them. Doubtless, this practice creates numerous adults who feel they are in the wrong careers.

Orcinus has an alarming investigative post here on how Latvian fundamentalists are coming to the United States specifically to attack gays -- often violently.

Amuirin has an intriguing post on the Days of the Dead celebration here. This was the first time the holiday made sense to me.

Enreal posts a poem on the aftermath of a relationship here. I thought it captured well how we all feel at some moments in the fallout from a failed relationship.

The Atheist Ethicist writes about the Maine decision to provide birth control upon demand to middle schoolers here. This decision has been sensationalized elsewhere, but the Ethicist looks at it with remarkable rationality.

Over at An Unquiet Mind, Mahendra has prompted one of the most interesting economic discussions I've seen in a while here with his post comparing the economies of Dubai and the States. The comments are extensive, but very much worth reading as several people with extensive information weigh in.

A photographer who goes by the name Markablue just began a photography blog here. Her main theme is nature and she starts off with an excellent selection of fall material that strikes me as very reflective.

Maha looks at corporate funding in American politics and finds good news: The Christian Right is being marginalized this election cycle. Story here.

Bill Hulet posts an exceptionally insightful essay on fundamentalism, reason and religion here. In this case, the religion in question is Daoism.

AOS asks whether reading a book matters if we forget that we've read it, he and comes up with an interesting take on that question here.

David defines genius in an amusing yet thoughtful way here.

After a hiatus of about two months, Brendan has started blogging again here.

Ybonesy posts an hilarious open letter to the makers of digital cameras here.

Eric writes about the neurochemistry of motherly love here.

I began with Rambodoc and will end this week's round up with him too. Here is an absolute must read post -- a gripping, true life account of his care for an aged patient written in beautiful prose.

If one thinks of creation stories as containing psychological truths, rather than physical truths, then perhaps those stories in which the world was created out some pre-existing substance are more psychologically true than those stories in which the world was created out of nothing.

I've tried to point out in the post that follows this one how our awareness of the world is limited. That is, we are not aware of the world as is, but only as interpreted. This psychological truth seems to imply, however, that our interpretation is derived from some kind of information we get from the world. Our eyes detect photons. The photons are of the world and pre-exist our interpretation of the world. We then interpret those photons. That act of interpretation can be seen as an act of creation in which we make the world -- not out of nothing -- but out of something (photons).

Yet, if all that is true, and if one wants to look at creation stories as psychological truths, then those creation stories which state the world was created out of pre-existing matter would seem to be more psychologically accurate than those creation stories which state the world was created out of nothing.

My senses tell me I'm sitting in a solid chair. On the other hand, physics tells me the chair I'm sitting in is mostly empty space. How can it be there is a difference between my subjective impression of the chair and what physics tells me is objectively true about the chair?

The short answer is that my brain and nervous system (very much including my senses) do not reconstruct reality as it is. My eyes do not, for instance, see the atoms of my chair, nor the empty space between the atoms. Instead, my eyes take in photons that have bounced off the atoms of the chair. My eyes and brain then process and interpret that information. In the end, what I see bears little resemblance to what is actually there according to physics.

One way to understand the relation between my subjective impression of the chair and what physics tells me is objectively true about the chair is to consider the analogy of a pilot landing an aircraft on instruments. Although the plane's instruments give the pilot very little information about the world -- and even though what information they give him is highly processed and interpreted -- the information he gets is sufficient for him to navigate. Just so, our brains and nervous systems give us very little information about the world and the information they do give us is highly processed and interpreted -- yet it's usually sufficient for us to cope with the world.

We are all like that pilot -- we must cope with the world on instruments alone. That's the position our brains and nervous systems leave us in.