The NYT again:

A Delaware school district has agreed to revise its policies on religion as part of a settlement with two Jewish families who had sued over the pervasiveness of Christian prayer and other religious activities in the schools.

One family said it was forced to leave its home in Georgetown because of an anti-Semitic backlash.

It seems that a Jewish woman who had for years sat through prayer after prayer at her child’s school finally had enough when at a graduation a minister proclaimed that Jesus was the only way to truth. So she did something totally outrageous and politely and reasonably asked the school board to consider more inclusive, less specific prayers. That didn’t go down well.

The family faced threats and had to leave town.

Certain forms of Christianity in the US seem more like tribal beliefs than real religion. There’s an utter divide between the message of Christianity as seen in the Sermon on the Mount, say, and the sheer hatred that is shown to anyone who dares step out of line. So much for turning the other cheek, loving your enemy, and the meek inheriting the earth.

And there’s also a complete disregard for the US constitution — even a warping of it — when Christians claim that anything stopping them from forcing their views on others in the public square is an infringement of their right to free speech and religious practice: “As news of the request [for more inclusive prayer] spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit the free exercise of religion, residents said.”

The suit was, quite properly, settled in favor of the Dombrich family and another family who chose (perhaps wisely — hey can still live in the county) to remain anonymous, and states:

• that within 30 days the district has to amend its religion policy to clarify what practices are constitutional
• that school officials may not organize prayer at graduation
• and that people will be able to complain anonymously about violations about religious liberty or any other policies.

If it’s like this in Delaware, you have to wonder what’s going on further south.

From the New York Times:

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, after three decades of growth that has seen the prison population nearly triple. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.

The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

It’s pretty disturbing reading:

The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. China is second, with 1.5 million people behind bars. The gap is even wider in percentage terms.

Some of this is very pointless and involves nonviolent drug crimes and drink driving:

“We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” [Texas State Senator John Whitmire] said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.”

Of course the article does point out that violent crime rates have been dropping — that’s the bonus of locking up the 1% of the population who have real problems with impulse control — but there have to be better and cheaper alternatives to dealing with people who commit offenses such as possessing drugs.

Glenn Greenwald makes a scathing comparison between how Barack Obama has been publicly forced by the media to disavow Louis Farrakhan’s unsolicited support, and John McCain being given a free pass for welcoming the support of John Hagee, who likes to call the Catholic Church “The Great Whore,” who thinks that the US should invade Iran in order to help bring about Armageddon, who believes that God flooded New Orleans because he was pissed off about a gay parade, and who believes that Muslims have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews. (And that’s not to mention his view on the Harry Potter books, the “whole purpose” of which “is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult.” The Harry Potter books are always a good touchstone of religious sanity.)

In a follow-up post Greenwald reports on a conversation he had with Catholic League President, Bill Donohue (of whom I am no fan — the man is himself bigoted in the extreme) in which Donohue claims that McCain is “not going to get away with this with the Catholic community.”

It’ll be interesting to see how much the media pick up on McCain’s support from and of a noted bigot, and how much traction Donohue gets. Bill Donohue is fully capable of making big waves when he wants to.

One of the most difficult areas of practice for me is remembering to have a compassionate attitude towards people in the media who have opinions that I strongly disagree with. My mind’s habitual tendency is to assume they are stupid (they hold views that are, from my point of view, self-evidently wrong) or evil (they know they are wrong but have chosen to be so in order to further some political or social agenda). William Kristol is a good test case. At times I find it very hard to let go of those two main habitual tendencies and to understand why he believes what he believes.

Kristol was recently taken on as a weekly columnist for the Times, despite the fact that he had just been fired from another position, is on record as saying that the Times is at best a second-rate publication, and has opined that the Times committed treason by revealing that the government was illegally spying on its own citizens. And despite the fact that he was one of the main architects of the Iraq war, which he had helped plan years before 9/11, and his repeated errors in predicting the outcome of that war, the presence of WMDs, the likelihood of Sunni/Shia violence, etc.

His first column was a classic, with both a prediction that Obama would win New Hampshire and, as a bonus, a misattributed quote, which required a correction to be appended to later editions.

Well, in today’s column about Obama he outdoes himself. And I find it hard to think of him as anything but either stupid or malicious. But it’s a good practice to avoid doing so.

Just as one example, where he quotes Michelle Obama:

Michell Obama: “Barack Obama … is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Bill Kristol: “So we don’t have to work to improve our souls. Our broken souls can be fixed — by our voting for Barack Obama. We don’t have to fight or sacrifice to help our country.”

Look back at what Michelle Obama said, and then look again at Kristol’s spin on it.

“We don’t have to work to improve our souls,” compared to:

• shed your cynicism
• put down your divisions
• come out of your isolation
• move out of your comfort zones
• push yourselves to be better
• engage

Notice all those verbs. This is Kristol’s idea of “not working to improve” ourselves. This is his idea of “not fighting or sacrificing to help our country.”

How can Kristol, a supposedly intelligent man, dismiss the actions — painful, difficult, sacrificial work as tey are — that Michelle Obama is calling for as being the antithesis of action?

Presumably Kristol is not stupid. He know what a verb is. He knows what Michelle Obama is actually saying. I’ll try to avoid thinking that he’s evil (despite the fact that his own brand of “sacrifice” involves spinning lies about weapons of mass destruction, a quick war, and a gratefully liberated people, and thereby sending thousands of people off to die while remaining far, far away from any possibility of taking up arms himself).

I can only think that he’s genuinely blinded himself to the words he reads. He’s desperate for another neo-con president (President Mike Huckabee? — another misstep by Kristol) and he hates the idea of a Democratic president. He wants a muscular, manly, missile-launching Republican (possibly McCain, who is “manly, courageous and principled“) who will “protect” us by listening in to all of our phone calls and reading all of our emails and who will do whatever he wants because real men make up the law as they go along — they are the law — and will oppose big government while making sure that the government has unchecked powers to make people disappear and torture them.

Kristol really, really hated the idea of Hillary Clinton in the White House, and Barack Obama wouldn’t be as bad as that, but he still utterly hates that idea. Kristol hates the idea od Barack being president, and Barack therefore must be a bad person, and therefore must be completely unlike the kind of manly man Kristol idolizes and fantasizes himself to be, and therefore cannot be calling upon people to make sacrifices and work on themselves because that’s the kind of thing a Republican would do (except they don’t — let’s fight terrorism by going shopping).

So Kristol is neither stupid nor evil, as I am habitually driven to think, but is merely so blinded by his own delusion that he literally can’t see the words that he himself writes.

He can’t even see that the fault he accuses Obama of — being merely words without substance — is exactly his own defining flaw. They have a word for this. They call it projection. It’s where someone is unable to see flaws that they detest in their own character and so they see and detest them in others — even when others are free of those flaws themselves.

So back to compassion. I haven’t managed to arouse much compassion for Kristol, but at least I’ve managed to get to the point where I’m no longer thinking of him as stupid or evil. I can see him instead as trapped in a particular set of views, and at least that’s a start.

Despite erratic federal government support, wind power is thriving in Texas as the oil industry there declines and as wind technology continues to become more efficient.

Obama’s grandma, although poor, has a solar-powered cellphone.

Frank Rich deftly eviscerates Hillary’s campaign in The Audacity of Hopelessness. (Although I find myself wondering whether the tables may yet turn).

Slate has a clever mash-up of Hillary’s campaign and a 1999 Reese Witherspoon high-school election movie.

And something on Bill Kristol (I still have to avert my gaze from his column when I look at the New York Times on a Monday).

Over half of Britons have no religion.

The other night I made a vegetarian version of the traditional Scottish dish, haggis, of which Wikipedia has the following to say:

There are many recipes, most of which have in common the following ingredients: sheep’s ‘pluck’ (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal’s stomach for approximately three hours.

Here’s my version, which lacks onions, but which still reminded me strongly of my youthful experiences with the original version, and which I offer as a service to humanity.

4oz of unsalted, roasted peanuts
4oz of raw shelled sunflower seeds
8oz of pinhead/steel-cut/coarse-cut oats (the name varies)
1 teaspoon of black pepper
1 teaspoon of white pepper
1 tablespoon of mixed herbs
2 teaspoons nutmeg
2 teaspoons thyme
5 tablespoons soy sauce
8 tablespoons safflower or sunflower oil
12oz TVP or two packets (24 oz) of Yves Meatless Ground

Finely grind the peanuts and sunflower seeds in a blender, then dry roast them with the oats, herbs, and spices in a thick-bottomed frying pan.

Remove from the heat and add the TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein) or Meatless Ground.

Add the vegetable oil to the mixture. Add about 18oz water (if using Yves Meatless Ground, which is already moist) or 24oz water if using dry TVP, and mix well. The mixture should be slightly sloppy.

Pour into baking tin or casserole, cover tightly with tinfoil, and bake in the oven at a medium - high heat (gas mark 5, or 400°F) for 45 minutes, uncovering for the last 20 minutes.

This will feed approximately eight people. Serve with mashed potatoes (”tatties”) and “neeps” which is mashed turnip (Scotland), swede (England) or rutabaga (US).

If you’re not familiar with cooking turnip/swede/rutabaga, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes longer than boiling potatoes. Cut the vegetable into chunks and cook in a covered pot with a small amount of water, checking regularly to make sure it doesn’t boil dry. Mash with a potato masher and season with marge/butter, salt, and pepper.

The tastes of haggis, neeps, and tatties complement each other wonderfully.

As far as the nutmeg goes, don’t make the mistake I once made and misread your own handwriting, confusing teaspoons with tablespoons. Nutmeg is psychoactive and I was tripping for days!

I’m a little surprised to have been nominated for Blogisattva awards under three categories. The Blogisattva awards honor English-language Buddhism blogging during calendar year 2007, and the awards are “given wholly for merit, and not as a measure of blogs’ popularity” (which is a good thing in my case, since I don’t get a lot of visitors — I love you all, though!).

So the nominations were for (cue drumroll):

• Best “Life” Blog Post [Best Achievement Blogging in the First Person (as a diarist; writing of events in one's life; or offering personal thoughts)] for Visiting Maia’s Family
• Best Achievement Blogging Opinion Pieces or about Political Issues
• Best Achievement in Clean, Straightforward, Unaffected Design

I don’t expect actually to win any of these awards, because my blog is such a mishmash of different topics. I just write about whatever takes my fancy on any given day. Plus my political views aren’t exactly deep (I don’t even watch TV — I once had to ask someone who a character in a political cartoon was — it was Dick Cheney!). And was the design nomination for the old design or the new one? — I changed it a few weeks ago.

If I was going to get an award for anything I’d hope it was for the blog at Wildmind, where I do my best writing. Check out today’s very erudite post based on a quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, for example. Sheesh, I even did my own translation from the French! Pretentious? Moi?

Still, mustn’t grumble, as the Buddha probably said.

Oh, and do remember to check out the Blogisattva Awards shortlist for some writers that really deserve to be nominated — like my former student Justin Whitaker (nominated for “Blog of the Year” amongst other categories).

A friend just reminded me about these two articles from a few years back:

Does E-mail Make You Dumber?: If you feel like a zombie at work, perhaps you’re suffering from infomania, the term the Hewlett-Packard affiliate in Britain coined for people addicted to e-mail, instant messaging, and text messages.

Infomania’ worse than marijuana: Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed.

More on dumbing. Wired magazine points out that the creationists have shot themselves in the foot in Florida. Until recently Evolution wasn’t even mentioned in the state’s science standards. Then a new proposed curriculum included evolution. Aghast, several counties pushed for a change to the language and so all references to “evolution” were changed to read “the scientific theory of evolution.”

To a creationist that’s a good thing, since that means that “evolution is only a theory.” But in scientific parlance a “theory” is a logically self-consistent model for describing the behavior of a related set of phenomena, and which is backed up by abundant experimental theory and observation. It does not mean “an unsubstantiated conjecture” as the creationists like to think. Not understanding much about science, creationists tend to assume that a scientific law is something grander than a theory, when in fact it’s the other way around. A law is a more specific and limited prediction of how something in nature behaves, while a theory provides more of an overarching framework. In scientific parlance a theory is as grand and as rock-solid as you can get.

Not understanding that, Florida’s creationists have now inadvertently agreed that Evolution is indeed the best explanation we have of how life changes over time.

Two interesting articles:

The Dumbing of America

and

Florida will teach evolution, but only as theory

The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has created a stir by announcing that every 10-year-old child in the public school system will have to study the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis.

Let’s set aside that Sarkozy has chosen to directly interfere with the curriculum without any consultation — something many people, myself included, would find objectionable.

And then let’s focus on the criticisms he’s faced, not about his decision-making style but about the decision itself.

These have included (all are taken from the Times’ article cited above):

• focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis
• the plan could backfire, creating resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short shrift
• “truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality” (Pascal Bruckner, philosopher)
• “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child” (Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor)
• “If you do this with the memory of individual Jews, you’d have to do it with the victims of slavery or the wars of religion. We can’t have this approach” (a teachers’ union leader)
• singling out French victims of the Holocaust for study and excluding other groups, like the Gypsies is “chauvinism” (an anti-racist organization)

I find myself puzzled by these reactions. It seems to me that a 10 year-old is generally mature enough to empathize with another child’s experience, and that this would be a very useful exercise. Some of the other objections seems simply confused — take the last, for example, which seems to assume that Gipsy children cannot also be French. Surely that’s a racist assumption in itself.

I think I must have been about 10 years old or maybe a bit younger when I saw “All Our Yesterdays” on television (a program that showed historical newsreels from 25 years previously). I was horrified by the footage of the liberation of the concentration camps, with wax-like bodies being bulldozed into pits (possibly this episode? — which would make me 9 at the time). This made a huge impact on my development. I knew that this was real life and not some movie, and that something truly evil had happened in history. Unfortunately I was much older when I first read Ann Frank’s diary, but I would have welcomed an opportunity to get a sense of what one individual child’s life was like during Nazi times.

But my life as a 10 year old was a long time ago. I’d be very interested to hear from the parents of 10 year-olds with their thoughts of the appropriateness of Sarkozy’s proposal (the actual idea of 5th graders studying the lives of individual children who lived and died under Nazi rule, and not his autocratic style of decision making).

Here’s a very sobering article by Nick Davies, in which he gives an account of how modern journalism has become so debased. One key to this is the fact that in the last 20 years each journalist’s output has on average tripled. He estimates that only 12% of “facts” published in newspapers have been checked.

I’d noticed some indications of this but thought of it as laziness. But seemingly it’s the opposite — journalists having so much demanded of them that they don’t have time for real investigation.

The other key component is the emergence of the PR industry. So we have governments, industries, and other pressure groups producing their own “news” which “churnalists” then regurgitate.

Anyway, Davies has a book that’s just come out and it looks to be interesting if this article is anything to go by.

In December I used some money I got from my family as a gift to participate in the National Geographic “Genographic” project. I sent off a swab of my cheek cells to have my Y chromosome tested. I just got the results back the other day. No big surprises — I’m a mamber of Haplogroup R1b, which is the most common haplogroup in Scotland (where I’m from).

But what is more interesting is that my family’s journey begins, as does that of all human beings alive on the planet today, in or around Ethiopia, where last spring my wife and I adopted Maia. So over the last 60,000 years or so my family has migrated in a large loop from Ethiopia, up to Scotland, and in my case over to the US. And then we’ve headed back to Ethiopia to adopt. I guess that means Maia took a shortcut!

The New York Times recently had a piece on the gadgets that distract drivers from, you know, actual driving.

But they had in mind technology rather more sophisticated than this –

– a product that is thankfully unavailable at present.

I’m reminded of the woman who told me she once rear-ended a vehicle because she was distractedly listening to a Thich Nhat Hanh tape on meditation. At least she wasn’t reading the actual book.

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe.

Suppose the Iranian government arrested and beat Katie Couric, held her virtually incommunicado for six years and promised to release her only if she would spy for Iran. In such circumstances, Iranian investments in public diplomacy toward the United States wouldn’t get very far, either.

Read it in Nick Kristof’s column.

Living with differences can be hard:

There are problems when people divorce and have conflicting views on what the children’s religious upbringing should be (”Religion Joins Custody Cases, to Judges’ Unease“.

There are problems when people live together and the end up adopting different diets (”I Love You, But You Love Meat“).

Check out this quote from the latter article:

No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”

I don’t think that kind of thing helps us live together.

I don’t know which is sadder — the fact that today the senate is likely to give retrospective immunity to both the president and telecoms companies for blatantly breaking the law and spying on US citizens without warrants, or that the passing of these laws is being largely ignored by the media, with the exception of Glen Greenwald’s column in Salon.

You’ll need to sit through a brief ad before you can read the column, but it’s well worth reading.

More on hatred in US politics.

In “Hate Springs Eternal” Paul Krugman accuses Obama’s supporters of hatred towards Hillary, although he offers little if anything as evidence for this claim.

In “A Calumny a Day To Keep Hillary Away” Stanley Fish discusses some of the comments on his earlier post about Clinton-hatred and exposes more of the same.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter (who I seriously suspect is mentally ill) says the following:

“I’m not equating Hillary Clinton to Stalin, and if I did I apologize to Stalin’s descendants… I’m not comparing McCain to Hitler. Hitler had a coherent tax policy.”

Crooksandliars.com reminds us of a vicious joke by presidential candidate John McCain:

Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.

This was not one of those unfortunate and spontaneous slips of the tongue, but a pre-scripted joke in a public talk. At the time Chelsea Clinton was 18 years old.

Then MSNBC’s David Schuster couldn’t resist suggesting that the Clinton family was prostituting their daughter:

There’s just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea’s out there calling up celebrities, saying ‘Support my mom.’ Doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?

That’s an odd comment to make about a 28-year-old woman who is working on her mother’s political campaign. I don’t believe that Schuster expressed any similar distaste about the fact that several of Mitt Romney’s boys were working for him.

And some of the comments about Hillary that I’ve seen on Digg.com are unprintable, including one calling for her assassination (although that particular comment didn’t use any four-letter words).

There really is something very toxic about the political climate in the US at the moment. It’s not just fringe elements either (like the Digg commenters who call Hillary a “witch” or refer to her in even cruder terms), but people who are center-stage in the media.