It’s hard to believe the sheer extent of the intellectual dishonesty that reigns in the White House these days. Bush’s repeated statements of concern about human-induced global warming appear to be nothing but a sop:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail - NYTimes.com

Somehow I find this even more shocking than the lies that got us into an unnecessary war in Iraq. It’s so freaking childish and passive-aggressive.

A four-legged fish with the head of an alligator. Cool!

And creationists complain about a lack of transitional forms!

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Fossil fills out water-land leap

I came across this interesting post today, in which an email from Bill Gates explains his frustration with trying to download a program from the Microsoft site — and it really does sound like a painful experience, complete with the usual scary messages, pointless questions, etc.

Here’s just a taster — it’s worth reading the whole thing:

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

Hey, Bill, if you’re that frustrated with the Windows experience have you ever thought of switching to a Mac?

Another shot of Maia’s great great great grandfather, Leslie Lickley. Born 1840. Died 1910.

I confess that sometimes I get frustrated with my Mac, but honestly I could never go back to using a PC. This graph shows the kind of care Apple takes. While Microsoft programs become more and more bloated, Apple are working on slimming down their applications (and the Operating System itself).

Just look at the changes in the Mail program, and in Font Book and Preview!

I was very touched by Peter Lovenheim’s piece on neighbors in the NYT today. After a local tragedy where a man killed his wife and then himself, Lovenheim decided that he wanted to get to know his neighbors better. He discusses staying over with an elderly widower and helping form a community to support another neighbor with cancer. It takes courage to reach out to people like that.

According to social scientists, from 1974 to 1998, the frequency with which Americans spent a social evening with neighbors fell by about one-third. Robert Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” a groundbreaking study of the disintegration of the American social fabric, suggests that the decline actually began 20 years earlier, so that neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

We’re fortunate in that the area outside of our house is a quiet cul de sac, and families with kids tend to congregate there in the early evening. So I get to talk to the neighbors. But although I know their names and their kids names I can’t say that I know any of them particularly well. There’s only one neighbor (immediately next door) whose house we’ve been into, and who have been in our house. I keep vaguely thinking of inviting other neighbors in for coffee, but never get around to it. I want to do something about that.

********

Added later: It occurred to me during the day that I’ve been struck in the past by how rarely I meet neighbors outdoors.

When Shrijnana and I returned from Ethiopia we were rather disturbed by that lack of outdoor activity, even in lovely spring weather. While in Ethiopia you’ll see people outdoors all the time, just hanging around, or walking, even miles from the nearest town, we got back and realized that our neighborhood (a condo complex of 100 dwellings) resembled a scene from 28 Days Later. You do see people outdoors, but it’s the odd person walking a dog or walking to or from their car, for the most part. And there are the gatherings outside our house, although they don’t happen ever day.

Sometimes in the evening, after dinner, we’ll go for a walk by the river that’s just behind our house. It’s delightful. But unbelievably quiet. Often we’ll see no other people at all, even on warm and pleasant summer evenings. Some people are probably having dinner, but I guess most are watching television. Or both! How sad.

Thanks to ThinkProgress for this.

Interviewer Chris Wallace: “Why would Mr. Bush leave office allowing Iran to go full speed ahead on its nuclear program and leave it up to the next president, especially if that president is Barack Obama.”

Bill Kristol said: “Honestly, if the president thought John McCain was going to be the next president, he would think it more appropriate to let the next president make that decision than do it on his way out.”

So if Bush thinks Obama is going to win, he’ll bomb Iran, but if he thinks McCain is going to win he won’t, because he trusts that McCain will do it himself.

This is just Kristol’s opinion, of course, but it was Kristol’s opinions that got us into the Iraq war (see Bill Kristol’s impeccable record of (false) predictions) so we shouldn’t dismiss him as just another talking head on TV.

Here’s the interview:

Maggie Jackson has written a book (Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) about the calamity of us being a world of information workers who are constantly interrupted and therefore are unable to think: Shifting Careers - Fighting a Workplace War Against Distraction - NYTimes.com

What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

This is territory familiar to Buddhist practitioners:

Awareness = sati (mindfulness: a general awareness of our experience)

Focus = ekegata (one-pointedness: selecting one thing from our awareness and paying attention to it in a focused way)

Executive attention = sampajañña (continuity of purpose, mindfulness of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what we need to do to get there)

Although arguably that third one could be appamada. The Buddha’s last words were appamadena sampadetha — with mindfulness, strive. The particular quality of appamada that sets it apart from other aspects of mindfulness is its readiness to act. It’s sometimes translated as “diligence” and it’s said that we should pick up our mindfulness (by means of appamada) as swiftly as a warrior would pick up a dropped sword on a battlefield.

I’ve ordered the book!

I was reading Jeff Jacoby this morning and was prompted to look up the divorce rates in Japan, and found the following list:

Divorce rate per 1000 couples

Japan: 2.2
USA:4.0
Germany: 2.4
France: 1.9
Italy: 0.7
UK: 2.6
Sweden: 2.4

It’s interesting how in this respect, as in so many others, the US is an outlier. More secular countries like the UK, Sweden, and France have much lower divorce rates, and Japan (a Shinto country) has a divorce rate about half of that in the US.

Jacoby frequently appears to inhabit a parallel universe, in which the oil companies making record profits as we pay record prices for gas is a good thing, and where price-gouging in the wake of a catastrophe is also a good thing (”Higher prices make it possible for victims to get the help they need to ride out the crisis and for the devastated region to recover as quickly as possible”). Yes, he’s a conservative, and opposed to the “reality-based community.”

So when I read the following in an analysis of why birthrates are declining — “Skyrocketing rates of divorce have made women less likely to have as many children as in generations past” I was surprised. If this is true it’s slipped by me. It seems to me that people get married and have kids on the assumption that they’re going to be sticking together. Then they (sometimes) get divorced, marry again, and have more kids on the assumption that they’re going to be sticking together. I’ve not been aware of people planning the arrival of their offspring on the assumption that they’re going to get divorced at some point. And in fact the birthrate in the US is much the same now as it was in 1957, well before divorce started to dramatically increase (around 1970).

And since Jacoby had mentioned that the birthrate in Japan had started to decline earlier than in other countries I thought it would be interesting to check out the divorce rate there. Anyway, the divorce rate in Italy (the country whose birthrate decline Jacoby highlights) is the lowest of the lot, suggesting there’s not much in his analysis. As usual.

Nice guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the “dark triad” persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

Bad guys really do get the most girls - sex - 18 June 2008 - New Scientist

But there’s just one problem — many women find “bad guys” irresistible.

So it’s all women’s fault, really. If they didn’t breed with these scoundrels the world would be rid of narcissistic, thrill-seeking Machiavellis.

If the Mozart Effect teaches us anything, it’s that the results of a flawed study are always at risk of becoming a common expression, a copyrighted product, a popular belief infused with a magic that is difficult to dispel.

More than half of Britons think Christianity is likely to have disappeared from the country a hundred years from now, according to a survey: Christianity ‘could die out within a century’ (Telegraph)

On the other hand, “just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years’ time.”

That seems more likely.

What most interests me is the next part:

Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.

Buddhism however, proved more attractive than both Islam and Judaism, and was chosen by nine per cent of those questioned.

I think it’s fair to say that the average British person doesn’t know much about Buddhism, but it seems they have a favorable impression of it.

I’m not persuaded in the predictive abilities of the British public, however. The last I heard, the number of practicing Christians in the UK (those who actually attend some kind of church service) was under 15% and dropping. Many people call themselves Christians just because that was the faith of their parents or grandparents.

I can’t imagine Christianity disappearing, but I do think that the numbers of practicing Christians is likely to stabilize at a low level — perhaps between 5% and 10%. In a century Buddhism may well catch up with the lower end of that range that by a process of uptake, and Islam may also reach parity with Christianity because of their higher birth-rate.

According to another Telegraph report, “by 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians.”

But then I suspect that Islam may increasingly see its own youth “going native” and becoming more secular, leaving Christianity and Buddhism as the most prevalent religions in 2108.

The Times outlines a report that claims that “churchgoing across all denominations in England will fall from about 3 million today to about 700,000 in 2050. In Wales it will tumble from 200,000 to 42,000 and in Scotland, from 550,000 to 140,000. The figures take into account the recent boost to Catholicism from the number of Polish immigrants to Britain, particularly in Scotland.”

The religious times they are a-changing.

I was a witness in the court case referred to in a recent Boston Globe story. I’d been asked by the Corrections Department to be an “expert witness” in a case where a Buddhist inmate had not been allowed to have a vegan diet and had not been allowed to have a meditation mat and cushion.

I was pleased that the judge upheld the inmate’s right (which he’s been pushing for over a ten year period) to have a vegan diet. Whether, as a Buddhist, one is a vegetarian, vegan, or meat-eater is a question for the individual’s own conscience, but there’s a perfectly valid case for sticking to a vegan diet as an expression of “ahimsa” or non-harm.

I was more surprised with the decision over the cushion.

Prison officials … testified that the cushion and pillow could be used to hide contraband. They also said that they give Buddhist inmates access to such items in group meditation sessions in a classroom once a week. If Yeboah-Sefah wants to meditate more often, they said, he can use his prison-issued pillow and mattress.

I’d testified that an ordinary pillow would be unsuitable for meditation, and although I understand the security concerns I thought that some compromise would have been reached, along the lines of foam blocks or a meditation bench being made available.

I wasn’t surprised to hear the following comment, which is fairly typical of the attitude of many people in the corrections department:

Steve Kenneway, president of the 4,500-member state correction officers’ union, condemned the lawsuit as an example of when inmates “manipulate the system.”

In fact a corrections department staff member started to say exactly the same thing to me while we were waiting to give evidence. I simply pointed out to her that we were forbidden to discuss the case and she thankfully dropped the issue.

This is my great great grandmother, Mary Lickley (née Robertson). She was married to Leslie Lickley.

I believe she was born 1841 and died 1907. Married 1859.

Last night I was interviewed for a film on religion and science. I was a little wary about who the people were behind the film (especially given the deception practiced by the producers of the Intelligent Design film “Expelled,” who lied to participants — or at least the scientist participants — in order to get their involvement).

But they turned out to be a good crowd and to be genuinely seeking a variety of viewpoints. They’d recently interviewed Daniel Dennett, so I was flattered to be included, although I’ve no doubt that Dennett would look askance at my Buddhist practice.

After I’d explained that Darwinism really, really isn’t a problem for Buddhists the interviewer asked if I had a final message for the audience, which would be high-school students and teachers. What I said was along the lines that I’d encourage people to practice radical honesty and to apply the same standards to judge their own beliefs as they apply to the beliefs of others. “intellectual integrity” was one phrase I used.

The illustration above (found on Digg) is a perfect “illustration” of the kind of thing that happens when you switch off your critical faculties in order to support the insupportable (in this case that the bible is literally true and that the world is only a few thousand years old). You end up with lies. You end up lying, and teaching lies to children.

It pains me to have to point out something so obvious, but wouldn’t you think that if dinosaurs were alive 2,000 years ago (or even 10,000 years ago) there would be one single example, somewhere in the world, of dinosaur remains being found alongside modern animals? Or even in recent strata? Really, it would make more sense for these poor benighted, ethically-challenged people to have stuck with the claim that fossil remains were planted by the devil. Or that they were planted by God as a test — apparently even some Christians think that God lies.

Buried in an NYT editorial (Op-Ed Contributor - The U.S. and Iraq Are Repeating the Errors of a Disastrous 1930 Treaty) is the news that the US has $50 billion in frozen Iraq assets, some of this dating back to the first Gulf war.

And this money won’t be given back until the Iraqis agree to ratify a “pact” the details of which are being kept secret from the US people and even from congress. Some details have been leaked, however, by the Iraqis, who aren’t entirely happy about the terms of the pact:

While not formally a treaty (having been carefully crafted to avoid the requirement of Senate ratification), the wide-ranging pact that the United States proposes nearly replicates the 1930 accord. According to press reports based on leaks from the Iraqi Parliament, the pact envisions giving the Americans rights to as many as 58 military bases and control of Iraqi airspace. It would grant immunity from Iraqi laws to American military personnel. And it would empower American officials to detain suspected terrorists without the approval of Iraqi authorities.

This is the US bringing “freedom” to Iraq.

I wonder what’s in the small print?

In the last week Maia has started putting together two-word sentences, which so far have been along the lines of “hi dada” and “hi mama.” Yesterday she came down the stairs unassisted, although her nervous father was hovering attentively nearby. For the cognoscienti, she used the “sit and slide” method. Prior to this she’d been convinced that she could simply walk down, and to her credit she could almost do it apart from the twist at the top of the stairs where the handrail is out of her reach.

She’s also repeating words like nobody’s business. Almost anything you say to her she’ll try to repeat.

And when I returned home after a five-day trip her face had actually changed shape!

This is all wonderful to see!

There’s a good review here of the last episode of season four of Battlestar Galactica. Read no more if you want to be preserved from spoilers.

I really had not expected this season to end with the fleet reaching Earth. Having seen that they’d ended up in orbit around the blue planet, I didn’t expect that they were going to land. And having seen them land I wasn’t at all expecting them to find an apocalyptic wasteland, which looked very like it might have been NYC. That’s what’s great about BSG — it constantly defies expectations.

And I just can’t guess where it’s going next. So there are probably survivors on Earth, but how are the final ten episodes going to spin out the Cylon / fleet / earthling interactions? How is the fifth of the final five Cylons going to be of any relevance now that Earth has been found?

2009, when the final 10 will be show, seems a long way off, but apparently there will be TV movies between now and then. I’m excited!

Fiscal Poison Pill - Bush’s Tax Cuts and the McCain and Obama Plans

“…the sad case of John McCain, part of whose lingering image as a maverick rests on his early opposition to the Bush tax cuts, which he declared excessive and too tilted toward the rich.

“Since then the budget surpluses of the Clinton years have given way to persistent deficits, and income inequality has risen to new heights, vindicating his opposition.

But instead of pointing this out, Mr. McCain now promises to make those tax cuts permanent — and proposes further cuts that are, if anything, tilted even more toward the wealthy. And how is the loss of revenue to be made up? Mr. McCain hasn’t offered a realistic answer.”

It’s heartening to see Doctor Who featured in the NY Times: The Man Behind the New Doctor Who, Changing British TV

It is hard to overstate “Doctor Who’s” significance for Britons of a certain age.

Too damn right. One of my earliest memories is of watching Doctor Who with my family on a Saturday night, usually in Dundee while visiting my grandparents. I don’t remember many specifics, but when I recently purchased the very first season of Doctor Who, from 1963, when I was two years old, I could remember having watched parts of it. There was only one scene that I could specifically remember (the Doctor using a cape to cut a Dalek off from its power supply (a metal floor), but the general shape of the Dalek city was also vaguely familiar. It’s pretty impressive that a show can make that lasting an impression in a two-year-old’s mind.

Doctor Who has come a long way since then — or rather it’s arced around and made a steep ascent. That first season was intended as “serious drama” — but it was also Science Fiction on a shoestring budget, with scenery that wobbled to the touch. That feature became a constant (falling rocks would bounce off of the main characters without leaving so much as a bruise) but unfortunately the quality of the drama became laughable over the years, until I was too embarrassed to be seen watching it.

But what a thing it’s become in its rebirth, under the brilliant direction of Russell T. Davies! The scripts are excellent, the acting is frequently top-notch, and the special effects are glorious. And the iconic title music has been only minorly retouched, in a way that preserves its eeriness while also making it even more visceral than it already was.

I’ve never missed an episode of the new show. ( I still don’t have a TV — can I confess to using Bittorrent? Does that make me a bad person? I promise to buy the DVDs!)

The spin-off, Torchwood, is Angel to Doctor Who’s Buffy — in more way than one. Like Angel, Torchwood is meant for adults and deals with more serious themes. Both are darker than their parent shows (although Buffy its long dark night of the soul in the form of season six). Both Torchwood and Angel have handsome leading men who wear long overcoats. Both leading men are immortal. Both shows feature ensembles of diverse characters with various skills, dealing with alien/supernatural forces. Both series use high, swooping shots of a city (LA and Cardiff) to break up scenes and to create atmosphere. Both make use of the team walking, in wedge formation, towards the camera in slow motion. The parallels are a bit uncanny at times, and definitely deliberate.

Like Angel, Torchwood started off shaky. The first half of season one of Angel was mostly dull, and it wasn’t until the arrival of Wesley Windham-Pryce (”rogue vampire hunter”) and the departure of the Irish guy whose name I can no longer recall that the ensemble really started to gel. The whole first season of Torchwood, it must be said, lacked flair, and was only sporadically interesting. The second season, however, became gripping, and it ended by taking a huge risk in killing off two of the ensemble. This left me rather stunned, and longing for season three to see how the show continues.