A poll to chew on

My 24-hour take-home open-book-but-dastardly comprehensive exam is tomorrow. I'll be offline and up all night squeezing every last minute out of those hours. The Better Half bought me a case of Tab, my "drug" of choice since I was but a teen (and not available in San Francisco!), to assist in maintaining wakefulness (no promises for coherence).

While I'm writing, and then weeping, and then spending the holiday weekend curled into a fetal position, digest the results of the latest Pew Poll on Religion and Public Life, which says Americans yearn for the via media on this issue.

One of the interesting points to me: "Only 7 percent of Americans identify with the "religious left" (an increase, nonetheless), but "32 percent of the public identify themselves as 'progressive Christian'"! They "tend to be more moderate than left-of-center on political issues." That is an unhelpful distinction, since there are moderates on both "sides" of the center. I won't be able to dig into the specifics before Friday, but if you want to, the full report is here.

Of Dwarf Planets and other downsizeable objects

Pluto has been demoted from a full-sized planet to a "dwarf planet," and Neptune could be next! What is this universe coming to?!

The difference in Pluto's stature was immediately apparent. Here is Pluto and its "moon" when Pluto was still a planet:


And here is Pluto and its "moon" since Pluto was demoted:



Pluto's fans and supporters are taking it pretty hard.

But observers in other disciplines have been inspired to re-examine their own sacred cows and classification schemes. Reasonality proposes the Dwarf Presidency, for example. (MizM disclaimer: Mr. Reasonality is a friend and former colleague; welcome to the blogosphere "Cal"!)

So far, so good

(Baxter and one of the wonderful techs at the SF/SPCA animal hospital.) (Updated: I replaced the original photo with one edited to blur the tech, since I forgot to ask if I could post her picture!)

Baxter was heading outside with a vet tech when we went to get him this morning. The tech said he'd been very quiet up to that point, then got so agitated that she "thought he had to pee." But he saw us coming up the sidewalk and either forgot what he was going to do, or - as the tech suggested - just "knew" we were coming for him!

Alas, with this many stitches to mess with for the next two weeks (warning: "stitches" photo follows!)...
Yucky photo coming...

Yucky photo coming...

Yucky photo coming...

(For the squeamish, I tried to put enough "warnings" there to push the photo out of your window.)

...he'll need to spend a lot of time in this fashionable headgear:



(Another "yucky photo" alert.) You can see the pre-surgery growth on his knee in this picture.

It was big, but that still seems like a mighty generous incision he's sporting!



Some good meds, some napping in the sun... He'll be just fine. We'll get the biopsy results in a week or so. Thanks for all the good wishes!

Enlightenment from "DarkSyde"

(Updated to correct a surprising number of typos.) "DarkSyde," a regular contributor to Daily Kos, today reflects on the five year anniversary of Bush's announcement that he would cripple all stem cell research. DarkSyde puts it in linear terms, first:

Five years ... let's put that in technological perspective: Are you reading this post on the same computer you had five years ago? Does your business use the same routers, hubs, software, and servers you used five years ago, with no upgrades or replacements? Now extend that analogy to stem cell research and you get the idea of where we could be. For half a decade, this precious research has been frozen in time, placed in suspended animation at the expense of the sick and dying, to benefit the already rich and the powerful while enabling the incompetent.

Then he gives us a brilliant visual, posting these pictures and caption--

The President's rationale in pictures: Left an Iraqi girl, one of the thousands of living human beings BushCo considers worth sacrificing for an unknown benefit, maybe, at an unknown future date, perhaps, in some unknown way. Right: A human embryonic stem cell magnified thousands of times; a life too precious to risk destroying no matter what the potential benefit.

Of course, the administration's medieval mindset is getting to be old news, and we grow weary of protesting it. But folks, Bush's war on science is serious business, systematically crippling research and education. From a July 22 NYT article I saved (now only available in paid archives):

NASA's Goals Delete Mention Of Home Planet
By ANDREW C. REVKIN (NYT)
Published: July 22, 2006

From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush's goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Then there's Friday's news that evolutionary biology had mysteriously and "inadvertently" been omitted from a list of majors approved for federal student aid:

Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
By CORNELIA DEAN

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.

“If a field is missing, that student would not even get into the process,” he said.

That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.

One of them, Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned about it from someone at the Department of Education, who got in touch with him after his essay on the necessity of teaching evolution appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 15. Dr. Krauss would not name his source, who he said was concerned about being publicly identified as having drawn attention to the matter.

An article about the issue was posted Tuesday on the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. Krauss said the omission would be “of great concern” if evolutionary biology had been singled out for removal, or if the change had been made without consulting with experts on biology. The grants are awarded under the National Smart Grant program, established this year by Congress. (Smart stands for Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent.)

The program provides $4,000 grants to third- or fourth-year, low-income students majoring in physical, life or computer sciences; mathematics; technology; engineering; or foreign languages deemed “critical” to national security.

The list of eligible majors (which is online at ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0606A.pdf) is drawn from the Education Department’s “Classification of Instructional Programs,” or CIP (pronounced “sip”), a voluminous and detailed classification of courses of study, arranged in a numbered system of sections and subsections.

Part 26, biological and biomedical sciences, has a number of sections, each of which has one or more subsections. Subsection 13 is ecology, evolution, systematics and population biology. This subsection itself has 10 sub-subsections. One of them is 26.1303 — evolutionary biology, “the scientific study of the genetic, developmental, functional, and morphological patterns and processes, and theoretical principles; and the emergence and mutation of organisms over time.”

Though references to evolution appear in listings of other fields of biological study, the evolutionary biology sub-subsection is missing from a list of “fields of study” on the National Smart Grant list — there is an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology and biological oceanography) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology/limnology).

Students cannot simply list something else on an application form, said Mr. Nassirian of the registrars’ association. “Your declared major maps to a CIP code,” he said.

Mr. Nassirian said people at the Education Department had described the omission as “a clerical mistake.” But it is “odd,” he said, because applying the subject codes “is a fairly mechanical task. It is not supposed to be the subject of any kind of deliberation.”

“I am not at all certain that the omission of this particular major is unintentional,” he added. “But I have to take them at their word.”

Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. “It’s just awfully coincidental,” said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.

Jeremy Gunn, who directs the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the change was not immediately reversed “we will certainly pursue this.”

Dr. Rissing said removing evolutionary biology from the list of acceptable majors would discourage students who needed the grants from pursuing the field, at a time when studies of how genes act and evolve are producing valuable insights into human health.

“This is not just some kind of nicety,” he said. “We are doing a terrible disservice to our students if this is yet another example of making sure science doesn’t offend anyone.”

Dr. Krauss of Case Western said he did not know what practical issues would arise from the omission of evolutionary biology from the list, given that students would still be eligible for grants if they declared a major in something else — biology, say.

“I am sure an enterprising student or program director could find a way to put themselves in another slot,” he said. “But why should they have to do that?”

Mr. Nassirian said he was not so sure. “Candidly, I don’t think most administrators know enough about this program” to help students overcome the apparent objection to evolutionary biology, he said. Undergraduates would be even less knowledgeable about the issue, he added.

Dr. Krauss said: “Removing that one major is not going to make the nation stupid, but if this really was removed, specifically removed, then I see it as part of a pattern to put ideology over knowledge. And, especially in the Department of Education, that should be abhorred.”

If you haven't curled up with Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, now is a good time; since the book's original publication just one year ago, the Administration has been so dogged in its anti-science efforts that Mooney had lots of material to add to the paperback edition.

Baxter's Big Scary Day

Keep a good thought for this guy. Baxter is having surgery Friday to remove a tumor from his leg. We'll all be glad to see it go. We've been operating under the hypothesis that it was a sebaceous cyst - not at all uncommon in an older dog - but it got suspicious-looking this summer. We'll have it biopsied, too.

Anesthesia gets a little dicier as dogs and cats get older, and Baxter is around 13. But we're counting on picking him up Saturday morning!

The big judicial decision that happened while the networks were running Jon-Benet stories

You probably didn't hear much about the stunning slap-down of Bush's unconstitutional wiretapping program on Friday -- what with the far more important news that a visibly disturbed man has made a dubious claim to be the murderer of Jon-Benet Ramsey. But a judge confirmed what we all knew, and Bush had a conniption, and the wingnuts are - predictably - screeching with racist indignation about the judge. Buzzflash sets them straight.

All of which reminds me... I went bumpersticker shopping at Carry A Big Sticker and got this one



and this one



and this one



But the only one the Better Half will allow on the shared automobile is this one.

Nice, but pretty innocuous. The Better Half is afraid the others will invite small arms fire when the vehicle ventures outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

(By the way, it's nearly 10 p.m. Pacific time, and the Apocalypse hasn't happened, yet. So I guess my comprehensive exam is still on. 7 days and counting...)

Exam Countdown

 

Many, many thanks to the lovely and talented "Dr. Ruth" (no, not that Dr. Ruth) for permission to post her gorgeous photo of a cactus wren - which she snapped somewhere along her journeys through New Mexico and Arizona.

Count on things being a little sparse around here for the next 11 or so days. During my non-work hours, I'm desperately and anxiously preparing for a comprehensive exam. In fact, I should be doing that right now! 

Jim Wallis in Berkeley, September 11

I've received this notice from a couple of sources, and keep meaning to share it. For those of you in the Bay Area: Jim Wallis will be speaking in Berkeley on September 11. 'abc' and I will have just heard him the previous weekend at the Politics and Spirituality conference we'll be attending in Pasadena, so I will probably be catching up on homework instead of attending this event:

Christian leader Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, will speak about faith and politics at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley on Monday, September 11 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm in an event co-sponsored by the Graduate Theological Union, the Sojourners organization, and the Beatitudes Society. The executive director and editor-in-chief of Sojourners, Wallis brings a progressive message that links personal values with public issues. Prior to his talk, books will be available for purchase from 5:00 to 5:30 pm.

First Congregational Church of Berkeley is located at 2345 Channing Way in Berkeley, California 94704. For more information, contact David Myers at 510/649-2420 or dmyers@gtu.edu.

Pat Robertson: Ceasefire sucks

Just two weeks ago Pat Robertson alarmed me greatly when he declared himself a believer in global warming.

But I'm relieved to report that he's back to normal:

Pat Robertson laments Mideast cease-fire

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. The Reverend Pat Robertson, who prayed for victory last week with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, contends that the cease-fire with Hezbollah has rendered the entire bloody conflict pointless.

Back from Israel to resume hosting his "700 Club" broadcast, Robertson quoted a Bible passage from the prophet Isaiah: "We were with child. We writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind."

"In other words," he said, "nothing came out of this at all. 'We writhed in pain,' but nothing was born from it."

Suggesting that the invasion of Lebanon failed to achieve its objective, Robertson said, "Israel went in, but what have they done? Is the word of Isaiah true? -- 'We writhed in pain but we gave birth to wind' -- I'm afraid so."

(via Faith in Public Life)

Brown Bears=Sitting Ducks

(Update: photo should be clickable, now. But just in case, it came from here and is used with gratitude!)

I just caught a very disturbing story on CBS News.

The reporter visited McNeil River State Game Sanctuary in Alaska, which runs a kind of eco-tourist program where lucky lottery winners (200 a year) are allowed to come and observe/photograph very habituated wild brown bears at close range.

(CBS) The spectacle plays out each summer at the world's premier bear-viewing area: Alaska's massive brown bears posing, wrestling and filling up on migrating salmon in the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary.

CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen reports there's not a more camera-friendly group of brown bears in the world, because over time they've become very accustomed to having human visitors watch what they do.

And it's a tough ticket. A lottery system grants admission to just 10 visitors a day, totaling just 200 for the entire summer.

"It's overwhelming," says Steve Roberts, who came from Minneapolis to see the bears. "You just don't know which way to look."

"It's a three-ring circus," says Ruth Roberts.

Some people wait years for their chance to visit the sanctuary. Cheryl Parker, of Fairbanks, Alaska, found herself taken with a skinny girl bear who was trying to catch salmon: "There's a girl out here who's a tiny thing, and it takes her a while to get that fish. But once she gets it, she tears off with it."

The sanctuary is located a float plane ride over Cooke Inlet on the Katmai Peninsula, just past the still-steaming Augustine volcano. Once there, it's a four-mile hike to experience the ultimate bear tale.

Close encounters are common, and, as Bowen discovered, unnerving.

A young bear looked to Bowen for a little help with other, bigger, bears who wanted his fish. Guides shooed him off, but retired sanctuary manager Larry Aumiller said it's another sign that these are not your average bears.

"They're so confident and so unconcerned about us and what we're going to do, that they're relaxed enough to play," Aumiller says. "It's great."

Therein lies the problem. McNeil's bears may be too relaxed for what's about to happen, when, one year from now, adjacent buffer zones that protect them will be opened to trophy hunters. It's led Aumiller to retire, because he fears he's set the bears up for disaster.

He says, "When you finally get there, and they finally trust you, and you know that trust is going to be violated, I don't know how to describe it except to say it's heartbreaking."

Emphasis mine. Seems like that little zinger should get a bit more play in this story! Trophy hunters will be allowed to shoot habituated bears? Sounds like Dick Cheney's cup of tea. Judging from the comments following the story link, a lot of reader/listeners are outraged by the plan. One commenter posted a link to an online petition you can "sign" here (and get more info here).

Well, that didn't take long -- Part II

(Here is part 1.) Try to act surprised.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

The New York Times was deeply impressed by the tightly coordinated spin operation:

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

By the time the president’s top political strategists met at his ranch on Friday for an annual summer fund-raiser, the events had given them an opportunity to pull together the Republican Party as it headed toward the home stretch of the campaign, rallying once more around Mr. Bush’s signature issue, the fight against terrorism.

The entire effort was swiftly coordinated by the Republican National Committee and the White House, using the same political machinery that carried them to victory in 2004. It began in the days before the anticipated loss of Mr. Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, to Ned Lamont, a vocal war critic whose victory Republicans used to paint Democrats as “Defeatocrats.”

That word originated in a White House memorandum by Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, suggesting ways to frame the debate, that was shared with officials, including Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, and Karl Rove, the president’s top strategist.

The effort continued with the news of the British intelligence breakthrough, with the message that the plot had highlighted the stakes of a fight that the Democrats, according to Republicans, were not equipped to face.

But Democrats, seeing a political opportunity, began to focus on national security, making a vigorous case this week that the Republicans were mismanaging the war and making the country more vulnerable to attack.

“If the Republican Party thinks this is a good political issue for them, they are mistaken,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

And a top Republican strategist cautioned that the party’s candidates still faced serious challenges in states where the war and Mr. Bush were overwhelmingly unpopular.

But at the very least, news of the plot helped the White House and the Republican Party achieve something they have struggled to do all year: bring the party forcefully together with the president.

(Hat tip Americablog and FDL.)

Massive oil spill off the coast of Lebanon

Hannah Allam, McClatchey Newspapers:

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- A massive oil spill off the coast of Lebanon is choking marine life, polluting the air as it evaporates and threatening to produce a long-lasting ecological disaster if Israel doesn't allow cleanup crews into the sea soon, local environmental officials warned yesterday.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil poured into the Mediterranean Sea after Israeli jets bombed a power plant south of Beirut in mid-July, during the first days of the war between Israel and Hezbollah militants. A month later, Israel's maritime blockade is still in place, making Lebanese coastal waters far too dangerous for specialized teams to get to work on the spill, environmental officials and activists say.

While international attention is focused on the human casualties of Israel's month-long bombing campaign, the Lebanese government also is pleading for help to save its pristine beaches and fragile underwater life.

"The turtles are hit, the dolphins are hit, the urchins are hit, the corals are hit," Lebanese Environment Minister Yacoub Saffar said. "We are facing a major ecosystem failure."

The spill already has reached Syrian waters north of Lebanon, and the governments of Cyprus, Turkey and Greece are on alert, as strong tides spread what experts are calling the worst spill ever in the Mediterranean and a disaster comparable with the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.

The United Nations, the European Union and Greenpeace International have dispatched experts to assess the damage, but no real cleanup can occur until the waters are safe again for boats.

Cleanup efforts are expected to take more than a year and cost more than $150 million.

The crisis began July 13, when Israeli air strikes targeted fuel storage tanks at the Jieh power plant, about 19 miles south of Beirut. Another strike at the same site came two days later. The tanks caught fire and burned for weeks, as thousands of tons of industrial fuel oil washed into the Mediterranean.

The early bombing campaign against Lebanese infrastructure was so intense, Mr. Saffar said, that the government was unable to conduct a comprehensive study of the damage. He added that it was only on Aug. 2, nearly three weeks after the last strike, that the Israelis provided aerial photos of the damage.

Satellite photos show the spill as a series of oily blobs darkening the aqua waters just half a mile from Lebanon's coast. The spill runs 93 miles long and more than 8 miles wide at some points, and it is contained in a small sea rather than an ocean.

"This is like a spoonful of sugar in a cup of tea. If you dump it in a bathtub, it's different," Mr. Saffar said. "And the Exxon Valdez treatment started 72 hours after the spill. We are 25 days late."

The damage already is visible at several beach resorts, where inky waves have washed oil-covered fish and birds ashore. The fuel's most volatile elements are the first to evaporate, which sends toxins into the air in and around Beirut, experts said.

A greasy, gray film has shown up on cars near the coast, and the government warns that it's just a matter of time before the pollution causes headaches and nausea among Lebanese fishermen and coastal residents. The government has advised all Lebanese to stop eating seafood until the scope of the pollution is determined.

"All along the bay, it's just a strip of oil. The white sands have become black beaches," said Zeina Alhajj, who is studying the disaster for Greenpeace International. "The water is full of oil and debris and dead fish. We saw crabs full of oil, struggling, fighting."

An oxygen-starved "dead zone" that has appeared annually off the coast of Oregon is more extensive this year:

[...]On Tuesday, underwater video cameras remotely operated from this research vessel sent back a starkly different view — a reef barren of fish but littered with what researchers estimated as thousands of carcasses of decaying crabs.

Worms, normally dug into sea sand, drifted dead along the bottom.

"It's just a wasteland down there," said Francis Chan, an Oregon State University marine ecologist aboard the Elakha. "I didn't expect to see anything quite like this."

These crabs and worms died because they proved too slow to move away from an extraordinary swath of oxygen-depleted water.

Scientists call this a dead zone.

Although this reef appeared to be a worst-case scenario, oxygen-poor water now stretches along 70 miles off the Oregon Coast. Oxygen-poor water also has been detected off the coast of Washington's Olympic Peninsula.[...]

Try not to miss this 5-part special feature in the LA Times, Altered Oceans. It doesn't seem to require registration, at this point. Each part is essential reading, and the graphics, photos, and videos are all worth viewing.

Loren Eisley, quoted in Sylvia Earle's 1995 book, Sea Change:

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water....Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast upon the sea.

Well, that didn't take long.

How breathtakingly coincidental. One day after Lamont wins the Connecticut Democratic primary, the Prince of Darkness, VP Cheney, heads out to warn Americans that the election of Ned Lamont will prove to "Al Qaeda types" that we don't have the stomach to fight the war on terror, and Tony Snow warns Americans that electing people like Ned Lamont leads to events like 9/11. Then today, a foiled plot is announced (the White House has known about it for several days), the US moves the color-coded terror threat level to "red" for the first time ever, the RNC is all ready with a new "war on terror" fundraiser plea (via Americablog) and "anonymous" administration officials celebrate an opportunity to make political hay:

But Bush's Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

"I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

(Also via Americablog.) Of course, we knew this was coming. The next three months will be one long scarefest as the Rovians try to win back their apostates.

I finally got to listen to a podcast I've been carrying around for months - Martin Doblmeier talking about the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith." Download and listen to the program if you can, or read the transcript and look at the photos on the SOF site. (And rent Doblmeier's documentary on Bonhoeffer.) But I was particularly struck - and even more so today - by something Bonhoeffer said at a conference in August 1934:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture, and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security.

I wasn't going to do this...

...but it's just too good. From the Department of Says-It-All:

George Stephanopoulos reports:

According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President's political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

Via TPMCafe.

(Update: A Lieberman advisor claims no help was offered.)

And now for something completely different

Because every news- and blog-site you look at today is going to have a blow-by-blow analysis of the causes and meanings of Joe Lieberman's momentous and much-deserved loss in the CT primary -- including discussion of his campaign's last-minute 24-hour "they hacked our web site" smear (to account for a massive crash that was their own fault), their refusal to acknowledge that the Lamont campaign offered their own technical staff and even hosted the site for the day, and the details of Lieberman's plan to carry out his threat of further dividing the Democrats by running as an independent in order to keep his place at Bush's table -- I'm not going to post about any of that.

Instead, I'm going to link to this very cool story about caterpillars. An enticing snippet:

Few reference-quality collections of specimens exist, because, unlike birds and beetles and butterflies, dead caterpillars do not keep well. Scientists have tried pickling them in alcohol, or hollowing them out and blowing them up like little balloons, but both techniques distort them badly.

And until recent advances in DNA science, the only way to identify a caterpillar positively was to rear it to adulthood, which requires careful husbandry. (There are well-known moths whose caterpillars have never been seen by science.) Most caterpillars shed their skins five or six times as they grow, and each stage, or instar, can have radically different markings and patterns from the previous one.

“In order to do this well, you sort of had to know the entire universe,” said Dr. Wagner, who said that 5 percent to 10 percent of the caterpillars in his book had never before been studied through their entire life cycles. The 700 species in the book are only a small fraction of the 5,000 east of the Mississippi.

It's a very cool feature. Watch the video, too (it's in the multimedia sidebar).

I snatched the photo above of the cecropia moth catepillar from Google Images because I remember them from my youth and think they're bizarrely gorgeous. I think we also called them tomato worms, but that could be a crossed-wire in my addled memory. In any event, when I was growing up in Ohio, we saw them all the time -- in the moth form, too. Seems like I don't see them at all anymore. (My "little" brother - then around 7 - will never live down having adopted one as a playmate one afternoon - carrying it around on his bike, "feeding" it blades of grass, etc., and finally carrying its limp and deflated former-caterpillar-self to my mother, announcing, "I don't want it any more, it's too dead.")

Here's a link to Wagner's book, Caterpillars of Eastern North America. (Entry updated to fix a format issue and make sure nobody was left thinking my now 38-year old brother kills caterpillars.) (Also, my brother protests, "I believe I was much younger than SEVEN.")

Shirley learns to type

Like clockwork, Shirley arrives at around 10:30 p.m. each night to leap up into my lap and rest some part of her body on the keyboard tray. Tonight, she decided she's been watching long enough and was ready to give it a try.

"What do these do?"


"Left paw, A-S-D-F... Right paw, J-K-L --- is that a bug?!"


"I'm trying to work, here."


I'm taking notes from Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning, entering them into a nifty citation manager called, fittingly, Citation. You can read Shirley's contribution on the last line.


"That was exhausting."

Backyard blogging

Two weekends ago I sat on the sunny back porch, ostensibly to study. I was armed with my trusty Kodak Z-740, in case anything cool happened on the feeders -- but of course, I was supposed to be reading and not watching. I've tried this ruse several weekends in a row, and finally had to admit to myself that it's not working. I don't read; I watch stuff. So for the rest of the month, I am locking myself indoors on weekends, as much as it pains me. These are my "parting shots" from that last hurrah.

First, a relatively new customer - a house sparrow.

One of the regulars, a finch - looking a little disgruntled about the empty thistle feeder (which is also blowing from side to side).

A tiger swallowtail dining on bouganvilla.

The same swallowtail, taken from about 1-1/2 feet away and with telephoto - on a different part of the bush.

This last one I took this morning - from the kitchen window, looking down into the yard, THROUGH glass, a screen, and framed by safety bars! So, apologies for the lack of crystal-clarity. But, talk about making yourself at home! I made this feeder from a jug, after my better half expressed concern that I might possibly be getting a little carried away on feeder-purchases. I inserted a long perch, but the finches climb right inside and chow down!(All photos by MizM.)

That strange sound you hear...

...is the scales falling from their eyes:

Then there are undecided voters like Peggy Beekler, a retired social worker who lives in the 3rd District of Kentucky, represented by Ann Northup.

"Well, I'm rather disappointed in the Republicans," Beekler says. "I think they've made a mess of things, even though I've been a Republican."

Beekler is not happy about the war, but she's also unhappy about the so-called values issues that Republicans have counted on to get their voters to the polls.

"I think to do an amendment on burning the flag would be totally ridiculous," Beekler says. "I also think when Bush vetoed the stem-cell research … I feel like that's ridiculous because they're just going to destroy all those embryos anyway, so even though I am for life, I think that shouldn't have been vetoed. I think that was a really bad thing."

Beekler represents one of our most surprising findings: On the question of which party would do a better job on "values issues," like stem-cell research, flag-burning and gay marriage, Democrats prevailed by their biggest margin in the entire poll: 51 percent to 37 percent.

"And when we list values issues like stem-cell research, flag-burning and gay marriage, these are the issues that Republicans took the initiative, used their control in Congress to get on the air to be voting on, to be talking about," Greenberg says. "What this says: By 13 points, voters say they are more likely to vote Democratic because of hearing about these issues. Which suggests that the strategy of using the Congress to get out the base is one that's driving away a lot of voters."

On other issues like the war in Iraq, or the state of the economy, Democrats have a smaller advantage.

Only on the issue of illegal immigration are the parties tied -- in the view of likely voters in the most competitive districts.

Voters are ready for change, but are Dems ready to fight fire with fire? (Yes, I've linked to that last one before.)

"Centrism is for suckers"

Paul Krugman compares the strategies of conservative versus liberal advocacy groups, and has some warnings:

...The Sierra Club’s executive director defended the (Lincoln) Chafee endorsement by saying, “We choose people, not parties.” And it’s true that Mr. Chafee has usually voted with environmental groups.

But while this principle might once have made sense, it’s just naïve today. Given both the radicalism of the majority party’s leadership and the ruthlessness with which it exercises its control of the Senate, Mr. Chafee’s personal environmentalism is nearly irrelevant when it comes to actual policy outcomes; the only thing that really matters for the issues the Sierra Club cares about is the “R” after his name.

Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.

The point is that those who cling to the belief that politics can be conducted in terms of people rather than parties — a group that also includes would-be centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman and many members of the punditocracy — are kidding themselves.

The fact is that in 1994, the year when radical Republicans took control both of Congress and of their own party, things fell apart, and the center did not hold. Now we’re living in an age of one-letter politics, in which a politician’s partisan affiliation is almost always far more important than his or her personal beliefs. And those who refuse to recognize this reality end up being useful idiots for those, like President Bush, who have been consistently ruthless in their partisanship.

Now, speaking of useful idiots... The Republicans' favorite "Democrat" is in meltdown. Joe Lieberman's campaign is paying staffers to try to provoke Lamont supporters on camera. Last weekend, Lieberman's staff was distributing race-baiting fliers in church parking lots. And he's blatantly lying about his position on Iraq. Really, how much lower can he go - I mean, besides hiring Republicans to steal the election? (Note to the Lamont camp: I hope you aren't falling for the carefully placed stories trumpeting the fact that Lieberman is "scaling back" his get-out-the-vote operation.)

The "tipping point of despair"

This is too good. Here's just an excerpt, but you'll resonate with the whole thing:

There is an argument to be made that the world is no more in crisis now than it has been at any other point in history, give or take a world war, and that the only reason we are freaking out is that the countries involved are western. No one reported much existential angst during Rwanda. When Israel bombed Beirut airport I was aware that part of the reason I got end-of-the-world shivers was that, unlike the airports in Baghdad or Mogadishu, I have been to Beirut's and it is just like Luton. When two countries with well-decorated departure halls and branches of Starbucks start fighting, you pay more attention than when Ethiopia marches into Somalia, as it did in July without anyone paying much attention. (The Ethiopian troops entered at the invitation of Somalia's secular interim government, to help fight the Islamic militia, who promptly threatened them with another jihad).

These are strange times and the fact that everyone claimed to see them coming in 2004 hasn't made them any easier to deal with. It occasionally feels as if magnetic flip is taking place, the process of polar reversal that happens every 300 millennia or so when north becomes south and south north, and birds fly into buildings and people with pacemakers keel over in the street. What can you do? For the past 10 years I have taken William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on holiday and for the first time, last week, I actually thought about reading it. (I didn't, obviously.) As multiple wars on multiple fronts drag on, you try to initiate a cycle of response that reminds you there are things to be grateful for; the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo going off without violence, for example, and Mel Gibson self-detonating. You reassure yourself that, as in all cycles of history, this one will come to an end, too. Then you remember that the man in charge of writing the ending is George Bush, and you have to start again.

Well, well, well

Pat Robertson has declared "I'm a convert" on global warming. Is this one of those heartbreakingly-fleeting moments of clarity that dementia sufferers occasionally exhibit? Or is it a TRAP? Did Oklahoma Senator James Dumbkopf Inhofe (who recently compared the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" to "Mein Kampf" and those who warn of global warming to the Third Reich) convince Robertson (who recently informed us that Ariel Sharon's stroke is a punishment from God) to embrace global warming so that legions of respected climate scientists would abandon the fight?! (OK, I'm more-or-less kidding about that possibility.)

A sage and learned woman I know suggests that Robertson's flock has finally left him behind on this issue, and he's trying to catch up.

Just kidding

Well, that photo probably just lost us our Ohio readership -- which I think amounts to my mother and my college roommate -- but COME ON, PEOPLE! If you can't vote these nutbags out of the majority this fall -- or, maybe I should say, even if you do technically vote them out but a series of suspicious developments reverses the election results and you aren't prepared to fill every courthouse in the state with legal challenges -- then we're going to have to conclude that you kind of like being governed by potential felons and frauds and wingnut "clergy" who demand your gubernatorial challenger "prove" his sexuality in court. (OK, OK, it would be damn good entertainment if there weren't so much at stake. If Molly Ivins gets tired of Texas politics, there's a very rich vein to tap in Ohio.) (Hat tip to G.D., who spotted the t-shirt somewhere in the Castro.) (P.S. That's the San Francisco Castro, if Rev. Russell Johnson wants to know.)

But this is a really good start, Ohio! -- no matter how patronizing the coverage. Good thoughts and prayers are headed your way.

Speaking of tampering with elections, someone is finally organizing a legal challenge to another suspicious electoral outcome, the Bilbray "win" in San Diego.

Poor Katherine Harris! She personally facilitated the fraud that was Florida 2000, and this is the thanks she gets?

Lynn Woolsey introduced The Iraq War Powers Repeal Act of 2006, H.R. 5875! (Mentioned here last week.)

You'll probably be shocked to learn that Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Cover-up Committee, will see to it that a report on pre-war intelligence use/abuse/failures will not be released until after the November elections. That would be the same report he said 9 months ago was nearly done. Apparently, it wasn't even really started. Well... you know... they've been busy.

Really, Mom, just kidding about that t-shirt.

I usually like EJ Dionne Jr's columns. And for the most part, I like his analysis this week of what Lieberman's troubles mean for the Democrats --

The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It's true that Lamont's campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq War and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush's Middle East policies.

But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency -- an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and 1980s.

Like the earlier generation of conservatives, today's Democratic activists are impatient with accommodating the powers-that-be. They demand that Democrats stop trying to chase a "center" that has veered ever rightward since 1980.

Instead, they want to haul that center back to more progressive terrain. That's why so much of the political energy in Connecticut seems to be with Lamont.

But he also parrots increasingly tiresome "wisdom":

A Lieberman loss next week could also create distracting problems for Democrats. Lieberman has said he would run as an independent if he lost the primary. This would divert national attention from the Democrats' central goal of making this fall's elections a referendum on Bush and the Republican Congress.

Cow pies! Lieberman has made a career of diverting, distracting and dividing Democrats, and that's a big part of why he's in the trouble he's in! It is NOT just his bizarre allegiance to Bush's war. It's his bizarre allegiance to Bush! Mark Schmitt has a very smart interpretation of Lieberman's problem today:

It’s a great expression of the Democratic Party of 1996: You got your enviros, you got your minorities, you got your women. Each group has one issue. For the enviros, it’s ANWR (the most trivial of victories, but the one that raises the money). For the minorities, affirmative action. (Likewise, of minor relevance to the actual structure of economic opportunity for most African-Americans and Latinos.) For women, it’s all about “preserve abortion rights.” There are a couple others, but those are the basic buttons you press to be credentialed as a good liberal Democrat. After you press them, you can do whatever you want.

But has Lieberman failed to press those buttons? No! In fact, he’s been pounding on them like that guy at the elevator who thinks that if he presses “Down” hard enough and often enough, eventually the elevator will recognize how important and how late he is.

But it’s not working. Why? Two reasons: One of course is that Iraq, and the constellation of foreign policy and security failures it represents really is huge. And while Democrats can accept a fairly wide range of viewpoints, roughly from Biden’s make-it-work to Murtha’s get-out-now, only Lieberman’s stay-the-course is ridiculous. It’s pretty difficult to look at ANWR and Iraq and conclude that a good position on ANWR more than offsets a bad one on Iraq. (Especially if there’s no reason to think that Ned Lamont has a different position on ANWR or the other three buttons.)

The second reason is that Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society. And a vision of a just society - not just the single-issue push-buttons of a bunch of constituency groups - is what a center-left political party ought to be about...

(Emphasis mine.) It's just killin' Lieberman. Some Democrats are finally articulating a principled vision, and the establishment Dems don't know what to make of it. And pseudo-Dem Joe Lieberman is completely befuddled!

Sunday I attended a church service out of town, in order to hear a good friend deliver the sermon. I scooted into the service just in time, and found my friend's partner in the pews. Her partner is Catholic, and was perusing the day's selected hymns in the bulletin. "It's a very Catholic selection of music," she said, thumbing through the pages, "very Catholic." She continued, "Really... I would almost think I'm at a Catholic service."

She paused. "...Except there's a woman presiding."

Paused again. "...And she's my lesbian partner."

Which reminds me (in a loosely connected way), I just love this bumpersticker.

Just so's you know what's up around here... I start the doctoral program in ethics this fall, and at the end of August I'm getting a head start by taking one of four comprehensive doctoral exams (a little early! because I've already taken some of the courses it covers). If I pass, it will very slightly speed my progress through the program, and that's a good thing (she says, staring down her 44th birthday). But it means I need to study quite a bit in the next four weeks, and really shouldn't spend much time compulsively scanning headlines and blogs. My posting has been relatively light since our "sabbatical" ended, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.

It will probably also shift direction, slightly. With such an important election coming up, it will be impossible not to blog about political news, but for my own sanity and well-being, I need to spend a more time on the news relevant to my own studies (environmental ethics, especially the biodiversity crisis), and on developments pertaining to the progressive faith community. I hope y'all will continue to find those things worth checking in for. Of course, I'm not speaking for my co-conspirator, abc, but her posts have tended to be more thoughtfully tailored toward progressive faith issues to begin with. (I also hope to post some short reviews of a few good books I've managed to scarf down this summer.)

And for those increasingly necessary moments of zen, I'm adding a few blog links to the sidebar - sites I head for when my "other" blog visits start to give me a headache. Enjoy.