This is so unfair
Here in the States, next weekend is a three-day weekend for Memorial Day, when we honor our war dead. Personally, I've been looking forward to this weekend for about a month. I'm very much in need of a long weekend to putter around the house and read about mammoths. You can imagine how bummed I am to discover that the world is ending tomorrow.

I have received information psychically, which is corroborated by scientific data, according to which on May 25, 2006 a giant tsunami will occur in the Atlantic Ocean, brought about by the impact of a comet fragment which will provoke the eruption of under-sea volcanoes. Waves up to 200 m high will reach coastlines located above and below the Tropic of Cancer. However, all of the countries bordering the Atlantic will be affected to greater or lesser destructive and deadly levels....

-- Eric Julien

Technically, this won't really be the end of the world, but Julien's sources believe that the comet wil kill 58 million people and deal a death blow to Western civilization and that's enough to ruin a perfectly good three-day weekend in my book.

More on Julien's warning is available here and here.

Pat Robertson is the strongest man in the world
According to Pat's website:

Did you know that Pat Robertson can leg-press 2000 pounds! How does he do it?

Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide ministry, develop visionary scholars, while traveling the globe as a statesman?

One of Pat's secrets to keeping his energy high and his vitality soaring is his age-defying protein shake. Pat developed a delicious, refreshing shake, filled with energy-producing nutrients.

That's simply amazing! I'll bet the sports guys are amazed, too. Let's see what they have to say.

There is no way on earth Robertson leg presses 2,000 pounds. That would mean a 76-year-old man broke the all-time Florida State University leg press record by 665 pounds over Dan Kendra. 665 pounds. Further, when he set the record, they had to modify the leg press machine to fit 1,335 pounds of weight. Plus, Kendra's capillaries in his eyes burst. Burst. Where in the world did Robertson even find a machine that could hold 2,000 pounds at one time? And how does he still have vision?

Um, okay. But I'm sure a godly man like Robertson would never lie. Maybe he meant 2000 grams.

In other news, Pat Robertson has discovered that snake oil is a great source of protein to use in making delicious and refreshing milk shakes.

Just so we're clear on this
When a Republican Vietnam veteran gives a commencement speech and gets heckled by the crowd, we should notice how hateful and uncivil the Angry Left is for being rude to him.

When a Democratic Vietnam veteran gives a commencement speech and gets heckled by the crowd, we should notice how hateful and uncivil the Angry Left is for provoking the students into rudeness.

Got that?

Birds
Last week, Coturnix tagged me for a new blog meme and, like everything else this last week, I'm way behind on it. But, enough excuses. Here it is. This one is the beautiful bird meme. It's the simplest meme I've ever seen. It has one question: what are the ten most beautiful birds? That shouldn't be so hard to answer, should it?

Unfortunately, I'm not a bird watcher or a naturalist, so I don't know squat about birds. I could have looked up a good field guide and flipped through till I found ten that I thought were pretty, but that didn't seem very honest. I could have tried something clever, like naming some really obscure birds, extinct birds, cartoon birds, or listing some of the neighborhood birds by their first names (Let's see, there's Chester, Big Sue, Kim, Leah, Little Sue, Robyn...). But I decided to go with naked honesty and name birds I have seen and can actually name.

My pool of name-able birds is quite limited. Most city birds are little brown birds. The city also has lots of pigeons and seagulls. They can be interesting, but they're not really what I would call beautiful. Here in Seattle we have a few wild falcons, an occasional blue jay, and crows. I think all of those qualify as beautiful. Back in Alaska, we had several types of eagles near my home and the family cabin. On the cliffs around Prince William's Sound are puffins, which are so unbearably cute that they are inevitably every child's favorite bird. The state bird of Alaska is the ptarmigan, an type of pheasant that molts in the fall to change from mottled brown to snow white.

My favorite birds are ravens and crows. When I was a little kid in Idaho, I didn't think much of crows. I saw them in the potato field and on phone lines. They always looked like a detail-less silhouette rather that a bird. They sure didn't look like their cartoon alter-egos, Heckel and Jeckel, Fox and Crow, or the jaybirds in Dumbo. I didn't understand the racial stereotyping in those cartoons until I was a teenager.

The first winter after we moved to Alaska, I discovered ravens. One day my family went to see an ice sculpture competition. It was one of those glorious sunny winter days right after a fresh snowfall. The ground was clean and white and the sky was so blue it hurt. I learned how the combination of fresh snow and bright sun can cause you to loose your depth perception. As we got out of the car and had that moment of milling around that all families have when getting out of the car, I started watching a crow going about its business in the parking lot nearby. There was a dumpster on the far side of the parking lot. Suddenly I became dizzy. The crow was not near me, it was on the far side of the parking lot next to the dumpster. While my eyes were trying to focus on the proper distance to bring the two together, my mind was totally unable to make sense of the size of that crow. If it was next to the dumpster, it had to be half as tall as the dumpster, maybe two and a half feet tall. That was the first time I'd ever seen a raven. Later I learned about the importance of Raven to many Alaskan native mythologies. I learned how smart they are.

Since getting a house, I've had a chance to watch real crows and learn how much like ravens they are. Crows are smart, cooperative, and loyal. Once, while working in the yard, Clever Wife saw a small crow with terrible looking feathers crash into the lilac bush while two bigger crows flapped about screaming. She thought the big crows were attacking the little one and called to me to come and help. I tried to drive the big crows off while she tried to help the little crow get out of the bush and escape.

The big crows flew up in a tree and kept screaming, while occasionally throwing pine cones at my head. The little crow got out of the lilac, climbed up on our garden bench, and launched his self into the air, only to crash into a lavender bush and get stuck upside-down.

Clever wife helped him out and put a leaned a board against the fence so he could climb up and launch him self from a higher perch. After we watched him crash into most of our bushes, we finally figured out that he was a young bird learning to fly. His feathers weren't ragged because he'd been attacked; he was molting and his adult feathers hadn't all grown in yet. The big crows were trying to protect him from us.

After that episode, Clever Wife and I read up on crow behavior. Crows, it turns out, mate for life and take very good care of their young. By the end of the day we knew Little Crow's voice well enough to keep track of him throughout the rest of the year while he grew up.

Bad definitions
A number of libertarian leaning writers (here, here, and here) have noticed some silliness from my neck of the woods. The "Definitions of Racism" page on the Seattle Public Schools website contains the following definition for "Cultural Racism."

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

As libertarians, the other bloggers were most offended at the ideas that valuing individualism and supporting a standard form of English were racist activities. They missed the point that this definition is just one sub-definition within larger definitional context.

The list Seattle Public Schools list of definitions includes five different types of racism and a sixth overall definition of plain racism. All of these definitions are drawn from the 1997 book Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice edited by Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin. The book appears to be a facilitator's manual for giving diversity seminars. The same editors have also produced a book of readings for the same purpose. I'm not familiar with the book or its editors, so my comments are based entirely on this set of definitions.

The whole set of definitions seems to be based on the questionable assumption that the exercise of prejudice is only possible by a power-holding group toward a powerless group. The generic definition of racism reads:

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.

This definition clearly argues that only White folk can be racist; all other races are exempt from this attitude. You can see why this definition pushed the buttons of the libertarians by living up to cartoon-like stereotypes of white liberal guilt and the privileged position of victims. As a self-defined bleeding-heart liberal, it pushes quite a few of my buttons.

The standard definition of racism, as most people use the word, is prejudice based on race. Their definition is one of oppression based on race. Presumably the motive for this oppression is prejudice, but that is not necessary for the logical function of the definition nor is it in any way stated. Practically speaking, any oppressing group will come to be prejudiced toward the objects of their oppression, but, again, this is not necessary for their definition nor is it stated.

Most of the examples given in the sub-definition for cultural racism, which originally provoked the libertarians, go beyond being peculiar and debatable and are just plain wrong. If racism is synonomous with oppession and only Whites can practice racism, then "having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, [and] defining one form of English as standard" should be acts oppression by a White majority that lead to "systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups."

"[H]aving a future time orientation"--by which I think they mean planning for the future--is neither an exclusively Caucasian trait nor even particularly characteristic of Whites. Some whites do plan and some don't, but, in any case how does the planning by some Whites oppress non-Whites? "[E]mphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is a characteristic of urbanization and post-Enlightenment Western civilization but most non-Whites in the United States are urbanized part of post-Enlightenment Western civilization. As acts of oppression or prejudice, these two might arguably be true in relation to the United States in its relations with other cultures--at least to the extent that we insist all relations be conducted on our terms of time and individual sovereignty. However, it is not true with regard to relations between Whites and non-Whites in the United States.*

"[D]efining one form of English as standard" as an act of oppression by Whites against non-Whites is an even more ridiculous statement. Of all the dialects of North American English, only one is defined primarily by race, and that one is Ebonics. The others are all primarily defined by region. Saying that dangled prepositions are incorrect American English might be an act of Northern aggression against the South, but it is not an act of aggression by the White Northern race against the non-White Southern race.

As I mentioned, I know nothing about this book beyond this set of definitions. I'm surprised that it has a publication date as late as 1997. It reads more like the result of some kind of school of social/literary criticism from the late seventies or eighties. This kind of theory was already old and subject to ridicule when I was in graduate school in the early nineties.

I'm also not sure how significant these definitions are for policy in the Seattle Public School system. It could be that this page is nothing more than the result of some low level web designer searching for content to fill a page. At least I hope that's the case, but I have my fears. Seattle is a very touchy-feely city and we do love our multi-culturalism--even when it is embarrassing and badly thought out propaganda.

* There are two partial exceptions to this statement. Sovereign Native American nations and unassimilated immigrants do not always function within the same post-Enlightenment Western concepts of time and individualism as does the American mainstream. However, the cleavage between the two groups is not defined by race. The American mainstream is composed of members of most races.

An open letter to Keith Olbermann
Dear Keith:

I can call you Keith, can't I? It might be presumptuous, but I've watched you for so long that I feel like we're old friends. I suppose having strangers feel that they are entitled to be on a first name basis with you is one of the minor drawbacks to fame.

So, Keith, I wanted to talk to you about Bill O'Reilly. I see that you named O'Reilly the Worst Person in the World last night, again. How many times does that make so far this year? When we add in all the times that he was merely Worse or Worser, would it be easier to count the number of times that he wasn't on your list?

I think your relentless focus on the inanities of Bill O'Reilly is getting to be a tad unfair. The world is full of bad people. How do you think they feel? They get up each morning and do their worst, only to find that, at the end of the day, Bill O'Reilly has nudged them off your list again. Don't they deserve a chance to get their fifteen minutes of infamy?

Here's what I propose: establish a Worst Person in the World Hall of Infamy. Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Pat Robertson can be the initial inductees. White House press secretaries are entitled to automatic inclusion. This would give other bad people their own shot at the daily title.

If maintaining a Hall of Infamy sounds like too much work, maybe you could just rename your daily awards. Instead of the Worse, Worser, and Worst Persons in the World they could be the proud winners of the Pat, Ann, and Bill awards (awards are always on a first name basis).

You don't need to retire the fearsome threesome right away, but promise to think about it—in the name of fairness.

I remain, because I have no other choice,

John J. McKay

Better late than never
Bill O'Reilly wasn't as quick as his Fox colleague John Gibson and didn't get in on warning us about the brown hordes trying to extinguish our white civilization. But Bill does not give in that easily. He's managed to raise the stakes by discovering a secret fifth column within the white race that is planning to aid the brown hordes in extinguishing us. You'll never guess who it is. It's the liberal media elites!!! Who would have suspected that they would be the disloyal ones?!?

That's because the newspaper and many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.

According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.

An open-border policy and the legalization of millions of Hispanic illegal aliens would deeply affect the political landscape in America. That's what The New York Times and many others on the left want. They might get it. And that's the "Memo."

Oh. That is what you guessed? Damn, you're good.

Maybe a better title would have been, "better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Republicans take off their mask...
...and put on a white hood.

Towards the beginning of this year, when I realized that Republican strategists were planning to make illegal immigration one of their keystone issues or the midterm elections, I was worried about it unleashing a wave of overt racism. The xenophobic nature of the War on Terrorism was already pushing Americans in that direction and appealing to fear has been one of this administration's most dependable campaign tools. With the war in Iraq becoming less popular, people feeling insecure about the economy, and the well of public opinion already primed to fear brown foreigners, it was an easy segue to refocus our fear on undocumented Latin American immigrants. Last week, the racism inherent in this plan broke into the open at the pundit level.

Michael Savage is one of the most vile talking heads in America, so it's not surprising that he was one of the first to cross the line. What sent Savage to the microphone was a census report saying that "nearly half of the nation's children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly...."

What will it take to wake you up to the fact that you are being erased from the future of America? And why are you being erased? If you're a person of European descent, why do they want your child to be a minority in America? And when your little girl is a minority in America, what will happen to her? Tell me what will happen to her? Do you think that the minorities, when they take over the country, will be quite as benevolent and as enlightened as the European-Americans are today? Or do you sense that just perhaps, just maybe, they will not bring the learnings of the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, to their new power?

[...]

But logic dictates that if one out of every two children under the age of five is not white that within a very short period of time, whites are being erased from America. Now, when whites become a minority in America, tell me what you think is going to happen to your grandchild? Do you think that the people who are now minorities, when they seize power, when they are the senators, when they are the congresspeople, when they are the president, and the vice president, do you think they'll be quite as enlightened as our liberal government is today? And treat the minorities, meaning then the whites, as fairly as the nonwhites are being treated today? I don't, I do not.

[...]

We're going inherent the corrupt police of Mexico, we're going to inherent the corrupt judicial system of Mexico, we're going to inherent drug lords in America. Is that going to be the subrosa relationship here as well? Are they crazy? Don't they know what's going to happen?

Many conservatives, to their credit, find Savage a bit too much to stomach. For them, we have John "Big Hair" Gibson, who was inspired to address the same census report that Savage did, though in a more measured style. Style, however, is the only significant difference.

First, a story yesterday that half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call "gabachos" -- white people -- are having fewer.

Now, in this country, European ancestry people, white people, are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They are not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population, hence Eurabia.

[...]

To put it bluntly, we need more babies. Forget about that zero population growth stuff that my poor generation was misled on. Why is this important? Because civilizations need population to survive. So far, we are doing our part here in America but Hispanics can't carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies, or put another way -- a slogan for our times: "procreation not recreation." That's "My Word."

While Savage is simply disgusting, Gibson is incoherent. Part of that incoherence seems to come from his still being aware that he should be a little embarrassed to make a direct appeal to race. However, what set him off in the first place was the idea that Hispanics will soon outnumber Anglos. After making that point, he takes a dip into his nightmare vision of Eurabia, during which he has to admit that the Hispanics are on “our” side in the war of civilizations. But at the end, when admonishes “us” to have more babies, he’s still talking only to Anglo-whites. While he allows the Hispanics to be on “our” side, they still aren’t part of “us.” At best he’s being condescending in the style of “little brown brothers” or “honorary Aryans.” At worst it’s an open appeal to Anglo-white racial superiority.

In a way his deviousness makes him worse than Savage. He creeps around the point just enough to make it palpable to middle class Anglo-whites who don’t want to think of themselves as racist. Yet, at its core, his message is racist.

The party of Lincoln has been involved in this dance with racism for forty years now. When the Democratic Party unambiguously embraced civil rights and desegregation in the sixties, the Republicans could have joined with them in a bi-partisan effort to erase the great shame of American society, racism. At that point in history, the Republican Party had the better record on race. Instead, they chose to view it as an opportunity to pick up disgruntled white Southern voters.

The Southern Strategy transformed the Republicans in ways they didn't anticipate. It spelled the death of the liberal/social-reforming wing of the party. As the Democratic Party faded from the South, the Republican Party faded from New England. When the Republican leaders of the sixties wooed Southern racists with code phrases, winks, and nods, it didn't occur to them that those new voters would eventually become the majority of the party and take over its positions of power and the creation of its ideology. The Southern Strategy didn't result in the republicanization of the South; it resulted in the southernization of the Republican Party.* Whereas the identifying mark of Republicans was once a dour New England deportment, now it is Southern-style, vocal Protestantism. And racism, instead of disappearing, simply retreated for a generation to transform itself into a new style for a new generation.

The cynical and unprincipled strategy that the Republican Party has chosen for this election has the potential to release something very ugly in American culture. Once unleashed, it won't be easy to contain it again. But, making these kinds of cynical and unprincipled tactical decision in the name of simply acquiring and keeping power has been the hallmark of the Republican Party for over a decade now and I didn't really think they would stop now just because their action are hurting America.

obligatory disclaimer: Of course when I say this, I do not mean to imply that all white Southerners are racist crackers or that there has never been racism outside the South. Some of the most principled and courageous Americans have come from the South and the shame of racism is a common heritage of all regions. However, this doesn't change the fact that the Republican Party's descent into overt racism has been the direct result of their decision to use racism to woo disgruntled white Southern voters.

PS - I started to write this last Friday, but it's just been that kind of a week.

How to ask a question
Following USA Today's revelation that the NSA is trying to collect a log of every phone call made in the United States, the polling outfits have leapt into action to find out what we think about that. The Washington Post/ABC poll on Friday gave us this result:

It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

Acceptable NET -- 63

Unacceptable NET -- 35

Some right wing bloggers jumped at that result; two-thirds of Americans support our president keeping us all safe and sound, hurrah. Encouragingly, some conservatives and Republicans have remembered that they once disapproved of the government sticking its nose too deeply into our business and have expressed some reservations.

On Saturday, Newsweek released a poll:

As you may know, there are reports that the NSA, a government intelligence agency, has been collecting the phone call records of Americans. The agency doesn't actually listen to the calls but logs in nearly every phone number to create a database of calls made within the United States. Which of the following comes CLOSER to your own view of this domestic surveillance program:

It is a necessary tool to combat terrorism -- 41

It goes too far in invading people’s privacy -- 53

Don’t know -- 6

What are we to make of that twenty-two percent drop in approval over one day? Did people get a chance to think about what it really means and change their minds? Any poll watcher will tell you that the phrasing of a question has a strong effect on the results--this is the whole underlying idea behind push-polling--but, as Mustang Bobby pointed out, these two questions don't appear that different.

Opinions really are in flux and an opportunity exists to help establish the conventional wisdom on this subject. The defenders of the administration will continue to play on fear with the message that only bad people have anything to fear, our president would never do anything wrong, and only traitors question necessary security measures. The opponents of the administration find the whole business outrageous; this is the behavior of some cheesy police state, like Ceaucescu's Romania, not America.

I think that the uncertainty in opinion polling is caused by people being unsure of how this affects them personally. It's a sad truth that most people will gladly accept strong sacrifices for someone else. An Onion headline a few years gently lampooned this when they said, "98% Favor Mass Transit for Others." Over the last few years, how often have we read Op-Ed pieces that say Muslim-looking people should be happy to accept profiling and being thrown off planes if it will make us white folk feel more secure? We all know Pastor Niemoller's statement on this subject: “First they came for the Communists….” This kind of moral cowardice would be a joke if it didn't so easily lead to tragedy.

When Bush said we are only listening to al-Qaeda calls, who could argue with that? When he said we need to listen to many overseas calls to figure out which ones are al-Qaeda, most people thought that's reasonable, and, besides, I don't make overseas calls. Now we find out that they have been trying to get records of every single call in America and while people will start to nod and say "that's okay," eventually it penetrates their complacency that "every" means them, too.

I want to see a poll question that personalizes the issue:

As you may know, it was reported last week that the National Security Agency, a federal intelligence agency, has collected phone records for every call you have made or that has been made to you. Which of the following comes closer to your own view of this domestic surveillance program:

I'm ready to make any sacrifice if it will keep us safer from terrorism.

This is an unacceptable intrusion into my privacy and I want the head of the peson who thought this up on a plate, not one of the good plates either – use that old Milmac that we keep in the garage for camping trips.

Maybe the second choice is a little wordy and could use some editing, but you get the idea.

A bad joke
This reads like a sick good-news-bad-news joke.

A DNA test has confirmed what zoologists, big-game hunters and aboriginal trackers in the far northern reaches of Canada have imagined for years: the first documented case of a hybrid grizzly-polar bear in the wild.

Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker from the Northwest Territories, suspected the American hunter he was guiding had shot a hybrid bear last month after noticing its white fur had brown patches and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly.

The good news is that a unique bear hybrid had been discovered in Canada. The bad news is that it was discovered by a trophy hunter.

Polar bears and grizzlies are essentially different breeds of the same species, so a hybrid isn't a genetic problem. What mainly separates them is that they have completely different ranges and slightly different breeding seasons. David Paetkau, a geneticist quoted in the article, suggests the hybrid might be a sign that the bears are moving to new, overlapping ranges in response to global warming climate change.