WASTE OF BREATH AND MONEY: It looks as though the recent fad of performing scientific studies to prove that people with medical problems improve when other people pray for them is coming to a close. Here’s the NY Times article about a big study that showed that anonymous prayer for patients having heart operations had no effect, and that telling patients beforehand that they would be prayed for possibly made their condition worse! This study was privately funded, and cost $2.4 million. The federal government supposedly has spent $2.3 million for other similar studies. This seems like a royal waste of money, and spending any more money (government or private) after this study would be a downright sin.

I’m all for prayer and belief in God, but the notion that we can control the medical outcomes of another through our prayer (or lack thereof, if you don’t like the person) implies a severe lack of humility. Religion should stick to mystery, and science to the lack thereof. Unfortunately, many in our country have gone back to a snakehandler form of spirituality, a George W. Bush form of religiosity. Dr. Richard Sloan summed it up best: “Studying religion scientifically . . . makes for bad science and bad religion”. Mix religion with politics and the results are that much worse. Let’s hope that this waste of money is over; until we find a cure for cancer and AIDS and a thousand other terrible diseases, there are a lot better things to study.

(However, I am in favor of general research into the role of psychological states on health and illness; those studies do seem to say some valuable things.)

DEMOCRACY MARCHING IN IRAQ: Ah yes, the Iraq campaign; another George W. Bush idea. Mr. Bush’s theory is that democracy cures all. He figured that hurrying Iraqis to the polls would make up for the mess that we let happen after our invasion.

But despite three major elections, Iraq seems to be coming apart at the seams. The NY Times had an article today saying that a lot of Iraqis are leaving the many mixed Shiite – Sunni neighborhoods; the Shiia are heading for Shiite towns, or the Sunnis light out for their own turf. And the many mixed areas are thus becoming polarized, as those who remain are mostly Shiite or mostly Sunni (not both, as before). That’s not a good sign. The Newark Star-Ledger reports that about one-third of all Iraqi medical doctors have left the country since 2003 due to assassinations by the insurgency. The doctor shortage is causing people to die from lack of available care. Again, not good.

(As I’ve said before, I’m not criticizing the excision of Saddam Hussein; I’m criticizing the lousy job we did of filling the vacuum created by his absence.)

Now that the NY Times makes you pay to read Tom Friedman, my favorite overview-man has become John Simpson of the BBC (you can still read him for free!). Simpson has visited Iraq several times since the American occupation began, and he’s not optimistic about the current prospects over there. He makes the point that rushing the common folk to the voting booths before daily life could return to normal probably just made things worse. Here are Simpson’s own words:

“Looking back on the events of the past year, it is clear that the three different popular votes which were held in Iraq, two elections and one referendum, played a big part in whipping up the violence. People who had tended to regard themselves primarily as Iraqis were suddenly forced to focus on the fact that they belonged to a particular group: Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Christian or whatever. The act of voting was as divisive as it was empowering, and the fact that it happened three times in 11 months added to the intensity of the problem.”

So, if Mr. Simpson turns out to be right, America shot itself in the foot in Iraq by insisting on instant democracy! Yes, democracy is on the march in Iraq; a march towards civil war, that is.

Just a few notes —

1.) Pearl Jam has just released a song as the leader for a new album, called “Worldwide Suicide”. No doubt it’s a comment on modern times. I must comment, however, that Eddie and the boys are going out of their way on that track to sound like the Offspring. And that’s not necessarily bad, but . . . . if I want the Offspring, perhaps I should listen to the Offspring, and not Pearl Jam.

2.) In recent blog essays I’ve supported a rather strict and even militaristic approach to the Mexican border problem. I’ve argued that having an open border with Mexico was fine in 1920, but in a world full of anti-American terrorist threats, we have a right to take control of our borders. However, I definitely cannot support the border and immigration bill that’s now in the House. It would turn illegal alien status into a felony criminal offense (versus a civil offense subject to deportation, as at present). Now that’s going way too far; that’s playing with facism. I believe that we need to become more strict about the border, including more walls and guards; but we also need to be more understanding about the great majority of people who want to, or have already crossed it.

3.) The next mayor of Newark, NJ: Long-time mayor Sharpe James has decided not to run for re-election on May 9, which hands the election over to a young (36 years old) reformer named Cory Booker. Sharpe, now 70, was a traditional huckster-style politician who grew up in one of Newark’s gritty neighborhoods. But the people of Newark loved his act, giving him five terms in office and a State Senate seat. Booker, by contrast, is a Rhodes scholar and a Yale law graduate who grew up in the affluent suburbs thirty miles north of Newark. (He’s also a vegetarian, like me.) Nonetheless, he’s worked hard for this moment, having nearly beaten Sharpe in the mayoral election in 2002 after serving one term as a city council member. With Sharpe deciding to bow out while still undefeated and no other real opposition, it’s the start of a new day in Newark.

But I really wonder how Mr. Booker is going to do over the next four years. He reminds me of other idealistic and intelligent young reformers who tried to take the reigns of a troubled big city in the east: e.g., John Lindsay in New York (late 1960s), Dennis Kucinich in Cleveland (70s), Dr. Paul Jordan in Jersey City (70s), and Wilson Goode in Philadelphia (80s). Booker is going to take on a system of unions and council members and police directors and school officials and neighborhood leaders who know only one kind of political game: a bare knuckle, down-and-dirty stuggle for power and short-term spoils. Most urban reformers don’t do all that well in such an environment. They speak in terms of intelligence and unity and positive change, and find only stupidity and tradition and ethnic divisions and short-sighted power grabbing. They usually survive only two terms (in Philly because of term limits), by which time their popularity, charisma and idealism is gone. Then they try to run for state or federal office, but usually don’t get too far with that. They pretty much just fade away.

Well, I hope Cory does better. But from what I know of Newark, I can guarantee that he’s in for a rough ride.

WHERE DO I GO NOW THAT I’VE GONE TOO FAR — ah yes, that classic line from Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”. (The refrain from that song has been misheard by many as “when the bullet hits the phone”, quite amusingly.) This question basically sums up my religious life at present.

I was brought up in a fairly devout Roman Catholic family. In college, when most kids gave up on church, I kept on going to mass. I was searching for some meaning and relevance to it all. After college I found a group of priests and parishes and ministries that made up for all the unquestioned ritual and closed views that I experienced at Sacred Heart, the family parish. Sacred Heart was pretty much unfazed by the whole Vatican 2 thing. Sure, they changed from Latin to English and moved the alter away from the wall in ’66. But other than that, there was very little interest in ecumenical outreach or boning up on cutting-edge Catholic thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin or Thomas Merton. If you mentioned Dorothy Day, they would think you were referring to Doris Day. I haven’t been to Sacred Heart in a long, long time, but I’d imagine that things haven’t changed much. If anything, the Roman Church has been “coming home” to the little world of Sacred Heart over the past 20 years. (And why not — a former pastor there hooked up with Cardinal Wojtyla in Poland long before he became Pope John Paul 2).

After my divorce in ’87, I decided to expand my religious views. I tried out other kinds of churches, including the Episcopalians, the Unitarians and the Quakers. THey all were quite groovy, but my mind wanted something more. I needed to go on an intellectual journey into the heart of the Bible, especially the New Testament. I needed to go as far as intellectual rigor would allow me to go (or at least my own sloppy version of “intellectual rigor”). So, in the early 90’s, I started a course of personal research into a variety of topics including mythology, Christian history, early Judaism, the Roman Empire, comparisons between the world’s great religions, and ultimately, the “historical Jesus”.

I wondered if all this would eventually shake my belief in the basic Christian doctrines. Could I “go too far” and reach a point where the Trinity and the Resurrection no longer made sense? Or where even the need for God no longer existed?

The answers, in a nutshell are: Yes to #1; No to #2. Close study of the Bible and the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and the early Jewish-Christian church has convinced me that Jesus was a man; perhaps a very extraordinary man, but not the Son of Man. If you study other myths from other religions, you can similarly take the air out of them. But what you ultimately can’t do with any integrity is prove that God does NOT exist. And the inverse holds just as well: rationality cannot prove that God does exist, either. The rational process can take apart the complicated, imaginative myths regarding how God is related to humanity; but it cannot wipe God off the map either. In the end, the question is left in the fog of mystery.

Most believers would like some form of rational proof of God; the fog of mystery scares them, after a while. Thus the push amidst modern fundamentalists for “intelligent design” and creationism. After I lost my belief in the Resurrection, I put my stock in two other “Godly manifestations”: the fact that a majority of humanity expresses a belief in God; and the experience that mystics have of other-worldy union (which I myself briefly experienced back when I was practicing meditation regularly).

Unfortunately, scientists have recently shot these rationales down as empirical evidence supporting God’s existence. They’ve found that our minds were wired through evolutionary accident to make us believe in a Great Spirit (or tend to believe in one, anyway). So much for a rational grounding for faith; but at the same time, no reason NOT to believe either.

I realize that a majority of scientists and scholars do not believe in God. They seem to believe that they possess the ultimate world view. But they also seem to forget that whenever scientists in the past thought they knew it all, something came along to prove that the world is really bigger and more complex than they had imagined. As David Hume said back in the 18th century, science continually pushes back the veil of ignorance, but never eliminates it. And as Shakespeare said way back in the 16th Century, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5).

Here in the 21st Century, we can say that everything comes from the Big Bang; but where does the Big Bang come from? Right now, we don’t know. Maybe someday, string theory will push beyond the veil of mystery surrounding the Big Bang; perhaps it was due to the collision of “branes” floating in an 11-dimension realm. But then someone will ask, so where did the branes and the 11 dimensions come from?

In my opinion, atheistic scientists need to learn a bit more about the virtue of humility. (But so do Christian triumphalists and Islamic fundamentalists.)

So, my journey into logic and rationality has stripped away everything except God. It’s a lonely place; there aren’t many fellow searchers here. Most seem content to envelope themselves within communities of unquestioning believers or unquestioning atheists. But for those who do make the journey into this, the truest of Twilight Zones, the question becomes: can a person believe that the miracle of their own consciousness — something that the researchers and philosophers have tried to explain away but haven’t, despite various pretensions (e.g., Daniel Dennett) — does this miracle somehow point to the miracle of an ultimate consciousness (as Descartes seemed to be getting at)? The leap of faith is available to us yet, even at the Land’s End of an intellectual quest.

WHAT AMERICA NEEDS TO HEAR: The mood of the Democratic Party seems to have improved lately because of the Bush Administration’s recent mixture of bad luck and stupid flubs. The Dems could arguably re-take control of the House of Reps. during the Congressional elections this fall. The Senate is a harder proposition; most commentators see that as ‘one bridge too far’ for the Dems. Still, the GOP’s margin in the Senate may be reduced to 2 or even 1.

I think that’s generally a good thing, but not all that good. What do the Democrats stand for these days? About all they’ve got going is that they’re not Republicans. They don’t have a plan or a vision for the country, as they arguably did back in the 60s and 70s.

I know what I’d like to hear them say. But they won’t. No one that wants to gain political power would ever say what America desperately needs to hear right now. But just for laughs, let me tell you what it might sound like:

Over the past 6 years, really since 1980, we’ve been cutting taxes mostly for the rich and dismantling much of our federal government. When we tried to use what’s left of that government recently to rebuild a nation (Iraq), we saw that it wasn’t ready for prime-time. Had we gone into Iraq with another 100,000 troops in ’03 and brought with us enough resources to quicky recover the basic infrastructure, re-open the schools, and jump-start the economy, our dream of a unified, democratic, secular liberal government over there might have come true. But it’s too late now.

To get back the kind of government institutions that we need and once had is going to take a commitment on the part of both our leaders and our citizens; but realistically, it will also require money. That means higher taxes. We can’t keep borrowing; we’re already in debt way over our heads to foreign nations, including that big one in the east that now dreams of unseating us in ten years as the most powerful nation on this planet (i.e., China). We will spread the burden of these higher taxes fairly, asking those who have benefited the most from our unbridled economy over the past 30 years to contribute the most. But everyone is going to have to help out at least a little if America is going to regain its greatness. Oh, and while we’re in the mood for cold, hard reality, we’re probably going to have to re-establish the draft, although we may be able to put in a public service option such as the Peace Corp or Americorp coupled with Reserve training.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for anything like this. Even Howard Dean isn’t crazy enough to be this honest!

Michelle Bachelet: Now this lady is a winner. Ms. Bachelet, a trained M.D. (pediatrician), was just elected President of Chile. She’s agnostic, divorced, a socialist, and a relative newcomer to the world of politics. Sounds like my kind of gal! Well, it’s good to see that a conservative place like Chile, which was content to be led by a monster known as General Pinochet for 17 years, now trusts its future to a person like Ms. Bachelet. I’ll be cheering for her. Go Shelly!

Here’s a pic for you dog lovers:

I wonder if the cops would give the dog a ticket if the meter runs out?

JOIN THE FOREIGN LEGION: There’s an article in this month’s Atlantic Mag by Kenneth Pollack of the Brooking Institution about the situation in Iraq. Mr. Pollack agrees with the “oil spots” philosophy of Andrew Krepinevich, i.e. the idea that US and British forces should play a mostly defensive role providing reliable security in selected areas, versus continually launching offensive missions against the insurgents in their strongholds in western Iraq. Ever since modern armies became mechanized and highly mobile in the 1930s, standard military doctrine says that when you are attacked, you don’t just stand there and defend your ground; you counter-attack, take it back to the enemy’s turf. Pollack and Krepinevich are saying that in “asymmetric” wars against guerrilla / insurgency forces, such as Iraq has become, things are different. Because insurgency groups melt away into the small towns and villages so easily, it’s a waste of time for a modern army to try to attack them on their own territory. The best thing to do is to just stand your ground. That way, you stop the insurgents from inflicting an atmosphere of fear in the populace that you are trying to defend. Once fear sets in, normal life comes to a halt and it’s just a matter of time until the guerrillas win.

The problem with this doctrine is that it takes a whole lot of soldiers to do it. Pollack estimates that to do it correctly in Iraq would take about 440,000 troops, based on historical ratios of needed forces to population. However, counting American, British and trained Iraqi soldiers, we have about 220,000. So we can only control half of the country. However, once we secure an area, according to this theory, we should be able to move our troops over a few miles over into bordering unsecured areas. By doing that repeatedly over the course of many months, we should be able to spread out the secured zone, similar to the way that an oil spot slowly spreads. The US Army and Marines are aware of this theory, but thus far have refused to implement it.

I’m not a military expert; I was never in the service. But I would guess that if we concentrated our forces in half of the populated areas of Iraq, the insurgents and militias would embed themselves pretty firmly in the other half. If we then tried to spread out into hostile regions, we might not do so well. At the same time, we’d risk losing the security that we had previously established in our safety zones. It’s hard to stop car bombs and suicide bombers even if you have a soldier on every street corner; and once they leave, it’s that much easier.

The bottom line here is that we probably don’t have enough troops in Iraq to beat the insurgency. Three years ago, General Eric Shinseki said that we would need “several hundred thousand” soldiers to stabilize post-war Iraq. In his 2004 book, General Tommy Franks said that 250,000 troops were needed. It sounds as though we were at least 100,000 troops short of getting Iraq under control after the invasion. Now that the insurgency and militias have grown and gotten stronger, the gap is probably more like 220,000 soldiers, as indicated by Mr. Pollack’s analysis.

But even the 150,000 or so troops that we now have in Iraq (and that we can’t bring home anytime soon given the worsening threat of civil war) are straining the capacity of the US military and endangering our ability to cover other potential hot spots in the world (such as Korea). I would definitely conclude that our military is too small for us to become both the world’s policeman and the conqueror / re-builder of rogue states. We’re pretty much getting all the usable people that we can get thru voluntary recruiting. It’s fairly obvious that if we want to expand our military, we need to re-institute the draft. But college kids would go ape-s**t if that were to happen. The days of campus activism would be back, with chants once more of “peace, pot, microdot”. (Imagine all the creative energy that would be unleashed again from our youth, as in the late 60s). Mr. Bush and his friends certainly don’t want to see that happen.

So what can the US do? One idea that makes rough sense is to start a foreign legion aimed at men and women under the age of 35 from Spanish-speaking countries. We supposedly have a lot of Spanish bi-lingual officers in our military today that could staff and train such a legion. But why would young Latin Americans want to join such a force and do America’s dirty work overseas? Well, we could give them a deal — serve five years honorably and you get American citizenship, along with your legal wife and kids (or if you die in action, the wife and kids still get in). Disclaimer: I didn’t make this idea up. I saw it on some right-wing “war on terror” blog (www.windsofchange.net).

To raise the incentive, we could militarize the Mexican border and seal it tight (as many Republicans want to do; and I don’t entirely disagree). And at the same time, we would spread the word throughout Mexico and Latin America that there are still two ways into America — 1.) do the paperwork and get a five year workers visa, as Mr. Bush proposes and I agree with; 2.) join the foreign legion, do your time in Iraq or where ever, and get full citizenship. Right now, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about 485,000 people cross the border illegally every year. If 100,000 of them took the foreign legion deal, then before long we’d have an extra 500,000 in our military. We’d have our southern border back under control, and maybe we’d have enough military force to get involved in places where we could really do some good (like Sudan).

Again, this idea makes “rough sense”, but I’m sure that it would make a lot of people unhappy. And it probably would be harder to accomplish than it sounds. But if Bush and his Republican cronies had the guts to pull something like this off (I know the Democrats could never do it), I would have to take my hat off to them. For once.

OUT IN SPACE: I read today that NASA is eliminating many of it science satellites and planetary probes over the next five years because of President Bush’s mandate that we keep the Shuttle going for a while longer, finish the Freedom space station, and build the new CEV to go back to the Moon.

Oh great. NASA is eliminating some of the most exciting, far-reaching science missions, the cutting edge stuff that could help answer the biggest questions about the universe, just so that we can re-do what we did in space 30 years ago. Just send people whirling around the planet, and then back to the moon to pick up some more grey rocks.

Come on. Back in the 1960’s, at least it all had some military usefulness; it helped to scare the Soviet commies. But what’s the point today? The Shuttle is an old, dangerous piece of junk, and the space station is not a real science lab. It doesn’t have any true usefulness. It’s in the wrong orbit to be of any help in launching or recovering space probes from other planets (or from asteroids or comets). And it’s now well known that being in space for long periods is a major health hazard.

People just weren’t built to be in a weightless environment for more than a few days. (OK, the Moon has some gravity; but from what I’ve read, people will still be subject to bone and muscle problems due to the low gravitational force up there). Nonetheless, Mr. Bush thinks we should use our rockets and highest technology to put on another big space opera, instead of pushing our science where no one has gone before.

Well, maybe it’s just a part of Mr. Bush’s Christian viewpoint; maybe he sees astrophysics as the modern apple and scientists as the serpents. Perhaps we should just stay happy and dumb (and injured) in the garden of earth orbit and on the lunar Eden.

SHIPS AHOY: I live about 10 miles from one of the seaports whose operation might be taken over by a foreign corporation owned by an Arab government, i.e. the United Arab Emirates. I would like to be on the open-minded side of the fence about this. Foreigners own and operate all kinds of businesses here in our country, and the UAE has been generally cooperative with the US over the past decade or so. The US government didn’t find any ties between the corporation that would run our ports and terrorists or anti-American factions. They are probably just mariners and traders, something that the Middle East has been good at for perhaps two thousand years. So why stop them? Why give in to all the knee-jerk anti-Arabism that our politicians are now displaying?

Well, I do see a legitimate reason to halt this transaction, or at least to tie some protective conditions onto it. The Arab / Islamic nations are not the most politically stable places in the world. Iran was once as much of an ally to the United States as the UAE is. Our relations with the Palestinians have recently taken a turn for the worse. So, Middle Eastern governments can change and change quite quickly and unpredictably. What if there is an uprising in the UAE (perhaps tied to the projected populist assault on the Saudi monarchy sometime in the future), and a fundamentalist, anti-western government takes over? Would we want the current Iranian government running our ports? Before we let this deal go through, our government needs to establish its right to seize these port operations in the event of a radical governmental change in the UAE.

Another irony: President Bush often cites and celebrates the “march of democracy” in the Middle East. What if they held a fair election in the UAE? Or Saudi Arabia or Egypt, for that matter? An anti-western / pro-al Qaeda faction could take power via democracy. The people of Iran recently had a choice between pro-western and anti-western candidates, and chose anti-western / pro-fundamentalists. The Shiites in Iraq also seem to favor their own Islamists. If we are going to push democracy in the Middle East, maybe we need to hedge our bets by not letting the management of our seaports be tied to popular opinion on “the Arab street”. Because we still have a long way to go before that “street” sees us and our culture in a better light. Giving the sheiks in the UAE free reign to run our container ports would not do much to shine such a better lite.

ENTERTAINMENT TIME: I’ve decided to offer my readers (all two or three of you) some audio entertainment. Here, for your downloading pleasure, is an MP3 audio file that I made from a series of messages on my answering machine. The messages seem to be from a bill collector who was trying to contact someone named Steve (that’s not me!). These messages were obviously wrong numbers, but they just kept coming every day for about a week. If you’d like to listen, here is the link:

BillCollector.mp3

The bill collector dude is using a variety of psychological techniques. He’s trying to be calm and professional, mostly. He needs to maintain the higher ground, to stay in control. But sometimes he injects assertion and even an air of threat (“you need to return the call”). And then he mixes in a bit of mock helpfulness (“we’re trying to help you”, “we have an excellent offer for you”). Plus some occasional exasperation (“we’ve left messages”). Most interesting.

Luckily, I haven’t had any dealings with bill collectors; I don’t know any, have never worked as one, and (thank goodness) have never been hounded by one. So it’s interesting to hear a “collection account executive” in action, and ponder what techniques he’s using to earn his pay.

After a week or so, the calls stopped. Perhaps the collection agent finally realized that he had the wrong number. Or maybe Steve started paying. Hopefully I won’t be privy to their dealings again.

NOTE: The MP3 is about 1.84 MB. I made it, and I retain all rights to it. I zapped out the last names and scrambled the numbers so as to protect the guilty. You’re welcome to download it for free and to keep the file, so long as you use it for non-commercial purposes. You are not allowed to use it to make (or try to make) money. Trying to make money is probably what got Steve into trouble. So make your money some other way, and keep this thing pure, OK? Thanks.