WHY THE NEW YORK YANKEES DON’T GO TO THE WORLD SERIES: I’m not much of a sports fan these days. But when I was a kid I liked baseball (even though I could hardly play it), and was a big Yankees fan. The first time I went to a game at Yankee Stadium, I was with my uncle Joe and cousin Mike. We arrived a little late; it was the bottom of the first. We had just sat down, and immediately had to stand up again. The Mick had blasted another one into the stands. It was quite an introduction to the Bronx Bombers.

But as I drifted from teenagedom into young adulthood followed by creaky middle age, my love for the New York Yankees died. By the late 1970s, the Yanks were a hot team again (they were quite pathetic in the late 60s and early 70s, although I loved them nonetheless). But winning came with a steep price tag: i.e., ownership by George Steinbrenner. Sorry, but I never liked that man. He turned the Yanks into the best team that money can buy (tip of the hat to my brother for giving me that line). OK, no professional baseball team is in it purely for the olympian ideal. They all have a right to make money. But Steinbrenner turned it into something akin to the Roman gladiator games.

As such, I couldn’t help but feel good about the AL first round playoffs last week, where the Detroit Tigers trounced the Yanks. I even watched the final game on Saturday, rooting for the Tigers all the way. It’s nice to see that even in this modern era of big business baseball, there is still the occasional Cinderella team, the team that defies the odds with spit and vinegar. The Yankees, with their $200 million payroll, are a long way from spit and vinegar.

So the baseball fans here in metro NY are scratching their heads over the Yanks. Since 1996, they’ve been a game-winning machine during the regular season. This year they got off to a slow start, but by August they had the AL East shut down. The Yanks took the World Series in 96, 98, 99 and 2000 (against the NY Mets), but since then it’s been downhill. They lost the Series twice to National League expansion teams (Arizona in 2001 and Florida in 2003). And since 2003, they haven’t gone any further than the playoffs. What went wrong? Certainly not a lack of talent; the offense remains solid with Jeter and Giambi and Matsui and A-Rod and Sheffield, etc. etc. The pitching rotation perhaps needs a makeover, as Randy the Unit and Mike the Moose are getting old. But you’d think all that batting firepower would overcome the high ERAs. And yet, those bats seem to go cold in October. How do you explain that?

Well, here’s my take. I firmly believe that it’s economics. (At bottom, everything is economics! Well, mostly, anyway.) Most teams have a star hitter or two, maybe three if they’re lucky. With the Yanks, it’s almost all stars, all with high priced contracts. These guys have lawyers and accountants to help them think things through. In October, when the playoffs and World Series occurs, the players have been thru a long 7-month season, and it starts to get cold outside. The risk of injury goes up. The lawyers and accountants probably study the odds about that. They explain to their clients that it would not be in their long-run economic interest to “put out 200%” for a World Series ring. Sure, winning the Series does bring each player some extra cash. But if that cash is earned at the expense of a career-ending injury, then what good is it?

The lawyers and accountants also have a pretty good idea of how a team owner (like Steinbrenner) is doing financially. Even if they don’t see the official books, they know how attendance has been and how many broadcast contracts the team is getting with the media. If they see that it’s been a good season and that the team owner is clearly going to make a profit, they know they can keep squeezing for better contracts for their clients (i.e., the super-star players). In other words, after a good season, they all really don’t need the World Series! One or two playoff rounds is quite enough financially, for a team like the Yankees.

So . . . . I am boldly suggesting here that the super-star players for a team like the Yanks intentionally play a bit easier, a bit safer, a bit more conservatively once the winds of October start to blow. Let the guys from the one-shot, fluke Cinderella teams make the diving catches and miraculous throws and crashing plays at the plate. They know it’s probably their only chance at glory. Guys like Jeter and A-Rod need to live to see another season.

So, as always, Steinbrenner will blame the manager and bring in someone new. (Too bad, because everyone liked Joe Torres). And nothing will change. Steinbrenner will continue to make his money and the big Yankee stars will make their money and the big networks will make their money showing some underdog team going to the Series (perhaps the Mets this year) and doing the baseball equivalent of a cockfight. As back in the Roman Coliseum, it’s all pretty well scripted.

Enjoy, capitalist sports fans!

Sometimes I wish that I had more time to study philosophy . . . and that there were more people around to talk about it with! Actually, I’ve met a handful of people who know things about the great thinkers and the great ideas. Unfortunately, they’re kind of hard to get thru to. Maybe that’s the way I am too. Maybe there’s just something about philosophy that makes it hard to talk with other philosophers about. Well, such is life.

Or maybe I just don’t understand it all that well. I’ve been going thru my “Great Minds of the Western Tradition” CD series again, and I’ve found that I make a bit more sense out of it this round. But still, a lot goes over my head. Some of these thinkers really hit home for me, and some of them don’t. I felt good about Plotnius, Erasmus, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Vico, Hume, Montessquieu, J.S. Mills, Kierkegaard, James, Freud, Dewey and the Frankfurt School. And Nietzsche wasn’t as bizarre as his reputation would have it. But Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein just didn’t cut it with me. And the modern guys (and they are all guys – not one female made the list of great thinkers here) like Quine, Rawls, Rorty and Nozick left me cold too. Forget about Derida and Levi-Strauss; DOA for me. No one seemed to latch on to anything exciting since the turn of the 20th Century; but then again, it was a difficult Century. And then again, maybe it’s just me and my lazy mind at [non] work.

One thing that did irk me about so many of the pre-20th Century philosophers was their search for an “anchor”, an unmovable reference point for knowing, being and truth. E.g., Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. No one ever did much better. Plato speculated that there are “forms” behind it all; Hegel talked about “world spirit”; Schopenhauer said it is all grounded in “will”; and Husserl postulated something about a “transcendental ego”. And of course the ancient Jews and Christians said that it all comes down to God. Some folk said that science and empiricism is the best answer. Well, as it turned out, rational thinking left much to be desired (although irrational thinking leaves even more).

But one area of science does help answer a lot of philosophical questions, and that is the process of Darwinian evolution. In more than one lecture about a 16th or 17th century thinker, I wanted to shout back that all of this guy’s speculation could have been cut short and a lot of ink and breath could have been saved if they just knew how evolution worked back then. The first “great thinker” that seemed to get it was Dewey with his “empirical naturalism”.

But then again. I enjoy metaphysical speculation too, and I haven’t given up on the idea of God yet. So it may seem a bit contradictory for a person like me to be espousing the theory of evolution as the end-all for human wisdom. Well, perhaps I’m as much of a “piece of work” as some of the philosophers. Or maybe I’m just ready to concede that there is a natural realm, about which evolutionary processes can tell us much; and there is, at least in our minds, also a metaphysical realm, where everything is up for grabs. And the bridges between the two realms are very shaky.

But as humans, we are natural bridge builders, just as beavers are natural dam builders. So we go on speculating about how our realm of day-to-day objects, forces and complex side-effects (like American politics) relates to our imagined worlds of “forms” or “God and heaven” or “great laws”. Or perhaps “no other side at all”, as the atheists and modern scientists would have it. Well, no-bridge is still a metaphysical bridge of sorts; perhaps because evolution set our minds up to believe in some kind of metaphysics. It’s just part of our nature. The danger behind all this is that people too often decide that their bridge is better than all others. Then, even worse, they start trying to undermine or blow up the other bridges. That’s known, in its lighter manifestations, as closed-mindedness. When taken too far, it becomes holy war.

The best philosophy I can think of right now would be the attitude that your “bridge to the other side of reality” is my bridge too, and my bridge is your bridge. All bridges are to be respected (so long as they don’t lead to obviously disrespectful things like ritual killings or such). All religious and metaphysical views are to be considered. No one’s particular vision can contain the whole truth, but perhaps in the sum of all such visions lies a greater truth. That’s the best I can do for now.

It’s difficult to talk thoughtfully about the late Charles Roberts and the mayhem that he caused in an Amish community in Pennsylvania this week. You could try to write him off as a “nut case” or a “whacko” on the basis of what he did; but until last Monday, he was Mister Middle America, the kind of guy that modern neo-conservatives celebrate as the backbone of our country. He attended church, his father was a cop, he drove a truck picking up milk from farms during the wee hours, he was married and was a loyal father to three children. Roberts was the portrait of social stability, the kind of fellow that keeps this nation from flying into pieces. So when a guy like that flys into pieces, you gotta wonder.

I’m not a shrink, but I will say this. Male sexuality is not an easy thing to deal with here in America. Every day, the typical guy receives a whole slew of subtle but very contradictory messages from society about his inner reproductive urges (hey, that’s what they are, biologically, whether or not you want to think of them that way). Advertisements use sexual innuendo as a come-on; TV and the movies are full of it. Shock jocks on radio talk about and joke about sexual perversion, way beyond the boredom point (well, for me, anyway; I guess someone still likes to listen to Howard Stern).

And then, at the same time, there’s the new conservatism and the resurgence of old-tyme religion (especially in places like where Mr. Roberts lived). Our leaders now tell us to heed to our traditional morals and values. For a guy, that means keeping the rocket securely in the pocket until after wedding day. The licentious 1960’s are long gone; the pendulum has swung well to the other side. Except that our businessmen and women still use that licentious spirit to sell cars and clothes and movies and whatever. Modern porno is generally disgusting, but it’s just a mouse click away on any computer tied to the net.

And this confusion extends to the world of dating and mating. A whole lot of young women entering relationships today don’t want guys to be cave men, but they don’t want them to be completely in control of the “desire factor” either. So they keep their boys enticed with perfume, sexy clothes, hints and innuendos, etc. – always keeping them a little bit aroused and a little bit frustrated. It’s the woman’s way of expressing power in these cynical times. So much for finding your soul mate.

So what’s an honest guy to think about his strong, hormone-driven urges? Are strong male desires something to be acknowledged and tolerated, or something to be repressed and ashamed of? No one can give a fellow a straight answer; our society doesn’t have one.

Well, the truth is that most guys somehow figure it all out and make it into their 40s and 50s just fine, when the fires of desire start burning low (and then they reach for the Viagra so as to relive the good old days, if just for half an hour). Most guys don’t become rapists or child molestors. However, if there are other bad things going on, e.g. loneliness or unresolved anger or other unhealthy forms of “psychological environment”, then it starts getting easy for a young guy to imagine things such as Mr. Roberts did. Think about all those Roman Catholic priests who did so many terrible things to kids participating in their church programs, to the shock of so many lay Catholics. And the sad truth is that it’s open season for most children living in urban and rural impoverished neighborhoods (high crime, low employment rates, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, etc.). Rampant child abuse is a not-well-kept secret in the ghetto and the ‘holler.

I’m not trying to make an excuse for what those priests or poor folk do, or for what Mr. Roberts wanted to do (and what he did, which was even worse). But I think that someone has to be willing to talk to young males and let them know that America in the early 21st Century is NOT an easy place to grow up in, and that there’s not much support available about how guys can honestly and responsibly think about their sexual feelings. If someone authoritative could just say “no, you’re not a monster for having these urges and you’re not crazy for being confused about them. It’s not your imagination that you’re being jerked around by the world.” I can’t say that this message would have saved those innocent Amish girls in Nickle Mines, PA. But I can say that there are a lot of young guys who are walking wounded but don’t look like it, and their confusion about what their body is doing to them and what religion says about it and what they see on TV or the Internet makes it all worse. Just a bit of sympathy and understanding, just a hint that “you’re not alone”, might help a whole lot of them to get thru it without hurting themselves or anyone else.

P.S., about the Amish. I don’t know how their culture deals with male sexuality. You’d think it would be extremely repressive, but maybe it’s easier that way; no confusion, clear standards.

Nevertheless, we are getting a pretty good indication about how the Amish deal with the shock of violation and death wrought by the outside world. They deal with that by doling out forgiveness. They refuse to hate. They don’t call for the death penalty. No eye for an eye, and the violator’s dental work stays intact too. They’re reaching out to Charles Roberts’ family and offering sympathy. That’s extremely powerful. My hat is off to the people with the funny hats. They don’t talk much talk, but they do walk the walk.

I watched a little bit of a new TV show called “Ugly Betty” the other day. It’s on the ABC network. ABC – are they still around? I don’t watch much TV these days, but the two or three programs that I do watch generally come from NBC and PBS. Once in a while I might catch something on CBS, but ABC is pretty much the dregs. ABC shows are mostly second-rate re-makes of things that worked on other channels. There’s not much originality or risk-taking on that channel (ever since “Sports Night” went down). About all ABC has going for their shows is that they always select the most handsome male actors and the hottest female actors for them. To me it’s way too artificial, even by TV standards. I call it the “Ephram Zimbalist Junior” syndrome. Yes, ABC did have a couple of hits in the 70’s and 80’s using dumpy looking actors – there was Roseanne, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Welcome Back Cotter. But those were the exceptions that prove the rule. ABC has always tried to make up with pretty faces for what they lack in plot line and originality. Don’t forget that ABC is where Bruce Willis got started (ah yes, remember Moonlighting?).

[I think that the pretty-face syndrome helped to kill Commander In Chief, which was an interesting idea (a woman as President of the US). CIC might have stood half a chance had ABC used realistic actors (akin to what NBC did with The West Wing). It also would have helped if ABC didn’t try to focus the plot so much on the super-stars, i.e. Donald Sutherland and Gena Davis (who wore way too much red lipstick to be taken seriously as the Leader of the Free World). But ABC is locked into the pretty-face philosophy.]

That’s what makes Ugly Betty somewhat interesting. According to the plot, Betty is a dumpy-looking secretary set into a pure ABC scenario, i.e. a fashion magazine where everyone is rudely glamorous. As such, it’s an interesting meta-twist against the standard ABC formula. Betty lives with her gritty Hispanic family in Jackson Heights, New Yawk. So Ugly Betty is sort of like Roseanne meets Dynasty (yea, I know, that was from another channel; but it could well have been an ABC show!). Unfortunately, I don’t have much hope that the writers and producers of Ugly Betty see and appreciate the irony; much less will they be able to play against it. For one thing, Betty’s ugliness is fake. Betty is played by actress America Ferrera, who in reality isn’t ugly. They have to give her braces and a bad hairdo and some nasty glasses in order to make her seem repulsive. And even then, she’s no worse than a mildy geeky high school girl (if there are still any like that these days). Come on, if they wanted real ugly, it wouldn’t have been hard to find.

And the show is an hour long, which is a lot of time to cover with a half-baked idea. The killer is that the second half-hour competes against The Office on NBC, which is another NBC success story (it’s become my one regular-network indulgence each week). So, I predict that Ugly Betty will be lucky to survive thru the spring following a time change. It’s just too bad; it’s another interesting TV show idea that somehow landed in ABC’s lap and they just couldn’t handle it. Oh well, at least I don’t own any stock in Disney (ABC’s owner).

Although I usually refrain from discussing my health problems on this forum, I’m gonna break that rule a bit and tell you about my recent colonoscopy. Yea, I finally had one. I’m 53, and my doctor was lobbying pretty hard for me to get my entrails checked out. What pushed it over the top for me was the fact that a friend (an older guy, admittedly) recently went in for his first one, and they found colon cancer. (So far he’s holding up well, determined to beat it; I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.)

Actually, there’s not much for me to tell about the colonoscopy itself, other than it went well. Nothing bad was found (thank goodness!); and more interestingly, my gastro guy’s last name starts with a Z. So yes, I had Doctor Z driving an endoscope up my butt.

Still, most of the story here is about the preparation phase. That’s the part that everyone hates.

While “getting up my courage” to finally have the procedure done, I read a number of people’s experiences posted on various web sites. And that all helped me to take the plunge. So I’m gonna say a few things about my own preparation experience, in hope that it might help someone else who is nervous about getting a colonoscopy. Everyone’s experience of a colonoscopy is different, but the bottom line is that you CAN get thru it and that it IS worth the trouble.

Doctor Z’s preparation rules were fairly simple, compared to some others that I’ve read about on the web: you finish breakfast the day before by 9AM, then eat nothing after that. You continue to drink water, clear juices, broth, tea and clear soda until midnight. From midnight until after you’ve had the thing done, no food OR liquid. For the clean-out, Dr. Z prescribed two (relatively) heavy doses of phospho-soda laxative mixed with ginger ale, four hours apart.

Well, I got thru the first phospho-soda batch pretty well. I kept my nose closed while drinking it, but it really didn’t seem so bad. After an hour or so, a lot of colon cleaning got done. Around 5 PM, I downed the second laxative cocktail. By 5:30, the waterfalls had started, but I was disheartened by it. There were still a lot of food particles mixed in, including some black shapes from the skin of a piece of baked squash that I ate the day before (which was probably baked a little too much).

Oh no, I thought. Dr. Z would see the black particles that didn’t come out and get mad, and would make me do it all over again. So I decided to chug down as much water as possible, and thus maximize the final clean-out. At one point I was literally gulping water into me while it was shooting out the other end. I was doing a real power-wash of my intestines. My final sitting occurred just after 6PM, and I was a bit confused. There weren’t any more black pieces in the liquid, but there were still a few very small food bits, and they were rather translucent. Was that good enough?

I didn’t quite realize just then that my body was headed for a crash. I may have had a sip of juice at that point, but it wasn’t enough. I soon became disoriented and fearful. With 20/20 hindsight, I should have made a cup of tea as to have bought time, when I could have drank enough sweet stuff to have stayed out of la-la land. But by 8:30, I couldn’t figure out what to do. I got scared. Then my stomach got upset and I tried to heave; only bile and acid came up. Yuck. I slept on and off throughout the night, waking up quite sure that I couldn’t go thru with the whole thing. I was tempted to pick up the phone and call Dr. Z’s line as to tell him that I was canceling. Somehow I decided to hold off until morning, but I was sure that I would die if I tried to have a colonoscopy in this condition.

Well, morning arrived, and the daylight made me feel a little bit better. Not great, but just enough to get on with the show. Still, it was only about 30 minutes before my brother was to pick me up when I finally decided not to cancel. I was unwashed and unshaven, but what the heck. They’d have to take me as I was.

When I got to Dr. Z’s den of endoscopy, I was just coherent enough to get thru the check-in and preparation rituals. Everyone there was very nice (despite my unkempt condition), and that helped immensely. My brother didn’t say anything brilliant to me on the drive over, but I got the sense that he knew that I could get thru it. So yea, I needed that last minute human encouragement to finally do the deed.

And, as I said before, the whole thing came to a happy ending. Dr. Z said to me afterwards that I did a very good prep job. I later found out why that was important. There have been studies indicating that colonoscopies aren’t 100% perfect. There is a small chance (as in any medical procedure, really) that something bad will not be picked up. I recently read one of those studies on a web site, and it speculated that if the preparation job wasn’t really clean and some food particles still lined parts of the colon, a “bad thing” (polyp, neoplasma, whatever) could be covered up and passed over. And you don’t want that.

Well, I’m not a doctor and I’m not trying to give out any medical advice here. I’m just telling you about my own experience. Still, I would suggest that if and when you have a colonoscopy, you should discuss the importance of doing a clean and thorough preparation with your doctor beforehand. Doing a “power wash” at the end like I did may not be right for you (although when I have to do it again I’ll try to be ready for the ensuing “crash”). Maybe it’s better to change your diet in the last few days before the procedure as to help make the clean-out go better. Or doing a follow-up butt enema? Again, it’s all something to talk about with your doctor; let her or him give you the best advice for your specific situation.

But do have it done if you are getting near 50 (or earlier if you have a family history or other relevant problems). As my friend tells me, colon cancer really does happen, and colonoscopies are the front-line of defense against it — if they are done in time. No matter how unpleasant, you can forget about a rough colonoscopy in a few days (as I’m already starting to do). But colon cancer is a drag that goes on and on (although a lot of people do eventually beat it, or at least learn to live with it). As much as I hate to say it — LISTEN TO YOUR DOCTOR!

(And then actually consider following his or her orders.)

THERE’S KITSCH AROUND THE CORNER: I didn’t become aware of the Thomas Kinkade phenomenon until lately, when I noticed that a small Kinkade litho print that my brother bought for my mother’s house. Right after that, I finally noticed the Thomas Kinkade Gallery not far from my humble abode here in Northern New Jersey. So I took a walk over to it and looked in the window at the displayed artwork. It seemed a bit . . . . formulistic, shall we say. Cloyingly sentimental, perhaps. Trying a bit too hard to evoke some longing for the good old days. Just the kind of stuff that my mother likes! (Smile)

I’ve seen this kind of art before. Growing up and dwelling much of my life in the working class suburbs, I’ve come to know the cheap stuff pretty well; the sentimental Norman Rockwell knock-offs, portraits of the sea and rustic villages, the black-velvet craze of the late 70s and early 80s, etc. I once saw two big black velvets side-by-side at an outdoor market along Route 46 in Little Ferry; one was Elvis, the other was Jesus. I’m really sorry that I didn’t get a picture of that.

The interesting thing is how Kinkade, “the painter of light”, is using cutting-edge American marketing techniques to stay above the K-Mart gallery scene (and thus keep his prices up). His stuff is as mass-produced as anything I saw in the home furnishing section of Two Guys (a classic proletariat-oriented department store chain that went under in the late 70s) back when I was a kid. And yet, the Kinkade organization is convincing a whole lot of people that these things are unique, collector’ items, heirlooms, an investment. Having an exclusive gallery in “Upper Montclair”, a rather tony suburban neighborhood noted for its artistic sensibilities, certainly doesn’t hurt.

Hey, I certainly won’t begrudge people for their tastes. I’m not exactly on the cutting-edge of artistic sensibilities. I’m a sucker for sentimentality too. It just amazes me how effectively Kinkade is making a good buck on stuff that really isn’t all that different from what you can get in the Wal Mart home furnishings section. You can find lots of “light” there too!

Anyway, here are pics of the Kinkade Gallery of Upper Montclair, with an autumn display theme. Note for the legal beagles, these shots were taken from a public sidewalk, where the US Constitution says that everything (other than perhaps a top-secret stealth bomber at an air base somehow visible from a highway) is fair game for “artistic expression” such as photography. Hey, my own “works of art” are hardly any less worthy than Kinkade’s, even if I haven’t found a way to make a buck off of them! Enjoy.

  

They had a computer/electronic equipment recycling day in my town yesterday. I had some junk that wasn’t working anymore, so I packed it in a box and headed down to the DPW. I was a little wary, having once gone to a County toxic junk day where you had to wait in a line with your car for almost a half hour before you could drop your stuff off (which reminded me of the gasoline lines of the late 70’s and early 80’s). But no, this went quickly. No big line; there were only two or three cars ahead of me. It was a very efficient operation, just pull up, hand the stuff over to a couple of guys who help you unload, and pull right out. Easy.

The town hired a group called Advanced Recovery, Inc. to collect and recycle the computer junk. I tried to do a search on Advanced Recovery, but couldn’t find too much. They have a web site that says they have two locations, one in Newark, NJ and one in Tennessee. I assume they are run by a bunch of for-profit capitalists. But nonetheless, I wish them well — so long as they are the real deal. I assume that they re-sell what ever is salvagable and dispose of the rest in an environmentally responsible fashion. Their locations should bring jobs to places that sorely need them. Hopefully they don’t dump electronic stuff having mercury and other toxic waste into some abandoned Appalachian coal mine (most computers and electric gizmos in your home have toxic stuff in them; thus the need for special disposal).

Capitalism can be done in an enlightened, socially beneficial manner. Unfortunately, the free-for-all nature of open market competition usually encourages companies, both big and small, to take shortcuts that often put the public in danger (defective products, cheating on pollution laws, charter bus companies that don’t fix things right and hire cowboy drivers, etc.). I just hope that Advanced Recovery Inc. stays “in the light” and avoids “the dark side” of capitalism. The guys that I saw running the show on Saturday looked like groovy people. Let’s hope that our system still allows such guys to do well by doing good.

One more thing. I read a little about the recent comments on Islam that got Pope Ratzinger (Benedict, whatever) into hot water. In my estimation, the problems that cause this kind of thing are twofold: 1.) both sides (the Islamic leaders and the Vatican) are living in the past. A sense of history is a good thing, but the Pope was quoting a 14th century document about an argument between the Byzantium Emperor and a Persian Islamic scholar. And the Muslim authorities who chastised “Il Papa” pretty much took the side of that long-dead scholar. Everyone here is living in the past. 2.) No one involved in this little affair has as much as a smidgeon of humor about it. I don’t think there’s been a pope who could relax and laugh at a joke since John the 23rd. All of his successors, including the popular John Paul II, just took it all way too seriously. And the Islamic institutions . . . . let’s not even go there.

The Pope was hinting that Islam has a bias, however small, towards jihaddist violence, given the story of Muhammed and his warrior conquests. Yea, there’s something to that. But for many Islamic people today, Islam is mostly an institutional religion that presents the old stories as a metaphor for the fervor that should accompany faith in the Almighty. And Christianity, despite the inherent peacefullness of the story of Christ, has shown over the centuries that it knows how to make war and aggression with the best of them.

For better and for worse, Christianity sited itself in areas of the world that have experienced tremendous economic growth over the past half-millenium. The Islamic lands were once prosperous from being located at the crossroads of trade between Europe, Asia and Africa. But today they’re in a slump. Christian Europe got out of its slump (the Dark Ages) after the faithful finally got restless and defied Church authority, so as to advance. The Islamic world hasn’t quite reached that stage yet. So you have two cranky institutions, the Catholic Church (which once ruled an impoverished kingdom and still hasn’t gotten over being marginalized into a mere “spiritual authority”), and Islam (which still rules a kingdom that was once rich and mighty, and hasn’t gotten over that kingdom’s fall into poverty). Neither of them are in the mood right now for laughing, turning the other cheek, and just getting on with living in modern times.

Let’s just hope that Christians and Muslims learn to laugh a bit more and not take their institutions so seriously. Both religions claim to be God’s true representative on the planet Earth. At least one of them has to be wrong. But most likely, they’re both wrong. Hey, some common ground!

I’ve been all geeked out lately, which explains why I’m behind with this blog. I really was never much of a computer head, but my trusty Dell Dimension L667R is getting old (like me), and who knows how much longer it’s got (again, like me). So I decided to go on ebay and get a “lifeboat”, a second computer to keep around as a spare in case of an unexpected crash one fine day. Yea, I do eventually need to get a new computer. But with my finances currently under pressure because of my mother’s home care needs, I just don’t feel like shelling out a grand or so for something decent (yea, I see all those ads by Dell and other companies for “full systems” for less than $500; but when I finally get a new computer, I want something substantial, not an e-mail / video game toy; gonna need a Pentium processor, full business software suite, DVD burner, etc.).

So I put up $70 and bought another old Dimension L, this time an L866R (maybe 6 months younger than my venerable 667). Seemed as though it would be easy to clone the old system to the new, since I have Norton Ghost 2003. BUTTTTT, things turned out to be a bit more complex than I had figured. Well, it’s a long story, but suffice it to say that the new system has taken on a life of its own. I had to put up additional cash (another $170 worth), but now I have a Win 2K system with a CD burner, modem, network card, 80G hard drive, 384M RAM, a KVM switch to go back and forth with the original computer, and pretty much all the software I had with the old system.

Do I really need two computers? No, but it’s nice to be ready, given the degree to which I’ve come to rely on the darn thing over the past 5 years. And since I don’t have anti-virus on the new [old] computer, I can fool around with “resource-hog” programs that don’t run well on the main box, e.g. StarLogo. Once I’m finally ready to get a new system (perhaps with Windows VISTA — yuk), I’m hoping to keep at least one of the old boxes. That should qualify me for permanent geek-dom!

Interesting Article of the Week: While I was slaving over my new ancient computer, the NY Times published an article on some recent medical research that really makes you think. It’s about a series studies which all show there to be a gene that regulates stem cells in a way that makes human beings fall apart as they get older. It’s basically the old-age gene. When you’re young, your stem cells churn away to keep your muscles tight and your skin smooth and your bones and joints strong and your eyes and organs working right. But when you get old, those cells stop knocking out replacements for the worn out cells throughout your body, so your skin wrinkles and your muscles get weak and achy and your joints get rusty and your eyes and heart and everything else just don’t work very well anymore.

Well, in and of itself, that’s not surprising. But what is interesting is the finding that the same process also keeps cancer from happening. OK, it isn’t perfect; in reality, old people get cancer, much more than young people. But without this genetic process and the Ink4 protein that it produces, cancer would be much more prevalent. We’d seem to be in great shape in our 50s and 60s, but out of nowhere we’d all suddenly be dying of cancer. Hardly anyone would make it to 70. (FOOTNOTE: The latest theories about cancer say that it is caused by a series of random mutations that take place in your stem cell genes over time, maybe one mutation every 5 to 10 years. It takes a total of maybe 6 or 7 mutations to fire-up the cancer process, which makes the stem cells go into overdrive and knock out tumor cells in lieu of normal body cells. These mutations can be hastened by environmental factors such as exposure to toxic chemicals or radiation. And some people have genes that make these mutations easier and faster. But even the perfect human in the perfect environment will eventually have cell mutations. At bottom, the question of when these mutations happen is a throw of the dice. I knew a guy who unexpectedly died of leukemia in his 30s. We all tried to explain it away, e.g. he spent time in Buffalo where the water was toxic from Love Canal. But most likely, he was just unlucky; his mutation dice rolled the wrong way. So long as our stem cells kept churning away, sooner or later everyone would get cancer. But the Ink4 protein turns the stem cells down after age 40, lengthening the average time for the 5th, then 6th and 7th mutation to take place, thus putting off the start of the cancer process.)

What a crazy choice nature has given us. Option 1: stay in great shape until you are 50, maybe 60, then be absolutely assured of getting cancer. Option 2: go into a steady decline after age 40, but hold the cancer off longer (or until something else gets you). Well, actually we don’t have that choice; nature (through evolution) already made the decision. We will suffer old age, we will become weak and frail and dependent; but on average we will stay around longer. According to the Times article, medical science isn’t going to find any way around this nasty choice any time soon. The promise that stem cell research will let us live to 100 feeling like a college student all the time has taken a big setback. The dream of 80 years of hot sex has been put on ice. It’s back to reality for today’s youth. Maybe you all should go back to treating old people (like me) nice, because it turns out that you’re probably going to suffer old age too.

PS, my generation was told by science that we would travel to the Moon and Mars for vacation trips. Instead, we got personal computers. Does today’s youth believe science about stem-cell fountains of youth and pollution-less hydrogen cars? Bah, I’ll stick with what I can trust; including my old computers.

Love Lies Bleeding: The young couple living upstairs from me recently decided to take their relationship to the next step, i.e. engagement. In a burst of romantic enthusiasm, the young man decided to celebrate their commitment by decorating his SUV with professions of love. However, the remains of Hurricane Ernesto just came through town, drenching us with several inches of rain. And just as love itself is so often worn down by the storms of life, my neighbor’s windshield poetry was somewhat the worse for it all.

WHY WE STILL NEED LIBERALS: I’ve been reading a liberal book lately. It’s called “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”, by Thomas Frank. I hoped it would be an unbiased, insightful analysis of how the GOP and its social conservatism won the hearts and minds of the hordes out there in the heartland, those who would have done a whole lot better under a Democratic / Liberal government. I hoped it would expose the fallacies of both smothering liberalism and laissez faire conservatism, and put forth some new ideas. But alas, it did not. This book is full of liberal ax-grinding. And that gets on my nerves.

Here’s a quote which exemplifies Mr. Frank’s approach to liberal versus conservative and Democrat versus Republican. He describes a well-off suburb of Kansas City called Mission Hills, which is home to a great many captains of industry and commerce. In describing how most of Kansas is going down the tubes financially, he opines that “the people of Mission Hills are unfazed . . . . they know that poverty rocks. Poverty is profitable. Poverty makes stocks go up and labor come down.”

Now really. Even the wealthy owners of capital have to sell their products and services to someone. They still need a middle class to keep their offices and factories humming. So it can’t be quite that bad.

Or can it? I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR the other morning, and I heard a report on the growing number of families without health insurance. One of the biggest causes is the reluctance of many employers these days (Wal Mart most famously) to give their workers coverage. I heard a Mr. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute say that expanding the government programs which pick up some of the uncovered workers (such as Medicaid) is exactly the wrong thing to do. Mr. Cannon claimed that the availability of government coverage for the working poor encourages employers not to offer health insurance. He implied that if there were no government alternatives, maybe the companies would be more willing to offer health insurance; the forces of supply and demand for labor would lead them to be nicer. It’s the government that’s making them so mean.

That’s one of those arguments that make a whole lot of sense if you don’t think about them. Since when do workers have the upper hand in the labor market? If this were 1960, you could argue that strong labor unions insure the workers’ bargaining power against mega-corporations (which are sometimes practically the sole employer in a small town, e.g. a mining town in Kentucky or a refinery somewhere in Louisiana). But today, the labor unions are on their knees. The percentage of workers who are members of unions is at an all-time low (12.5%, versus 53% in 1956). Big corporations have a whole lot more power over the terms of employment than individual, unorganized workers do. Big business has effectively used international trade to crush the American working man and woman.

I used to be unsympathetic to unions, as they went too far to protect sloth and inefficiency. I really thought that big business was being reasonable in its demand for worker “give-backs” and deregulation; at first they certainly were. But since Ronald Reagan, big business has gotten greedy. The ridiculous days of early capitalism, where workers died from dangerous machines and pollution, or barely stayed alive on meager wages, are coming back. Big business is truly a heartless monster after all. The rich are becoming filthy rich, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is being squeezed out. Somehow the capitalists are doing just fine selling their wares mostly to each other (or pushing the peons to buy on credit). I hate to say it, but perhaps we do need flaming liberals and stodgy unions after all!

The GOP offered America a contract, and the heartland took it. You can have you guns and your God, and we won’t make you sit next to gays and people of color. But in return, we will pick your pocket, take away your economic security, health insurance, clean environment and safe workplace. In return, we leave you with the chance to get rich. Too bad only about 1 in 1000 will even get close. But our mass media will leave you with sweet dreams, wonderful stories of those who have traded rags for riches in our “economy of opportunity”.

Perhaps Howard Dean is a necessary evil after all . . . . Kansas, how long until you figure that out?