Good grief! It’s Christmas day, and we sit here in a mountain home surrounded by conifers, and it’s snowing. The whole scene is a Leanin’ Tree Christmas card. We’ll be around relatives and over-excited kids today, and I think back to the days when my own kids were up at 5AM jumping with excitement. In Billings, where the kids grew up, there was a guy who used to take his helicopter and fly a lit-up Santa sled with reindeer across the rimrocks north of town on Christmas Eve. We would go to evening mass (a hangover from my own childhood), and then tour the city looking at lights. But seeing Santa’s sled was the key – it meant that the kids had to get home and get to sleep so that he could come visit.

They figured that out soon enough, but it had charm. I wonder if he still does that. Not Santa – the helicopter guy.

Anyway, I often write about religion here – I don’t much care for it. Christians have coopted the winter solstice, and now maintain that it isn’t a real Christmas unless you also worship. Without Jesus, they say, it’s just a materialist orgy. It is that, for sure, but long before there was a Jesus, when it was deep winter and the fields could not be worked, when people were stuck in their huts for untold hours of darkness, they began to celebrate that date when the days would start getting longer. I too like that idea – Christmas is a sign that it’s only 65 days or so now until pitchers and catchers report to the practice fields in Arizona and Florida.

It’s a time for sharing our bounty and talents, for families to gather. I wish I was with my own kids today – they are scattered all over and each decided this year to stay in place. None of them are churchers, but when they get together, they are oddly like every other family, and their Christmas memories are just as pure as anyone’s.

So, from one who loves this pagan ritual to all of you who come here to, I hope, be entertained, Merry Solstice, and many more.

The primitive mind endows the world with agents, and makes a god or gods the cause of events which affect man. (Joan Symington)

God allowed Katrina to happen to bring attention to lack of preparation for terrorist attack. (Charles Colson)

The discussion down below regarding Huckabee’s sublime appeal to right wing Christian voters reminded me that religion is a powerful force in our lives, and that no amount of reasoning will overcome it. We nonbelievers will always be a minority. But as I implied down in the comments, the job of leadership requires a realistic sense of how the world really operates. For that reason, I suspect that most of our presidents have been either atheist or agnostic, or at least indifferent to Sunday preachers.

The question of evil underlies every debate on religion. The presumption on the believers’ side is that religion is a counterbalancing force to evil, that we are involved in a battle between light and dark. So sayeth the Bible, Pat Robertson, and Star Wars. But it doesn’t take much research to uncover how religion itself has been co-opted into doing evil.

It’s no surprise. Most people are good because good is its own reward. Most people are kind and generous. As individuals, humans have immense capacity for goodwill and benevolence. But as a group, humans can be truly ugly. I’ve often wondered about this – how our capacity for evil manifests in our group behavior. George W. Bush loves his family, will pray over a Christmas turkey, and unleash horrible violence on the Iraqi people. Hannah Arendt referred to it as the “banality of evil”, how kind and caring and generous people become cogs in larger machines that do evil.

I suspect it has to do with a couple of things – one, that human leaders are not chosen, but choose themselves. A person has to want power to achieve power. The very fact that a person wants to be president ought to disqualify him from that office. But that’s now how it works. In the end, we are led by people who are hungry for power. The trilogy of the ring was an illustration of the lure of power, and how power corrupts us. Perhaps our greatest president, George Washington, didn’t want the job. That’s what made him great. He chose not to be king. That quality is extremely rare.

Our inhumanity percolates up into our group behavior. Suppose I have within me a small lust – a dislike of Muslims or blacks – alone I won’t express my inner feelings. But if there are many like me, our groups will give voice to those impulses. The Ku Klux Klan is a perfect example – men hiding under hoods, their anonymity allowing them to express ugly sentiments toward their black brothers and sisters.

So it follows that our leaders can lock into our individual prejudices, and use them to foster our anger and enlist our support in attacking other countries. They create archetypes for us, objects of hatred like Saddam Hussein or Osama. With that object in place, our national hatred is set free, and insanity and violence ensue.

But there’s a counterbalance to this – there are organizations through which our good impulses are expressed. The United Nations is one, as is just about every charity I have ever encountered. The UN operates on a large scale, and though it lacks the power of the United States, it has on occasion counterbalanced the evil that comes from our leadership. It tried to do so before we invaded Iraq, but just didn’t have enough.

Most religious organizations embody individual charitable impulses. Most churches do good work. But this animal called the “Christian Right” is not such a body. Like fundamentalist Muslim extremists, the Christian Right calls upon us to hate other people and invade other countries. Clever leaders have seen their numbers, and have enlisted them in their power quests. The Christian Right gives expression of the evil that lurks in our hearts. As such, we need to call upon the good within us to expel them from our leadership. They are truly dangerous.

We’ve crossed the line, rubbed it out completely. It’s getting out of hand, this Christian stuff.

Interesting video. Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has overseen an investigation of Ohio’s electronic voting system to assure that votes are counted accurately and that the system is secure from tampering.

Her conclusion: “There is cause for great concern.”

You have to follow this stuff on the internet, as it is just not covered by the media. Two Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) election officials are in jail for interfering in that state’s recount. 56 of 88 counties have illegally destroyed their election ballots and records, in direct defiance of a federal judge. There’s widespread suspicion that Ohio was stolen, that Bush once again occupies the White House by fraud.

Jennifer Brunner trounced former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell at the polls, and promised to clean up Ohio’s elections.

Ohio witnessed a 6.7% flip in exit polls versus counted vote. The exits say Kerry won. There’s widespread evidence of multiple means of fraud, from voter list purges to illegal lock downs of election headquarters (Cincinnati) to shorting black voters of voting machines to illegal caging. Then there were the machines themselves – seems anyone with a wi-fi could hack them.

Her recommendation: Paper ballots with central point optical scanning. The State of Ohio would take over training of election personnel, and would be in charge of keeping machines secure and training state employees to use them. This would eliminate the former system where state employees, corporate reps and independent contractors all had access to the machines at various times leading up to the election. Security was nonexistent.

She also recommends a two week election period where polling places are open seven days a week, to replace this crazy system where we all try to squeeze into the school cafeteria on the first Tuesday in November. That is long overdue.

Interesting video. It will be an interesting battle in Ohio to see if she can push her reforms through the legislature.

Researchers have discovered that endorphins, a brain chemical that operates on the same opiate receptors as alcohol – with the effect of suppressing pain – can also be released after deep expressions of religious faith. Perhaps most widely associated with strenuous exercise, endorphins are thus part of the brain’s response to spirituality – not just moments of religious ecstasy, but a steady, calming diet of faith.
Justin A. Frank, M.D., Bush on the Couch, p57

Quite a while back we were at dinner with a neighbor couple who we did not know well, but wanted to know better. It was a pleasant evening and we shared many interests. But at a point late in the meal, he laid it on me: “Mark, are you a spiritual man?” Poof! The bubble evaporated. He tried to recruit me for his religious study group. He was quite excited that they were about to open up Paul’s epistle to the Romans – he’d been suffering through some of his other letters in anticipation.

Buzzkill. How to ruin an otherwise fun evening. At least he wasn’t selling life insurance.

I grew up in a religious family – not slightly so, not one inclined to bow to the formalities while ignoring the substance. My parents were deeply religious, and I attended Catholic schools for twelve years. I don’t have many fond memories – mostly, sitting through the same ceremony again and again and again and again was frightfully boring. When I hit my teen years and could drive myself, I started “attending” 7PM Sunday mass – at the church of the great pinball at a local bowling alley. I was always afraid that Mom would ask me specifics of the service – what was the gospel and stuff like that. But she didn’t. She knew.

I never understood the appeal of religion. To this day, it gives me the creeps. I was hobbled by my youthful indoctrination, and carried with me the mandate to believe due to fear of damnation for many years. At last, one night around the time of my first midlife crisis, I decided it was all bunk, that I would not be damned, that financial ruin would not happen, that my kids would not suffer greatly if we all just sort of pretended that it wasn’t there. Freedom.

But I see so much religion going on around me. I see a cynical man like George W. Bush, and assume that he, like me, doesn’t’ really take it seriously – that he’s just diddling his base. Mr. Bush’s psychiatrist, Dr. Frank, thinks Bush is sincere. That worries me. I like the idea that most of our presidents have been agnostic or atheist or indifferent and practical. Having a genuinely religious man in the White House could be dangerous.

Look around. It is. This Bush guy, with his certainty and inability to self-reflect, is really harming people.

But I see the good too. I know people whose lives have been turned around by religious faith – it seems to minimize self-destructive impulses. I’m happy for them, even more so if they keep it to themselves. I see the hundreds of cars at the fundamentalist churches as we make our now-and-then trip to our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. I know that religion is making people happy. And now I know why. It is giving them an endorphin buzz.

But it’s creepy. I am not of a mind that can endure for long secret friends and miracles. Repetitive ritual is extremely boring. The yielding of one’s identity to a “higher power” robs one of one of the things that can produce satisfaction – individuality. It’s no accident that I am one of those who hits the keyboard every morning and churns out this stuff – that I eschew political party ID and seek out the nonconformist route. It is my own key to happiness – to be who I am.

For most people, it seems, there is happiness in plunging one’s self into a group. We’re tribal – I get that, but I rebel at the notion that a man in a pulpit or podium has any special wiring or communication channels to some higher imaginary being. It’s all here, right in front of us, and everything we can know is there – clues are everywhere. Life is exploration, and satisfaction is now and then finding that some small puzzle piece fits.

We’ll never have all the pieces or be able to stand back far enough to see the whole puzzle. But that is satisfying too. How boring it would be to have all the answers, to have everything spelled out in detail. How boring is religion.

The Mitchell Report is out, and 80 or so baseball players have been identified as having used steroids to advance their careers. There is so much going on there that it would take a professional sports writer to parse it all out. And they are trying, but they are missing some key points, I think.

First, however, the comedy. Roger Clemens is in full-denial mode, and is so wealthy that he doesn’t even need to do it himself. His hired gun, his lawyer, is doing it for him. Andy Petitte is beating a strategic retreat, saying he did it once for an injury, not explaining the curative powers of the drugs. And Mike Stanton is doing the most common thing of all – he saying he never met the guy who fingered him, wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a police lineup.

But there’s other stuff to note as well. For one, the Mitchell Report pays only lip service to ownership and management’s role in promoting the sorry state of affairs. They knew. They had to know, but they also knew that baseballs leaving the park brought in the fans. The San Francisco Giants used Barry Bonds all they could, milked him for every ticket they could sell, and once be broke Henry Aaron’s record, unceremoniously dumped him.

But the report was commissioned by ownership, and it did not bite the hand.

Think of this: Mitchell had one real witness who led him to another, and two men gave him 80 suspects. Think what would be if he had four witnesses, if he had a line to every training room in the league. What I heard right after the report was released was a huge rush of escaping air. It was a collective sigh of relief. If you have a favorite team and follow its athletes, pay special attention to those whose performances have declined severely these past two or three years. I’m thinking of players like Austin Kearns, who was a rookie phenomenon projected for greatness who last year hit five home runs. Be suspicious.

I see very little expression of understanding for the athletes. Had I that kind of ability, and knowing my competition had an advantage in juicing, what would I do? Would I turn my back on millions of dollars to remain pure? We’re talking about people of ordinary means here, many of them from Latin America who are supporting families and communities. The pressure on them was substantial, the rewards high, the punishment nonexistent. In the end, their bodies will suffer, their muscles will deteriorate prematurely, and surely they are at risk for cancer. It’s an awful thing, but circumstances brought it about. These are not bad people. They are just people.

I do hope that the real records and superb athletes of days gone by – Ruth and Aaron and Koufax and Spahn and Seaver – are accorded higher respect than the ‘roid boys. Bonds deserves to be in the Hall of Fame for being a superior athlete during his natural years, as does Clemens. But anything they did post-injection deserves an asterisk.

And, finanlly, there’s the problem of testing – some forms of human growth hormone are still undetectable by means of urine testing. If there is a way, juicing will be done. I hope the players’ union sees its way clear to open the door for thorough and independent testing. I love this game, and want to see it clean and healthy.

Nike has come out with a new running shoe that has a computer chip embedded in it. The chip sends messages to your Ipod as you run. So, for instance, if you are in a 10K road race, it will tell you things like “five kilometers left to run” or “two kilometers to go and you have burned 1,980 calories”, and “the race is over. Please stop running.”

In the old days, runners would look at the signs on the raceway that said things like “1K” and “2K”. Some of the higher tech races would paint lines on the roadway delineating the distance. But it was awkward. Some runners would take their eyes off the course and look at their watches, a dangerous practice. The whole process of running a race was both puzzling and perilous. Hi tech has at last joined up with Runners World.

Talking shoes is a great concept that can be extended to other forms of clothing. In my own case, I’d be happy if, when I put my shirt on in the morning, it said “Day four”, or, concerning my shorts, “Day three. Please consider changing me out.” Computer chips could also enhance my fashion sense, as when I attempted to put on sandals with white socks – “Very nerdy – please remove socks”. Then there’s my age-appropriate attire – black socks with jeans, and the jeans themselves pulled up around my navel – “Please, please! Don’t do this.”

Computer chips could also sense galvanic skin responses. Say for instance, a 57 year old man happens upon a twenty-something gal in a halter top and tight shorts while buying his Metamucil at the grocery store. What would the chip say? “Avert eyes. Think fiber.”

There was a creepy piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution – “Unfettered Citizen Journalism Too Risky”, by David Hazinski.

Makes me want to wretch – not that bloggers aren’t reckless and lazy, but the attitude he has that journalists are somehow doing their job. Right – it was journalistic integrity that allowed Bush to take us into the Iraq disaster, Iran to follow. It’s journalists’ willingness to cozy up to power that exacerbates the problems we have today with a runaway executive. And it’s journalistic integrity that allows presidential candidates to be peppered with softball questions in debates, without follow up.

CNN’s last YouTube Republican debate included a question from a retired general who is on Hillary Clinton’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender steering committee. False Internet rumors about Sen. Barack Obama attending a radical Muslim school became so widespread that CNN and other news agencies did stories debunking the rumors. There are literally hundreds of Internet hoaxes and false reports passed off as true stories, tracked by sites such as snopes.com.

Journalists allowed Grover Norquist to horn in on the Republican YouTube debate. Agenda, anyone? The last Democratic debate I saw, Dennis Kucinich was excluded by the Des Moines Register. Before that, he had to interrupt to be heard. Why? Journalists have decided he’s not a “front-runner”. The Obama rumor was spread by FOX News, supposedly comprised of journalists. And there’s Media Matters and FAIR, fine organizations that are devoted to debunking mainstream corporate journalism. Somebody had to do it.

Bloggers do an end run-on journalists. We work without their supervision. In the old days, we were relegated to letters to the editor, sidestepped, censored and muffled, all to satisfy the embedded right wing philosophy of some smug editor.

We’re not a pretty lot, and we don’t pretend to be journalists. Neither should Hazinski.

From: The Thom Hartmann Show, December 4, 2007:

Wendell Willkie, Republican, running against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940:

I believe that the forces of free enterprise must be regulated. I am opposed to business monopolies. I believe in the right to collective bargaining by labor, without any interference, and full protection of that obvious right. I believe in minimum standards for wages and maximum standards for hours, and I believe that such standards should constantly improve. I am in favor of the regulation of interstate utilities, of banking, of the securities markets. I believe in federal pensions, in adequate old age benefits, and old age allowances. I believe that the federal government owes a duty to adjust the position of the farmer with that of the manufacturer. If this cannot be done by parity prices, then some other method must be found without too much regimentation of the farmers’ affairs.

Ronald Reagan, Democrat, in 1948:

The profits of corporations have doubled while workers’ wages have increased only one quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as fast as wages, and the small increases that workers did receive was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings. For example, here’s an Associated Press dispatch I read the other day about Smith L. Carpenter, a craftsman in Union Springs, New York. Seems that Mr. Carpenter retired some years ago thinking that he had enough money saved up so that he could live out his final years without having to worry. But he didn’t figure on this Republican inflation, which ate up all his savings. And so he’s gone back to work. The reason this is news is because Mr. Carpenter is 91 years old. Now take it to contrast the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which had a net profit of $210 million dollars, after taxes, for the first half of 1948 – an increase of 70% in one year. In other words, high prices have not been caused by higher wages, but by bigger and bigger profits.

The Republican promises sounded pretty good in 1946. But what has happened since then, since the 80th Congress took over? Prices have climbed to the highest level in history, although the death of the OPA was supposed to bring prices down through “the natural process of free competition”.

Labor has been handcuffed by the vicious Tart-Hartley law. Social Security benefits have been snatched away from almost a million workers by the Gerhardt Bill. Fair employment practices, which had worked so well during war time, have been abandoned. Veterans’ pleas for low-cost homes have been ignored, and many people are still living in made-over chicken coops and garages. Tax reduction bills have been passed to benefit the higher income brackets alone. The average worker saves only $1.73 per week. In the false name of economy, millions of children have been deprived of milk once provided through the Federal School Lunch Program.

This was the payoff of the Republican promises, and this is why we must have new faces in the Congress of the United States. Democratic faces. This is why we must elect not only President Truman, but also men like Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, the Democratic candidate for senator from Minnesota.