NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Thu, 24 Feb 2005
Our Godless Constitution
It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of
George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian
precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the
one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you
repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his
Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having
been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on
Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the
picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously
absent.
Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was
too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of
Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According
to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of
"foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But
as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot
anything important.
In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is
mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as
Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the
Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to
"the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men
being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More
blatant official references to a deity date from long after the
founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until
the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of
Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton,
"The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].
In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship
between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of
Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of
Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:
As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense
founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no
character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of
Musselmen--and as the said States never have entered into any war
or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared
by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions
shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between
the two countries.
This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and
President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification;
the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this
was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it
was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no
record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in
full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there
were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.
The whole
article is well researched, excellent, and deserves wide
attention.
Posted at 10:57 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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True Believer
(Via Patriot Boy.)
Posted at 10:35 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Wed, 23 Feb 2005
Just a reminder
For the record, the national
debt is currently $7,692,366,884,904.27 as of Dad's 82nd birthday. That's almost A Trillion Dollars more than eighteen months ago.
Posted at 21:11 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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R.I.P. Gene Scott, Ph.D.
Hadn't thought of him in years, frankly, but Gene
Scott has died. Anyone who had a big satellite dish back in the
Old Days® knows him intimately. A very strange (in the good sense)
televangelist whose 24/7 broadcasts on G3/20 were great for tweaking
your dish and setting things up. He also broadcast on shortwave with
an amazing amount of world-wide power in several bands. He was a
serious Christian preacher, biblical scholar, a pretty informed
theologian, and also expatiated with a genuinely scholarly/mystic
grasp of things like Atlantis, UFOs, Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Easter
Islanders and Australian Aborginal beliefs. He owned horses, was a
dedicated racetrack connoisseur and handicapper, and always had a
collection of glossy-magazine-class Southern California Beauties on
his arm. I spent more than a few nights bemusedly watching his
shows. What a character. What an intellect. What an operator.
Godspeed, Gene.
Posted at 20:05 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Mon, 21 Feb 2005
I Will Miss You, Hunter
Perhaps the best writer of the last 75 years offed himself about 18
hours ago with one of his beloved handguns. Something tells me that he
simply couldn't stand, at the age of 67, going any slower.
There are a lot of examples of his genius, but the one that takes
my breath away is the piece that he wrote for ESPN, less than 24 hours
after the World Trade Center attacks. It
illustrates the amount of vision that was packed into one person.
It
was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the
World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I
was writing about
sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared
to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New
York on TV.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the
history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco
earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000
were slaughtered in one day.
The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes
and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates
as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the
supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from
Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained
firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.
And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No
nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers
flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans.
No. It was four commercial jetliners.
They were the first flights of the day from American and United
Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was
nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and
Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to
the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode
on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown
Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes
for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make
no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will
stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled
by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It
will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no
identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" --
or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet
planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the
Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one
was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense
system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to
nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some
apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world
took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick
and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what
will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan,
maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not
even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York
papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for
them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not
guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as
George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long
time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by
Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a
National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter
where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and
confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as
he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the
ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.
OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.
The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship
has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on
TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.
The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.
Hunter proposed the following as his epitaph: "It just never got fast
enough for me." I suspect that this is exactly what the problem was
last night at 9:00 PM. Some people see so much that they can't imagine
not seeing everything. And they can't even start to accept the
idea of seeing Less.
I am glad that he shared what he could while he was here.
Hunter travels at thought-speed now. He no doubt sees very
well. It's finally fast enough for him.
Posted at 14:41 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Mon, 14 Feb 2005
Always Low Prices Wages. Always.
So you like to shop at Wal-Mart. Most of you know that I have been
pretty well informed on the subject for a while now. Just discovered a
piece in The New York Review Of
Books on the
current state of the monster. Here are some telling
excerpts. Remember, when they say "government", they mean your
money.
One of the most telling of all the criticisms of Wal-Mart is to be
found in a February 2004 report by the Democratic Staff of the House
Education and Workforce Committee. In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in
holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the
costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they
qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous
rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee
Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for
children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions
for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The
report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs
federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart
employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5
billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.
Wal-Mart is also a burden on state governments. According to a
study by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 2003 California taxpayers subsidized $20.5
million worth of medical care for Wal-Mart employees. In Georgia ten
thousand children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state's
program for needy children in 2003, with one in four Wal-Mart
employees having a child in the program.
[...]
Wal-Mart is a ferociously anti-union company, and the UFCW has yet
to organize a Wal-Mart store. Every store manager at Wal-Mart is
issued a "Manager's Toolbox to Remaining Union Free," which warns
managers to be on the lookout for signs of union activity, such as
"frequent meetings at associates' homes" or "associates who are never
seen together...talking or associating with each other."
The "Toolbox" provides managers with a special hotline so that they
can get in touch with Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters the moment
they think employees may be planning to organize a union. A
high-powered union-busting team will then be dispatched by corporate
jet to the offending store, to be followed by days of compulsory
anti-union meetings for all employees. In the only known case of union
success at Wal-Mart, in 2000 workers at the meat-cutting department of
a Texas Wal-Mart somehow managed to circumvent this corporate FBI, and
voted to join the UFCW in an election certified by the National Labor
Relations Board. A week later Wal-Mart closed down the meat-cutting
department and fired the offending employees, both illegal acts under
the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB ordered Wal-Mart to reopen
the department, reemploy the fired workers, and bargain with the
union, but Wal-Mart has appealed the NLRB decision and the litigation
continues.
[...]
There's plenty more there. Give it a read.
Let's repeat: "The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee
Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about
$2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual
welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees."
Now go on ahead. Go to your nearest SuperCenter and buy a 50 lb
bag of "Sam's Choice" dog food.
Then donate it to the nearest Wal-Mart employee so she can go feed
her kids.
Posted at 10:38 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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You Heard It Here First
(Well actually, you heard it on MetaFilter first.) Anyway, California is in for a rough week, according to group of South African psychics:
A group of psychics led by colourful 'SilverJade', based in Johannesburg South Africa, have predicted that a series of earthquakes and other natural disasters will strike the western coast of the United States on or around the 23rd of February 2005.
As at the 11th of February 2005, they have successfully predicted a significant event, a 5.5 magnitude earthquake in south eastern Alaska, as being a first step in a series of smaller events leading up to the big bang. The next step of the prediction is set to occur at some time on or around the 13th and 15th of the month.
Posted at 09:56 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Tue, 08 Feb 2005
Physics Geekery
Quote of the week:
Strange as it may seem, it requires no net energy to create an entire
universe. Baby universes are in principle created naturally when a
certain region of space-time becomes unstable and enters a state
called the "false vacuum," which destabilises the fabric of
space-time. An advanced civilisation might do this deliberately by
concentrating energy in a single region. This would require either
compressing matter to a density of 1080g/cm3, or heating it to 1029 degrees kelvin.
From Michio Kaku in an article from Prospect magazine...
Posted at 20:10 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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