The Daily Sabbatical

My favorite part here is where the delegate reveals either a) that he suspects everyone but him has nude statues in their living rooms, or b) he has nude statues in his living room, but doesn’t want to admit it for fear that not everyone has them.


Work on Texas GOP’s platform stirs passions

09:02 AM CDT on Friday, June 13, 2008

By WAYNE SLATER / The Dallas Morning News

HOUSTON – Robert Hurt went to Washington and didn’t like what he saw – nudity in the nation’s capital.
“Nude women, sculptured women,” he told the state Republican platform committee, which sat in rapt attention.

Of all the evils in Washington that the Texas GOP took aim at this week, removing art with naked people from public view was high on the list for Mr. Hurt, a delegate from Kerrville.

“You don’t have nude art on your front porch,” he explained. “You possibly don’t have nude art in your living rooms. So why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?”

Mr. Hurt offered statistics: He’d heard that 20 percent of the art in the National Gallery of Art is of nudes.

He offered detail: On Arlington Memorial Bridge overlooking the famed national cemetery, “there are two Lady Godivas, two women on horses with no shirt on and long hair.”

Actually, they are classical sculptures about war – one called Valor, depicting a male equestrian and a female with a shield, and Sacrifice, a female accompanying the rider Mars.

The GOP platform will be presented today to the full convention. Like all platforms, it’s a statement of principle and a political document to rally the troops.

In this, a presidential year, it advocates prayer in school, getting out of the United Nations, teaching intelligent design with evolution in science classes, repealing of the minimum wage, declaring illegal immigrants criminals and outlawing abortion with no exceptions.

“Hallelujah!” said a delegate who had urged strong anti-abortion language.

The platform calls homosexuality contrary to “the unchanging truths” ordained by God. It opposes gay marriage, civil unions and the custody of children by gays.

The party’s own leaders aren’t spared. There’s a call to repeal the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, sponsored by the party’s presidential nominee, and to oppose the Trans-Texas Corridor, the brainchild of Gov. Rick Perry.

Ridding Washington of naked art didn’t make it. Neither did a complaint by a Kerr County delegate that her daughter was having trouble getting college scholarships.

“There are so many scholarships, if you are the right color,” she said. “But for a white girl, who has good grades, you really have to look.”

Glenn Sheblaton of Coppell, whose family fled communism, called for language to withdraw American troops from Iraq, saying, “You can’t impose democracy from the barrel of a gun.”

The committee disagreed.

“There is no substitute for victory!” the platform says in supporting the Bush administration’s war on “radical Islamist terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries around the world.”

Last week, the Texas Democratic Party decided not to call for a federal Department of Peace and Nonviolence in its platform for fear Republicans would use it against the party in the fall campaign.

In much the same way, Republican Bill Calhoun of Houston cautioned against calling affirmative action “simply racism disguised as social value.” He said such language discourages blacks from joining the GOP.

The issue was debated in committee, principle vs. politics. In the end, strong language prevailed.

“That may not always be the best political strategy,” platform committee chairman Kirk Overbey said Thursday. “But we’re here to say we’re sticking by our principles.”

I’ve been pounding out the pages of the new book in the coffee shops of Tuscaloosa, and I’ve discovered that I require a cup of coffee every thousand words. After about five thousand, which is about all I can write in a day, I begin to feel sick and have to take a nap populated by coffee beans and cosmology.

I’ve developed a ritual. In the morning, I write in a coffee shop that is apparently named after a type of pickle, which the shop also sells. (It also sells dried out cigars and refrigerator magnets that say things like “I see dumb people” and “Of course I love you, honey. Now go get me a beer.”) Here, you can work to the sounds of Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, and The Animals.

In the afternoon, I work in a dingier darker shop that is manned by folks with much more facial hair. In this shop you can work to the sounds of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and (?) The Travelling Wilbury’s. It calls itself a studio cafe, and has the predictably terrible art on the walls. Today, I began to notice a biblical theme to some of the art. I thought it might be that I was just prone to interpret things this way, since I’m writing a tombstone for God, but then I noticed A Prayer a Day on the bookshelf, beside several suspiciously uplifting self-help books. Suddenly it all fell into place. How had I failed to notice that there was an entire nook advertising the services of a wedding planner? And another selling scented candles? The case was closed when I got a closer look at one of the candles in the restroom. “And the lord god said, let there be light. And there was light.” And apparently it smelled of Peach Berry. This has to be one of the weirdest coffee shops I’ve ever been in.

I hear tell of other coffee shops in Tuscaloosa, but I don’t see much need to investigate. Between pickle obsessed roasters and wedding planning jesus freaks, I’ve got plenty of space to write a dialogue on God. Perhaps if I find an espresso shop and firing range I’ll change my routine.

Bob Dylan Backs Obama
In an exclusive interview with The Times, published today, Dylan gives a ringing endorsement to Mr Obama, the first ever black presidential candidate, claiming he is “redefining the nature of politics from the ground up”.
Related Links

* Artist Dylan has got everything

Dylan, 67, made the comments when being interviewed in Denmark, where he stopped over in a hotel during a tour of Scandinavia.

Asked about his views on American politics, he said: “Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.

“But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama.

“He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”

He added: “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.”

I’ve just finished reading an older book by one of my new favorite writers. Anne Carson is what you would call a poet, but she’s a poet who challenges the traditional divisions among forms. At least in this volume Carson’s work usually has an underlying narrative but it is liberated from many of the constraints of short fiction. Moments can flash on and off without being weighed down by the traditional contextual clues that our brains tell us we need, and the rhythm of the lines can set us up for the mental drift and inertia that accompanies a poem’s revelations.

Carson is, it must be admitted, a philosopher’s poet. She’s trained in the classics and has an academic background, but she’s not pedantic in the least. On the contrary, her work is often painfully real and humbled before the experience of life’s sharp edges. The opening poem, The Glass Essay, is from the perspective of a woman left by her lover, finding in Emily Bronte a mirror for her despair. (I’m actually going to read Wuthering Heights after this poem, which is a minor miracle.) For me, though, the two standout poems (all of her poems are rather long) are The Truth About God, and The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s guide. The former is a somewhat absurdist, but by no means disrespectful, take on religion, while the latter pulls us into the perspective of a man visiting a woman in Rome. He seems to know the woman only slightly and to know Rome even less, and he finds himself an aching stranger in both love and travel.

Talking about poetry is always to a great degree bullshit, so here are two snippets:

from The Fall of Rome
XLIV
A stranger is someone
who sits

very still at the kitchen table,

looks down at his knuckles,
thinks someday we will laugh about this,
doesn’t believe it.

From The Truth About God

God’s Work
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call

“no mindcover” is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.

God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.

From these diverse signs you can see
how much work remains to do.
Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

The Randomness Of Friendship Gets Its Own Study

Submitted by News Account on 2 June 2008 – 12:00am. Psychology

The actor Sir Peter Ustinov once famously said “Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get there first.” Psychologists now believe there is some truth to this argument.

Rather than picking our friends based on intentional choice like common values and interests, our friendships may be based on more superficial factors like proximity or group assignments, like a department where you work or even an entirely new job.

Mitja Back, Stefan Schmukle, and Boris Egloff of the University of Leipzig sought to test the notion that random proximity and random group assignment at zero acquaintance would foster friendship in the long run. The researchers investigated 54 college freshmen upon encountering one another for the first time at the beginning of a one-off introductory session and randomly assigned them a seat number in a group of chairs organized in rows.

They wrote of their results in a recent issue of Psychological Science, stating that sitting in neighboring seats as a result of randomly assigned seat numbers when meeting for the first time led to higher ratings of friendship intensity one year later. The same was true even if participants were merely in the same row.

The counterintuitive finding suggests that friendships may not be as deliberate we think.

“In a nutshell,” write the authors, “people may become friends simply because they drew the right random number.”

In the fine city of Tuscaloosa for a work vacation. Torin and I are starting in on our second book. (The first (A Dialogue on Consciousness) will be out in December with Oxford U. Press.) This one is on the existence of God, arguments for, against and in between. Tuscaloosa proves to be a good place to write, since there is really nothing else to do. Since I quit both drinking and eating meat (drinking alcohol, not meat) about three months ago, I’ve pretty much excluded myself from most of the activities in this town. So, I’m reading mostly philosophy and trying to get better at typing on my new eee pc.

One of the more interesting arguments I’m reading about claims that our universe appears particularly “fine-tuned” for life since of the many different settings of the initial physical constants only a very very few would allow life–or even planets–to arise. So, to explain the tuning, there are two hypotheses advances. One, of course, is that there is a god that tuned things, but the other is more interesting, i think ,which is that there are many many universes, actually existing, so many that the odds are some would be propitious for and generative of life.

I don’t buy the argument, even with its “choose your own oddity” conclusion, but it’s interesting. A book by John Leslie, “Universes”, develops the argument with rigour.

If the argument works, I gotta go with many universes, There are roaches in Tuscaloosa that no god would ever create.

Activists Keep the Faith, if Not Their Money

By Jonathan Mummolo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 31, 2008; Page B05

The price of regular at a Shell gas station in Petworth gleamed defiantly in the midday sun: $3.91 a gallon.

But unlike the customers rolling up to the station’s pumps this week, resigned to the fact that their wallets were about to take a beating, Rocky Twyman and company had a plan to bring that number tumbling down.

They would ask God to do it.

“Our pockets are empty, but we’re going to hold on to God!” Twyman, a community organizer from Rockville, said as he and seven other people formed a semicircle, held hands and sang, pleading for divine intervention to lower fuel prices.

It was the latest demonstration by Twyman’s movement, Pray at the Pump, which began in April. Since then, he has held group prayers at gas stations as far away as San Francisco, garnering international media attention and even claiming success in at least a couple of cases.

Some would say the proof of whether Twyman has the ear of the Almighty is in the result. On the first day of the movement, April 23, the national average price of a gallon of unleaded was $3.53, according to AAA. As of yesterday, it was $3.96.

But Twyman said true faith does not demand instant gratification, and he plans to keep his pump-side prayers going “until God tells us to stop.”

“This whole thing is a wake-up call from God to Americans, because we idolize men so much,” said Twyman, 59, a public relations consultant and Seventh-day Adventist who believes that high gas prices are a sign of the apocalypse drawing nigh. “I think through this crisis, God is trying to call us back to depend on Him more.”

The debut album by The Dodos is both exciting and frustrating . It’s exciting because there are high points on this album that transcend those on any recent release and because there is such a curious confluence of influences here that a novel result is achieved. Unfortunately the frustration comes because the album as a whole is a little uneven. There are still more than enough splendid tunes here to warrant a purchase, but one will be drawn to the skip button now and again.
While the first track is a bit worrisome, sounding as if Ben Gibbard discovered the banjo, things quickly advance to more interesting terrain as the band finds its stride. The trick with these songs, or most of them, is an underlayer of rapid percussion (highlighted by staccato rimshots) and an Andy Partridge style vocal track in minor key. Guitars come in two distinct but equally interesting flavors: blues riffy and rhythm. The former works best when it gets the song going, but the songs really explode when the rhythm guitars take over in a hand-blurring frenzy. There is definitely a bit of a formula here, but it’s a damn good one and during the few tracks the band departs from it you might find yourself wishing its return.
My most frequent reference point remains later years XTC (skylarking, etc.), but that’s mostly because of the melodies. The rest of the sound belongs with the recent crop of bands who are using percussion to good effect, such as Yeasayers and Vampire Weekend.

Fools.mp3

Even if this report turns out to be false, which given this administration’s track record I doubt, this should be the source of serious consternation to any concerned citizen. Meanwhile, The New York Times wants you to know that Yves St. Laurent died.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

· Report says 17 boats used
· MPs seek details of UK role
· Europe attacks 42-day plan

* Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor
* The Guardian,
* Monday June 2 2008
* Article history

An amphibious assault vehicle leaves the USS Peleliu, which was used to detain prisoners, according to the human rights group Reprieve

An amphibious assault vehicle leaves the USS Peleliu, which was used to detain prisoners, according to the human rights group Reprieve.

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were “disappeared” to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate’s story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

“Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time. Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush’s departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism.”

The Liberal Democrat’s foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: “If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly.”

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: “There are no detention facilities on US navy ships.” However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships “for a few days” during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as “prison ships”.

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband’s statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA “black sites” are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been “extraordinarily rendered” to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.