Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

In the summer of the North, Greenland lost record amounts of ice last year, and the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice cap was reduced to a small size never seen before. Now it’s the summer of the South, and the same activity is being seen in Antarctica, which is losing its ice at a rate almost as fast as Greenland. The rate of ice loss, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has increased by 75 percent over the last ten years because glaciers are speeding up in their flow to the Antarctic seas. That happens when water from the melting ice lubricates the bottom of the glacier, easing its flow over the ground beneath.

The team’s results do not include data from 2007, the second-warmest year on record. Eric Rignot, who led the study, comments, “Ice sheets are responding faster to climate warming than anticipated.”

There’s an interesting story about people seeing lights in the sky in Texas. Some say that they’re alien space ships. Others say that they saw military jets chasing the lights.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, is on the scene, “investigating”. Helpfully, Kenneth Cherry, the leader of the Texas chapter of MUFON, announced to reporters that “We believe there is some sort of phenomenon in action here.”

What an expert opinion. A phenomenon? A phenomenon in action?

You mean that something happened?

Thanks for the insight, MUFON. We none of us could have figured that out. Keep up the good work.

Thanks to the Associated Press too, for reporting that essential insight.

Never mind the Nancy Grace screeching her outrage on CNN – school shootings are not on the rise. That’s the finding of a new study by the Centers for Disease Control. The study found that the number of people killed in mass killings on school grounds has actually remained very stable over time. In fact, since 1992, the year that George H. W. Bush was voted out of office, the number of incidents of single homicides at public and private schools “decreased significantly”.

What’s increased significantly during that time is the commercialization and consolidation of the news media. The small number of businesses that now exert strong control over much of the news we hear have found that people tend to tune in very reliably for news stories that suggest an out-of-the-ordinary epidemic in school violence, and that means that they can bring in more advertising revenue. They’re cashing in on people’s emotional fascination with the perception of escalating school violence that does not exist.

There is a solution. Turn off the TV news, and get your information from sources independent of the consolidated media giants. Starve them of the profitable attention of your eyes.

At a campaign event today, Fox television personality Bill O’Reilly jumped a barricade, swore repeatedly at an Obama campaign staffer, pushed him aside to get access to Barack Obama. Then, Bill O’Reilly called the Obama campaign staffer “low class”.

Low class?!?

Is that what Bill O’Reilly thinks the 2008 presidential election is about? Trying to keep the lower classes down? Class warfare from the wealthy, like him, against the rest of America?

So now, according to Bill O’Reilly, the Barack Obama campaign is with the working class of Americans, not the wealthy elites.

Did Bill O’Reilly mean to give Barack Obama that endorsement?

Yesterday morning, Senator Joseph Biden was all full of bluster. “You can’t tell me this race is over,”, he said.

Um, yes I can. Senator Biden, your race is over.

Maybe if you had spent less time talking about what a great guy you are, you could have lasted until New Hampshire. Then again, you were relatively clean and articulate… though not as much as Barack Obama.

In one of the most surprising endorsements of the 2008 presidential election, Ralph Nader has thrown his support to John Edwards for President, just a couple of days before the Iowa caucuses. The reason for Nader’s endorsement is very clear: Hillary Clinton is heavily associated with big corporate interest groups, and John Edwards offers the strongest voice in this year’s elections against corporate influence over America’s democratic government.

Nader said of Senator Clinton, “She has experience in the Senate, and what that experience has meant is going soft on cracking down on corporate crime, fraud, and abuse, soft on cutting tens of millions in corporate subsidies.” Yes, Hillary Clinton has experience, but it’s the wrong kind of experience – like her experience on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart.

Hillary Clinton is the wrong choice for the Democrats, and John Edwards is the strongest alternative.

Though some Green Party activists are still trying to draft Ralph Nader for President in 2008, it’s becoming very clear that Ralph Nader will not run, and that, if he does, almost nobody will vote for him. Endorsing John Edwards was the best play for influence that Nader could make.

In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature, but could not give the address. In the speech he prepared, however, he wrote:

“Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth, violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.”

I like the sound of what he says, but is it true? Isn’t violence a brutal form of honest communication? Isn’t any falsification of the violence separate from the violence itself?

If not, where does the falsehood come in, afterwards?

Walking down Michigan Avenue here in Chicago this morning, I had a pleasant experience around The Golden Compass. I was carrying my copy of the His Dark Materials Omnibus, which contains The Golden Compass and three different people went out of their way to compliment the book.

There was a specific theme in their comments. Each person commented to me that I ought not to take things for granted, and that the characters change as the books progress. It wasn’t with disappointment or annoyance that they made this point. It was with appreciation.

There seems to be a trend in the sort of person who appreciates The Golden Compass: They value change and ambiguity, and complexity.

Is this what the religious authorities who send out email alerts against The Golden Compass really have a problem with? Is their true protest against complex understanding of character, as opposed to the tediously simple good and bad split of tales like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?

Witch good. Lion bad. Some people like that kind of absolute judgment, and they’re refusing to even read The Golden Compass.

I’ve just finished reading the first 100 pages of The Golden Compass. No spoilers in this review of those pages – you should discover the book for yourself.

I will tell you, however, that if you’re letting some ratty old email church lady email keep you from reading the book, you’re missing one hell of a treat. It’s a great read, with lots of action, really interesting characters, great settings, and rich language.

I have not seen one single “militant atheist” line in the book so far. I am seeing a lot of undercurrents of struggles against social class hierarchies and sexism, as well as xenophobia, however.

If the film is half as good as the book, you’ll really be missing out if you decide to stay home and sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” instead.

That’s your choice to live in an impoverished literary world, all centered around one jealous book, letting other people tell you what to think, I guess.

I’m not trying to tell you what to think. I’m just suggesting that you let the Fox News commentaries take a back seat in your mind for a minute, and read the first hundred pages of the book to see what it’s all about yourself.

Get ready, folks! The Golden Compass is almost here!

The movie, which looks to be an absolutely stunning fantasy, will be released on December 7, 2007 – just a couple of weeks. Of course, I’m just judging that opinion on the trailer and secondary items I’ve read. I have not yet been able to get my hands on the book – stuck in the house with Thanksgiving guests and all that.

So, I’d like to hear from people who have read the book, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. In the United Kingdom, it’s entitled Northern Lights.

What did you think of the book, and what do you think we can expect of the film?