J.C. Klotz's Open Salon Blog

Winter Rules and Lies

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:08:35 -0400

In golf, amateur hackers (such as myself) will often play by winter rules: that means if your ball is lying in a really bad spot you can correct its location to make for an easier shot. The theory is that it’s winter and the course is in bad shape. Of course, sometimes you play winter rules in mid-July.

Two events in the news bring this to mind. One is the intention of the golf grand Pooh-Bahs to punish Tiger Woods because he objected to a functionary hurrying play in his latest tournament so that his opponent who had a one stroke lead rushed into a triple bogie (3 over par) on the sixteenth hole allowing Woods to catch-up and take the lead.

That Tiger objected to his opponent being rushed was a generous display of sportsmanship that is all too rare these days. Forget all his great wins and remarkable record, in my book it is his finest moment because this fierce competitor revealed his respect for his fellow competitors and a refusal to gloat over what he regarded as a tarnished victory.

Would that the participants in the current debate on health care showed some of the same class. Unfortunately we are witnessing a hard truth that we have yet to cope with: that there is a determined right wing in this countrty that is always playing winter rules and lacks a sense of sportsmanship that is a hallmark as politics at its best.

Compare if you will the Clinton, G.W. Bush Administrations and the first seven months of the Obama Administration. The Clinton Administration was hobbled from its outset by a series of investigations and outlandish charges, including that Bill and Hillary murdered one of their closest friend, Vince Foster. The culmination was the Lewinsky affair which paralyzed the Clinton administration for its last two years.

Yet, the country enjoyed great prosperity during his term, and he had some amazing successes, including bringing a semblance of peace to the Balkans which for centuries had been synonymous with ethnic hatred and political instability – the precipitant cause of World War One being an assassination in Serbia.

The press feasted on his travails.

Then came eight years of the utterly incompetent George Bush Administration which ignored pointed warnings about Bin Laden plotting to attack America, let him slip though our fingers in Afghanistan and lied us into war in Iraq.

In the meantime “regulatory reform” laid the ground work for the gravest financial crisis since the time of the Great Depression.

The media essentially gave GWB a free pass. Mendacity and manipulation in the White House was scarcely noted. The Democrats, cowed by the media, more or less played possum until the 2006 election. John Kerry, when faced with outrageous accusations about his combat record in Vietnam, turned turtle.

And now after seven months of the Obama Administration, we have seen the most vicious attacks since the Clinton era and a media which reports gravely on the most atrocious lies and in a fair and balance manner, giving the lies legs.

Tiger Woods, in giving his opponent his due, was a lot like the Democrats: playing the sportsman. But the Obama opposition is beyond sportsmanship and truth. It’s all winter lies, moving the ball for a better position to destroy your opponent.

How voting fraud in Iran demonstrates the existence of God.

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:06:41 -0400

The God of Probabilities: How voting fraud in Iran demonstrates the existence of God

Is the title of this piece a jest? Am I kidding? What possible relationship could there be between voting fraud and the issue of God’s existence. Well there is, at least metaphorically; but it will take some explanation. Bear with me. You may actually find a pay-off here.

When I was but seven years old, I began catechism class in the Catholic Church. Once a week we were “released” two hours early from public school so that we could go to our local churches for religious instructions. As I recall, the very first lesson we learned from our blue-covered Baltimore Catechism was that we could never understand God because he was immortal, had always existed and his ways were beyond human comprehension. Having taught me at age seven that God was incomprehensible, the Church has spent the last 65 years explaining God to me. I think there’s a incongruity there.

I transferred from public school to Catholic school for grammar school and high school. I won a gold medal for science and although I didn’t pursue science as a career, it has always been an interest of mine. So to has been my religion for which I also won a gold medal.

It is a fact of history that science and religion have been at best uneasy intellectual partners in the quest for meaning of the human condition. Many things that were thought to be divine and supernatural in earlier times have yielded to scientific explanation. The supernatural became the natural. Early gods included fire, wind, the oceans, volcanoes, star, planets, comets, the moon, and the sun, among other phenomena we now explain blithely in scientific terms.

Twenty or so years ago, I suffered a mild crisis of faith. I had been become familiar with a smattering of chaos theory and quantum analysis. I was startled to learn that atoms were not like miniature solar systems. The popular conception was a nucleus of protons and neutrons around which electrons orbited. Rather, this basic structure of all matter was chaotic and the location of “particle” of it unknowable at any given moment. It seemed that all of existence, at its most basic level was governed by the “Law of Probability.”

That’s a tough thing for a person of religious bent to digest. Is all of existence merely the result of a cosmic coin flips? But then another thought took hold. If there is a “Law” of “Probability” whose law is it? Why should the chaos of quantum existence ever be ordered by anything?

Concurrent with the scientific thought that all existence was chaos ordered only by the Law of Probability, has been scientific investigations into the issue of human consciousness and, as is claimed by some, the interaction of human consciousness with a greater consciousness which some claim to have observed. Piere Teilhard Chardin and others have discerned a “noosphere” of intertwined human consciousness that has evolved from interactions that lower level of consciousness are incapable of joining. Freud’s heretical protégé, Carl Jung, postulated a “collective unconsciousness” which might be better described as collective consciousness.

Ironically, perhaps, scientific experiments designed to explore the issue of collective consciousness rely primarily on the applications of the law of probability. Among the most accessible is that of The Global Consciousness Project: Meaningful Correlations in Random Data whose work is explained at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

The purpose of the project is “”to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.” It’s principal activity is to “collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world.” The issue is whether major events that effect the psyche or consciousness of large masses of people distort the results of the random number generators into more than standard deviations from the norm. In sum, the scientist involved in this project believe they do, and their data demonstrates they do.

There are a number of other projects of a similar vein described by journalist Lynn McTaggart in The Field, (Harpers, New York Updated Edition 2008). Among the experiments she describes are coordinated remote prayer. The Field has an extensive bibliography if you are interested. The results reported by Ms. McTaggert all show consciousness interactions that distort results beyond those expected from standard deviations of the law of probabilities.

So how does election fraud in Iran relate to the issue of God’s existence?

On June 20, 2009, the Washington Post, published a study by Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University. They analyzed the results of the Iranian elections. Their thesis was that given the length of the numbers reported in the results, that the last digits, irrespective of their original authenticity, should have reflected the law probabilities. In sum, there are ten digits, 0 to 9, and in the absence of consciousness intervention by humans attempting to jiggle the results, there ten digits should have been distributed relative evenly in the last column (i.e. each digit approximately 10% of the time). This was of course subject to standard deviations which depend on the size of the sample and in this case the length of the numbers preceding the last digit.

The point of the authors was that the variations were not in accord with the law of probabilities and well beyond standard deviations. They also used a second neutral analysis (the number of non-adjacent digits in the last two columns). That also exceeded standard deviations.

Their conclusion was that the probabilities of the election results not being manipulated was one in two hundred. By applying the law of probabilities we learn that there has been conscious intervention. This is not the same thing as the Global Consciousness Project, but it is at least a metaphor about the interplay of probabilities and consciousness on a cosmic level. But then, even St. Augustine recognized the Genesis was not history but a metaphor for deeper truths â€‘ truths thathave now been overtaken by science in the “Big Bang” theory and evolution.

So existence is governed by the law of probability, but deviations from law are evidence, at least in some cases, for conscious intervention. In Iran, the consciousness intervention was by the operatives of a corrupt regime engineering a fraudulent election. But, in the chaos of quantum existence, the evidence of conscious intervention leads ultimately to a consciousness beyond just humanity, beyond just this universe, but inclusive of all the infinite number of universes that may exist.

All hail the God of Probabilities who creates the law and then lights the way to move beyond it. I believe that way is love. But that’s another story.See http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

Obama in Cairo: Last chance to avoid Holocaust II?

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:06:41 -0400

Obama's initiative in Cairo is more than a political gambit, it is a probably last chance to avoid another Holocaust. The question is whose Holocaust will it be.

The Right Wing extremist emergence as the power in the Israeli government had its genesis in the assassin's bullet which struck down Yitzhak Rabin, the last Israeli Prime Minister with stature to deliver a peace for land settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli deadlock.

The victors in the Rabin assassination were the extremists on both sides. That the Israel right wing "won" is obvious. It ought to be equally clear that the extremists who wish to push Israel into the sea also won. Moderate voices on both sides were muted.

Now, the most extreme Israeli position - that the Arabs must be expelled from all the land west of the Jordan - is holding Israeli politics captive.

The opposition to a Palestinian state means that the Palestinian population of the West Bank will be stateless. If there are any people on earth who should know what statelessness means it ought to be the Jewish population of Israel. The Nazi's decreed that Jews were stateless and thus had the protection of no sovereign. There were exceptions for Jews who claimed in citizenship in nations beyond the Nazi control.

In 2007, my wife Rene and I visited the Ann Frank Museum in Amsterdam. It was a profound experience. While those of us who remember the book and movie made from her diary as a affirmation of her life, the Museum also tells the story of her death and the last few agonizing months of her life.

One gut-wrenching moment was a filmed testament of a Jewish woman who had been a childhood friend of Anne. Her father had obtained citizenship for their family in a South American country and when they were interned, they were kept in a part of the concentration camp reserved for foreign nationals. They were separated from the stateless Jews by a barbed wire fence. On day she discovered her friend Anne on the other side of the fence. Anne was starving and begged for food.

That evening by prearrangement she met Anne by the fence and threw food over to her, but another woman took the food from Anne and left Anne howling in anguish. She never saw Anne again.

The zealots who would keep the Palestinians stateless are writing on the same page as the Nazi’s. It is their expressed intention to expel all Palestinians from the West Bank. The Israelis fear a second Holocaust but extremist remedy is to create a Palestinian one.

The problem for Israel is that it is an enclave of 6 million Jews in a sea of 1.5 billion Moslems. In 1099, a Crusader Army defeated the Moslems and seized control of Jerusalem. But they too were an enclave in a sea of Moslems. Their enclave lasted only 89 years. Israel is 61 years this year.

For Israel to survive, it must have a permanent t peace with the Moslem world. A peace secured by force of arms will only be a temporary peace. Expulsion of the Palestinians will offer no respite.

Obama’s speech in Cairo was wise and balanced. Both sides must heed his words.

At least it's not the Bay of Pigs

Wed, 20 May 2009 06:05:40 -0400

The question is whether Obama, the sum of all hopes, has been had by the CIA. According to reports aired by Keith Olberman on Countdown, the memos released by the CIA have a certain fishy smell. The agency has been cooking the books on Nancy Pelosi and altering its records.

If this is true, it’s a replay of the Bay of Pigs when newly inaugurated JFK was led into dsiaster by the CIA and realized too late that he’d been had. So far, there are no dead bodies and the intended victim Nancy Pelosi is still alive but the vultures are gathering.

The bad part of this for Obama is the role played by Leon Panetta, Obama’s hand-picked CIA Director. If Olberman’s right about the cooked-book memos, then Panetta’s endorsement of them at the expense of Pelosi is egregiously wrong. Dead wrong. On behalf of the old CIA hands who, did in fact torture, Panetta is taking on the Democratic House Speaker in an effort designed to destroy her credibility and capability to lead.

This is a “fine kettle of fish.”

Although this fiasco is not an international crisis like the Bay of Pigs, unless Obama has decided to destroy Pelosi, he has been betrayed by Panetta (an old Clinton hand). Pelosi was nominally uncommitted had her thumb on the scale for Obama during the primaries last year. Maybe I’m an optimist, or maybe I’m a pessimist, but I see a blowback on this.

Because Panetta is Obama’s man, and because Pelosi isn’t going quietly, the net result of this may very well be the one thing Obama has sought to avoid: the full scale investigation by Congress of torture and if the books have been cooked, indictments and criminal prosecutions. Anything less than full exposition now will mean that Obama’s legs have been cut-off, and when the newer problems arise, he will be lost in the CIA’s infinity of mirrors.

Anyone willing to bet on Pelosi versus the old boys at the CIA? I’m going for the filly.

The Paradox of Israel and the Joshua Syndrome

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:04:35 -0400

“

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

Galatians 6: 7-9 (KJV)

The Paradox of Israel and the Joshua Syndrome

Some people close to me are a bit surprised that this Passover, as opposed to other Passovers, I was so out of sorts. Maybe it’s because, recent events make it no longer possible to ignore what I believe to be the paradox of Israel and what I will call the Joshua complex: Blame it on the History Channel.

Having lived long enough to remember the founding of Israel and observed the important events since then, I have my own insights that may to some appear to be at odds with Israeli history as it is now perceived. On of the basic ironies of Israel history is that the impetus towards its founding did not come from observant, ultra-Orthodox Jews but rather secular, even Marxist ones. There were Israeli terrorists groups at its founding, notable the Stern gang, but the face of the Jewish settlers though militant were also benign: David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first President being the most obvious example.

While to some Jews, the claim of Israel to Palestine may have been biblically based, to the world at large, the claim was more direct and even practical. One of the weapons employed by the Nazi’s in rounding-up the Jews for extermination was “statelessness,” that is the Jews of Europe had no state to defend their cause. Of course, it was the Nazi’s who created the statelessness through the draconian Nuremburg laws, among other things.

Recently I had occasion to visit Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Museum. The story told in popular book and Movie, “the Diary of Anne Frank, did not dwell on the what happened after she and her family were finally captured by the Nazi’s. There is revealing vignette by another Jewish woman, who had been a childhood friend of Anne, and met her in the concentration camp – except that she was separated from Anne by a barbed wire fence. Her father, unlike Anne’s father, had made a shrewd move of obtaining citizenship in the Western Hemisphere. Thus when interned by the Nazi’s they had the status of a national status ands were not stateless persons, without protection. The most depressing thing of my visit to the Museum was her description of Anne’s condition in the last few months of her existence in the concentration camp where she eventually died of disease.

Jewish statelessness played an important part in the Nazi’s Holocaust regime and it was the Jewish claim to statehood that in the aftermath of World War II that had the greatest claim to the conscience of the world, not a “promise” in the Old Testament. Because the Zionists had already settled much of Palestine through legitimate land acquisition and were resettling Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Palestine (against the desires of the British government), an independent Jewish state in Palestine made sense to the world community and ultimately the fledgling United Nations. Because many of the Zionists were Marxist of the Fabian Socialist stripe, even Stalin supported the founding of Israel.

I am sure that historians who have studied this may quarrel with nuances in the above description of events, but I suggest that it’s pretty much in keeping with the events described by Leon Uris in his epochal novel (and later movie adaptation, Exodus). The founding of Israel depicted by Uris included a plea for Arabs and Jews to co-exist. The kibbutzim which played such an important role in Israel’s founding were socialist collectives.

Let’s skip forward to today, and let’s compare American actions in Iraq to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the reason for my despair. I did not support the invasion in Iraq and played a role in marshaling opposition to the invasion in the Sierra Club. I am appalled at the atrocities at Abu Grav and the individual atrocities committed by American troops. But I would suggest that with one notable exception, the American reaction to this atrocities has been one of America’s finest hours.

What is not America’s finest hour, is the failure, thus far, to follow they trail back to the highest levels of government which through its embracing of torture and other extreme measures created the climate which led to the crimes of the a few soldiers on the ground.

There have been convictions and sentences to imprisonment of American soldiers who committed atrocities. Not every case has resulted in a conviction, but the cases were brought and tried. On one level, it is a tragedy, that we put our GI’s in a position where the stress of combat and the lack of Pentagon leadership led to unspeakable acts. But the fact is that they were prosecuted and convictions have resulted.

Not so with Israel in Gaza and it now appears that one reason why is the coming into power of the Israeli right wing, among which significant factions a appeal not to the conscience of the world but to the claim that God gave this land to us. Thosewho assassinated Rabin have won.

Jews are a tiny fraction of the world population and the “people of the book.” The people of the book â€‘ Moslems, Christian and Jews â€‘ do not constitute a majority of the world’s population. An appeal to Old Testament “rights, may go-over well with factions of the Israeli population (and some Christian fundamentalists), it will be meaningless to most of the rest of the World and since at least a third of the “People of the Book” are Moslem, to that third, not at all.

There were reports by Israeli soldiers of witnessing atrocities against civilians by some Israeli soldiers. They have been dismissed by the new Israeli regime as “hearsay.” Some observers have tied this to the rise in the Israeli Army of more Orthodox Jews who take seriously the biblical gift of all of Palestine to a Jewish nation and seek its implementation. The same divine right continues to power the expansion of Israeli settlements to, and expropriation of, Arab land.

And that brings me to Joshua and the History Channel. In a series of ancient battlers and military commanders, they explored the accomplishments of Joshua, a truly outstanding military commander who was by modern lights, a war criminal of monumental proportions. We sing that “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho.” What happened after Jericho fell was that Joshua ordered the death of all its inhabitants – including women and children. After all, God had given the land to the Israelites. In modern parlance, Joshua’s campaign was "ethnic cleansing."

It may be argued that that was then, a much more brutal time before the development of the Law of War. But the Israeli cover-up of atrocities in Gaza sows the seeds of ultimate Israeli defeat, as horrible as that prospect is. If the Israeli right wing can squelch dissent in Israeli by more moderate factions and elevate it’s war policy to a divine right from God, Israel is in more dire straits than it can imagine.

What Israel must do is face head-on complaints about its tactics in Gaza and if there were civilian atrocities, find – and prosecute – the perpetrators. If it doesn’t, the last vestige of Holocaust based support for Israel may vanish. The bell is tolling for the civilian dead of Gaza. To paraphrase John Donne, Israel must listen to those bells, because they may be tolling for Israel, as well.

Johnklotz.blogspot.com