Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Acorn Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree
One of the many used clichés is “the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.” A variant of the saying is “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” verifiable on the Hahnenberg farm with its 17 acres of apples. Both clichés have been used to mean a variety of things, chief of which is: "A child exhibits the same or very similar traits as his or her parents."
As a father of eight children, it’s a scary thought. Fortunately, the better traits of my children come from their mother. On the other hand, teaching has been my life-long profession…and, guess what? All but one of my children earned their undergraduate degrees in education. So, maybe there is some truth to the saying.
On a more serious note, there is some discussion on the tube about the organization ACORN, an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
The history of the organization is traceable back to Arkansas.
Started in 1970 by Wade Rathke and Gary Delgado, ACORN actually started off as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now, since that is where it had started. This particular ACORN was first in charge of clothing, food, furniture, and other needs of welfare individuals living in the area. During this time, ACORN grew and started a bigger movement in the area, uniting welfare and other poor individuals around important issues such as education, free school lunches, and emergency health care.
In the mid-70s ACORN expanded to the states of Texas and South Dakota, and began focusing not only on local issues, but larger national issues as well. In 1978, ACORN went to the Democratic National convention with an outline called the "People's Platform" listing things such as decreasing unemployment rates, protection of workers' rights, guarantee women's rights, and the protection of families.
Who runs ACORN today? Up until recently, Wade Rathke and his brother Dale held much power within ACORN. According to some reports, Dale embezzled close to $1 million from the organization. ACORN declined to press charges, a reimbursement deal was struck, and the Rathke brothers resigned, but Wade is still deeply involved. Bertha Lewis is currently the organization’s CEO.
Who is Bertha Lewis? For one thing, she has a passion for left-wing politics. Ms. Lewis, the executive director of the New York Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has logged thousands of miles collecting signatures, walking picket lines and getting out the vote. Ms. Lewis, 56, started down the road almost 20 years ago, fighting successfully for everything from squatters' rights to a higher minimum wage.
How does ACORN get money? Congressman John Boehner says ACORN affiliates in just 11 states have received more than $31 million in taxpayer funding, at least $11 million last year alone.
According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the Illinois Secretary of State, Project Vote’s purpose is to “lessen the burdens of government, promote the social welfare, lessen neighborhood tensions, eliminate prejudice and discrimination, combat community deterioration, and relieve the poor and distressed through educating the public about rights, privileges and opportunities in the area of civic participation, and all permitted activities incidental to or in furtherance of these purposes.”
Barack Obama served as Director for Project Vote in 1992. The organization, which works to register low-income and minority voters, was founded in 1982. Project Vote is affiliated with ACORN, and the two organizations work closely together. ACORN reported that “Project Vote, a nonpartisan voter registration organization, became the newest member of the ACORN family of organizations in 1994.” In an article posted on ACORN’s website in early October 2008, “ACORN and Project Vote announced the conclusion of the most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in history, assisting more than 1.3 million Americans complete applications to register to vote in 21 states.”
In November 2007, Senator Obama addressed ACORN and thanked the organization for its work. While Obama has denied that he had any involvement with ACORN other than some legal work he did for them in 1995, his statements in 2007 suggest otherwise. In Senator Obama’s own words, “I've been fighting alongside Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
So far, not much to raise eyebrows about an organization who, from its own website at www.acorn.org, has “an absolute commitment to organizing the poor and powerless plus a constant willingness and ability to break new ground.”
“From the beginning, when it brought together Black and white, welfare and working poor, ACORN defied expectations of what a community organization could be. It pioneered multi- racial and multi-issue organizing, led the way in electoral organizing, and branched into innovative housing development, community media and labor organizing.”
“No issue has been too large or small for ACORN. From the proverbial traffic light on the corner which often gives a neighborhood group its first taste of power to winning community reinvestment agreements from the nation’s largest banks, ACORN’s accomplishments have made a real difference in the lives of its members.”
“While some organizations have moved away from organizing low-income communities, ACORN has never wavered in its belief that without large scale organizations of poor people, progressive change is not possible in America.”
However, not is all well with ACORN. ACORN has been implicated in voter-fraud schemes in 15 states – some examples:
Last year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.
Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida; however, Orange County elections officials rejected Mickey’s application, which was stamped with ACORN’s logo.
Nevada officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas offices as part of a probe into voter-registration fraud - noting that some forms submitted by ACORN workers included the names of Dallas Cowboys players.
Officials in Lake County, Indiana, report that fully 1,100 of 2,000 new voter-registration forms delivered by ACORN were "suspicious."
In Washington state, officials recently closed an investigation into ballot cheating that resulted in prison terms.
ACORN submitted more than 800 phony registration forms in Independence, Mo., with one woman registering 10 times, using three birthdates, four different Social Security numbers and six different phone numbers.
In Vote Today Ohio, ACORN took advantage of a quirk in that state's law, which allowed people to register and vote on the same day without having to prove residency, to drive hundreds of people from homeless shelters and drug-rehab centers to the polls.
On May 28th, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, is demanding congressional hearings into the financial structure of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
"I don't think they've been examined in any significant way at all," he said.
King questions the actions of ACORN officials as well as the multitude of nonprofit activist groups that apparently overlap with ACORN and share the same headquarters address in New Orleans.
"This spider web, this myriad web of ACORN dollars and revenue streams, every bit of them should be looked at, all the corporations that they are networked with all of the boards of directors of those corporations, the inner locking connecting, the faces that are the same from board to board."
Chief among the groups to benefit from stimulus spending will be ACORN. ACORN's national political action committee, ACORN Votes, endorsed Obama for president last fall. ACORN national president Maude Hurd said Obama was "the candidate who best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about like stopping foreclosures."
You may also remember that during last year's primaries, the Obama campaign paid $832,598 to Citizens Services Inc., another ACORN affiliate, for get-out-the-vote activities.
As everyone who hasn't been in a coma for the last year knows, ACORN and President Obama go way back…all the way back to the big oak tree of social change.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The Tortured History of the Kurds
Throughout the formation of the new Iraq, the term “Kurds” has been a frequent topic of the news. Along with Shiites and Sunnis, the Kurds comprise the three major factions that have been involved in negotiations toward a democratic Iraq.
Throughout the last eight years, the Kurds have generally been supportive of U.S. involvement in the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime. It was the Kurds, in northern Iraq, after all, that Saddam targeted for genocide with the use of chemical weapons.
In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq. The campaign was mostly directed at Kurds who sided with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 100,000 people), many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands. Hussein was reponsible for the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations.
But the genocide didn’t end there. In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, he cracked down ruthlessly against several uprisings in the Kurdish north. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human rights violations against the northern Kurds similar to the violations mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from 20,000 to 100,000.
The term “Kurdistan” today refers to a region, predominately peopled by Kurds. In 1920, Turkey fell under the aegis of the League of Nations, which, in a 13 point treaty, wanted to punish the Turks for their being part of the Central Powers in World War I. The Central Powers consisted of the German Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire (also known as the Turkish Empire), and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. In the treaty, Turkey was to agree to “the establishment of local autonomy for Kurdistan” the boundaries of which were to be established by the English, French, and Italian governments. It also provided that the League could establish a free and independent Kurdistan at some point in the future should the Kurds request it.
The term Kurdistan is used today to refer to a land mass, depending on what sources are used, about the size of France. Kurdistan is split among several countries…Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Estimates place the Kurdish population in these countries at over 30 million. Kurds are the fourth largest ethnicity in the Middle East after Arabs, Persians and Turks. According to the CIA World Factbook, Kurds comprise 20% of the population in Turkey, 15-20% in Iraq, perhaps 8% in Syria, 7% in Iran and 1.3% in Armenia. In all of these countries except Iran, Kurds form the second largest ethnic group. Roughly 55% of the world's Kurds live in Turkey, about 20% each in Iran and Iraq, and a bit over 5% in Syria.
From a political standpoint, Iraqi Kurdistan is the only region which has gained official recognition internationally as an autonomous federal entity. Kurds in Iran are also officially recognized as a minority, although no Iranian territory is designated as ethnically Kurdish.
Kurdistan is a mountainous region with a cold climate and it receives enough annual precipitation to sustain temperate forests and shrubs. The region has an extreme continental climate—hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter. Despite this, much of the region is fertile and has traditionally exported grain and livestock to the cities in the plains. The plateaus and mountains of Kurdistan, which are characterized by heavy rainfall and in winter a heavy coat of snow, are a water reservoir for the Near and Middle East. Kurdistan is the source of the famous Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
There are vast oil and mineral resources in Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is estimated to have around 45 billion barrels of oil reserves making it sixth largest in the world, mostly recently discovered.
Most Kurds are bilingual or polylingual, speaking the languages of the surrounding peoples such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a second language. Kurdish Jews and some Kurdish Christians usually speak Aramaic as their first language. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic rather than Kurdish.
The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, with a minority being Shiites. The original religion of the Kurds was Yazidism, a religion greatly influenced by Jewish, Zoroastrian, Christian and Islamic beliefs. Christianity and Judaism is practiced, but in small numbers.
Because of the genocidal efforts of Saddam Hussein and his first cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, (dubbed "Chemical Ali" by Iraqi Kurds for his use of chemical weapons in attacks against them), Iraqi Kurds have been supportive of American intervention into Iraq following 9-11.
Why haven’t the Kurds, with their own cultural identity, been able to unify and demand independence?
The name of the game is the political stronghold Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have, over the years, placed on any dream of independence. Agrarian by nature, many Kurds have dreamt of autonomy, but their nascent political aggressiveness has been no match for the control the four countries hold on them. There were recent skirmishes with Turkey by Kurdish rebels early in 2008 in northern Iraq, but the Bush administration agreed with the Iraqi government in supporting suppression of the Kurdish movement. Kurds periodically have held uprisings in all four countries, with little success.
The drive for Kurdish independence looks bleak for the future. It is a case of an ethnic group, with a long and tortured history, being denied its century-long promise of independence given by the forerunner of the United Nations…the League of Nations.
Throughout the last eight years, the Kurds have generally been supportive of U.S. involvement in the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime. It was the Kurds, in northern Iraq, after all, that Saddam targeted for genocide with the use of chemical weapons.
In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq. The campaign was mostly directed at Kurds who sided with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 100,000 people), many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands. Hussein was reponsible for the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations.
But the genocide didn’t end there. In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, he cracked down ruthlessly against several uprisings in the Kurdish north. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human rights violations against the northern Kurds similar to the violations mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from 20,000 to 100,000.
The term “Kurdistan” today refers to a region, predominately peopled by Kurds. In 1920, Turkey fell under the aegis of the League of Nations, which, in a 13 point treaty, wanted to punish the Turks for their being part of the Central Powers in World War I. The Central Powers consisted of the German Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire (also known as the Turkish Empire), and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. In the treaty, Turkey was to agree to “the establishment of local autonomy for Kurdistan” the boundaries of which were to be established by the English, French, and Italian governments. It also provided that the League could establish a free and independent Kurdistan at some point in the future should the Kurds request it.
The term Kurdistan is used today to refer to a land mass, depending on what sources are used, about the size of France. Kurdistan is split among several countries…Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Estimates place the Kurdish population in these countries at over 30 million. Kurds are the fourth largest ethnicity in the Middle East after Arabs, Persians and Turks. According to the CIA World Factbook, Kurds comprise 20% of the population in Turkey, 15-20% in Iraq, perhaps 8% in Syria, 7% in Iran and 1.3% in Armenia. In all of these countries except Iran, Kurds form the second largest ethnic group. Roughly 55% of the world's Kurds live in Turkey, about 20% each in Iran and Iraq, and a bit over 5% in Syria.
From a political standpoint, Iraqi Kurdistan is the only region which has gained official recognition internationally as an autonomous federal entity. Kurds in Iran are also officially recognized as a minority, although no Iranian territory is designated as ethnically Kurdish.
Kurdistan is a mountainous region with a cold climate and it receives enough annual precipitation to sustain temperate forests and shrubs. The region has an extreme continental climate—hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter. Despite this, much of the region is fertile and has traditionally exported grain and livestock to the cities in the plains. The plateaus and mountains of Kurdistan, which are characterized by heavy rainfall and in winter a heavy coat of snow, are a water reservoir for the Near and Middle East. Kurdistan is the source of the famous Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
There are vast oil and mineral resources in Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is estimated to have around 45 billion barrels of oil reserves making it sixth largest in the world, mostly recently discovered.
Most Kurds are bilingual or polylingual, speaking the languages of the surrounding peoples such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a second language. Kurdish Jews and some Kurdish Christians usually speak Aramaic as their first language. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic rather than Kurdish.
The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, with a minority being Shiites. The original religion of the Kurds was Yazidism, a religion greatly influenced by Jewish, Zoroastrian, Christian and Islamic beliefs. Christianity and Judaism is practiced, but in small numbers.
Because of the genocidal efforts of Saddam Hussein and his first cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, (dubbed "Chemical Ali" by Iraqi Kurds for his use of chemical weapons in attacks against them), Iraqi Kurds have been supportive of American intervention into Iraq following 9-11.
Why haven’t the Kurds, with their own cultural identity, been able to unify and demand independence?
The name of the game is the political stronghold Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have, over the years, placed on any dream of independence. Agrarian by nature, many Kurds have dreamt of autonomy, but their nascent political aggressiveness has been no match for the control the four countries hold on them. There were recent skirmishes with Turkey by Kurdish rebels early in 2008 in northern Iraq, but the Bush administration agreed with the Iraqi government in supporting suppression of the Kurdish movement. Kurds periodically have held uprisings in all four countries, with little success.
The drive for Kurdish independence looks bleak for the future. It is a case of an ethnic group, with a long and tortured history, being denied its century-long promise of independence given by the forerunner of the United Nations…the League of Nations.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Is Repairing Hubble Worth the Risks?
On Monday, NASA sent a crew of astronauts to install greatly improved instruments on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.
According to NASA the 11-day mission will include five spacewalks during which astronauts will install two new instruments, repair two inactive ones and perform some component replacements. The mission is the final one to service the Hubble telescope and is expected to keep the telescope working until 2013 when the orbiting observatory will be replaced by the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
There are serious inherent risks in the Hubble repair mission.
First of all, there’s the ever-increasing amount of space junk in proximity to Hubble. Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew of seven will face increased danger from space junk because of Hubble's extremely high and littered orbit 350 miles up. Even innocuous things like nuts or bolts traveling at 18000 miles per hour could puncture space suits.They will need someone to come and get the cry-- fast -- if their ship sustains serious Columbia-type damage during launch or later in flight. They will not have the luxury of camping out at the international space station while awaiting rescue. The space station will be in another orbit and impossible to reach.
The current mission, once canceled because it was considered too perilous, does have an unprecedented safety net: another space shuttle on the launch pad. There is no guarantee, though, that NASA could pull off a rescue in time to save the Hubble crew. It would take three to seven days, at least, to launch a second shuttle.
Another danger is there will be no ability to check Atlantis to examine it for missing heat shield tiles from the distant ISS, the downfall of Columbia. A piece of insulating foam came off Columbia's external fuel tank during lift-off in January 2003, leaving a hole in the left wing. The shuttle disintegrated during re-entry over Texas on 1 February 2003, killing all seven of its crew.
Should a rescue mission be necessary, similar risks to the rescue shuttle vis-à-vis damaged tiles could result in the unthinkable.
Finally, the repair mission to Hubble will require everything to go just right.
"Hubble servicing missions can be compared to delicate dental work," said HST deputy program manager Mike Weiss of Goddard. "While the dentist fills your tooth or fits you for a crown, his assistant is at the ready handing him, or her, the right tools. Without an assistant the task would take much longer and the chance for errors would increase."
The HST team has spent months developing procedures and tools necessary for this last Shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. In the process they have successfully overcome many obstacles such as safely gaining access to failed circuit boards inside ACS, figuring out a way to pull out boards while wearing pressurized gloves, and installing a new cover on ACS once repairs are complete.
Is this mission worth the risks? Most everyone at NASA thinks so. I don’t.
Why? Just three days later, on May 14th, the European Space Agency will launch two even more advanced telescopes, named Herschel and Planck. Herschel will have the largest mirror ever put in space, 11.5 feet across, half again as big as Hubble's mirror. Planck will have the sharpest vision, detecting differences as small as two parts in a million.
Herschel, will sweep the entire sky every six months over a three-year period. It will build the most accurate map ever made of the cosmos. ''Planck will provide the deepest, clearest, sharpest and least obstructed view of the beginning of the universe ever seen,'' says Benjamin Wandelt, a Planck scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It will be ''a quantum leap in our ability to address fundamental questions about how the universe began.''
Then there is the planned JWST telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. Launch is planned for 2014.
JWST will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.
The cost of this last mission to repair Hubble is projected to be $1.1 billion. Let’s not forget the potential 14 lives that will be put at risk.
Finally, According to NASA, Hubble has provided major scientific breakthroughs… Does it need to do more?
• The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
• The HST has opened speculation that nearly all galaxies may harbor supermassive black holes.
• The HST has helped scientists determine the process of how planets are born.
• The HST detected the first organic molecule discovered on a planet outside our solar system.
• The HST detected a distant supernova that suggests the universe only recently began speeding up.
• The images of planets, galaxies, nebulae, novae, and, especially, the Ultra Deep Field below have changed forever how mankind can see the known universe. The Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, made from data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003 through January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light, looking back approximately 13 billion years, or a little over half a billion years after the universe was created.
I think Hubble has done its service to mankind.
However, President Spock would probably approve, since money flows from Washington like water over Niagara.
According to NASA the 11-day mission will include five spacewalks during which astronauts will install two new instruments, repair two inactive ones and perform some component replacements. The mission is the final one to service the Hubble telescope and is expected to keep the telescope working until 2013 when the orbiting observatory will be replaced by the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
There are serious inherent risks in the Hubble repair mission.
First of all, there’s the ever-increasing amount of space junk in proximity to Hubble. Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew of seven will face increased danger from space junk because of Hubble's extremely high and littered orbit 350 miles up. Even innocuous things like nuts or bolts traveling at 18000 miles per hour could puncture space suits.They will need someone to come and get the cry-- fast -- if their ship sustains serious Columbia-type damage during launch or later in flight. They will not have the luxury of camping out at the international space station while awaiting rescue. The space station will be in another orbit and impossible to reach.
The current mission, once canceled because it was considered too perilous, does have an unprecedented safety net: another space shuttle on the launch pad. There is no guarantee, though, that NASA could pull off a rescue in time to save the Hubble crew. It would take three to seven days, at least, to launch a second shuttle.
Another danger is there will be no ability to check Atlantis to examine it for missing heat shield tiles from the distant ISS, the downfall of Columbia. A piece of insulating foam came off Columbia's external fuel tank during lift-off in January 2003, leaving a hole in the left wing. The shuttle disintegrated during re-entry over Texas on 1 February 2003, killing all seven of its crew.
Should a rescue mission be necessary, similar risks to the rescue shuttle vis-à-vis damaged tiles could result in the unthinkable.
Finally, the repair mission to Hubble will require everything to go just right.
"Hubble servicing missions can be compared to delicate dental work," said HST deputy program manager Mike Weiss of Goddard. "While the dentist fills your tooth or fits you for a crown, his assistant is at the ready handing him, or her, the right tools. Without an assistant the task would take much longer and the chance for errors would increase."
The HST team has spent months developing procedures and tools necessary for this last Shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. In the process they have successfully overcome many obstacles such as safely gaining access to failed circuit boards inside ACS, figuring out a way to pull out boards while wearing pressurized gloves, and installing a new cover on ACS once repairs are complete.
Is this mission worth the risks? Most everyone at NASA thinks so. I don’t.
Why? Just three days later, on May 14th, the European Space Agency will launch two even more advanced telescopes, named Herschel and Planck. Herschel will have the largest mirror ever put in space, 11.5 feet across, half again as big as Hubble's mirror. Planck will have the sharpest vision, detecting differences as small as two parts in a million.
Herschel, will sweep the entire sky every six months over a three-year period. It will build the most accurate map ever made of the cosmos. ''Planck will provide the deepest, clearest, sharpest and least obstructed view of the beginning of the universe ever seen,'' says Benjamin Wandelt, a Planck scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It will be ''a quantum leap in our ability to address fundamental questions about how the universe began.''
Then there is the planned JWST telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. Launch is planned for 2014.
JWST will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.
The cost of this last mission to repair Hubble is projected to be $1.1 billion. Let’s not forget the potential 14 lives that will be put at risk.
Finally, According to NASA, Hubble has provided major scientific breakthroughs… Does it need to do more?
• The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
• The HST has opened speculation that nearly all galaxies may harbor supermassive black holes.
• The HST has helped scientists determine the process of how planets are born.
• The HST detected the first organic molecule discovered on a planet outside our solar system.
• The HST detected a distant supernova that suggests the universe only recently began speeding up.
• The images of planets, galaxies, nebulae, novae, and, especially, the Ultra Deep Field below have changed forever how mankind can see the known universe. The Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, made from data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003 through January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light, looking back approximately 13 billion years, or a little over half a billion years after the universe was created.
I think Hubble has done its service to mankind.
However, President Spock would probably approve, since money flows from Washington like water over Niagara.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Rise of Secularism in the U.S.
Secularism is a term used for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century to denote a form of opinion which concerns itself only with questions, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life. Anything that is above or beyond the present life should be entirely overlooked. Whether there is a God or not, whether the soul is immortal or not, are questions which at best cannot be answered, and on which consequently no motives of action can be based. A fortiori all motives derived from any organized religion are worthless. Such are the opinions of secularists.
A study done recently by the Episcopalian Trinity College in Connecticut found a significant decline in Christianity in the U.S. The drop has occurred dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels.
The survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of last year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990. Those who do call themselves Christian are more frequently describing themselves as "nondenominational," "evangelical," or "born again," according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
The survey is conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation. Conducted in 1990, 2001 and last year, it is one of the nation's largest major surveys of religion.
The increase in people labeling themselves in more generic Christian terms corresponds strongly with the decline in people identifying themselves as Protestant, the survey found. People calling themselves mainline Protestants, including Methodists and Lutherans, have dropped to 13 percent of the population, down from 19 percent in 1990. The number of people who describe themselves as generically "Protestant" went from approximately 17 million in 1990 to 5 million.
Meanwhile, the number of people who use nondenominational terms has gone from 194,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million. Northern New England has surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country; 34 percent of Vermont residents say they have "no religion." The report said that the country has a "growing non-religious or irreligious minority." Twenty-seven percent of those interviewed said they did not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they died, and 30 percent of people who had married said their service was not religious.
Another significant report on the status of religion in the U.S. comes from an extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid. More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.
Although there are about half as many Catholics in the U.S. as Protestants, the number of Catholics nearly rivals the number of members of evangelical Protestant churches and far exceeds the number of members of both mainline Protestant churches and historically fringe Protestant churches.
Other surveys - such as the General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972 - find that the Catholic share of the U.S. adult population has held fairly steady in recent decades at around 25%. What this apparent stability obscures, however, is the large number of people who have left the Catholic Church. Approximately one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic. This means that roughly 10% of all Americans are former Catholics. These losses, however, have been partly offset by the number of people who have changed their affiliation to Catholicism (2.6% of the adult population) but more importantly by the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S. The result is that the overall percentage of the population that identifies as Catholic has remained fairly stable.
So, what are the causes of these shifts in religious identification and the underlying move toward secularism?
First, we as Americans really do not like being told what to do. Believing in a God requires accountability and rules to one degree or another and some tend to resent that.
A second factor is that many in America view Christians as rigid, condescending, self-righteous, judgmental and hypocritical. The sordid tales of Swaggart, Bakker, Haggard, and the Catholic priesthood’s child abuse scandals are where some get their perception of leaders of Christianity.
Third, many believe that anything can be acceptable as long as society decides it is. The debate in this country over same-sex marriage would not have been imaginable in my youth. In my upbringing, marriage was between a man and a woman. Today, same-sex unions are becoming legal in several states, because the courts and state legislatures approve of the practice. This trend runs contrary to the traditional teachings of virtually all major world religions. Just to cite a few: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.
Fourth, the desire for power among those who lead us in the political arena often leads to moral compromising. I have no intention of judging any specific person’s conscience in any of the attitudes I express in this column, but I will give some well-known examples of leaders whose religion teaches one thing, but whose political leadership contradicts the basic tenants of the religion they espouse and practice on Sundays.
Our Vice-President is a Catholic; our leader of the House of Representatives is a Catholic; our governor is a Catholic, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services was reared a Catholic in Ohio and Leland, Michigan, and so on…Their stance on abortion, for example, is publicly pro-choice. Most U.S. Catholic bishops find this inconsistency to be deplorable. The platform of the Democratic Party has been, in recent years, pro-choice. Many Catholics and evangelicals are one-issue voters, because they see abortion as the killing of innocent life. Many of these voters find that, biologically, it is incomprehensible that a 10 week-old fetus with all of its fingers and toes could be disposed of as nothing more than an inflamed appendix.
Fifth, in my experience as a public school administrator, I found that many young people equate morality with legality. Abortion is legal, so it’s okay. Divorce for virtually any reason is fine, as long as the legal paperwork is in order.
Sixth, public entertainers like Bill Maher and Howard Stern ridicule organized religion often. Hollywood itself is often a soap opera of drug addiction, failed marriages, promiscuous relationships, and disdain for anything morally binding. Books and movies like "The Da Vinci Code" call into question teachings of two thousand years. Never mind that Brown used obscure apocryphal writings to create a scenario that runs like a Rex Stout mystery novel, nor that, taking Brown's cue, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks have engaged in money-making efforts to perpetuate "religious" movies that are dismissed by emminent scholars as what they are...fictional rubbish. Yet such nonsense appears on big screens in Dolby sound and has an emotional, if not intellectual, impact on viewers. To Hanks' credit, he admitted "We play fast and loose with an awful lot of fact," in the Code's sequel, "Angels and Demons." No wonder biblical fundamentalists hold to literal interpretations of the Bible and are wary of any scholarly attempts to understand how the Bible came to be. Yet such fundamentalism runs counter to the idea of divinely-designed evolution, and, as such is rejected many biblical scholars.
Seventh, peer pressure among young people invades conscience with the mantra that “if everyone is doing it, it must be normal.” So, illicit drug use, violence, promiscuity, cheating in school, bigotry, and cynical racism become acceptable. And this is not just a problem among young adults.
Eighth, the role of television, the internet, the news media, and a host of growing technological wonders of communication have little regulation. Anyone’s opinion is just as good as anyone else’s. There are no absolutes in life the secularist might argue, no rock-solid moral truths upon which one can rely. I recently had a discussion with an agnostic who attempted to prove to me that 1 + 1 does not equal 2. In the mataphysical world, for example, if eternal verities do not exist, then religion and science itself fall apart. Maybe geometry has axioms you cannot prove? If you don't accept those primary, unproveable, axioms, there goes a big chunk of math out the window.
Ninth, there is such a rush in modern life to deal with a fast-moving world, that people have little time to reflect on the purpose of their existence, little time to read the wisdom philosophers and theologians have written down through the ages, and virtually no time to be silent and reflective for any length of time. There is little time to look up at the stars and wonder how they got there, little time to examine the beauty in nature and wonder if all of this just happened by chance, or whether there was a divine designer behind it all.
Tenth, Americans are a very impatient people. If one prays to God, and there seems to be no immediate answer, then forget God. We are Americans, after all, and anything is possible if we take control. We are a self-reliant people. No need for platitudinous preaching on the weekend. We can always pull ourselves up without divine help. Chance and serendipity are the rule..."Good luck" is a phrase that rules out a God who just might be watching over us, caring for us, and asking only that we seek His will.
Eleventh, the desire to experiment and try new things is the very nature of inquisitive minds. However, each of us desires to be "center stage" in life. So, whether its tatoos, body-piercing, pink hair, New Age belief in the "power" of gems, or whatever is the newest fad, it's all about "me" getting noticed. If I have a "Me" to adore, what place is there for a God?
Twelfth, true religion demands sacrifice and suffering. No one likes to embrace suffering as a means of self-purification. Many embrace mega-churches because of the promise of monetary success if one but tithes, not to God, but to an Elmer Gantry-type minister who preaches God's blessings in this life while coming to their church in a limousine from a multi-million dollar mansion.
Finally...and I could go on and on...“political correctness” often conflicts with religion and common sense. It is now almost politically "incorrect" to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Who would have ever thought that the “War on Terror” would be officially morphed into “Overseas Contingency Operation”…or “pregnant” into “parasitically oppressed”?
Alexis deTocqueville, an educated Frenchman who came to the U.S. in 1831 when he was only 25 years old, and spent quite some time in Michigan, later wrote Democracy in America, a two-volume study of the American people and their political institutions. He had some keen insights into our country relative to religion and our form of government.
I have selected a few quotes of his that may be of interest in this column. They do not always touch on the rise of secularism, but they touch on values and moral principles pertinent to our democracy.
"As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
"America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
"Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."
"The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality."
"There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle."
"There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."
"In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own."
"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness."
It all boils down to what I see as the inherent danger of a democracy vis-à-vis religion: Democracy has the capability of marginalizing morality itself and installing the new state religion: Secularism.
A study done recently by the Episcopalian Trinity College in Connecticut found a significant decline in Christianity in the U.S. The drop has occurred dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels.
The survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of last year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990. Those who do call themselves Christian are more frequently describing themselves as "nondenominational," "evangelical," or "born again," according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
The survey is conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation. Conducted in 1990, 2001 and last year, it is one of the nation's largest major surveys of religion.
The increase in people labeling themselves in more generic Christian terms corresponds strongly with the decline in people identifying themselves as Protestant, the survey found. People calling themselves mainline Protestants, including Methodists and Lutherans, have dropped to 13 percent of the population, down from 19 percent in 1990. The number of people who describe themselves as generically "Protestant" went from approximately 17 million in 1990 to 5 million.
Meanwhile, the number of people who use nondenominational terms has gone from 194,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million. Northern New England has surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country; 34 percent of Vermont residents say they have "no religion." The report said that the country has a "growing non-religious or irreligious minority." Twenty-seven percent of those interviewed said they did not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they died, and 30 percent of people who had married said their service was not religious.
Another significant report on the status of religion in the U.S. comes from an extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid. More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.
Although there are about half as many Catholics in the U.S. as Protestants, the number of Catholics nearly rivals the number of members of evangelical Protestant churches and far exceeds the number of members of both mainline Protestant churches and historically fringe Protestant churches.
Other surveys - such as the General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972 - find that the Catholic share of the U.S. adult population has held fairly steady in recent decades at around 25%. What this apparent stability obscures, however, is the large number of people who have left the Catholic Church. Approximately one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic. This means that roughly 10% of all Americans are former Catholics. These losses, however, have been partly offset by the number of people who have changed their affiliation to Catholicism (2.6% of the adult population) but more importantly by the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S. The result is that the overall percentage of the population that identifies as Catholic has remained fairly stable.
So, what are the causes of these shifts in religious identification and the underlying move toward secularism?
First, we as Americans really do not like being told what to do. Believing in a God requires accountability and rules to one degree or another and some tend to resent that.
A second factor is that many in America view Christians as rigid, condescending, self-righteous, judgmental and hypocritical. The sordid tales of Swaggart, Bakker, Haggard, and the Catholic priesthood’s child abuse scandals are where some get their perception of leaders of Christianity.
Third, many believe that anything can be acceptable as long as society decides it is. The debate in this country over same-sex marriage would not have been imaginable in my youth. In my upbringing, marriage was between a man and a woman. Today, same-sex unions are becoming legal in several states, because the courts and state legislatures approve of the practice. This trend runs contrary to the traditional teachings of virtually all major world religions. Just to cite a few: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.
Fourth, the desire for power among those who lead us in the political arena often leads to moral compromising. I have no intention of judging any specific person’s conscience in any of the attitudes I express in this column, but I will give some well-known examples of leaders whose religion teaches one thing, but whose political leadership contradicts the basic tenants of the religion they espouse and practice on Sundays.
Our Vice-President is a Catholic; our leader of the House of Representatives is a Catholic; our governor is a Catholic, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services was reared a Catholic in Ohio and Leland, Michigan, and so on…Their stance on abortion, for example, is publicly pro-choice. Most U.S. Catholic bishops find this inconsistency to be deplorable. The platform of the Democratic Party has been, in recent years, pro-choice. Many Catholics and evangelicals are one-issue voters, because they see abortion as the killing of innocent life. Many of these voters find that, biologically, it is incomprehensible that a 10 week-old fetus with all of its fingers and toes could be disposed of as nothing more than an inflamed appendix.
Fifth, in my experience as a public school administrator, I found that many young people equate morality with legality. Abortion is legal, so it’s okay. Divorce for virtually any reason is fine, as long as the legal paperwork is in order.
Sixth, public entertainers like Bill Maher and Howard Stern ridicule organized religion often. Hollywood itself is often a soap opera of drug addiction, failed marriages, promiscuous relationships, and disdain for anything morally binding. Books and movies like "The Da Vinci Code" call into question teachings of two thousand years. Never mind that Brown used obscure apocryphal writings to create a scenario that runs like a Rex Stout mystery novel, nor that, taking Brown's cue, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks have engaged in money-making efforts to perpetuate "religious" movies that are dismissed by emminent scholars as what they are...fictional rubbish. Yet such nonsense appears on big screens in Dolby sound and has an emotional, if not intellectual, impact on viewers. To Hanks' credit, he admitted "We play fast and loose with an awful lot of fact," in the Code's sequel, "Angels and Demons." No wonder biblical fundamentalists hold to literal interpretations of the Bible and are wary of any scholarly attempts to understand how the Bible came to be. Yet such fundamentalism runs counter to the idea of divinely-designed evolution, and, as such is rejected many biblical scholars.
Seventh, peer pressure among young people invades conscience with the mantra that “if everyone is doing it, it must be normal.” So, illicit drug use, violence, promiscuity, cheating in school, bigotry, and cynical racism become acceptable. And this is not just a problem among young adults.
Eighth, the role of television, the internet, the news media, and a host of growing technological wonders of communication have little regulation. Anyone’s opinion is just as good as anyone else’s. There are no absolutes in life the secularist might argue, no rock-solid moral truths upon which one can rely. I recently had a discussion with an agnostic who attempted to prove to me that 1 + 1 does not equal 2. In the mataphysical world, for example, if eternal verities do not exist, then religion and science itself fall apart. Maybe geometry has axioms you cannot prove? If you don't accept those primary, unproveable, axioms, there goes a big chunk of math out the window.
Ninth, there is such a rush in modern life to deal with a fast-moving world, that people have little time to reflect on the purpose of their existence, little time to read the wisdom philosophers and theologians have written down through the ages, and virtually no time to be silent and reflective for any length of time. There is little time to look up at the stars and wonder how they got there, little time to examine the beauty in nature and wonder if all of this just happened by chance, or whether there was a divine designer behind it all.
Tenth, Americans are a very impatient people. If one prays to God, and there seems to be no immediate answer, then forget God. We are Americans, after all, and anything is possible if we take control. We are a self-reliant people. No need for platitudinous preaching on the weekend. We can always pull ourselves up without divine help. Chance and serendipity are the rule..."Good luck" is a phrase that rules out a God who just might be watching over us, caring for us, and asking only that we seek His will.
Eleventh, the desire to experiment and try new things is the very nature of inquisitive minds. However, each of us desires to be "center stage" in life. So, whether its tatoos, body-piercing, pink hair, New Age belief in the "power" of gems, or whatever is the newest fad, it's all about "me" getting noticed. If I have a "Me" to adore, what place is there for a God?
Twelfth, true religion demands sacrifice and suffering. No one likes to embrace suffering as a means of self-purification. Many embrace mega-churches because of the promise of monetary success if one but tithes, not to God, but to an Elmer Gantry-type minister who preaches God's blessings in this life while coming to their church in a limousine from a multi-million dollar mansion.
Finally...and I could go on and on...“political correctness” often conflicts with religion and common sense. It is now almost politically "incorrect" to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Who would have ever thought that the “War on Terror” would be officially morphed into “Overseas Contingency Operation”…or “pregnant” into “parasitically oppressed”?
Alexis deTocqueville, an educated Frenchman who came to the U.S. in 1831 when he was only 25 years old, and spent quite some time in Michigan, later wrote Democracy in America, a two-volume study of the American people and their political institutions. He had some keen insights into our country relative to religion and our form of government.
I have selected a few quotes of his that may be of interest in this column. They do not always touch on the rise of secularism, but they touch on values and moral principles pertinent to our democracy.
"As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
"America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
"Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."
"The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality."
"There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle."
"There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."
"In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own."
"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness."
It all boils down to what I see as the inherent danger of a democracy vis-à-vis religion: Democracy has the capability of marginalizing morality itself and installing the new state religion: Secularism.
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