Full disclosure: I am Jewish.

When I lived in Massachusetts, I drove over to Connecticut on Primary and Election Day to hold a sign for Ned Lamont. The high point of the latter day was when an obviously Lieberman voter called me a Communist when I tried to hand him a Democratic slate.

Sanctimonious Joe (D-Likud) makes me cringe when he parades his Jewishness as some sort of moral privilege, hoping that it will over-shadow his toadying to the radical Right that supports Israel only because the believe that the Second Coming requires its existence. (According to the prophecy in that crazy book ---which even Luther hesitated to include in Scripture --- what happens to the Jews after that doubtful event might lead to second thoughts about such support. Half the Jews convert to Christ and the other half go to Hell with the rest of the goyim.)

In sort, Holy Joe makes me sick. At least he has put his "tuchus afen tisch" (Yiddish for "ass upon the table", i.e. come clean)about where his interests lie. I fervently hope that there are enough Dem pickups in the Senate so that we can tell him to "geh cocken afen Yom" ("go crap in the ocean") and be quit of him for good.

JRosen

Has anyone here ever heard the term "provocateur"? Cointelpro used them. Is it too conspiratorial to think that DHS, ATF, or FBI might occasionally resort to the same. Happy Jack's "stranger" sounds a lot like one of those to me.

I wrote this back in 2003, but I think it still applies:

George Bush the Second , a nimble logician

Has offered to us this profound proposition:

The harder the bad guys in Baghdad attack

The closer we are to the prize in Iraq.

Following this is a simple conclusion

As what seems a crisis is but an illusion.

In fact, we have found just the metric we seek:

It lies in the tally of bombings per week.

And taking this thought to the end of the line,

We can count as success every missile and mine

And there at the end will be triumph complete:

When they set off a nuke in the heart of Tikrit.

I agree that Mr.Williams compromised his integrity. But the serious condition that he addresses is real, and perhaps there is a valid point that what he calls "relativism" is a cause. But I think that a basic generally held attitude (expressed most clearly in popular culture)is far more important in explaining the situation.

In my own teaching experience, while I never denigrated anyone for an honest effort, I never said something was good or even adequate, if it wasn't. It would have been cruel to do so, since I was teaching (hopefully) professional musicians. In that world (where I have spent my entire adult life and a good part of my adolescence as well) you do not succeed unless you can do the job, and it is quite quickly apparent whether you know your stuff or not. And being rejected in an audition, or even playing an occasional bad performance, can be devastating unless you are inured to the experience, and used to being criticized. I would say that I was trying to toughen my kids hides without hardening their hearts. And if they did not have the gifts, or the toughness, or had started too late, or weren't passionate enough, they had time to find that out while they still had time to choose something else.

It also happens that I had some training in math and physics and learned quickly enough that I would never be more than mediocre at either. So my professors' toughness was to my benefit. But I still take pleasure in understanding as much as I do.

But the main point I want to make is this: so long as our society stigmatizes would-be scientists as "geeks", "nerds", "uncool" etc. etc., regards intellectual distinction with contempt, and disdains the self-discipline required for any significant expertise in art or science, the society will get what it deserves: a nation of consumers who won't understand a mortgage contract, be able to question a physician about important issues, balance a checkbook, or understand what is wrong with I. D.

I believe that this attitude has deep roots in our history, and will not be easy.perhaps even impossible, to change. But what is most sad to me is not that we won't be "competitive" against cultures like China where learning is venerated, but that the idea of learning, of mastery and deeper understanding for its own sake and the unique pleasure it can give an individual --- let alone those around him -- has apparently disappeared as an ideal. You may want to play Mozart for your infant to enhance his chances to get into Yale, but what is wrong with doing it so that he grows up able to experience Mozart for Mozart? That is a pleasure unlike anything else.

Finally (and please forgive the length of this rant; it has been brewing inside me for a very long time, decades at least)training in real science (and real art, too) teaches integrity, respect for high standards, and a certain impatience with the shoddy the phony, the BS in which we are drowning. And were people to learn basic logic and critical thinking, what would become of advertising and political campaigns? One could ask at this point "Cui bono"?

The question answers itself.