How Much Of A Problem Is The South?

Have you noticed that you meet a lot of people on an east -west axis, but very view on a north-south axis? Have you ever even met someone from Alabama? There's a reason for that: Southerners tend not to like the North, and Northerners tend not to like the South. It's much more of an issue for the South, however. They still haven't forgotten The War of Northern Aggression. And they are acutely aware that they lost -- much, much more so than Northerners are emotionally aware that they won. Shelby Foote had a great piece on that in Ken Burns's The Civil War. He pointed out that Patton of all people should have known better than to orate to the effect that America had never lost a war, as his ancestors fought on the Southern side.

My personal observation is that the South is so culturally distinct as to be a different country. If it were simply a matter of lagging in cultural evolution, they would be about 75 years behind -- but that is not all there is to it. Southerners really like being Southern, and in my opinion they are not going to change. And don't get me wrong -- I actually kind of like them.

The point of immediate relevance is that now that they've gotten over their hatred of the Republicans for Reconstruction, their socioploitical energies have re-equilibrated to a very reactionary position. I wonder if the South is going to be a political obstacle in dealing with the rest of the world. Why? Because without them, people like Bush simply cannot win; and with them, we have to fight tooth-and-nail for any sembalnce of liberal influence in our politics.

I realize that this is a pretty broad brush, and there are pockets around Atlanta and Knoxville and Austin and other places where these comments do not apply. The entire state of Florida may be an exception. John Edwards, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter seem pretty cool. But looking at that enormous red blotch on the electoral map, you have to wonder. How much blue-er would this society be if candidates did not need Southern votes?

I do not see secession as a practical solution. So what are we going to do?

Q: Will Edwards win North Carolina?

Why Won't Democrats Mention God?

One of the most maddening things for me about contemporary politics is that liberals and progressives choke on words like God and Jesus and Judaism, or even spirituality. This of course hands the whole field over to the Falwells of the world, not to mention that nut-case military officer who said that God had raised George W. up to lead us. George himself acquiesces in these offerings.

Kim Campbell, former Canadian PM, made an interesting observation on Bill Maher's show: "Americans don't appreciate the fact that a political candidate who says that the jury is still out on evolution and who says that God told him to run would not stand a chance of being elected in any other modern democracy."

She also made a plea to Nader not to disenfranchise his followers, i.e., to join with Kerry.

Anyways, why do democrats talk about God like Baptists talk about sex? Yeah, we believe and all that, but can we not talk about it? Whom are we afraid of offending? Now we know there is a large Jewish contingent on the progressive side of things, and they are nervous about religion. And with good reason. But atheists surely cannot be holding us up for ransome here.

Just because we have different views on spirituality doesn't mean we don't have them. I thought the whole modern progressive movement was about finding common ground. If we can accomodate diverse views on abortion, war, raising taxes and a host of other issues, why can't we accomodate different views on God. Screw the atheists. They need to appreciate my firm conviction that God exists as much as I need to appreciate their right not to believe. Anyway, in my view, scratch an atheist and you find a very angry person witha huge authority problem. This is of course due to having Yahweh (the god of fire and brimstone) rammed down your throat instead of Sermon-on-the-Mount Jesus, but more on that later.

The most important result of this failure to acknowledge God is horrible bad karma. After all, he/she/it is only the groundmass of existence, the BIg Kahuna, the source of existence/consciousness/bliss, and the giver of life. Hey, but what do I know? Go ahead and rank him somewhere below recycling in the political scheme. I'm sure he doesn't mind, being so humble and all. I'm sure that the Holy Spirit will continue to guide the country,even though the Founding Fathers would puke at our current spiritual cowardice. It borders on apostasy, actually.

But as noted above, the more important thing is that millions of spiritual people are left out. Just because you are spiritual doesn't mean you are anti-gay, anti-feminist and pro-abortion. What I am saying is that those groups who demand that their special issue be addressed need to grant the same favor to those who think the spirituality of our people needs to be addressed. And the spiritual among us need to quit being shy and demand recognition by the democrats.

If this means finding common spiritual ground with the Jews and non-denominational souls in order to make the progressive movement complete, then so be it. The post-denominational age is coming anyway. Get used to it.

Arianna Huffington -- Who Knew?

This from the same woman who shared a dais with Pat Buchanan in '92 and ran for governor of California as a republican last year:

"It's clear that the damage being done by the Republican fanatics - whether in Washington or Sacramento - is such that we cannot afford the kind of protest votes that are geared toward long-term reform... Now we have seen George Bush's true colors. We have seen what has happened in Iraq. We have seen what has happened to the goodwill that we once enjoyed around the world. We have seen the results of his regressive economic policies. We have seen who benefits and who loses in the world according to George Bush. It's folly to pretend that it doesn't make a difference whether Bush or [Kerry] is in the White House. It's like trying to unring the last three year's carillon of alarms."

"...[S]topping any more Republican takeovers has an urgency that supersedes the larger imperative of breaking the stranglehold of two party politics in order to challenge the broken status quo."

--from Fanatics and Fools.

Bill Maher and Michael Moore literally got down on their knees on Maher's show last week and begged Ralph Nader to pull out. I hope he was listening.

Meteorites in Washington

I am at the Carnegie Institution of Washington this week, working on my research. There is a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites, and what distinguishes them is that they are older than the earth and essentially have the same composition as the sun (except for hydrogen and helium.) You have to think about that a little bit. They can be thought of as frozen globs of the stuff from which the solar system was formed. Now they also contained some short-lived radionuclides form the supernova that apparently triggered the collapse of the gas/dust cloud that formed the solar system. Some of these dust particles acquired an organic mantle during the millions or perhaps billions of years that they spent in interstellar space. The particles also probably had ice on them.

Anyhow, the gas and dust coalesced into planetesimals, and the decay of the radioactive elements heated the planetesimals into a hot mud. Most of the water boiled away, but before it did, it reacted with the silicate dust grains to form hydrated silicates and carbonates. But most intriguingly, these planetesimals had a fair amount of organic chemicals on them, including amino acids. Later, the planetesimals broke up, and pieces of them landed on earth, most notably near Murchison, Australia around 1969 or so. These fragments had probably been floating in space for over 4 billion years.

I am studying the oxygen isotopic composition of the Murchison organic materials to see whether they were synthesized in the hot mud of the planetesimal, or whether the isotopic signature reflects an interstellar origin. Just how oxygen isotopes will tell you that gets rather arcane. My advisor (Bob Clayton) basically invented this field, and I learned it from him. Why we would want to know this, other than it's cool to think that amino acids may pre-date the earth, is also arcane. But with a little JD and a clock rolling over into single digits, I'm sure I could make it clear.

So there. That's my answer to the longstanding question "Just what the hell is he doing?" You may refer inquiries to this post.

Here in Washington, I am working with George Cody and Conel Alexander. Conel has organic residue from Murchison, and I am stripping away the oxygen atoms that might have exchanged with the planetesimal's water. That would leave only the oxygen that might have formed in interstellar space. I will extract the oxygen from the stripped residue and measure the ratios of the various oxygen isotopes. The result? Either it will look like planetesimal water, or it will look like something else. The something else would become grist for the imagination.

A foot in the door.

This is the first posting to this site. Brian McGuirk inspired me to try this. Once we figure this thing out, there will be more.