In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were “silently longing” for Christianity, he said.

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84.

His writing meant so much to me.

My previous post on him illustrates his vision and (to me) his profundity.

To me he was a true humanist. With humor and cynicism his books enlighten and console me.

I think this from the obit in the NY Times says it well:

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness.

Out of reflex I'd wish to say "thank you" to Kurt, but I know he'd understand that he can't hear me anymore.

UPDATE: From Pharyngula, quoting a speech by Vonnegut:

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

I will comply. Kurt is up in heaven now.

On a warm pre-spring, moonless night earlier this month, after a nice dinner with a couple of my Wonder Valley compadres, we drove east, then north east from Twentynine Palms, on North Amboy Road. My friends knew of an art installation by Helena Bongartz made up of projected lights onto the landscape as I understood it.

We came upon an isolated, abandoned house painted with an ever changing array of brilliant, multi-colored lights. The experience of the combination of the dark night, the warm breeze, the quiet and the light show was sublime.

Here are links to a profile of the installation and Helena Bongartz, and to her website poplight.net.

You can see the photos I took with the camera in my mobile phone here. I wish I had brought a better camera, but I will be back to visit this amazing site again.

I came across the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement from a post on cartoonist Nina Paley's ("America's Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist") website.

What a noble cause! And by my (in)action of not having any children, I have been a member all along. From VHEMT's About The Movement page:

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons.

It's going to take all of us going.

Nina Paley is a great cartoonist and the illustration on the page and leading this post was done by her. Check out her work. Paley's post which brought this to my attention follows:

Sometimes the greatest compliment comes in the form of being hated by the right people. So I was thrilled to discover this condemnation from the Forced-Birthers, who only took five years to notice my work exists. Five years, but so worth the wait.

The organization criticizing Paley is the insipid Generations For Life whose slogan is �The Youth Outreach of the Pro-Life Action League.� You should specifically check out the Paley cartoons which GFL describes as �horrific�. I think they (meaning Paley's cartoons) are spot on, entertaining and moving. And rather than seeing the humor the GFL poster goes on to opine:

What I don�t understand is why anyone who subscribes to the idea of voluntary extinction doesn�t just hurry things along and commit suicide.

How �christian� of them.

Anyway, if you choose to join VHEMT, feel free to do so. They ask for no dues, no contributions. The statements on their web site are about as sane as they come. I'll leave you with this from their site:

Q: Are you really serious?

We're really vehement.

Many see humor in The Movement and think we can't be serious about voluntary human extinction, but in spite of the seriousness of both situation and movement, there's room for humor. In fact, without humor, Earth's condition gets unbearably depressing -- a little levity eases the gravity.

True, wildlife rapidly going extinct and 40,000 children dying each day are not laughing matters, but neither laughing nor bemoaning will change what's happening. We may as well have some fun as we work and play toward a better world.

Besides, returning Earth to its natural splendor and ending needless suffering of humanity are happy thoughts -- no sense moping around in gloom and doom.

From a recent UNICEF study: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries

The United Kingdom and the United States find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings for five of the six dimensions reviewed.

Among the most appaling statistics is how low the US ranks in infant mortality. This while spending significantly more of its Gross Domestic Product on health care:

Health spending as percent of GDP, 2004:

United States: 15.2%
Switzerland: 11.5%
Cambodia: 10.9%
Canada: 9.9%
Japan: 7.9%
Mexico: 6.2%
Africa: 6.1%
China: 5.6%
Russia: 5.6%
India: 4.8%
Pakistan: 2.4%
Congo: 2.0%

(click pic for larger image)

This is on Salon's front page. In the article itself they change the word "uppity" to "smug".

This is really shameful.

Update - at about 8 PM they changed "uppity" to "smug" on the home page.

Dahlia Lithwick, herself a very good columnist on legal matters, writes a great remembrance of Ivins in her What I learned from Molly Ivins and therin relays a illustrative Ivins bon mot:

Ivins once described her job as "to provide regular instruction in the science of how to keep laughing, even though you've considered all the facts"

� which helps me put into perspective my last post on the anger I feel about Bush.

I'll miss having the opportunity to read Molly Ivins' work and I will endeavor to keep laughing.

Apparently released last November but somehow just coming to my attention, this record is just wonderful. Recorded and lovingly produced by Mr. Young to his exacting standards, this title is from what is being called the Neil Young Archives with the promise of more to come.

From the on-line store:

This first release is from 1970 and features a Crazy Horse line-up with Danny Whitten, Jack Nitzsche, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. The show includes an extended "Down By The River" and a 16-minute "Cowgirl In The Sand" (which has previously appeared only on a '90s import). Other songs include Whitten's "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown," as well as "Winterlong," "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and "Wonderin'."

The CD/DVD version includes the whole set in High-Resolution audio with photo montages (no video).

The sound is crisp, the energy level high and the mix, especially the vocals with Danny Whitten's great harmony, is very engaging. Not to mention the great guitar work which, when Neil and Whitten get it on, rocks out. Since Whitten died (of a heroin overdose about two years after this recording) the Crazy Horse line up, while now having Frank Sampedro on rythym, who is still great, lacks the challenge that Whitten's guitar work provided.

Highly recommended, five stars, two thumbs up, and all that.

Browsing the web today I came across this story Bush voices support for abortion rights opponents:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush marked the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision Monday, telling thousands of abortion foes he shares their goal of seeing "the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected into law."

Nothing special, just another day. Just another example of his manipulation and hypocracy. As he always does, he didn't show up for the event, but phoned it in, so he could avoid being photographed there. I felt, as I usual, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, when I looked at Bush's smirking visage during yet another encounter with the on-going experience of being exposed to this man and his stupendously negative and horifying effect on this country and the world.

It occured to me, as it frequently does, that the anger that I feel, about him and his associates, that whatever apparently impotent actions I may take against them is natural and instinctive but in the long run not very healthy. But what can one do?

Then I recalled and looked up some passages in Orwell's 1984 about the Two Minutes Hate:

The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

�

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Now, the metaphor is not perfect, but the experience I and many others have gone through over the past six years is like the conditioning that those poor souls in 1984, fictional though they may be, had to endure.

And so, it occured to me that what might be healthy would be for me and others in my boat to institue a practice that we could call the "Two Minutes Revulsion" and take a brief time out to project our anger towards Bush & Co., get it out of our system and then move on for the rest of the day.

Worth a try anyway �

WASHINGTON � The steadily rising cost of the Iraq war will reach about $8.4 billion a month this year, Pentagon spokesmen said Thursday, as the price of replacing lost, destroyed and aging equipment mounts. The Pentagon has been estimating last year's costs for the increasingly unpopular war at about $8 billion a month. It rose from a monthly "burn rate" of about $4.4 billion during the first year of fighting in fiscal 2003.

Here's my calculation of how $8.4 billion breaks down:

Besides the horror as to what this money is being spent on, remember that much of this money is going into the national debt, to be paid for somewhere down the line � certainly long after Bush and his crew are gone.

Funny in a way, but so true.

This reminds me of a post I did in September 2005 showing the correlation between states that voted for Bush vs. Kerry and slave vs. free states in Civil War America.

Interesting, no ?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.

The letters were sent a few days after Christmas to more than 5,100 Army officers who had recently left the service. Included were letters to about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.

"Army personnel officials are contacting those officers' families now to personally apologize for erroneously sending the letters," the Army said in a brief news release issued Friday night.

The Army did not say how or when the mistake was discovered. It said the database normally used for such correspondence with former officers had been "thoroughly reviewed" to remove the names of wounded or dead soldiers.

"But an earlier list was used inadvertently for the December mailings," the Army statement said, adding that the Army is apologizing to those officers and families affected and "regrets any confusion."

At this point, it's safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap �

As Mark says: "When interpreters, scientists, and teachers can no longer speak scientifically verifiable truth without fear of reprisal, we are in serious trouble indeed."