Jing-reed's Musings from Thailand

Credibility

My desktop dictionary is never more than a click away. 

Available whenever I need a word or synonym. How odd that the people of the U.S., and the U.K., seem to place little or no value on the necessary credibility of their leaders.  Nor that those leaders be held accountable for their actions.

Nearly three weeks ago, on May 1, the Sunday Times of London published a secret U.K. government memorandum discussing a July 23, 2002, meeting between Blair and his top security advisers. The memo said that military action against Iraq "was seen as inevitable" and that Bush wanted to remove Saddam "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," weapons of mass destruction.

The  memo said that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The report was not disavowed by the British government.  And even in light of this revelation Tony Blair was elected to serve his third term as Prime Minister.  The news and press in the U.S. treated the revelation of this memo and its contents with little less concern than the daily weather forecast.

Now it should also be noted that at the time of the memo, Bush officials were insisting in chorus that they had NO plans to attack Iraq. And yet it is known that Iraq was on Bush's radar screen when he took office in 2001, perhaps even before. Books by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the White House's National Security Council, both attest to early signs -- even before 9/11 -- that war against Iraq was high on Bush's agenda.

In the run-up to the war, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice used appearances on Sunday television shows and in speeches to friendly audiences to start the drumbeat that Iraq had unconventional weapons and direct ties to Osama bin Laden. 

As the memo, which is no longer quite so secret,  pointed out,  "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Can any political leader, especially the one currently residing in the White House, and who continues to lie with impunity, be considered credible?

Neanderthals in Kansas

A book for neuron tingling:

Sean B. Carroll  -  Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom

As science continues to advance the new field of Evolutionary Developmental  biology, or Evo Devo, is the subject of this fascinating new book by Sean B. Carroll.  In the not far distant past developmental biology consisted of embryology and the manner in which living things develop from a single fertilized cell to a fully functioning organism.  And that was about it.  But advances in genetics has spawned something new in which paleontology, genetics, embryology, molecular biology and comparative anatomy are all sharing the spotlight – Evo Devo.  Now evolution can be traced in step-by-step genetic transcriptions and protein translations.  Rather than speculation about how insects developed flight, those genes which were involved in making wings can be demonstrated.

The title of the book comes of course from Darwin’s Origin of Species — “… from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”  Patterns within nature, from spiders to butterflies to chimps and humans, and how they developed are all here and presented in an immanently enjoyable read. 

Am reminded of the concluding paragraph from “EARTHDANCE: Living Systems in Evolution”  by Elisabet Sahtouris which I also recently read:

“The more we learn about nature, including human nature, the more we can see that our living parent planet and our whole living cosmos are far more beautiful and awesome in the reality of their self-creation than is any myth we made as we struggled to develop our knowledge. At last our scientific and religious quests can merge in the recognition that conscious, sacred, self-creating nature, both Gaian and cosmic, is our physical and spiritual source, the wellspring of our ancient inspiration to love, and the experienced guide we have always sought -- the guide we need more than ever now that we stand on the brink of maturity.”

Myths are an integral part of who we are as a species.  Is the creation myth of the Australian Aborigines during the ‘time of the Dreaming’ any less valid than the Hindu or Judeo-Christian ?  And in fact the Old Testament contains a creation myth other than the more familiar Adam and Eve story in Genesis.  Scattered throughout the books of the Old Testament are references to the great battle of the creator-god Yahweh with the monster of chaos, the Leviathan, which led to the formation of the earth. And both of these creation myths were based on the earlier Babylonian Creation Epic.   Every group of people on the planet devised a story to explain their existence.  All are charming, fascinating, and yet in the final analysis, all are myths.

Now we come face to face with the reality of contemporary middle America, and an entire state bent on making a fool of itself, again.  Kansas, and its fundamentalist hijacked State Board of Education has decided to have another try at replacing any mention of evolution by instituting some nonsense called ‘intelligent design’, which is a repackaged edition of  ‘creationism’, the teaching of which the Supreme Court outlawed in 1987.  Both contend, in face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, that the earth was created no more than 6,000 years ago.

As a teacher [retired]  I love both myth and fable and understand their value in the development of human society, but am not about to confuse them with fact, evidently something that some contemporary Kansas neanderthals seem incapable of comprehending.