Contemplate Neurogenesis

Over a lifetime, the human mind can evolve wonderfully. The brain itself evolves to meet the demands placed on it. First it creates new connections on the fibers that extend from the brain cells. Then the cells grow new fibers. And now, science has discovered, the brain grows new brain cells. Neurogenesis, the process is called.

This may not seem that big a deal. Muscles grow new muscle cells. But the teaching has been for years that nerve tissue, once damaged, cannot regrow. We are born with one set of brain cells, and we must preserve them fearfully, we were taught. It turns out, though, that those of us who were fearlessly blowing our brain cells away were growing new ones as the old ones died.

Brain cells are born in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. The new cells then migrate to where the brain is working hardest. They howdy up the other cells, begin networking, and get involved.

Where the mind works the hardest, there grows the brain. We become more like ourselves each day. Our own nature being the best, we grow chauvinistic, xenophobic, racist as we compare ourselves to others not so fortunate as to be us. Whatever we do with our brain, we do better and better and better.

Playing chess, for example, requires some centers of the brain, but not others. Emotions must be suppressed, so that pure rationality plays the game. Successful rationality seeks further success. There can be a loss of the emotional side of a chessplayer's life experience. Soldiers can discover a similar loss. Studying flowers may help them recover by focusing their minds on the living and the vulnerable.

When a mind is not exploring new alternatives, not making decisions to try new things, do the baby brain cells it produces then reinforce existing behavior?

For some people, a repeated decision to wash one's hands before doing something can reinforce the parts of the brain that the mind used to make that decision, and soon one washes for everything. A mind like this is automatically patterning.

People who rarely choose new paths develop habits which they then depend upon to guide them. Ruts.

If, however, available choices become broader and broader as so often happens these days, ruts may erode as minds reach to grasp new levels of understanding and brains grow new cells to support that reach.

A mind that gets started seeing the humor in everything can connect emotion and logic. A continued focus on all parts at once can develop the habit of being whole.

Want to grow your feeling side? As you walk down the street, glance at each person who passes and try to think of the word that best describes how he or she feels.

Just a little hobby. I tried it. After five weeks, suddenly I'm seeing into people like I've never seen before. One can invent new hobbies that open one up.

But how can one keep from merely echoing the known? How can one become what one can not yet conceive?

This question will require some contemplation.

The Evidence Gathers

The evidence gathers all by itself these days, like blood congealing or iron filings forming into a magic flower in a magnetic field.

As modern data, the evidence replicates itself using e-mail echoers and data maven bloggers, not to mention those unwilling participants in evil who bring emails home to cover their tails, ready to be whistle-blowers if their teakettle gets tipped. Anything leaked or discovered jumps into the pool and gets shared and known and shared again, distributed far and wide, far beyond anyone who has any hope of ever being interested in it.

Bloggers aggregate facts into competing theories, which argue with each other until some shared understanding of the real is formed. Everyone is trying to skim everyone else's cream, to combine the combinable in new ways and so to add a further layer of understanding to the known. As illusions fall, the cream of truth rises to the surface.

"What questions would you like Congress to ask Mr. Gonzales?" bloggers inquire, and questions to be asked then vie for popularity. Congress stands advised, handed a menu of questions its constituents want to explore.

The evidence drives the process.

A Second "Secret Surveillance Program"?

Did Gonzales' Department of Justice have more than one secret surveillance program watching US citizens?

Could one secret surveillance program be watching us, a program that people know about and which can be named, and yet there also be another program that our supposed leaders don't admit to knowledge of and dare not name?

Attorney General Gonzales' latest message to Congress suggests the possibility.

Back in 2006, Gonzales told Congress that the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, according to the Washington Post. (Hat tip to TM)

But two days ago, former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey described (video) a remarkable case of just such a controversy regarding a secret program. Mr. Comey and several other senior appointees threatened to resign if a program continued that they considered illegal. When they went directly to the President, he ordered it changed.

No controversy?

Either Gonzales lied in November or Mr. Comey was speaking about a different secret program. Mr. Gonzales' program is titled with caps, while Mr. Comey was careful not to name his program, other than to say that it was secret.

Are there two programs? If two, could there then be three? Four? If there are many and not one, the friction around one could provide smoke cover for the others. Are there secret secret secret secret programs?

Soon we will know. The Senate Judiciary Committee asked Mr. Gonzales if he would like to reword his testimony. He responded that he is sticking with what he said.

So there clearly appear to be at least two secret citizen surveillance programs, one whose name can be stated, another so secret that it cannot be named.

Secrecy creates an environment that permits screw-ups. Fallout from mistakes can be limited. Short-term solutions aggregate into policy. This guarantees cycles of the Fukovsky-Fukupsky effect. Secrecy cannot help but wave a flag.

To not part of the known is to ever be at risk of curiosity, in the Age of Transparency.

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Glorifying all this scandal is the fact that Mr. Bush, who it would more and more appear temporarily occupies the Office of the President, sent Mr. Gonzales and Andrew Card to Attorney General Ashcroft's hospital bedside to obtain his signature on an approval for the secret secret surveillance program at a time when Ashcroft had handed his authority over to his deputy, Mr. Comey.

Mr. Bush had apparently called ahead to the hospital room to tell Ashcroft's wife that his people were coming. She called Comey, he raced to the scene and ran up the stairs. Ashcroft and Comey had previously agreed that the surveillance program was not legal. The signature was not obtained, the emissaries left in a huff.

Mr. Bush knew that Comey was the acting Attorney General, but he tried to get a signature from Ashcroft. Criminal obstruction of justice?

Congress will have to decide.

Democrats Guarantee The Future Of Blogging

Lobbying reform? What lobbying reform?

The Minority Majority

The two largest minorities in America - Hispanics and Afro-Americans - can together elect the next president.

Together. Merely by being minorities, they share a common experience. Members of both minorities see careers trapped under glass ceilings. They share a power vacuum at the top. The old, white men who danced on the stage at the last Republican debate were to them like rag dolls shaking in the wind.

A majority waiting to happen.

The Bursting Dam

Are Republicans getting nailed as Justice rights itself?

"Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak, the Chicago alderman who led a Republican clique that blocked much of Mayor Washington's good works is now under indictment.

The new Republican governor of Nevada is facing an FBI probe for money laundering.

Ben Stevens, the son of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, is on the verge of being indicted.

The FBI just searched the home of Representative John Doolittle of California.

Timothy Griffin - the Karl Rove assistant who was arbitrarily swapped into the position of US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas by the firing of his predecessor - US Attorney Timothy Griffin himself may soon be under investigation for felony voter fraud.

US Attorneys now need to prove their independence. The world is watching.


Crimes committed by the Justice Department in pursuit of Republican election victory continue to surface. In Milwaukee, an innocent woman has been ruined, her home taken, her reputation destroyed so that a Republican could be elected governor.

Surely, she will sue. Such a civil suit could document crimes and even more crimes in the Department.


Meanwhile, a long list of other branches of government that were recruited into ensuring Republican victory suggests that violations of the Hatch Act may abound.

Another golden opportunity for US Attorneys to prove their non-partisan professionalism.


A thousand crimes beget a million questions.

The Deconstruction Era

Rumsfeld is gone. The new Secretary of Defense thinks we should leave Iraq by summer if no major progress is seen. The war will be an admitted loss.

Attorney General Gonzales now appears not only to have given control of the hiring and firing of the Justice Department's fangs - their U.S. Attorneys - to Karl Rove in the White House, he also appears to have limited all hiring to Republicans. A Republican Justice Department.

This means that in the Civil Rights Division only two of the fifty attorneys are African-American. Even the interns had to be Republicans.

Needless to say, many of them did their part to fulfill the Republican agenda. Rove gave the word early on that the name of the game would be "voter fraud".

So right before the election, a number of U.S. Attorneys across the nation announced investigations and indictments for Democratic voter fraud. Many were directed against Acorn, a grass-roots organization that registers voters. The stink was enough to turn several elections from likely Democratic victories to Republican victories. The fraud cases were later thrown out of court for lack of evidence.

Now it appears that this was a concerted effort by one party in the election to use a national resource - the Justice Department - to help that party win.

There are certainly criminal indictments to come. But what about civil suits?

Justice falsely indicted Acorn. Will Justice be sued? Karl Rove subverted Justice so that they would falsely indict Acorn. Will he be sued? Rove acted on behalf of the Republican Party. Will they be sued?

The Justice Department has an internal rule against interfering in elections. The cases they brought, they say, were an "unwritten exception to the rule". One wonders how many other "unwritten exceptions" they have to the rules. Can they write them down? Make a list? Can they say why they have rules?

How soon before law firms are tripping over each other, hoping to get Acorn to sue for big bucks? Congress is eliciting testimony. It is a public record. Shouldn't be long.


But the Justice attack on voter registration workers was only half the show. Rigged touch-screen voting machines were the other half.

While the Acorn indictments may have dampened the vote, they also dampened peoples' expectations about the vote. That made it easier for people to accept the kind of surprise ending that can come when voting machines are rigged to guarantee a vote for one side. It would then appear that disgusted voters sat on their hands and didn't vote.

A one-two punch. Unfortunately, the rigged machines were so obvious that they attracted attention, and the changes to the vote began to fall apart when the returns proved dubious. Both their own voter fraud and the phony indictments have proven a profound embarrassment for some Republicans, who themselves may now sit on their hands and choose not to vote.

Bush's administration is coming down piece by piece. Rumsfeld is gone. Gonzales is tied up preparing testimony for Congress. His minions are resigning. Impeachment talk is afoot, and bills have been filed. Head by head, bad government is being deconstructed. As the bad falls away, the good remains.

"The Party Of The People, By The People, And For The People" is at risk of losing its Lincoln heritage. If a certain tall young lawyer from Illinois starts using phrases like "shall not perish from the earth" in his campaign speeches, then surely Lincoln will belong to another party, a party of the people.

All Roads Lead To Rove

Karl Rove, the President's insanely happy chief advisor, a man whom Bush calls "Turd Blossom" because he can make poop look good, is getting more and more fingers pointed at him these days.

First there was the Valerie Plame trial and its uncontroverted testimony that Karl Rove had outed a CIA agent to cover administration lies. Not the CIA's idea of how to serve the nation, one would think. So far, he's gotten away with it. He still has his security clearance. But his actions were transparently against the law, and sooner or later he will need to reconcile his life with this past.

Now it appears that Mr. Rove may also have been exerting influence inappropriate for a Presidential advisor over at the Justice Department. There, Attorney General Gonzales delegated to two junior staffers, Monica Goodling and Kyle Thompson, the task of hiring and firing U.S. Attorneys. Mr. Rove appears to have guided their work from the White House. Republicans got appointments, Democrats and Independents did not. That is illegal.

The White House has managed to lose Mr. Rove's firing-related e-mail. Congress has subpoenaed the Justice Department for their copies. Just as every stick has two ends, every email has two copies. At least two.

Rove also tried to involve staff in fifteen different departments of the government in supporting Republican election candidates. That's definitely not what they're there for. If he also involved them in hiring based on peoples' political preferences, he may have been party to more crime.


Republicans who come up for re-election in 2008 are distancing themselves from the Bush debacle and becoming independents. Contributions can go to them directly. Money sent to the Republican Party will more and more go toward legal defense as the scandals unfold. That giving will be a contribution to defend what the party has been, not a gift toward any future.

Also, democrats are taking their donors.


A certain Ms. Palfrey, provider of feminine charmers for a fee, with the help of ABC News has disclosed that the head of U.S AID, Randall Tobias, availed himself of her services, even as he

"...oversaw a controversial policy advocated by the religious right that required any US-based group receiving anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution “loyalty oath." "

This man needs the gift of moral insight. May God so grant.


The 2004 Ohio presidential vote - the one that put Bush over the top - is beginning to look very suspicious.

"On the night of 2-3 November, 2004, the computer designated to count Ohio votes was cut out of the loop. Its web address was diverted to a private company in Chattanooga, TN, named SMARTech.

It’s easy to ‘impersonate’ someone else’s website. This is a common ruse used in conjunction with emails that ‘phish’ for your financial information. But such scams can be detected by inspecting the address bar at the top of most browsers. For example, the screen may look just like Washington Mutual’s login for bank customers, but the address is not http://WaMu.com, but instead points to a site (in India!) labeled only as http://202.71.146.148/.s/.wamusk/index.php.

The web redirection on Election Night of 2004 went a step beyond this: Not only did the official website of the Ohio Department of State look just right, but it had the right address: http://election.sos.state.oh.us. Any citizen or press service looking for real time election results from the state of Ohio would have been directed here. In every sense, this SMARTech site became the official vote tabulation for the state of Ohio.

If the name SMARTech sounds vaguely familiar, it is because the same web server, run by the same company, was in the news last month. It is the site that handled the email accounts for White House aides who did not want their communications to be subject to Congressional scrutiny."

If this is so, then the legitimacy of Bush's election is undone. He truly is merely the man who occupies the office of the President. He knows it, and he knows that we know it.


Meanwhile, Congress has discovered that it can put reluctant witnesses in jail. It has in its rules a rarely-used power to hold witnesses guilty of inherent contempt for refusing subpoenas. Mr. Gonzales is not the sole enforcer of the law.

He could resign. But any appointee who resigns under Congressional fire will need to be replaced under Congressional scrutiny. Mr. Bush has apparently decided to go with the staff he's got, rather than the staff that might help him get beyond his present predicament. So Gonzales will stay. For now.

If one is following the path that God has ordained, then, some think, one need not fear failure. God will not allow it. If God be for us, who can be against us? Therefore, consider not failure! Such souls could remember, though, that God will provide difficult moments sufficient for one's own enlightenment.

Green Zone Turns Red

Four people died on Wednesday, as for the third day in a row, insurgent rockets exploded inside Baghdad's "Green Zone", the specially fortified area that holds both the American authorities and the protege Iraq Government.

Red blood has spilled in the Green Zone. And not for the first time. In March, two people were killed in a rocket attack. Less than a week later two suicide vests were found, smuggled into the zone. On April 12th, in the Iraqi parliament cafeteria, a suicide bomber killed eight.

Is the Green Zone under seige? Says the Philippine Information Agency regarding Wednesday's killings,

"Three days of continuous mortar and rocket fire into the heavily fortified Green Zone in Iraq finally had one rocket streaming into the zone and found Idulsa and three other foreign nationals in the open."

Sounds like a siege. Or maybe somebody is boiling a frog?

Meanwhile, the Iraq Parliament still hasn't passed that darned oil bill that would give their oil resources to the big oil companies to develop. The Kurds pulled out of the plan at the end of April, as the text had been changed. The Sunnis don't like it, either. The Shiites cannot pass it all by themselves.

The Parliament is planning a long summer recess, infuriating the U.S. Congress, which should be more understanding, since it takes its own summer recess. If rockets continue to land in the Green Zone, Parliament may adjourn sooner.

One Republican candidate - Governor Tommy Thompson - proposed at the Republican Debate last night that the Iraq oil money be split three ways, with one third going to the national government, one third to the provinces, and one third to each and every citizen. If we had only done this four years ago, where might we be today!

Secretary of State Condi Rice is for the first time talking to Iraq's neighboring states at a conference in Egypt, discussing their involvement in the future of Iraq. After we leave, perhaps.

Senators Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd have announced that they will be introducing a bill to revoke Mr. Bush's war powers, to take effect in October, 2007. Mrs. Clinton has been criticized for voting to enable Bush's war - now she's making up for lost time.

And the Justice Department is coming apart at the seams. Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were given the power to hire and fire US Attorneys - and took instructions from the White House. Hires were limited to Republicans. Monica broke the law.

Stay tuned.

Won The War, Lost The Occupation

Four years ago today, Mr. Bush, who occupies the office of the President, turned aside an aircraft carrier bringing war-weary sailors into San Diego just beyond view of the harbor so he could be photographed landing on it in a plane without the city in the background, as if the ship were still far out at sea.

He could have arrived by helicopter, but the plane was more photogenic. He jumped out of the plane wearing a sexy jumpsuit that emphasized his genitals - "codpiece" is the word - as if he himself were a fighter, rather than one who had walked away from his term of service.

He gave a resounding welcome to the heroes, a banner in the background reading "Mission Accomplished" provided by the White House, although they modestly denied it at first.

He had slowed the boat and extended the tour of duty of 5000 sailors by one day so he could sleep on their boat overnight, but they still applauded.

The war had been won. Mission Accomplished.


Then we stayed. And we stayed and we stayed.

And as we stayed, the country fell apart. For four years we have stayed, and our war of occupation has destroyed the country we had wanted to become our friend.

It has also destroyed our military, our financial health, and has just about destroyed the party that put Mr. Bush into office.

Won the election, lost the Presidency.