The New York Times carries a story that describes events that make Bush repellent to some people. And Bush will never get it.

More than a week after Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled this city, workers newly assigned to collect the dead stopped on a downtown street. There before them, on its back, lay another corpse, all but baked into a pose of submission by several hot suns.
The workers placed the corpse in a zippered black bag somewhat larger than the kind used to protect rented tuxedoes. They slid their collection into the back of their vehicle, closed the door, and drove off into the ebbing chaos.

So began one dead man’s journey toward eternal rest, a journey that continues to this day.

Read the whole thing.

The Seattle Times has the call, quoting Christian Beckner, who runs Homeland Security Watch:

“If a terrorist group were able to knock the NSA offline, or disrupt one of the nation’s busiest airports, or shut down the most important oil pipeline in the nation, the impact would be perceived as devastating,” Beckner said. “And yet we’ve essentially let these things happen — or almost happen — to ourselves.”

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation “D” for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

“I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm,” said Casey Dinges, the society’s managing director of external affairs.

Maybe if it was in Iraq…..

I got the kids into the car this morning, a milestone on the project timeline that is “get out of the house, get going”. The kids are in a Boy’s and Girl’s club this week. They do some field trips and do some make work projects. It is labeled “Science and Technology Camp” but it seems to be geared for the lowest common denominator. No matter, the kids have fun and I’m more interested in them learning social skills than science.

The milestone of getting into the car was absent JMan’s cap. Today is the end of the week field trip. They go to a beach somewhere. I got the kids a couple of hats, nothing fancy, a cotton baseball cap. I couldn’t find JMan’s this morning. He used it early in the week, but it went missing this morning. I thought about it and decided to let him wear mine.

My cap is nothing special. It was a freebie from some film commission. I like it because it is different and free of branding. If I lost it, and I have lost others, I would probably not miss it terribly. But I don’t like the hassle of finding another one.

I told JMan that he could use my cap and he said, “I’ll try not to lose it.” He is now seven, and I remember the times when he was younger and I loaned him my cap with that admonishment. I felt a little like a schmuck in that he would say that straight away. I wanted to hold him to my heart to ease the ache I felt there. I was driving, so I reached behind me and patted his leg.

Being a parent has moments like this of bewildering complexity where there is no roadmap for how to feel what we feel. It is another one of the things that happens to me as a parent that I cannot explain to the kids. There is chagrin for the image that I might be leaving with him, and love for the boy that is developing empathy.

As if it were ever possible, I’ll try not to lose them.

Slip of the hand or ideology run amuck?

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

We’ll see.

Somewhere, where Jesus is, he is thinking of hastening the Apocalypse just to shut up people like Senator James Imhofe of Oklahoma.

“What’s happened there is nothing short of a miracle,” he said.

If what has happened in Iraq is a miracle, where does that leave raising someone from the dead?  Curing leprosy?  Feeding 5,000 with some loaves and fishes?

Senator, when you can feed 5,000 Iraqis with a convoy, I’ll be impressed.

Adam Hanft writing about Gunter Grass at HuffPo, says

Therein lies the problem. I’m not convinced it’s healthy, in the long-term, for a society to pin the label of moral Zeus on anyone. Perhaps that galvanizing and oxygenating force is necessary in the short-term, when the culture has been through a wrenching trauma and an institutionalized order doesn’t exist yet. Post-war Germany was an example of this existential void, and so was post-apartheid South Africa. Grass and Mandela rose to those moments, but by doing so they were created an ethical aristocracy that was beyond criticism.

Truly healthy societies don’t draw their moral authority from a single individual, or even a few of them. Evolved societies and cultures are able to situate and draw their moral conclusions from within. At its best, America has had that internal locus of rightness, which is in many ways a direct descendant of our founding meritocracy. The promise of a jury of our peers would be meaningless without it. When America goes wrong it’s because our ethical GPS goes haywire.

This is what I have been thinking about for a while. The needless American incursion into Iraq is an example of that compass going wrong. When I think of the sacrifices that have been made for our blessed experiment in self-governance, it seems that things like this Iraq war devalue those sacrifices. We fought two forms of secular totalitarianism in the last century. One war was by needs violent, the other violent in turns. Blessed with 20-20 hindsight, it would appear that the violence of the latter could have been avoided.

We face a new form of totalitarianism, and it is based on religion. It is important for us to face it, but this war in Iraq is a diversion from that task. Saddam was a bad dictator, but he wasn’t the issue. Our goal was to win them over by showing them the superiority of rule by the polis. What they are seeing is a coup in action, a polity freed from its ethical moorings.

I am reminded of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

If Bush the Christian believes in a Judgement Day, I wonder what he thinks God will say to this incursion into Iraq and the deaths and destruction there?

I don’t know how this war will impact the lives of my children, but I don’t think it will be for the better. Lincoln finished with:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Amen.

From Cosmic Variance:

The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe. We can tell a story that fits all the known data, in which ordinary matter (every particle ever detected in any experiment) constitutes only about 5% of the energy of the universe, with 25% being dark matter and 70% being dark energy. The challenge for early-twentyfirst-century cosmology will actually be to understand the nature of these mysterious dark components. A beautiful new result illuminating (if you will) the dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 is an important step in this direction. (Here’s the press release, and an article in the Chandra Chronicles.)

Well, well, well.

Poll info from the same day.

CNN headline:

Poll: Opposition to Iraq war at all-time high

USA Today headline:

Bush rating best in six months

Now here’s the rest of the story.

From CNN:

Just 35 percent of 1,033 adults polled say they favor the war in Iraq; 61 percent say they oppose it — the highest opposition noted in any CNN poll since the conflict began more than three years ago.

Bush’s disapproval rating exceeds his approval, 57 percent to 42 percent.

That’s in the same ballpark as was found in an August 2-3 poll: Bush garnered a 40 percent approval.

And that was up slightly from a 37 percent approval in a poll carried out June 14-15.

Fewer than half of respondents (44 percent) say they believe Bush is honest and trustworthy; 54 percent do not.

And just 41 percent say they agree with Bush on issues, versus 57 percent who say they disagree.

Americans are about evenly split on whether their commander-in-chief understands complex issues, with 47 percent saying yes, and 51 percent saying no.

From USA Today:

The arrest of bomb plotters in London has helped buoy President Bush’s approval rating and the prospects for Republican congressional candidates in November.

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday put Bush’s approval rating at 42%, the highest in six months. His approval rating on handling terrorism was 55%, the highest in more than a year.

Some Republican bag man, on assignment at USA Today, tells the facts, but not the truth.

In a letter to a friend recently, I countered the saw of “history is written by the victors” with “history is written by the aggressive.” Steve Clemons has a good example of that. He tells the story of to men in Japan.

I know both of these writers/intellectuals — and Komori has established a kind of franchise on the debate about Japan’s historical memory. He is the authoritative right-wing commentator on the politics of Japan’s war memory and on Japan-China relations. He’s part of a group that understandably argues that Japan needs to get beyond its kow-towing to China and other nations in the region over World War II — particularly given the behavior of the Chinese government towards its own people in the 1960s and 1970s.

Which one is the more aggressive?

I mostly agree with Tamamoto’s analysis of Japan’s foreign policy portfolio — but Komori has put out the clarion call to zealots and fanatical right-wingers in Japan to protest Tamamoto as an an anti-Japanese, extreme leftist intellectual, according to one observer, “in essence a panda-hugging traitor.”

Komori obviously learned more than English while in DC.