Friends of mine will wonder, “Where were you when all this was going on?” I can only answer, “Well, my head was up my ass, you see….”

Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber have launched their first issue of “Underground,” a comic book mini-series about a woman attempting to preserve an ancient subterranean cave from the tourist industry. Things go bad quickly, thanks to hasty dynamiting by eager developers, putting lives in jeopardy. Parker is a witty and smart writer, and Lieber draws action-packed scenes with a strong attention to details, both geological and human. Highly recommended.

Read a preview online or download a PDF of the first issue. And give Steve some love: He and his brilliant author-librarian wife Sara Ryan were burgled of their laptops recently — a loss that I can only imagine feels like a lobotomy.

Click the cartoon to read it full size.

Unrelated thoughts….
Today I watched several hours of MSNBC and CNN. Don’t ask me why. It might be some masochistic streak in my personality. Or I am secretly addicted to non-stop updates on all things Michael Jackson, Sarah Palin, and the endless speculation about the impact of Al Franken becoming a potential 60th vote for Democrats in the Senate (provided Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd are ever well enough to enter the chamber.) Because that is all I got, despite a new show ever hour featuring a new batch of reporters and personalities and pundits. Any mention that 4,000 U.S. troops initiated a full-on assault against the Taliban in Afghanistan today? Not. A. Peep. But I did hear that Sarah Palin challenged President Obama to a jog-off.

Hey, whaddaya know - a new cartoon.

Click the link to make it bigger. And more legible.

I forgot to blog about this when I posted it to the In Contempt site. I’ve been out of practice for the past 2 months, during which I got sucked into the twitter-facebook warp. They make it really easy to just post links to news stories that get my panties all up in a knot, so it’s really addicting. Last week I resumed regular blogging; it exercises my brain enough to come up with a half-way decent cartoon idea. But it got me wondering if we will see a slight reduction in personal blogging in favor of more tweeting and facebooking, much as we have seen the decline of zines in the wake of website and blog creation. Zines are still around, but they are nowhere near the “scene” they used to be prior to the popularization of the Internet.

The Supreme Court refused yesterday to hear a case brought by a student Bible study group against their school district, which refused to charter them as a school club.

The school refused to let the group be chartered as a school club. They cited the group’s name, the fact that students would have to pledge to Jesus Christ to vote in the club and that allowing the club in would bring religion into the school. The club’s would-be founders then sued the Kent School District, claiming discrimination.

Couldn’t this have been more easily resolved? Like, say, drop the pledge to Jesus requirement? Open up the study to anyone interested in the Bible?

After all, it should be pretty obvious that, for better or worse, the Bible is an important literary work in the history of Western Civilization. A lot of claims have been made based on its contents that people have used to justify slavery and its abolition; war and peace; Jim Crow and Civil Rights; Creationism and The Big Bang; monarchy and democracy; burning heretics at the stake and religious tolerance; overthrowing the State and imposing Absolute Rule; etc, etc, etc.

I seriously doubt such discussion is what this Bible study group had in mind. (The price of religious fealty for admission gives a clue.) The difficulty we have in even allowing space for such discussions in public education — opposition coming from religious zealots and from church-and-state separators alike (though not at all alike, I should add; the latter just want to keep religious indoctrination at bay) — speaks volumes about the low level of religious maturity extent in our culture. Just too politically loaded.

Speaking of using the Bible to justify dumb shit, Barry posts an interesting excerpt on the various pro-slavery arguments that Americans used prior to the Civil War. Instructive stuff.

The fundamental flaw of American exceptionalism is it assumes the United States can and should control events in the world. As a wealthy and powerful force in global relations, we certainly have obligations and contributions to make — particularly in areas of humanitarian aid, fighting diseases, and assisting developing countries meet technological challenges — but the limits of our power are much larger than generally assumed by foreign policy makers and the think tanks who harangue them.

If by now you are rolling your eyes and saying, “duh!” then you may underestimate how powerful is the myth of American power and leadership. Today American combat forces are leaving Iraq, save a contingent of 50,000 troops (thus begging the question, what constitutes “leaving”?), an unstable state in its wake, en route to Pakistan and Afghanistan in hopes of accomplishing a similarly dubious feat. Have we learned anything?

A new CNN poll suggests that at least the taste for direct intervention has soured for most Americans, who deplore the events in Iran, but do not see any constructive role for the U.S. beyond tut-tutting human rights abuses. The Iraq experience has taught us at least this lesson: democracy cannot be imposed from above.

Yet there are so many more lessons to be learned. Look at Honduras. As the NYTimes reports, American responses to the recent coup are highly strained by past support of brutal regimes in Latin America — not to mention more recent imperial games:

The United States has long had strong ties to the Honduras military and helps train Honduran military forces. Those close ties have put the Obama administration in a difficult position, opening it up to accusations that it may have turned a blind eye to the pending coup. Administration officials strongly deny the charges, and Mr. Obama’s quick response to the Honduran president’s removal has differed sharply from the actions of the Bush administration, which in 2002 offered a rapid, tacit endorsement of a short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez.

…snip…

During a more formal meeting afterward, they discussed Mr. Zelaya’s plans for a referendum that would have laid the groundwork for an assembly to remake the Constitution, a senior administration official said.

But American officials did not believe that Mr. Zelaya’s plans for the referendum were in line with the Constitution, and were worried that it would further inflame tensions with the military and other political factions, administration officials said.

Even so, one administration official said that while the United States thought the referendum was a bad idea, it did not justify a coup.

“On the one instance, we’re talking about conducting a survey, a nonbinding survey; in the other instance, we’re talking about the forcible removal of a president from a country,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity during a teleconference call with reporters.

As the situation in Honduras worsened, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon Jr., along with Hugo Llorens, the American ambassador to Honduras, spoke with Mr. Zelaya, military officials and opposition leaders, administration officials said. Then things reached a boil last Wednesday and Thursday, when Mr. Zelaya fired the leader of the armed forces and the Supreme Court followed up with a declaration that Mr. Zelaya’s planned referendum was illegal.

The White House and the State Department had Mr. Llorens “talk with the parties involved, to tell them, ‘You have to talk your way through this,’ ” a senior administration official said Monday. “ ‘You can’t do anything outside the bounds of your constitution.’ ”

The take-away lesson here is two-fold: Just as our past military support of anti-democratic forces compromises our credibility in the present, our continued relationships with these forces undermines our better intentions. We cannot control our surrogates; they have their own agendas, and they will use our support for their own ends, which have a tendency to undermine our national interests (however defined.) Surely Saddam Hussein taught us at least that.

Following the more violent failures of the BushAdmin, a more strategic and diplomatic school of American leadership has come forward, as Obama seeks to extend American influence through more cooperative regional relationships. In some respects, this is an improvement over the so-called “neo-con” school of ideological bullying, but it is not much more “realistic” or any less prone to violence against innocent lives caught between their local oppressive regimes and the global interests of more powerful countries.

What is often missing in national debates over foreign policy — on the one side, “soft power” liberalism; on the other, “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” — is any argument that in most cases we have no role to play whatsoever. That the internal affairs of other countries are simply beyond our control, most often not even our business, although quite often made worse by the covert machinations of our military, diplomatic and intelligence agencies. As both Iran and Honduras demonstrate, our past actions in the Middle East and Latin America have ongoing legacies; the chickens are still coming home to roost, as it were. As our predator drones wreak havoc in the lives of Pakistani villagers, shouldn’t we be wary of hatching any more nasty chickens?

Cartoon by Chris Madden

NASA has uncovered the original analog tapes recording the first moon landing 40 years after they were lost shortly after they were shot. According to the Sunday Express, the tapes will provide a clearer picture of the Apollo 11 crew’s activities than the blurrier footage we grown accustomed to.

However, viewers have only ever seen such poor quality footage because the original analogue tapes containing the pictures beamed direct from the lunar surface were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

Instead, a poor quality copy made from a 16mm camera pointing at a heavily compressed image on a black and white TV screen has been the only record of the event.

Sounds great. As soon as they are up on the Internetx, I’ll force my kids to watch them with awe and wonder. “Feel the AWE! Feel the WONDER!” Then I will wax rhapsodic about Man’s innate drive to explore and conquer peoples with less developed military technologies. “Look at the stars, children,” I will intone sonorously with a slight catch in my voice. “That way lies our Manifest Density.”

Actually, I totally support space exploration, including a trip to Mars for study and possible colonization, should we ever get the technology challenges worked out. Sometimes I think fellow advocates get a little carried away.

Speaking of getting carried away, the Sunday Express places great confidence in the new tapes to perform what is probably miraculous:

Crucially, they could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

On the contrary, I predict another forty years of even wilder conspiracy theories. Just start with the question, “Why are they just finding these tapes, now, huhhhh? How could a vast bureaucracy like NASA misplace evidence from what is supposed to be the biggest feat of exploration since Magellan, huh? HUH?” Then let your paranoid fantasies fly free.

Exploring the caves of southwestern Germany, archaeologists have uncovered some amazing artifacts of early human culture. Last May, a so-called “Venus” figurine dating 35,000 years old is the earliest known representation of the female figure — well, okay, not a figure most women would recognize, but we should grant the out-sized proportions whatever artistic license and sacred meaning its creators intended. This week Dr. Nicholas Conrad of the University of Tübingen (Germany, duh), who uncovered the Venus, reported evidence of a 30,000 year old flute made of bird bone, the earliest found evidence of human musicality.

These findings are important, and awesome, and the more we can find, the better.

Here’s the “but” (cuz it’s me writing, so expect a “but”): Why does Conrad suggest that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated“? Let’s parse that statement a little. First, note the “one of” qualification. Given the history of previous racist assumptions held by earlier practitioners of his field of inquiry, Conrad is right to imply that the origins of human culture are probably spread throughout the world; in particular, Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and elsewhere along the path of human migration over tens of thousands of years.

My beef is with the term “originated.” How do we know that the bone flute artifact is not just one stop on the path of our species’ musical “evolution”? Bone tends to be more hardy than other likely materials for flute construction, such as wood, which would succumb to rot or to reclamation by the jungle. If our friends at Wikipedia are correct (they’re getting more reliable), homo sapiens occupied most of Africa some 100-150,000 years ago, and began migrating out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. Our species is roughly 200,000 years old. Geologically speaking, that’s a blink of an eye, but in terms of human development, a very long time for a species to move about, settle, hunt, gather, develop social relations, and cohere group identity, in which culture plays a central role. We can at least speculate that there are several kinds of musical instrument lost to history beneath the fecund soils of sub-Saharan African jungles or the sands of the Sahara itself as it creeps southward.

I’m not accusing Carlson of racism or of making racist assumptions, mind you. One could certainly make an argument (provided more archaelogical evidence, of course) that European forms of musicality originated in Germany, or that a significant branch of human musical invention took off from this point. It’s more a matter of care in how we phrase the significance of these findings, because they contribute to a larger impression of human cultural development, which in turn has had a significant influence on how we understand human evolution. The NYTimes articles I have linked to above show typical Euro-centric conflation of “evolution” and human creativity. Their author John Noble Wilford is an experienced science reporter and is no doubt aware of debates on this issue, yet here again we find a very casual use of the term “evolution” with all its cultural assumptions of a linear progression from lower to higher orders — of being, of consciousness, of sophistication, and so on.

This progression myth diverges significantly from the Darwinian theory of descent through modification in response to environmental challenges to survival and via genetic diversity that enables adaptation. The roles of chance, luck, and time play significantly here. Intentionality, not so much. When art evolves, humans move it forward in response to inherited conventions, prevailing theories, and the cultural needs of the moment; this is an active participation with history and context. As with our technology and our ability to transform our environment dramatically (including our food, for better or worse), art has an impact on our social relations, worldview, concepts of history and humanity, part of feedback loop with the actions we take in the world.

In short, art (and science, religion, and other aspects of culture) affects human development — as social creatures, not as biological creatures. I don’t rule out the possibility that a cumulative effect of our artifice — the net effect of our impact on our living environment — will have a future influence on development, provided we have the necessary genes to allow for whatever adaptation is needed. Certainly global warming is clear evidence of our transformative potential, though not a very good or “artistic” one. And in more recent times, we have been fucking with the gene pool to make our descendants more resistant to diseases, or to take on attributes we find preferable (oh yeah, no bigotry problems here, nooooo.) So far, however, these biological changes have taken a very long time, and will more than likely take another Very Long Time before we “evolve” into another species altogether.

Barring extinction, of course.

Old tech called it “above the fold.”

BTW - Political cartoons return Tuesday.

Lately I have been consumed by work projects, but this morning I thought I would catch up on some news. My timing is serendipitously excellent, because WOW, look at the crazy stuff the Oregon Legislature has been up to.

Okay, let’s start with the not-so-crazy: a bill to allow Oregonians to hang their laundry on clothes lines. No, really. Residents of condos and tightly regulated communities are bound by contract from using their balconies or backyards to dry their clothes in this environmentally-friendly way, so the OL is trying to loosen up such restrictions in favor of mitigating the effects of global warming. Opponents argue that it’s “unsightly” and (favorite Republican argument) will violate pre-established contracts. You can destroy the planet, but don’t violate the sanctity of private contracts, boys and girls.

The beer tax. Surprisingly, this bill has some life to it. Oregonians love their micro-brewed beer (I certainly do), so it is an obvious source of tax revenue. However, the state is home to a powerful beer industry that opposed any tax hike whatsoever, even though this bill would impose “less than a penny a glass” and contribute $50-100 million every two years to treating addiction and public safety. Please note such services have already lost funding in the state’s annual budget, thanks to the Gigundo Global Econopacolypse. I’d gladly pay an extra penny if it went to help people in recovery.

Okay, so not too crazy so far. Well, how about this? Republicans wanna empower local communities to regulate nude dancing. This is crazy, because voters have already rejected such proposals, and the Oregon Supreme Court has ruled against such legislation because it violates the state’s generous free speech laws. It’s crazy like running headlong into a brick wall, expecting a magical door to appear and open for you. Admittedly, I sympathize. My neighborhood has too many strip clubs — in fact, nearly every Portland neighborhood has too many strip clubs. If the Hawthorne Ave. folks can prevent McDonald’s and Lake Oswego can prevent a new Wal-Mart, can’t we keep the titty bars from spreading?

I have saved the best for last. The OL has already approved legislation to make sperm-throwing a sex crime. Governor Kulongoski is expected to sign it, though without any fanfare. Believe it or not, the reasoning behind this legislation is sound. Sperm-throwing has apparently become a gang initiation fad, as experienced by one young mother who was victimized while shopping at the mall with her daughter. What gets me is that this should be a no-brainer for any judge faced with such a case. It’s assault and it’s a sex crime. Duh!

Like the laundry legislation above, this is a law that arises because you cannot expect your fellow human beings to figure these things out for themselves. Er, that’s the basis of most law, I reckon. Hey, law-talking guys, what’s the legal theory? Compulsory legislation?

So, in sum, the Oregon Legislature has dealt with laws regarding laundry-hanging, beer taxing, nude dancing, and sperm-throwing. Your challenge: combine those concepts into a single sentence.

Dick Cheney (who pronounces his last name “Chee Knee,” because he’s as dumb as “So-to-may-er“) denies he ever said that thing that he said so many times that a majority of the U.S. public believed that it was true  — long after it was unquestionably NOT true — and that gave his government cover to invade Iraq in the first place.

There are other claims made by this zombie public figure who will not retire quietly into his dank hole under a rock that may be causing a great deal of consternation for his counterpart in a parallel earth dimension. “Okay, if I’m supposed to be the Evil One,” he says, while stroking his goatee, “why is this guy stealing all of my material? I got nothing to work with here! I might start feeding orphans, instead of feeding ON them.”