In Preparation for the Birkebeiner

The conditions of Lapham Peak were the best, or close to as good as the best, I'd seen them all season. Having skiied these trails last a week a few times, I did a korteloppet in a little over 2 hours. The first day I skiied the blue for colder snows, but today it warmed up enough for violet and it stuck perfectly, a perfect grip wax. The hills were fast and tears strained my eyes while fast dark and light from the sun and the forest trees made for a thrilling downhill rides.

I've noticed that much time can be wasted going over the tops of hills. I've been training myself to move quickly over hilltops, going as fast as I can and resting on the downhills. A lot of yardage can be lost from dithering around the hilltops.

What I liked most is that I'm skiing classic and a lot of the skate skiiers will pass me on the flats and think 'sayonarah baby'. I catch them on the hills and speed past them on the downhills. They don't know what hit them. The classic is still the bomb.

An example of a fallacy of composition

One more point about the town hall meeting with Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R, WI) (see below for full experience). Sensenbrenner kept insisting at the meeting that he was "intellectually honest" which he took to mean "that I won't tell you what I think you want to hear but what I actually think." And, I can attest to the fact that he did tell us what he thought regardless of what everybody else was saying.

But, we should note that this is a fallacy of composition. It assumes (wrongly) that the whole of intellectual honesty is contained in the part of it. It is true that a part of intellectual honesty is the willingness to tell others what you think regardless of whether you think it is what they want to hear. But this is not the whole of 'intellectual honesty', but merely a part of it. We might say that telling others truthfully what you think might be considered a virtue of declaration, that is, a virtue regarding declaring to others what your true opinion is. There are other aspects of intellectual honesty, however, such as that one should be willing to revise one's position when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, that one should seek out the best available evidence, that one should consider what justice (for all) requires and so forth. These are virtues of deliberation and must necessarily be a part of intellectual honesty.

In this respect, Sensenbrenner was attempting to claim for himself the whole of intellectual honesty when, in fact, he had fulfilled only one part of it. This is technically a fallacy of composition, of flip-flopping between the whole and the part to give the impression that the whole is contained in what is, in fact, merely a part of the term being used.

The Truth to Power Moment

I lectured the last week on Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. One of the examples was 'righteous indignation' which lay between the excess of 'envy' and the defect of 'spite' and, using the example of being outraged at the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in our society, I had been able to give an account of Aristotle's account of distributive justice as well.

Come Saturday morning, I am in the cavern of my den scrolling through the new york times.com while sipping warm, sweet coffee. And there it was, as it is below in my last entry, an op ed piece about the doctored up intel by Douglas Feith, creative writer or 'undersecretary of defense policy' under Donald Rumsfeld, used by Wolfowitz. His "intel" included such fantasies as that Mohammad Atta had met with Iraqi Foreign Intelligence personnel in Prague (I believe it was). I grew more outraged, mindful of all the deceptive reasons used by the Administration to make the war appear justifiable and necessary, and discovered to my great suprise that Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner would be present at a town hall meeting in Whitefish Bay just that afternoon.

And there I was, in the small library room with about 40 others speaking to a frowning and pissed off Jim Sensenbrenner. His willingness to attend these town hall meetings and listen to the bullshit piled on top of him was truly admirable. My card came up and, mindful of all of the accusations and bitter incriminations that I might have laid out, focused my attention on describing the deceiving of Congress and the Public about the intelligence justifying the war in Iraq. I asked him why, given that he was willing to impeach president Clinton in 1998 for that why he would not raise articles of impeachment for this. Suddenly, unbeknownst to me, like a great thunderclap, the crowd burst into spontaneous applause and yells of support.

Sensenbrenner stared at me with his ice blue eyes and maintained an even tone. He began schooling me in a teacherly tone as to the origins of impeachment, citing the standards described for it both in the Federalist Papers and in the Constitution. I could not disagree with this but I became aware of a feeling of righteous indignation within me that could take somebody to war--war with him, in particular. Fortunately I didn't act on it, but the feeling of being released and landing an axe through his brain was there. He declared that Clinton in 1998 had violated" constitutional procedures" which warranted impeachment. He then went on to make the case, in this bizarre mumbling tone which I took to be the height of obfuscation (a device anybody who has ever answered questions for a living knows how to do, viz. to switch into a kind of jargonistic rambling that gets around to making your point without laying out any kind of argument) how Bush has never committed any violation of constitutional procedures and therefore could not be tried. I interjected violently now, feeling the support of the crowd behind me, maintaining that lying to Congress and the people is a crime. He said that the evidence had been made available and that we were justified....Again, I interjected and told him that he knew this not to be true.

Before the conversation could continue, my time was up and it was off to a woman who made her case that the troops should be brought home and that Nancy Pelosi was not a hypocrite for her high hydrocarbon use. Sensenbrenner, thick skinned, pissed off establishmentarian authoritarian continued to hold court. Indefatigable and Unshakeable. Unswayed by anybody's arguments but his own. At meeting's end, I came up to his chair, shook the hand of the unshakeable one, and looked him square in his ice blue eyes with my ice blue eyes and said with a grin: "impeach him."

Where there's smoke there's fire

You may recall (years ago--before the 2004 election) that Sen. Pat Roberts was in charge of compiling a report on the prewar intelligence. You may have wondered whatever happened to the report. Well, I never heard anything about the "report" and what came of it. But, look! An op-ed piece in the NY times today. And there--there it is, the doctored up intel is plain to see. Impeachment proceedings? Two words: "let's roll!"

The Build-a-War Workshop
Published: February 10, 2007 NY Times
It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.
The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved.
We’re sure he was. But there is no comfort in knowing that his dirty work was approved by his bosses. All that does is add to evidence that the Bush administration knowingly and repeatedly misled Americans about the intelligence on Iraq.
To understand this twisted tale, it is important to recall how Mr. Feith got into the creative writing business. Top administration officials, especially Mr. Cheney, had long been furious at the C.I.A. for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the C.I.A. still refused to buy these theories.
Mr. Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
But the C.I.A. kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Mr. Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Mr. Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Mr. Feith’ s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith’s report said it did, and Mr. Cheney will still not admit that the story is false.
In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the “best source” of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.
The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted — and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if Pat Roberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.
It is now up to Mr. Levin and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the current head of the intelligence panel, to give Americans the answers. Mr. Levin’s desire to have the entire inspector general’s report on the Feith scheme declassified is a good place to start. But it will be up to Mr. Rockefeller to finally determine how old, inconclusive, unsubstantiated and false intelligence was transformed into fresh, reliable and definitive reports — and then used by Mr. Bush and other top officials to drag the country into a disastrous and unnecessary war. publishing the report until after the 2004 election, and now

The Purse Seine

Jeffers poem, below, is prophetic, even apocalyptic. Written in 1937, he states that "the inevitable mass disasters will not happen in our time or our childrens". Indeed, that is true. But it is looking like those "mass disasters" may begin to happen in this century. If only we can muster the courage to look with direct eyes, with the "tall, cold stare".

The Purse Seine
by Robinson Jeffers (1937)

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;
daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the
phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off
New Year's Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the
sea's night-purple; he points and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal
and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the
crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the
other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted
with flame, like a live rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the
narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,
sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could
I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful
the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our
children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers
-or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls- or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splin-
tered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that
cultures decay, and life's end is death.