Ignore Edwards' Affair

Yes, it's unseemly that John Edwards had an affair, especially with his wife struggling with breast cancer. It's also easy to snicker about Edwards, who so frequently held himself as more ethical than others, yet relentlessly lied about his affair.

But please, do not let this issue be used as a weapon against the Democratic party.

This is not the exhortation of a partisan Democrat--I more often vote Libertarian or Republican, but I do not want yet another irrelevancy to affect voters' decisions about whom to vote for. (For example, whites voting for Obama to prove to themselves and others that they're not racists.)

Look at the candidates' track record and positions on the issues that will most affect America. A non-partisan summary of those is at www.votesmart.org.

Huge Solar/Hydrogen-Power Breakthrough?

I'm always wary when a discovery is described as a breakthrough, but this may be the real deal.

MIT scientists have developed a quite simple technology that will both greatly improve solar panels and hydrogen-powered vehicles.

This research was just published two weeks ago, and before getting too excited, it's wise to wait a couple of months to see whether the world's scientists poke so many holes in it that it looks like swiss cheese, but for now, it appears we finally have an alternative energy discovery that is cause for celebration. I've read a number of articles about it, all positive, and I find the Popular Mechanics one the most interesting.

Side note: This research was funded by a family foundation, not by the government. I've become increasingly convinced that the government funding process tends to exclude out-of-the-box ideas: The proposals are reviewed by scientists steeped in conventional approaches to science. They reward their buddies who do the same sort of work they do. In contrast, a private funder is more objective: looking for the research proposals likely to yield big breakthroughs. Another example of that: Craig Venter's privately funded effort decoded the human genome years faster and much less expensively than the government funded effort. But perhaps my position here is just another example of my bias against government-run programs.

Job Search Advice from a "Spiritual Atheist" perspective

A fellow career counselor suggests that after you apply for a job, you should call to follow up and say, "I feel I'm a good candidate for the job because of X. What can I do to get an interview?"

From the job seeker's selfish standpoint, such strategies will help often enough to be worth trying, yet I find myself increasingly hesitant to recommend them to my clients and in my writings because, while they may help my clients, they cause pain for the employer.

The last time I advertised a job opening, I had 100 applicants. I'd hate to have had to deal with lots of squeaky wheels pleading "Pick me! Pick me!" If in reviewing their application, I wanted to interview them, I would. Also, such strategies reward pushy people, thereby punishing people who played by the rules: submit an application and I'll let you know if I want to interview you.

I'm increasingly finding that using "spiritual atheism"--asking myself what's the cosmically right thing to do--is leading me to be a better person.

Spiritual Atheism

There is no God worth praying to--How can anyone find comfort in a God who would allow literally billions of people, including infants, to die of horrendously painful diseases such as cancer?

Yet, a secular spirituality informs nearly everything I do:

-- As I supervise my assistant, I feel an almost sacred responsibility to make her worklife as rewarding as possible--after all, she's giving me some of the best hours of her life.

-- As I decide what projects and clients to take on and what to write about, I feel a secular spiritual obligation to choose the things that would make the biggest difference in the world.

-- As I decide what to buy, I remember that, even though my individual contribution is trivial, it's cosmically right to live lightly on the earth, to leave it better than when I entered it.

-- That I have a secular spiritual obligation to enrich the lives of everyone I meet, from the Comcast repairman to my wife. With her, that often includes staying out of her way, so she can fully flower and enjoy, although it also includes giving unwanted advice when I feel the benefits of doing so outweigh the liabilities.

Someone asked me, "How is spiritual atheism different from people whose motivation is to make the world better?" The reason I do the things I do go one step beyond "trying to make the world better." My core motivation is more universal--cosmic, if you will--a responsibility to make the biggest possible impact during the time I am alive. Simply because that's just in the cosmic scheme of things.

One liability of spiritual atheism: I rarely have what I call "Christian glow"--those Christians who walk around with an beatific look on their faces. Spiritual atheism usually doesn't make me feel good. It just feels like the right way to live, an obligation.

Race in the Workplace

The topic of my NPR-San Francisco radio show on Aug. 24 at 11 AM to noon Pacific time will be race in the workplace. I'll ask listeners to call in to describe their personal experience of race in the workplace. You can hear the show on the Internet live at this link or on the radio in the San Francisco Bay Area at 91.7 FM. When I ask for callers (probably around 11:30) feel free to call in: 415-841-4134.

New Study: Global Warming Prediction Models are Unreliable

A new refereed journal article reports a study that indicates that computer models predicting climate change are unreliable: http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.53.4.671

Here too is a collection of recent research that argues that the globe is COOLING. It was assembled by the minority party's of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Public Works and the Environment.

New Book Makes a Case Against Obama

I just received this press release about a just-published book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality written by a Harvard Ph.D and published by Simon & Schuster. This Sunday, it will be #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and currently is the #1 political non-fiction book on Amazon.com.

I am concerned that it is written by an ideologue, but given the media's uncritical genuflection before the Obama altar, this book might offer a needed balancing perspective.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
1 August 2008

CONTACT: Tim Bueler
media@timbueler.com
(310) 855-3460

NEW BOOK: THE OBAMA NATION: LEFTIST POLITICS AND THE CULT OF PERSONALITY

BY JEROME R. CORSI, PH.D.

In this thoroughly researched and documented book, THE OBAMA NATION: LEFTIST POLITICS AND THE CULT OF PERSONALITY (Threshold Editions; August 1st, 2008; $28.00), the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., explains why the extreme leftism of an Obama presidency would leave the United States weakened, diminished, and divided, and why Obama must be defeated—and how he can be…

Barack Obama stepped onto the national political stage when the then-Illinois state senator addressed the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Soon after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, author Jerome Corsi began researching Obama’s personal and political background.

Scrupulously sourced with more than six hundred footnotes, THE OBAMA NATION is the result of that research. By tracing Obama's career and influences from his early years in Hawaii and Indonesia, the beginnings of his political career in Chicago, his voting record in the Illinois legislature, his religious training and his adoption of Christianity through to his recent involvement in Kenyan politics, his political advisors and fund-raising associates, and his meteoric campaign for president, Jerome Corsi shows that an Obama presidency, would, in his words, be "a repeat of the failed extremist politics that have characterized and plagued Democratic Party politics since the late 1960s." In this stunning and comprehensive new book, the reader will learn about:

Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, from his father's and stepfather's Islamic backgrounds, to his Communist and socialist mentors in Hawaii and Chicago, to his long-term and close associations with former Weather Underground heroes William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—associations much closer than heretofore revealed by the press Barack and wife Michelle’s twenty-year-long religious affiliation with the black-liberation theology of former Trinity United Church of Christ Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons have always been steeped in a rage first expressed by Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X, a rage that Corsi shows has deep meaning for Obama

Obama's continuing connections with Kenya, the homeland of his father, through his support for the candidacy of Raila Odinga, the radical socialist presidential contender who came to power amid Islamist violence and church burnings

Obama's involvement in the slum-landlord empire of the Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko, who helped to bankroll Obama’s initial campaigns and to purchase Barack and Michelle’s dream-home property

The background and techniques of the Obama campaign’s cult of personality, including the derivation of the words "hope" and "change"

Obama’s far-left domestic policy, his controversial votes on abortion, his history of opposition to the Second Amendment, his determination to raise capital-gains taxes, his impractical plan to achieve universal health care, and his radical plan to tax Americans to fund a global-poverty-reduction program

Obama's naïve, antiwar, antinuclear foreign policy, predicated on the reduction of the military, the eradication of nuclear weapons, and an overconfidence in the power of his personality, as if belief in change alone could somehow transform international politics, achieve nuclear-weapons disarmament, and withdrawal from Iraq without adverse consequences for us, for the Iraqis, or for Israel

Meticulously researched and documented, THE OBAMA NATION is the definitive source for information on why and how Barack Obama must be defeated—not by invective and general attacks, but by detailed arguments that are well researched and fact-based.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jerome R. Corsi received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has written many books and articles, including the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. His latest bestseller was The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada. He is a senior staff reporter for WorldNetDaily.com and the author of two books on contemporary Iran: Atomic Iran and Showdown with Nuclear Iran. In his 2005 book, Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil, which he coauthored with Craig R. Smith, Dr. Corsi predicted oil prices at over $100 a barrel.

THE OBAMA NATION
BY JEROME R. CORSI, PH.D.
THRESHOLD EDITIONS
AUGUST 1ST, 2008
ISBN: 1-4165-9806-5; $28.00

Threshold Editions is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.