Government of the people, by the people, for the people? All gone....

That's a great line (from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address) and I daresay that many Americans instinctively believe in it....but I also would betcha that very few Americans believe it is true.

I can still remember the night that Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. We sat around in shock. How could this clown have won?

And then the latest cycle of the onslaught by the rich and powerful against...everyone else...started again in this country. Reagan and his cohorts followed an astonishingly simple formula:

• No one likes to pay taxes.
• Everyone has a gripe about the government.
• So blame the government for all our problems.
• Increase cynicism and distrust of citizens for their government.
• Then push hard to cut taxes (mostly those on the rich) because our government will only misuse those funds.
• Then with reduced revenues, we have to cut back on services to our citizens.
• Those citizens get even more unhappy with the government and so they agree to more tax cuts, more cuts in service...and...

The rich get richer, the middle class disappears, the poor...well, they are mostly invisible in our "great nation" in any case.

And so we come to 2011: Bush and Obama gave so much of our money away to bankers and Wall Street (with no strings attached), they got us into and keep us in wars of choice that suck up hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, and almost every Congressperson is primarily beholden to lobbyists and "donors" (read: bribes), that, gee whiz, so sorry, but there just isn't any money for health care, our roads, our children, our schools...you name it.

Today, the Chicago Tribune reports that the House of Reps has voted to end a program to test our produce for deadly bacterium like E. coli. Just weeks after an outbreak in Germany killed 35 people. This program costs $4.5M a year. Small change, a pittance, to protect our population. Why would they do this?

Ah, because the Produce Marketing Association has lobbied hard against it. "Unnecessary recalls", excessive regulation, blah, blah, blah.

This is a truly sucky Fourth of July. Our soldiers continue to die (and continue to kill, both innocents and combatants) in poorly planned wars with limited public support. Our government has been hijacked by people who hate our government and don't give two shits about our citizenry, our children, our future. They just care about lining their pockets. And we, the people, watch our country go down the drain, leaving behind millionaires and billionaires who will continue to do well...by selling their stuff to growing middle classes in other nations.

One, Two, Many Quizzes!

Eight months ago, you could visit www.plsqlchallenge.com and play the daily PL/SQL quiz...and that was it. If you wanted to play the monthly Toadworld PL/SQL quiz, you had to go to a different URL. It was a very limiting and inflexible.

I visited the home page of www.plsqlchallenge.com today and was overjoyed to see this:

 
We are now offering a daily PL/SQL quiz, the monthly Toadworld quiz, and three weekly quizzes: SQL, APEX and (the newest addition) a deductive logic puzzle.

I must admit to feeling a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. It is now so much easier to add quizzes, to manage quizzes, accept ideas for new quizzes from players, edit and review those quizzes online...we still have a long way to go, but this is a very nice place to be, compared to one year ago.

Weiner Distractions

From CNN:


"When fed up House Democratic leaders called on Anthony Weiner to resign last weekend, they were hoping to keep what they consider a disruptive political distraction from entering a third week. But Weiner did not step down, and Tuesday outside the House Democrats first meeting since Weiner admitted to sending lewd Twitter messages, frustration among some of his colleagues was palpable."It is taking away from all the issues we are fighting for. It's been what two weeks? It's been a very long two weeks," said Weiner's Democratic colleague from New York, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy.

I don't really care if Weiner resigns or not. I am inclined to agree with those who say "Let his constituents decide." Though I really can't imagine doing the incredibly stupid things that Weiner did and actually show up for work at the House of Representatives.

But I am struck by just how easily distracted are the supposed leaders of our great nation. What's the distraction? You've all said your piece. You want him to resign or you don't. You want him to go to therapy or you don't. So now get back to work.

If someone in the media asks you about it, you say: "I've said my piece and I am now busy doing the people's work."

Our elected officials are in general just so extraordinarily lame and ineffective (well, that goes mostly for the Democrats) or downright deceptive and destructive (mostly applied to Republicans these days, but certainly not exclusively).

If it wasn't for all those corporations and lobbyists feeding them big bucks and telling them what to do, they would truly be a laughing stock the world over.

Instead they are primarily an instrument for screwing over the poor and middle class.

But at least you don't have to claim that Weiner's penis is a distraction. FOCUS PEOPLE, FOCUS!

Latest PL/SQL Challenge championship playoff results published

On 7 June, we held the fourth quarterly championship playoff at the PL/SQL Challenge. Read about it here.


This playoff was a bit of a milestone for me. We'd just installed our new 2.0 platform, allowing for much more flexible configuring and taking of quizzes. And overall it worked splendidly for the playoff, which is a multi-quiz competition, compared to the daily quiz (just one question).


I am now able to automate so much more of the processing and administration of tasks for the site. This is important, because it takes up less of my time and I move closer to the day when other administrators can manage their own quizzes, for their competitions.


And now I will celebrate by tearing myself away from the computer to do some stretching.

Tax cuts for the rich - how ridiculous, and some advice for the President

Anyone concerned with saving, strengthening, preserving out democracy (you pick the word, based on your analysis of how degraded that democracy currently is) will agree that we must stop the persistent, immoral and illegal-if-the-wealthy-did-not-write-the-laws redistribution of wealth from poor and middle classes to the richest tiny percentage.

Looks like President Obama is going to try again to build support to reinstate taxes on the well-to-do. I sure hope he does a better job this time of defining the issue and generating outrage.

The choice should be very starkly presented: "Which is more important to you: that children in this country do not suffer or that millionaires and billionaires sock away another million or billion?"

Unfortunately, from what I've read I think Obama is going to repeat an earlier mistake: he will call for cancellation of tax cuts for Americans earning $250,000 or more.

If he sticks with the $250K boundary, I fear he (and we) will lose the battle once again. The problem is that this number is (or at least sounds) too low; it sounds, in fact, like an amount that lots and lots of people in the middle class used to make or feel they could make at some point. In other words, that number makes too many people feel like it could hurt them just as they start to succeed.

I urge President Obama (and we all know that he listens closely to what I have to say) to push up that number. Say instead:

"Let's reinstate taxes for anyone earning at least $500,000 a year."

I believe this one change could cause a significant shift in the way most Americans perceive this issue, and it will make it much harder for the rich, who are strangling our nation and bringing harm to our children through their disgusting greed, to defend themselves and the laws they bribe our Congresspeople to pass.

PL/SQL Challenge Version 2 Now Available!

We upgraded the PL/SQL Challenge website to version 2 this weekend. Check out the PL/SQL Challenge blog for more details on the features of this release.

We (myself, my son, Eli, Paul Broughton of Apex Evangelists, Scott Stegemann, with crucial assistance from  Dimitri Gielis and John Scott, principals of Apex Evangelists) have been working on this version for over six months. It involved a very thorough, interesting but also challenging redesign and reconstruction of both backend and frontend code.

In the process, we've put together a very flexible and generic platform to deliver quizzes for any technology, in virtually any format (single quiz, multiple quizzes, T/F, multiple choice, polls, etc.). My plan is to continue evolution of the platform into QaaS (Quiz as a Service), so that a single development team could use it to test and deepen understanding of their own application; vendors can use it to offer quizzes for their tools (I think a weekly quiz on Toad for Oracle would be immensely powerful), and so on.

The rollout has gone, well, sort-of-smoothly. Lots of issues to address, but no calamities. It will probably take another week to truly settle into the new version - partly because the revamping involved not only a massive number of new end user features but also a complete transformation of the way we manage the application "behind the scenes."

In versions 1.X, we had a set of basic data management pages for our metadata tables. Beyond that, I essentially used Toad for Oracle and SQL-PL/SQL scripts to manage the various tasks (set up new competitions, generate images, award prizes, etc.).  This was a drag for two reasons: took up too much of my time and made it impossible for me to hand off tasks to Eli.

So in version 2, we took several big steps towards improving visibility into the state of our data and also the ability to manage that data outside of an editor. We created, for example, a "competition at a glance" calendar that I can use to quickly check on the status of the quizzes and go directly to the appropriate data management screen. Here's the content of one week from the calendar:

And there's so much more....but I have run out of time to share my enthusiasm. I have to finish up the fifth quiz for the upcoming playoff, as well as set up five quizzes for next week.

Final test period for PL/SQL Challenge version 2

The PL/SQL Challenge development team has been working hard, hard, hard for the last five months (wow, is it that long already?) to create version 2 of the PL/SQL Challenge website. We plan to upgrade PLSQLChallenge.com over the weekend of 21 May; in the meantime, I encourage to visit  test.plsqlchallenge.com to get an early glimpse of the new design and functionality, and give us feedback.

More details on the test program may be found here.

Of course, it's taken a lot longer than I originally planned to put the site "back together." I say that because this version of the Challenge required an extensive refactoring of the table design and supporting code. That was really quite a lot of fun to do, but oh my a very intensive process.

The result is that we have taken a giant step towards transforming the website into a platform for delivering quizzes and tests: essentially, QAAS - "quiz as a service". This means that in the short run we can offer quizzes in a much more flexible manner (and also extend the site to offer quizzes on different technologies, like SQL and APEX). In the longer run, players will be able to set up their own competitions, with their own content.

For example, you could build and offer a series of quizzes to your development team about your own application, best practices, standards, etc. We're not there quite yet, but we are close.

So I hope you find some time to check out the test site; I look forward to your feedback.

Kaleidoscope11 - the Can't Miss Conference

I would like to think that anyone reading my newsletter, anyone engaged in Oracle development of any sort, would be well aware of ODTUG's annual Kaleidoscope conference. ODTUG is one of my favorite user group organizations, and not just because they have sponsored an annual Oracle PL/SQL conference for the last five years. In this era of "monster" conferences, like Oracle Open World, ODTUG has maintained its focus on developers and its intimate engagement between participants and speakers. If you can only attend one conference this year, I strongly encourage you to consider Kaleidoscope11.

Tom Kyte, Senior Technical Architect at Oracle Corporation, will be presenting Efficient PL/SQL - Why and How to Use PL/SQL to Its Greatest Effect and A Lot about Binding. I'll be presenting as
well, on Best Practices for PL/SQL Development in APEX.  Click here for a full list of database development sessions.

In addition to these sessions, Tom,Cary Millsap of Method-R Corporation, and I will participate in a ninety-minute interactive panel discussion on database performance, coding excellence, and performance optimization. With more than thirty-five Oracle ACE Directors presenting at Kscope11, participants will have the opportunity to meet and talk with experts from around the world. Other highlights include five full-day symposiums, an opening keynote  by Joey Asher, author of Even a Geek Can Speak, and the grand
event on board the famous Queen Mary. All sessions, symposiums, hands-on training, and events are included in the registration fee.

And to express their undying devotion to the PL/SQL community, ODTUG has graciously offered a $100 discount off the registration fee to all PL/SQL developers. Simply enter "PLSQL" for the discount code when you register.


Hope to see you there!

A new book about APEX - with a big heart

John Scott, of Apex Evangelists, a friend, highly respected Oracle technologist, and APEX expert, has just published his (well, he led the collaborative effort involving some 12 contributors) latest book on APEX, Expert Oracle Application Express.

His first book was of great assistance to Eli, my son, who has rapidly become a very competent APEX programmer, and I am sure this new book will be of even greater help.

If you work with APEX, I encourage you to pick up a copy of this book, not only because technically it should be quite excellent (disclosure: I have not yet read it myself), but also because all the authors have agreed to donate 100% of their royalties to two memorial funds set up to support the families of two APEX technologists who died: Carl Backstrom in 2008 and Scott Spadafore in 2010.

As John says in his blog, "If you are only going to buy one APEX book this year, please buy this one!"

You'll benefit and so with the families of Carl and Scott.

PL/SQL Channel ready for your viewing!

Now that I've decided to stop my constant traveling, I need to find another way to transfer my expertise to the hundreds of thousands of PL/SQL developers around the world. My latest initiative in this area is:



Yes, the PL/SQL Channel, featuring over 27 hours of detailed and tightly focused videos, showing you how to use many of the most important features of the PL/SQL language. You can watch these videos as often as you like, any time you like - and it costs just $395 per year, per developer (with discounts for multiple subscriptions). Compare that price to the $1000+ you will pay for one day (about 6 hours) of top-quality Oracle training - that you experience once and then struggle to internalize and apply to your development efforts. So visit PL/SQL Channel to sign up for a free trial and check out the videos.

Boost your (and your children's) immune system now!

I'm sure you've all read about how bacteria mutates over time and renders antibiotics harmless to them. And that the more and more widely we use antibiotics, the more rapidly the mutations occur, and the more difficult it is to produce new antibiotics that will beat the infections.

So...what happens when we run out of effective antibiotics entirely? What happens when scientists and pharmaceuticals companies are unable or unwilling (due to the unlikely return on investment because the bacteria mutates rapidly and renders the drug useless) to produce drugs that kill the bacteria?

According to a scary article in the highly-respected Scientific American, "many lethal infections that antibiotics have held at bay for decades might soon return with a vengeance." (sorry, subscription required to read the whole article).

No, really. We may in the very immediate future face a world in which bacterial infections routinely led to deaths. To give you a sense of how far down this path we have gone, did you know that there is at this very moment an epidemic of a very dangerous and difficult to defeat bacterial infection sweeping through the hospitals in our nation?

From the article: "The expanding epidemic has forced hospitals to reassess the efficacy of their infection-control measures....protocols include washing down patients with antiseptics every day and cleaning the surfaces in patients' rooms, down to the smallest joints and nooks on monitors and computers, as often as every 12 hours."

In other words, our health care system is currently battling simply to keep the infection contained within hospitals and not let it leap into the general population. And it looks like we are losing the battle.

Still, antibiotics are prescribed widely and casually. Worse - and this is really hard to believe - livestock is still being fed round-the-clock a low dosage of antibiotics to stimulate growth. I kid you not.

So I think that we need to do some worst case planning. Corporations today hold sway in our government (supposedly of the people, by te...oh, forget it) and will not allow any policies that reduce their short-term profits. Antibiotics will continue to be used in excess, and pharmaceutical companies will not develop a pipeline of new drugs.

It is, therefore, time for each and every one of us to do the only thing we can do: boost our immune systems to strengthen our bodies' ability to fight the infections. Fortunately, the way to do this is easily accessible to most Americans:

1. Eat fresh fruit and vegetables, especially dark greens like broccoli, spinach, kale. Avoid "factory food," including processed foods and fast food. In fact, just eat food, not food products.

2. Turn off the television and move your body; get some exercise!

Sure, you can take vitamins, supplements that supposedly boost your immune system, etc. - but from what I have read, there is no clear and wide consensus that these non-food delivery mechanisms of isolated components really do help all that much.

There are, on the other hand, endless studies (not to mention common sense) to show that a diet rich in fruit and vegetables, complemented by an active lifestyle, will make you stronger, healthier and happier.

Yes, I know - the "same old, same old." - and so boring. Eat right, exercise - where's the fun in that?

It is time, however, to move beyond whining about how it's so much fun to eat chips and candy and watch TV. It is time to recognize that the arrogance and carelessness of humans, driven by our profit-motivated economies, have outstripped our ability to deal the consequences of our actions (think: Japan and nuclear power, "super bugs", climate change, Gulf oil spill...).

Please, at least apply the above advice to your children. Get them started now on a healthy diet and exercise regime. Oh, and let them play in the dirt. Keep their environment too clean and sterile, and that will harm their immune system as well.

We should all support the NFL players

Like (I expect) many Americans, I have found it a little bit difficult to generate much concern over the looming possibility of a canceled NFL season. "Billionaires fighting with millionaires" is the most common, derisive view.

But I have two nephews who are working very hard to join that elite group of awesome athletes, and their interest has led me to look more closely at what is going.

I found a very eye-opening article titled NFL Lockout! in The Nation. This article is in the most recent issue, so it is currently only available to subscribers.

Consequently, first, I encourage everyone to subscribe to The Nation. Yes, it is a "left wing" news source. It is also one of the most highly-respected and long-published periodicals in our nation's history (it was started in 1856 with the following mission statement: "The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.").

Second, I provide excerpts of the article below, along with some of my thoughts.

1. NFL players have stated that they will continue to play under the current contract. In other words, they are not calling for a strike. Instead, the NFL owners have threatened to lock out the players and kill the season. If there is no football this next season, it will be due to the owners and not the players.

2. NFL players have asked that NFL owners open their financial books. "The NFL Players Association wanted access to ten years of financial audits so they could see why the most successful sports league on earth was claiming to be financially embattled. They wanted to know why the owners could feel justified in asking for 18 percent cuts in player compensation. They wanted to know why—despite all we now know about the brutal hazards of the sport—the owners could insist on adding two more regular-season games. But the owners refused to open the books."

3. The "billionaires fighting with millionaires" formula is very questionable. NFL players do make lots of money (the minimum starting salary for an NFL player is $325K) - but their career lasts, on average, 3.6 years. And they usually come out of those "careers" with serious and lasting damage to their bodies. As Dave Zirin explains in his article:

'It’s a workforce that draws almost exclusively from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s a workforce that will die some twenty years earlier than the typical American male. As Jaclyn Fujita, wife of NFL player Scott Fujita, wrote, "I don’t know that we were fully aware of the ultimate reality of the National Football League. We learned the hard way that he would work his ass into the ground, playing every defensive down and special teams, and would be the lowest paid man on the roster. That he would experience multiple concussions, but remain on the field. That he would suffer full ligament tears and shouldn’t have been walking, but team doctors would tell him it was a ‘minor sprain’ and should still play. That even though you have given your heart and soul to a team, they can easily replace you with a rookie who has never played in the NFL before."'

And Zirin concludes:

"Players are demanding to see the owners’ financial ledgers, to choose their own doctors and, for the first time in NFL history, to be treated like grown men. It’s remarkable that these twenty-first-century gladiators are praised by the media when they show so-called “manhood” on the field by playing through pain but are derided when they refuse to be treated like children.

"This is happening for one reason and one reason only. The owners want to show the players who’s boss. But it won’t just be the players who get hurt. Every stadium concession worker, every restaurant worker, every last person who, in these dyspeptic times, depends on the stadium to eke out a living will be affected."

Please take the time to read this article in full (subscribe!) or simply go thenation.com, search for "NFL lockout" and read the freely-available blog posts on this topic, by the Zirin and others. At a minimum, we should understand the real issues between management and players, and not simply be disdainful of the complaints of "millionaires."

Hey and why not dream a little? Perhaps if NFL owners can be compelled to back up their "sky is falling" claims about their finances with accounting transparency, then other corporate "leaders" who have convinced our elected representatives to give them hundreds of billions of dollars could also be forced to at least be accountable enough to prove that they aren't just ripping us off and dooming future generations to poverty.

Describing and Fetching/Copying/Manipulating any REF CURSOR

Ever needed to describe, fetch, copy or manipulate a REF CURSOR in Oracle, where you don't know the structure of the REF CURSOR in advance? My friend, Oracle test coach and PL/SQL expert, Finn Ellebaek Nielsen has spent a whole lot of time developing utility code implemented in a combination of PL/SQL, Java and C, that you can use as is in order to:

• Describe any REF CURSOR: Get an XML document containing a description of the cursor's columns, including name, datatype, precision, scale and declaration code for a variable usable with this column.

• Fetch any REF CURSOR to memory: Fetch the rows of the cursor into an ANYDATA instance. Optionally manipulate data for each row after it has been fetched through custom PL/SQL code.

• Copy any REF CURSOR: Fetch the rows of the cursor and copy these to either memory or a table and get a new REF CURSOR opened for this copy. Optionally manipulate data for each row after it has been fetched through custom PL/SQL code. Optionally call custom PL/SQL code either before the new REF CURSOR is opened or after.

The utility code works with any weak and strong REF CURSOR and also any CURSOR expression (fetch/copy/manipulate doesn't support LONG and LONG RAW columns). It's supported with any edition of Oracle Database 10g Release 1 and newer and Finn also describes how you can make it work for Oracle Database 9i Release 2. Lastly, Finn discovered that contrary to Oracle’s documentation it’s possible to pass a REF CURSOR directly to a C external procedure.

Read all about it on Finn's blog here:

http://ellebaek.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/describing-a-ref-cursor-in-oracle-10g-using-plsql-java-and-c/

http://ellebaek.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/copying-transforming-a-ref-cursor-in-oracle-10g/

Cheers, Steven

Fast moving football players

My nephew, Brian, is a big and fast football player. Well, he played football in college and is now in training for a pro day (NFL and other league coaches gather to watch players go through their paces) at the end of March.

He told me that at the training center he is using, they have special treadmills that can go up to 26 miles per hour (and support lots and lots of weight).

At the start of his training session, they had him do 8 second, 14 MPH sprints. We talked just the other day and he told that he had just managed to finish a 6 second sprint at 21 MPH.

Twenty-one miles per hour....and we are not talking about a lean, stringy human here. We are talking about over 250 pounds of muscle and bone, moving in a highly coordinated fashion; every motion, every muscle use has go to be optimized....

That is amazing. Go, Brian, go!

Surprise! New goal set for self improvement...

A few days ago, I discovered somewhat to my surprise that I had set a new goal for myself: improve my flexibility so that I could touch my forehead to my knee in what is known in Yoga circles as Jansirsasan:

Why was this a surprise, you might ask.Well, a few months ago, a friend who is an avid Yoga disciple and teacher was going through a divorce. She commented that she believed that there is a link between physical and mental flexiblity. That if a guy couldn't touch his toes, he was probably also (mentally and spirtually) a rigid, inflexible person.

You will probably not be surprised to hear that her ex-husband was very inflexible in every aspect (according to my friend, of course). I promptly showed her (and my wife) that I could, in fact, touch my toes.

So I was very glad of that. The reason, though, that I could touch my toes is that I had already been focusing my stretches on improving my flexibility, mostly because it made my back and legs feel better.

When you get right down to it, though, touching one's toes doesn't really make you all that flexible. So I continued to work on my hamstring and leg stretches. And then when I was talking to my wife about my stretching and how I was getting closer and closer to lowering my head all the way to my knees, I realized that in fact I had set a goal for myself of doing just that - and I hadn't even known it! Ah, strange brain....

So now at least twice a day, I tear myself away from my desk, lie down on my mat, do a bunch of abdominals and then focus on my stretches. I am currently about 3 inches away from my knees.

And I have two weeks to close the gap, because that's when I will see my friend again. And I want very much to show her that I can do Jansirsasan (even if I can't necessarily do much of anything else very well in Yoga).

If you are, like me, a programmer who spends hours and hours in front of a computer, I strongly urge you to get into a daily regimen of abdominal exercises and stretching (yoga or otherwise). You will have far fewer problems with your back and hips; your legs will not ache from lack of mobility and tightness.

And you will, as a consequence, write better and happier code.

The Joy of Reduced Status

I received a wonderful letter from American Airlines yesterday. I was informed that I am now a Platinum member of its frequent flyer program. No more Executive Platinum for me. I must admit, I did feel the slightest pang that I would no longer be treated like a superstar.

But really when I think about it, I was only super-special to AA because of all the money I generated for them. That's a somewhat empty form of flattery and unearned special treatment, something I can do without.

And do without I will, because jet airplanes and airports no longer are my second home.

When Walmart is too expensive....

When Walmart is too expensive, America really is in big trouble.


Read this article from Reuters regarding Wal-Mart's disappointing results: "The retailer reported its seventh consecutive quarterly decline in sales at U.S. stores open at least a year, posting a 1.8 percent drop that was much bigger than its worst forecast....rivals such as Family Dollar Stores and Dollar General have gained appeal with shoppers on tight budgets by offering lower prices, albeit for smaller quantities, on goods such as detergent, especially as those shoppers run short on money at the end of the month."

So, gee, I wonder: is the recession over? Sure, President Obama's new chief of staff, William Daley, received over $8M in compensation last year. But it sure does seem like lots and lots of people are doing very poorly, indeed, when Wal-Mart is too expensive for them. That gargantuan company is responsible for pushing down both prices and wages across the United States and other parts of the world. It forces suppliers to revamp their computer and distribution systems to improve efficiency (and reduce their prices).

And yet they are losing customers, who are so poor they can only afford to buy products in stores that specialize in re-selling stuff that other stores couldn't or didn't want to sell.

Must be the fault of public employee unions.

Religious fundamentalists taking over the U.S. military?

I helped found a group called Refuser Solidarity Network, which educates Americans about Israeli soldiers who refuse to take up arms against Palestinians. In the course of doing my work with RSN, I learned that in recent years, more and more Jewish fundamentalists have been joining the Israeli military (previously for the most part quite secular, since the Orthodox are given a "pass" on otherwise compulsory military service) and moving up through the ranks. It is believed by some that the truly awful invasion of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces last year that killed some 400 Palestinian children was influenced substantially by these zealots.

Turns out that we may have a similar problem in the U.S. military.

I just read a very disturbing article in the Nation titled "Backward, Christian Soldiers." Here is one excerpt:

Leading the Pentecostalist charge is a constellation of different groups, none more prominent than Military Ministry, an affiliate of Campus Crusade for Christ, a global outreach network with an estimated annual budget of nearly $500 million, raised largely from individual donors and congregations, according to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Military Ministry maintains branch offices at the nation’s main Army bases, as well as overseas initiatives like Bible-study programs globally. The group’s mission statement, according to its website, is “To Win, Build, and Send in the power of the Holy Spirit and to establish movements of spiritual multiplication in the worldwide military community.” In a 2005 newsletter, Military Ministry’s executive director, retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Dees, said the group “must pursue our…means for transforming the nation­through the military. And the military may be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure.”

Military Ministry is particularly well represented at basic training installations like Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army’s largest boot camp. According to MRFF researcher Chris Rodda, the group instructs recruits through Bible-study programs that “when you join the military, you’ve joined the ministry,” and it ardently associates conquest on the battlefield with religious conversion. In a 2007 report, MRFF provides links to photos of Fort Jackson troops posing with rifles in one hand and Bibles­, some with camouflage covers­in the other. A Bible-study outline distributed by Military Ministry cites Scripture to sanction killing in combat by “God’s servant, an angel of wrath,” to “punish those who do evil.”

...

The revivalist subculture within the armed forces is as overt as Washington is loath to confront it. In late September Weinstein sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on behalf of more than 100 Air Force Academy cadets who said they were obliged to falsely assume fundamentalist identities

I believe firmly that any individual should be free to practice their own religion (preferably in the privacy of their own home or place of worship). But when that turns into evangelizing and coercing others, it also turns into a big problem for our society. And when that coercion is happening within the military, I get downright scared about what could be coming.

Cutting back on catalogs and junk mail

It truly drives me to distraction to receive piles of catalogs from companies.Well, except for Victoria's Secret. No, no, just kidding. Seriously.


What an incredible waste and pollution, what a terrible use of precious resources (human, petroleum and more), to print and deliver millions of catalogs that are just then thrown away or perhaps recycled. I won't even get into how the U.S. Postal Service both benefits and is financially hurt by the deep discounts offered to mailers of this junk.


So that's why today I visit dmachoice.org, the website of the Direct Marketing Association, registered and then took advantage of the ability to turn off delivery of catalogs, magazines and other materials that members of the DMA might send out.


It won't stop all the junk mail, but it sure won't hurt. I encourage you to do the same.