Philosophers have attempted in vain to prove God’s existence. Saint Thomas went as far as to accumulate five different arguments. If one is not enough, the Saint seemed to have thought, five of them might “do” it, as if arguments relied on the muscle of other “lime -backing arguments” to reach the touchdown of apodictic conclusions. Descartes tried some thing similar with equally unconvincing results.

Modern philosophy, that in many ways began with British empiricism (Bacon, Locke and Hume), discarded the rational knowledge of God, based on the premise that all our knowledge begins and ends with our sensing of what is given in experience. We have no sensations of a God, therefore we have no theology. Recent analytic philosophers (Ayer, for example) have imported empiricist views into a philosophy of language: to say anything that cannot be verified by any actual or possible experince, is neither false nor true, it is simply nonsense. To say that “God exists” is as pure nonsense as to claim that “God does not exist.”

A quick reading of philosophers like Hume, Sartre or Nietzsche has yielded today an abundant crop of professionally aggressive atheists (Stenger, Dawkins, ec).) and stand-up comedians who simply make jokes at the Vatican Swiss guards or at the very idea of priestly celibacy (Bill Maher). It is my contention that both tribes impoverish our own humanity and deserve not much attention .

But one of the greatest philosophers of all times came also to the conclusion that a science of whatever is not given to us in space and time (he called it “metaphysics”) is just impossible: we can only understand what we can sense. But the empiricist Kant was intelligent enough to be puzzled by the fact that human beings seem irresistibly inclined to seek a knowledge they cannot attain: the failure of metaphysics becomes in his hands the metaphysics of failure, as it previously happened to Aristotle and later to Wittgenstein. Kant, as the metaphysician of failure, is by far my favorite philosopher: The sober end of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) leads us to the soaring vistas of the Critique of Practical Reason CPrR).

If CPR is all abut the limitations of knowledge, CPrR is all about the implications of unlimited desire and the moral order. Desire, like memory, points to realities that knowledge cannot grab. Unlike knowledge, desire has no definite bondaries: the satisfaction of a given desire becomes immediately the launching base of another desire. Practical reason (the will as it commands behavior), like desire itself, feels however bound by the demands of duty, the only good that is always an end in itself and never a means to something else. Health or even knowledge are not always good: there is nothing worse than a healthy or a knowledgeable criminal. We keep our promises not to look good to others or to preserve our self- esteem, but just and only because it is our duty to do so. To act for other motives, even for the fear of hell, is to act immorally. (Jesuits disagree with Kant on this one!). In a rational world, morality and happiness, must sooner or later, coincide. So Kant says, but others have serious doubts about it. Happiness and morality certainly do not coincide in this life (criminals can be happy!), therefore there must be another life in which moral goodness and happiness coincide. The guarantor of a happy immortality for the moral beings is God, the unreachable target of our metaphysical longings and the foundation of all our beliefs. Where science ends, belief begins, even reigious belief.

The interaction between a knowledge we seek in vain and a belief we hold explains all the inner struggles, all the nagging doubts that mark inexorably the life of all human beings. Simple-minded people seem to think that humanity is neatly divided into atheists who never believe in God’s existence, and pious souls who never doubt about it. But we human beings are more complex than that; faith wavers at times and doubt surges in the most unexpected moments. Saint Catherine of Siena had the ugliest imaginations when she attended Mass., When I taught philosophy at UCSC, a student called me at 3 am (!) to ask me whether I believed in God. “At this time of the night—I told him– I do not believe in my own existence.

Thee are times in life when the only way to preserve the essentials of some moral behavior backed by a wavering faith in God as the guarantor of a moral order is to take Pascal’s gamble:to behave as if God existed. If He does, you are in; if He does not, you have lost nothing, except perhaps some ephemeral pleasures. Death will tell you the final outcome. Unfortunately, dead people seem deprived of the tools to text back the answer to us. In the meantime, you and everybody else will struggle through existence as little bubbles of anxious doubts and unfinished projects, ready to burst into the nothingness of some cosmic black hole or into the loving embrace of a God we cannot even speak about.

Bubbles with religious doubts deserve human respect. The only religious people who do not deserve any respect are the intolerant, the holier-than-thou, and the fanatics: three plagues that, as Hume reminds us, threaten those who use religious belief as a weapon of their personal pretended superiority.

The economy reThe economy re mains the number one issue of the presidential campaign. Although AmericAlthouh America is still a prosperous country,  for the first time on record the growth of the economy has    and is failing to benefit most American families. Accounting for inflation, most families (the bottom 60% of the income ladder) are making less than in the year 2000. Americans still buy houses and cars, but they buy them partially at least with debt, a debt that in many cases will never be repaid.

During the Republican Convention in Minneapolis, the new VP nominee. Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, repeated, once again, all  McCain’s objections to Obama’s economics. Obviously, Palin’s speech had been written for her by one of the Bush campaign writers: the speech contained all the deceptions and all the lies that are becoming the daily stuff of our media. Both McCain and Palin know very well that they were deceiving the electorate. In fact, precisely that was their very purpose.
Between Obama

Obama has been called a Chicago  Liberal Democrat. He spent 12 years at the University of Chicago, the center of modern American conservatism and the home of Milton Friedman, the champion of laissez-faire and supply-side economics against Keynesian emphasis on governmental regulatory policies. From Friedman (and from Reagan!) Obama learned a basic respect for the power of a free market; but he also became increasingly aware of its limitations. Free markets have not prevented the growth of income inequality and environmental pollution. Lack of regulation, not an excess of it, has caused the bubble of predatory lending , the ensuing collapse of the housing industry, and the scary financial crisis of the moment. Obama’s remedy does not center on more regulation, but on what is called “nudging,” one of the tenets of behavioral economics. Economists have always been puzzled by that fact that economic decisions by individuals are often errors that undermine their self-interest. To prevent that from happening what is needed is not always a new regulattion, but a new strategy to change not the decision of robots but the decisions of human beings: to provide them with incentives, information, and rewards.

A good example of “nudging” in Obama’s economics is his controversy with Hillary Clinton during the primaries about the universal coverage of health insurance for Americans. Hillary would simply make it unlawful not to have health insurance; Obama would provide tax credit benefits to make having insurance economically feasible and an irresistibly wise choice.  The difference between Hillary and Obama was not a difference in the final goal (as Hillary unfairly argued during the campaign), but about the means to achieve the common goal of universal coverage.

Obama’s economic plan – a plan that he should clearly, vigorously and repeatedly summarize for the American electorate– has two undisputable aims:

1) To transfer the immense tax burden  (billions of dollars) from the extremely wealthy (about 3% of the American tax payers) to the middle class and to the poor (about 97% of the American families).  For the Republicans to disguise and to lie about this fact is, of course, extremely important. Otherwise, the election of 2008 would end in a landslide victory for the Democrats. That is why McCain, who is now hypocritically shouting for “change in Washington”(he IS Washington!), is and has always been for making Bush’s tax cuts for the very wealthy, a permanent feature of national politics. More about that later.

2) To reverse what us called the Great Partisan Growth Divide. From 1948 to 2007 the Gross National Product grew annually at the rate of 1.64% under 34 different republican administrations, and at the rate of 2.78% under 26 democratic administrations. But that’s only the beginning. As professor Larry M.Bartels (Princeton) has statistically shown, during the same period, income inequality in the United States trended upward under republican presidents and downward under democratic presidents. As a good democrat, Obama wants to bring back the tradition of his party, he wants the poor and the middle class to experience faster income growth than the income growth experienced by the very wealthy. Unfortunately for those of us who are not “very wealthy,” five of the seven administrations since 1980  have been republican. That is why the number of millionaires has increased fast while the number of people living near or under the poverty line has significantly increased. An Obama victory in November would reverse the trend: it would lead to faster economic growth and would significantly shrink the income gap between the very wealthy and the  median class and the poor.

To minimize income inequality is the top priority of Obama’ tax code, a code that reflects his eclectic, pragmatic. post-partisan economics.  Always a very thoughtful man, Obama’s economics is a careful synthesis of many theories. Unlike President Bush who is a stubborn victim of his own certainties and surrounds himself with people he knows tend to agree with htm (“choose the adviser and you choose the advice,” as Sartre wrote), Obama is attracted to people who challenge his own views, seeking always to synthesize rather than to contradict.

Obama has reached the conclusion that one of the most powerful was of changing the present income inequality in American society is a basic change in the tax code. The very core of that change  is the cancellation of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, cuts that according to Bush himself were to occur automatically in 2010. McCain is opposed to the cancellation of those cuts;  Obama, on the other hand, insists that  Bush’s cuts should be cancelled (in 2009?) ONLY for all tax payers with an annual income over  $250,000.

Republicans love to repeat –as they always do– that Obama.  would increase both taxes and  spending.  They misrepresent reality in a very deceptive way. Obama would just let expire the unfair and counterproductive tax cuts that Bush made into law in 2001, a law that was passed by Congress on condition that it would expire in 2010, and that costs the Treasury $3.6 trillion a year. I would like to remind the reader that a billion is one thousand millions and a trillion is one thousand billions, at least in the USA. No wonder the republican delegates in Minneapolis (an audience that did not include many members of poor minorities) were quite excited about McCain’s economic plans.  McCain’s almost  farcical tirades about “change in Washington” advocate some trivial changes, but retain the central elitist political philosophy of Mr. Bush: the blind belief namely that only a massive cut in taxes to the very wealthy would lead to productive new investments and eventually “trickle down” to all the tax payers.  These days financial chaos in Wall Street is enough refutation of that version of “supply economics,” It is true that some of the multimillionaires’ wealth does in fact crumble down to the impoverished masses. The problem is how much and when. The only reason in America to be a republican is simply to be very wealthy. Today, Donald Trump endorsed McCain (with not reference whatsoever to Sarah Palin).  Nobody doubts that “the Donald” deserves to be republican.  Under a possible McCain administration he would save almost three million dollars in the first four years. If you are as rich as Trump, do not hesitate to vote republican!!

Obama’s spendng cuts are also achieved by simply ending as soon as possible the bloody, illegal, unnecessary, revenge-provoking, national security-threatening presence of American occupiers in Iraq, a presence that costs tax-payers ten billion dollars per month.

Let me add a few words about the Bush tax code of 2001. Such code grants to the top 1% of households (CEO.s, movie actors, exceptional football players, and the rest of the American millionaires) about one hundred and ninety times more tax cuts than those received by the middle class. Eliminating such unfair and disproportionate tax cuts, and putting an end to the war in Iraq would provide the Obama administration with much needed resources to make possible the tax credits that would sustain a universal health insurance coverage for Americans, help home owners, and make possible for youngsters of the middle class households to attend the college of their choice without burdening themselves with predatory loans.  Of course, all of this is only a blueprint to be submitted to  Congress’s scrutiny and approval. But as blueprints go, it looks much more promising than anything the republicans have ever put on the table. It may be rejected by some redneck states with few electoral votes, but if would win “handily” (as Bill Clinton would say) in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, among other more enlightened American cities.

I offer the readers some numbers to make my point. These numbers do not pretend to be exhaustive, but only a partial but solid evidence of the radical differences between Obama’s and McCain’s tax policies. I emphasize payroll taxes over income taxes because  poor and low middle class tax payers do not have many corporate assets, capitals gains, bonds, etc: they just try every month to make it on the basis of their wages.

-Obama’s tax breaks for tax payers who make between $38,000 and $ 66.000  would amount to $1042 less than now. For the same people under McCain’s plans it would be $319 less than now.
-One the other hand, the McCain tax for wealthy tax payers who make more than $2.9 million annually, would be $269,000; the same people under Obama’s tax code would pay $701.805. Against McCain/Palin’s “misinformation” (namely, lies), it’s important to emphasize that such increase affects not “all Americans, but only tax payers on the very top of the income ladder” – Obama would keep the present taxes (under Bush’s 2001 plan) for all the tax payers who make less than $250,00, about 97% of the American population!

But Obama would  also give a $500 tax credit  per person to all the members of households that make less than $150,00, a   tax credit of $1,000 for tax payers that earn between  $8,000 and  $79,000, a tax credit of 19% of their mortgage up to $800 for people who do not itemize their deductions,  and would exempt from any tax  all seniors who make less than $50,000. Please, think about that!

-It’s true that McCain would double the exemption for dependents for all tax payer a provision that help minority familes with several children) lower corporate tax rates (that very seldom apply to people with low incomes), and lessen the bite of estate taxes forwealthy people pay on the profit made by selling their real estat).

In a few words:

The Obama tax cuts for the middle class and the poor would be roughly three times larger than those projected by McCain.
The McCain/Palin tax cuts would benefit mostly tax payers that make more than $2.8 million, about 0,1% of the American people!!

Obama’s tax code represents a shift of the tax burden from the middle class and the poor to the very wealthy, a shift  that has no equal in American history. Never forget that when you listen to the untruthful spinning of both McCain and Palin, the true disciples of Mr. Bush!

Let’s rush to the voting precints!

The economy reThe economy re mains the number one issue of the presidential campaign. Although AmericAlthouh America is still a prosperous country,  for the first time on record the growth of the economy has    and is failing to benefit most American families. Accounting for inflation, most families (the bottom 60% of the income ladder) are making less than in the year 2000. Americans still buy houses and cars, but they buy them partially at least with debt, a debt that in many cases will never be repaid.

During the Republican Convention in Minneapolis, the new VP nominee. Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, repeated, once again, all  McCain’s objections to Obama’s economics. Obviously, Palin’s speech had been written for her by one of the Bush campaign writers: the speech contained all the deceptions and all the lies that are becoming the daily stuff of our media. Both McCain and Palin know very well that they were deceiving the electorate. In fact, precisely that was their very purpose.
Between Obama

Obama has been called a Chicago  Liberal Democrat. He spent 12 years at the University of Chicago, the center of modern American conservatism and the home of Milton Friedman, the champion of laissez-faire and supply-side economics against Keynesian emphasis on governmental regulatory policies. From Friedman (and from Reagan!) Obama learned a basic respect for the power of a free market; but he also became increasingly aware of its limitations. Free markets have not prevented the growth of income inequality and environmental pollution. Lack of regulation, not an excess of it, has caused the bubble of predatory lending , the ensuing collapse of the housing industry, and the scary financial crisis of the moment. Obama’s remedy does not center on more regulation, but on what is called “nudging,” one of the tenets of behavioral economics. Economists have always been puzzled by that fact that economic decisions by individuals are often errors that undermine their self-interest. To prevent that from happening what is needed is not always a new regulattion, but a new strategy to change not the decision of robots but the decisions of human beings: to provide them with incentives, information, and rewards.

A good example of “nudging” in Obama’s economics is his controversy with Hillary Clinton during the primaries about the universal coverage of health insurance for Americans. Hillary would simply make it unlawful not to have health insurance; Obama would provide tax credit benefits to make having insurance economically feasible and an irresistibly wise choice.  The difference between Hillary and Obama was not a difference in the final goal (as Hillary unfairly argued during the campaign), but about the means to achieve the common goal of universal coverage.

Obama’s economic plan – a plan that he should clearly, vigorously and repeatedly summarize for the American electorate– has two undisputable aims:

1) To transfer the immense tax burden  (billions of dollars) from the extremely wealthy (about 3% of the American tax payers) to the middle class and to the poor (about 97% of the American families).  For the Republicans to disguise and to lie about this fact is, of course, extremely important. Otherwise, the election of 2008 would end in a landslide victory for the Democrats. That is why McCain, who is now hypocritically shouting for “change in Washington”(he IS Washington!), is and has always been for making Bush’s tax cuts for the very wealthy, a permanent feature of national politics. More about that later.

2) To reverse what us called the Great Partisan Growth Divide. From 1948 to 2007 the Gross National Product grew annually at the rate of 1.64% under 34 different republican administrations, and at the rate of 2.78% under 26 democratic administrations. But that’s only the beginning. As professor Larry M.Bartels (Princeton) has statistically shown, during the same period, income inequality in the United States trended upward under republican presidents and downward under democratic presidents. As a good democrat, Obama wants to bring back the tradition of his party, he wants the poor and the middle class to experience faster income growth than the income growth experienced by the very wealthy. Unfortunately for those of us who are not “very wealthy,” five of the seven administrations since 1980  have been republican. That is why the number of millionaires has increased fast while the number of people living near or under the poverty line has significantly increased. An Obama victory in November would reverse the trend: it would lead to faster economic growth and would significantly shrink the income gap between the very wealthy and the  median class and the poor.

To minimize income inequality is the top priority of Obama’ tax code, a code that reflects his eclectic, pragmatic. post-partisan economics.  Always a very thoughtful man, Obama’s economics is a careful synthesis of many theories. Unlike President Bush who is a stubborn victim of his own certainties and surrounds himself with people he knows tend to agree with htm (“choose the adviser and you choose the advice,” as Sartre wrote), Obama is attracted to people who challenge his own views, seeking always to synthesize rather than to contradict.

Obama has reached the conclusion that one of the most powerful was of changing the present income inequality in American society is a basic change in the tax code. The very core of that change  is the cancellation of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, cuts that according to Bush himself were to occur automatically in 2010. McCain is opposed to the cancellation of those cuts;  Obama, on the other hand, insists that  Bush’s cuts should be cancelled (in 2009?) ONLY for all tax payers with an annual income over  $250,000.

Republicans love to repeat –as they always do– that Obama.  would increase both taxes and  spending.  They misrepresent reality in a very deceptive way. Obama would just let expire the unfair and counterproductive tax cuts that Bush made into law in 2001, a law that was passed by Congress on condition that it would expire in 2010, and that costs the Treasury $3.6 trillion a year. I would like to remind the reader that a billion is one thousand millions and a trillion is one thousand billions, at least in the USA. No wonder the republican delegates in Minneapolis (an audience that did not include many members of poor minorities) were quite excited about McCain’s economic plans.  McCain’s almost  farcical tirades about “change in Washington” advocate some trivial changes, but retain the central elitist political philosophy of Mr. Bush: the blind belief namely that only a massive cut in taxes to the very wealthy would lead to productive new investments and eventually “trickle down” to all the tax payers.  These days financial chaos in Wall Street is enough refutation of that version of “supply economics,” It is true that some of the multimillionaires’ wealth does in fact crumble down to the impoverished masses. The problem is how much and when. The only reason in America to be a republican is simply to be very wealthy. Today, Donald Trump endorsed McCain (with not reference whatsoever to Sarah Palin).  Nobody doubts that “the Donald” deserves to be republican.  Under a possible McCain administration he would save almost three million dollars in the first four years. If you are as rich as Trump, do not hesitate to vote republican!!

Obama’s spendng cuts are also achieved by simply ending as soon as possible the bloody, illegal, unnecessary, revenge-provoking, national security-threatening presence of American occupiers in Iraq, a presence that costs tax-payers ten billion dollars per month.

Let me add a few words about the Bush tax code of 2001. Such code grants to the top 1% of households (CEO.s, movie actors, exceptional football players, and the rest of the American millionaires) about one hundred and ninety times more tax cuts than those received by the middle class. Eliminating such unfair and disproportionate tax cuts, and putting an end to the war in Iraq would provide the Obama administration with much needed resources to make possible the tax credits that would sustain a universal health insurance coverage for Americans, help home owners, and make possible for youngsters of the middle class households to attend the college of their choice without burdening themselves with predatory loans.  Of course, all of this is only a blueprint to be submitted to  Congress’s scrutiny and approval. But as blueprints go, it looks much more promising than anything the republicans have ever put on the table. It may be rejected by some redneck states with few electoral votes, but if would win “handily” (as Bill Clinton would say) in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, among other more enlightened American cities.

I offer the readers some numbers to make my point. These numbers do not pretend to be exhaustive, but only a partial but solid evidence of the radical differences between Obama’s and McCain’s tax policies. I emphasize payroll taxes over income taxes because  poor and low middle class tax payers do not have many corporate assets, capitals gains, bonds, etc: they just try every month to make it on the basis of their wages.

-Obama’s tax breaks for tax payers who make between $38,000 and $ 66.000  would amount to $1042 less than now. For the same people under McCain’s plans it would be $319 less than now.
-One the other hand, the McCain tax for wealthy tax payers who make more than $2.9 million annually, would be $269,000; the same people under Obama’s tax code would pay $701.805. Against McCain/Palin’s “misinformation” (namely, lies), it’s important to emphasize that such increase affects not “all Americans, but only tax payers on the very top of the income ladder” – Obama would keep the present taxes (under Bush’s 2001 plan) for all the tax payers who make less than $250,00, about 97% of the American population!

But Obama would  also give a $500 tax credit  per person to all the members of households that make less than $150,00, a   tax credit of $1,000 for tax payers that earn between  $8,000 and  $79,000, a tax credit of 19% of their mortgage up to $800 for people who do not itemize their deductions,  and would exempt from any tax  all seniors who make less than $50,000. Please, think about that!

-It’s true that McCain would double the exemption for dependents for all tax payer a provision that help minority familes with several children) lower corporate tax rates (that very seldom apply to people with low incomes), and lessen the bite of estate taxes forwealthy people pay on the profit made by selling their real estat).

In a few words:

The Obama tax cuts for the middle class and the poor would be roughly three times larger than those projected by McCain.
The McCain/Palin tax cuts would benefit mostly tax payers that make more than $2.8 million, about 0,1% of the American people!!

Obama’s tax code represents a shift of the tax burden from the middle class and the poor to the very wealthy, a shift  that has no equal in American history. Never forget that when you listen to the untruthful spinning of both McCain and Palin, the true disciples of Mr. Bush!

Let’s rush to the voting precints!

President Bush has always been worried about his legacy. He has serious reasons to be worried, unless Mr. Limbaugh becomes the historian of this terrible administration. So, in the last months of his tenure in office, he has devised ways to prolong his morbid impact on the history of humanity. These are, quite at random, some of the perverse steps he has taken.

1-    Regarding Iraq, he is trying to sign a treaty with the Maliki government to make legally possible the occupation of Irak by US forces for any foreseeable future with the authority to arrest (and to kill) Iraqis as we have been doing since 2002. The very idea of signing a treaty with a nation that is supposedly the front line of the war against global terror  (another presidential delusion), a treaty that would outlast the last days of one of the least popular administrations in American political history is obviously ridiculous. Fortunately, the government of Mr. Maliki is more interested in making possible the full sovereignty of Iraq without the presence of the hated occupiers (us). Obama’s visit to Iraq (today) has had embarrassing results for Mr.Bush and Mr. McCain: Maliki seems to agree with Obama’s timetable to withdraw American troops from Iraq! The surge has indeed been very successful.
2-    In the meantime, the US is building in Baghdad the largest US embassy in the world: a fortified city (larger than the Vatican) with its own shopping malls, theaters, residential condos, pools, etc. Mr. Bush’s imperial colonialism will forever have its own monument, even when he is again cutting firewood at his Texas ranch, a job he should have never abandoned. By the way, neither the proposed treaty with Iraq nor the construction of the embassy in Bahgdad, have been publicly and openly discussed with Congress, and much less with the American tax payers. The most secretive and opaque administration in American political history, is going to end fully in style.
3-    With respect to domestic policies, Mr. Bush is desperately trying to make permanent his tax cuts for the very wealthy, one of the unquestionable reasons for the multiplication of American millionaires and for all the miseries of a middle class dangerously teetering on the abyss of poverty. If McCain is elected, those taxes would remain for at least four more years. If Obama is elected, they would be instantly abolished. Obama and the country need that money to help the American middle class in many ways: health care, student loans for college, rebuilding the infrastructure, and funding a national energy plan  that would make possible electric and hydrogen cars, massive solar and wind mills, irrigation projects, etc, etc.

Today’s newspapers have announced that Europeans (at least Italians, French, Germans, British, and Dutch) favor Obama over McCain at the rate of 5 to 1. Let’s  pray to the gods that Americans do the same at the rate to 10 to 1. The last thing humanity needs is four more years of Bush’s morbid delusions.

The Choice Between Obama and McCain (I); A Conversation in an Evangelical Mega-Church of Southern California

Last Saturday (8,16.08), Reverend Warren, a much respected evangelical preacher and the extremely successful author of one of the world best-selling books (The Purpose-Driven Life), brought the two Presidential contenders, Barack Obama and John McCain, to answer roughly the same questions in front of a 2,000 audience of Southern Californian evangelical believers  — many, I suppose, from thickly conservatively  Orange County.

Rick Warren had a double purpose: one, to demonstrate that it was possible to disagree in a civil manner; two, to inquire into the depth of the candidates’ Christian values and to give them an opportunity to present their worldviews, namely to confess how their faith had molded their politics. The fact that faith molds politics is both inevitable and justified, as the reverend and this blog willingly assume.

The first purpose was achieved for the most part, a small miracle in our country in 2008. The audience was amazingly polite to both speakers and to their pastor. Reverend Warren  (he said to Larry King after the forum that he admired and respected both candidates) was fair and even humorous, as one could expect from a man of his caliber. The speakers themselves abstained from the mean and often personal trumped-up charges that they “approve’ in their television messages. They were not civil enough, however, to sit down in the same room to answer Reverend Warren’s questions.. After a quick handshake they departed in two different directions: Obama to face the audience; McCain to be “sequestered” in “a cone of silence’ that would deny him the advantage of knowing the questions minutes before he had to find an answer in his scripted repertory. The Obama campaign later on denied that McCain was were the pastor claimed he had been during the questioning, and that, in fact, he had heard the questions in his car radio. We will never know whether such a charge was one more example of the campaign’s mean tone or one more sign of the “ maverick” McCain’s cleverness. There is no doubt, however, that the questions themselves were open temptations for the speakers to pander to their “by invitation only” Christian audience. And they both did their share of pandering The “conversation” began with a straight confession by both candidates that they, yes, believed that Jesus Christ had died for their sins, a tenet of Christian faith that is hard to find in the Sermon on the Mount (Jefferson’s and mine favorite pages of the New Testament) and was first concocted in the mind of Saint Paul (Letter to the Romans) according to some biblical scholars. No matter what the theological ancestry of such thought might be, the truth is that neither Obama nor McCain had before given much evidence of their belief in Jesus as the Redeemer of humanity. But their words gained without any doubt some votes for the final reckoning of November 4.

Obama’s and McCain’s style in answering the questions was radically different.  Obama’s critics (the Neo-cons and the Republicans) found him “convoluted,” “wordy” and not “incisive enough.” To me they were the words of a very thoughtful man constantly involved in the life-long project of finding what is fair, of offerintg solutions rather than seeking applause.  McCain’s opponents –including the author of this blog –found McCain strictly tied up to catch phrases that had proven before to incite applause (as they did), enamored of slogans that sounded like commercials offering  ideologies for sale

One of Reverend Warren’s less felicitous questions was the Reaganesque question about evil. Does evil exist? What is the best response to it: to ignore it, to confront it, to negotiate about it (the word “negotiate” had quite a history in the primaries!), or to defeat it? The question does not make much sense simply because it was maddeningly abstract: evil is a polymorphous reality that calls for an equally polymorphous answer. One does not ignore a lethal cancer nor negotiates with a toothache. Defeating a drought is even more difficult than defeating the Taliban. McCain’s instant response was a response that one could learn in the Naval Academy, but would not help anybody sitting in the Oval Office of the White House.  But McCain did not hesitate (or thought) about the answer: ‘to defeat it,” he said in a heroic voice. The simple answer was simplistic, but, of course, it was loudly applauded. Is this the level of political sophistication the Republican party has descended to? So much for the wisdom of the Orange County’s audience.

Obama’s response immediately denied its Reaganesque overtones: “evil” is primarily what we encounter in our daily life here in America rather than the threat of evil foreign powers bent on destroying the American dream; nations like the Soviet Union whose casualties in the war against Hitler, both military and civilian-  were ten times larger than our own.

Another answer that clearly manifested the different stuff of which Obama and McCain are made off, was, like a mine-field, rich in explosive threats. “Who are the three wisest people you have met in your life? “  Obama, in an intimate mood, humbly admitted that two of the people he thinks are the wisest in his life are his wife who  is frank enough to remind him of his own failures, by simply saying “you screwed that one up”; and his grandmother, who never went to college, but was rich in common sense, the least common of all senses.

McCain, as it is his wont, immediately answered (he seems to avoid thinking) :  ‘General Petraeus.” I must admit that the answer made me feel sorry for our elder Presidential candidate. I am only about ten years older than McCain,  and pity a man who thinks that Petraeus is one of he wisest am he has ever met. The answer was pure campaign rhetoric.  Mc Cain has always relished the phrase that, as President, he would bring the troops back home only when they are victorious and proud (“I would prefer to lose this election than to lose the war”), a phrase that had always drawn fervent applause from the small  crowds he managed to attract, crowds that I guess have totally forgotten the rather shameful American  escape from the roofs of Saigon in 1954. I guess that McCain’s political design was to prepare Americans to morph the fragile and transient success of Petraeus’ “surge” in Baghdad into a historical victory of some kind before the summer of 2009 (!!), the time when American troops are urged to leave Iraq by the most recent move of Iraq’s ‘democratic’ leaders. Petraeus, however, a great general as anyone will admit, was unable or unwilling to say whether the presence of American troops in Iraq helped or not our country’s national security. So much for McCain’s “wisest man.”

Finally, one more question openly revealed the difference between the two men. Reverend Warren (unknowingly perhaps) asked a question that has a long history in western ethical thought, all the way from Aristotle to Pope Benedict XIV: when does human life begin? at what moment is a human fetus endowed with the inalienable rights of a person? The contemporary evangelical answer — very much influenced, believe it or not, by the Vatican’s “culture of life” –is to simply say that life begins at the moment of conception.  From that moment on, any attempt to interrupt a process that naturally (but, not always by any means). ends in a baby, is a sinful abortion, and, according to radical evangelicals, a homicide that should be reported to the local sheriff.

Such an answer, repeated by McCain without a single moment of reflection  is far from being a self-evident truth. On the contrary, it is counter-intuitive and naturally and intelligently subject to doubts, doubts that are the root of the pro-choice versus pro-life controversy and that should make prudent and thoughtful citizens tolerant and respectful of other people’s opinions. McCain’s was the answer of the slightly fanatic, just for a moment, just for political pandering.  Obama’s answer was exactly the opposite: such a question, he answered is “above my pay grade.” In fact, Obama went an inch too far.  :”If that is what you believe,–he said to Warren –there is no discussion possible between you and me. The only thing we can do is to pragmatically discuss in what ways we could minimize the number of abortions in our society” (a position close to that of Hillary Clinton).

I have a different attitude. Even if I accept the fact that a knockout counter-argument for choice does not always work, I think that there are ways to debilitate the rashness and anger of the pro-life champions. Here are a few questions for such people:
If a fetus — something you see only with a microscope or a good magnifying glass – is a person as you and me,
-why Christians never have funerals for fetuses?
-why even Catholics do not bury fetuses in Catholic cemeteries but dispose of them in ways I am not willing to descrihe??
-why does the Bible totally avoids saying ANYTHING about fetuses?-
_why does the  Catholic Church allow Catholic women who have been raped to take pills to prevent the fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus?
-why does nature (or ultimately, God) allow  millions of implanted fertilized eggs to be naturally aborted before birth?
And so on and so on.

Mr. McCain’s rash judgment based on ignorance is certainly not the ideal quality for a possible Commander in Chief, particularly at 3 am when the red telephone of immortal fame rings through the corridors of the White House.

Please, vote for Obama!

For years President Bush has repeated his favorite mantra: the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will never be decided by politicos in Washington, but by “the conditions on the ground.” The President’s subordinates, headed by the impeachable Cheney, have repeated it as a self-evident truth, although just a moment of reflection shows that it is no more than plain nonsense.

The conditions on the ground do not speak for themselves; they are only what human beings think that they are. In Iraq, of all places there are as many “conditions on the ground” as there are ethnic groups, religious sects, terrorist bandits, contractors and journalists, American or coalition soldiers, American “presumptive Presidential candidates on a quick visit, and last but not least, American generals in charge of military operations.

A good example of such diversity of opinions, and one that is particularly relevant these days, are the opinions about conditions around the city of Kirkurk.  Everyone agrees that Kirkurk is in northern Iraq, and that it is actually floating on millions and millions of untouched but easily recoverable oil. The disagreements begin when it has to be decided who is the legal owner of such wealth.

Before Saddam Hussein, Kirkurk was mostly inhabited by Kurds and Turkmen who do not speak Arabic nor care very much about Iraq as a nation. As the saying goes, Iraq was not created by God (as France or Egypt or Persia), but was created by Winston Churchill. Under Saddam Hussein many Kurds and Turkmen wereforced to emigrate out of Kirkurk; they were forcefully replaced by Arab-speaking Iraqis: Hussein wanted the oil under Kirkurk.

Today, Kirkurk reflects this bloody history. That is why the Iraqi Parliament can agree on almost everything, except on the conditions on the ground in Kirkurk, and even worse, when it comes to the conditions in the ”underground,” the billions of barrels of oil that are coveted by China, Western Europe, India, and, why not,  the United States of America.  The fate of Iraq depends in great part on the fate of Kirkurk. a name that Americans should begin to be familiar with before November, 4, 2008.

The diversity of opinion about the conditions on the ground pales in comparison with the diversity of the authority of the people who have such opinions.. The crisis really begins when those who matter most have radically different opinions on the conditions on the ground. In Iraq itself, Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds have three opposing views on such conditions.  What is truly dangerous is the difference of opinion of the Maliki Government on one side and the American authorities on the other: the generals in charge of the troops (mostly, Petraeus) .To Bush “the conditions on the ground” simply means “what I think are the conditions on the ground.”

Strange alliances are emerging that complicate the situation during the presidential campaign:  Obama and the Democrats seem to agree with the Iraq government (!) on establishing a deadline for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Their dates do not totally agree, but that could be fixed with some face to face discussion.  The Republicans, “guided” by the bellicose McCain  and inspired by Bush, have rather the model of the American occupation of Germany and Japan (which has been going on for  over sixty years!), a project that Iraqis rightly see as a twenty-first century form of imperial colonialism. McCain nonchalantly speaks of a hundred years Americas occupation of Iraq, an irresponsible manner  of speaking that invites suicide bombers
ready to murder the “infidels.” Having being confined to a Vietnamese prison for years does not seem to be the ideal training for a firm but prudent foreign policy.

The Conditions on the Ground

For years President Bush has repeated his favorite mantra: the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will never be decided by politicos in Washington, but by “the conditions on the ground.” The President’s subordinates, headed by the impeachable Cheney, have repeated it as a self-evident truth, although just a moment of reflection shows that it is no more than plain nonsense.

The conditions on the ground do not speak for themselves; they are only what human beings think that they are. In Iraq, of all places there are as many “conditions on the ground” as there are ethnic groups, religious sects, terrorist bandits, contractors and journalists, American or coalition soldiers, American “presumptive Presidential candidates on a quick visit, and last but not least, American generals in charge of military operations.

A good example of such diversity of opinions, and one that is particularly relevant these days, are the opinions about conditions around the city of Kirkurk.  Everyone agrees that Kirkurk is in northern Iraq, and that it is actually floating on millions and millions of untouched but easily recoverable oil. The disagreements begin when it has to be decided who is the legal owner of such wealth.

Before Saddam Hussein, Kirkurk was mostly inhabited by Kurds and Turkmen who do not speak Arabic nor care very much about Iraq as a nation. As the saying goes, Iraq was not created by God (as France or Egypt or Persia), but was created by Winston Churchill. Under Saddam Hussein many Kurds and Turkmen wereforced to emigrate out of Kirkurk; they were forcefully replaced by Arab-speaking Iraqis: Hussein wanted the oil under Kirkurk.

Today, Kirkurk reflects this bloody history. That is why the Iraqi Parliament can agree on almost everything, except on the conditions on the ground in Kirkurk, and even worse, when it comes to the conditions in the ”underground,” the billions of barrels of oil that are coveted by China, Western Europe, India, and, why not,  the United States of America.  The fate of Iraq depends in great part on the fate of Kirkurk. a name that Americans should begin to be familiar with before November, 4, 2008.

The diversity of opinion about the conditions on the ground pales in comparison with the diversity of the authority of the people who have such opinions.. The crisis really begins when those who matter most have radically different opinions on the conditions on the ground. In Iraq itself, Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds have three opposing views on such conditions.  What is truly dangerous is the difference of opinion of the Maliki Government on one side and the American authorities on the other: the generals in charge of the troops (mostly, Petraeus) .To Bush “the conditions on the ground” simply means “what I think are the conditions on the ground.”

Strange alliances are emerging that complicate the situation during the presidential campaign:  Obama and the Democrats seem to agree with the Iraq government (!) on establishing a deadline for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Their dates do not totally agree, but that could be fixed with some face to face discussion.  The Republicans, “guided” by the bellicose McCain  and inspired by Bush, have rather the model of the American occupation of Germany and Japan (which has been going on for  over sixty years!), a project that Iraqis rightly see as a twenty-first century form of imperial colonialism. McCain nonchalantly speaks of a hundred years Americas occupation of Iraq, an irresponsible manner  of speaking that invites suicide bombers
ready to murder the “infidels.” Having being confined to a Vietnamese prison for years does not seem to be the ideal training for a firm but prudent foreign policy.

During the Great Awakening of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin donated money to the building of a great hall in Philadelphia for preachers to use, including, he said, “the Great Mufti of Constantinople,” the chief Muslim adviser to the Ottoman Sultan.  That was the America of the Founders, the America I chose as my adopted country, not the America of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, both of whom made obnoxious comments on Islam.

Today, the Republican opponents of Barack Obama have spread the rumor that Obama is not a Christian, but a Muslim. Unfortunately, they mean that as an insult, while it could and should very well be a compliment, as it is to one billion peaceful Muslim believers throughout the world, including one million American Muslims and two members of the House of Representatives. By doing that they are responsible for reinforcing one of the most severe threats to our national security – which Republicans claim to be “their” strong domain–, the growing hostility between the Christian (?) West and the Muslim world, a somber distortion of the western media and the ominous background of President Bush’s delusional concoction about “the Global War on Terror.”

Although I am not a Muslim and was raised by a Catholic mother in Spain (!), I have always felt an irrepressible admiration for Islam, the religious belief of Muslims. To me to be a Muslim means much more than some kind of ethnic identity, as when we say that the former Yugoslavia  included Catholic Croats, Christian Orhodox Serbians, and Muslim Bosnians. It is also in that sense that we sometimes say that somebody is a Jew, meaning only that his father is a Jew, whether the person we are talking about is an atheist or a practical agnostic. It also means some thing radically different: a political ideology that professes a total effort, including violent means, to bring about the restoration of Sharia  (Muslim Law) in Islamic societies against a secularizing West. The icon of such ideology is Osama Bin Laden, whom I consider an abomination of Islam rather than an authentic Muslim.

The Islam I admire is the most uncompromising form of  monotheism in the history of religion. The only fully human response to Allah (“The God”)  is the total surrender  (“islam” means submission) of  humans to a unique God  whose nature remains transcendent and ineffable. In comparison with Christian dogmas about the Holy Trinity or the incarnation of God in Jesus, Islam passionately proclaims that Allah is the only God, and Mohammed is his prophet. No Muslim has ever been even tempted to believe that Mohammed was divine. In fact, Muslims delight in being reminded of the humanity of Mohammed. In sharp contrast with the Gospels, the traditions (the Hadith) about Mohammed’ life give us a healthy account of the Prophet’s sexual prowess. A Muslim philosopher, al-Ghazzali, wrote without hesitation that if the pleasure of sex could last forever, it would be very similar to life in Paradise. Apparently, Mohammed thought along those ways.

The Koran is not a theology about Allah’s nature, but a discourse about the moral response of humans to their divine Creator and Legislator. It is not an “orthodoxy’ (right opinion), but an orthopraxy (right behavior). The mesmerizing simplicity of Islam  was defiled by the contact of Muslim scholars with Hellenistic culture in Syria, but in most cases they bound themselves to specify the limits of human knowledge about God (we only know what God is not, the so-called “via negativa”) and to inquire about the “anthropomorphic” (human-like) language about the “Altogether Otherness” of Allah. Although these philosophical clarifications deviated somehow from the initial and appealing simplicity of Islam, they had a decisive influence upon medieval Christian philosophers and Theologians. My first contact with Islam was through Saint Thomas’ Summa Theologica.  Even now I hear echoes of Maimonides and ibn-Sina (Avicenna) in the writings of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.  Maimonides, a Spanish Jewish philosopher who wrote in Arabic, explained to the “perplexed” what is the acceptable meaning of speaking about God’s “hands,’ “face’, His “throne,’ etc . How can the incorporeal sit on a throne? He then came to the amazing conclusion that God’s “love” is not like any love we know, that God “is” not like anything that we know to be, that God namely  remains ineffable to humans, no matter how many volumes of theology (the science Kant thought to be impossible) you might find in the Library of Congress. It is wiser to keep in silence about “those matters we cannot speak of “(Wittgenstein).

All the religions of the Book– Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are different attempts to speak about the same and unique God we worship in silence, frustrated efforts to speak about the ineffable, culturally different acts of submission to the same God who created all of us equal in aspirations, doubts, and fundamental beliefs. The distinctive and different features of each revelation are historically and culturally important, but should not be divisive nor religiously relevant. They deserve respect, but they do not demand unquestionable submission. As post-Kantians philosophers have acknowledged, the failure of metaphysics has become the metaphysics of failure.

Thus, Islam is an open invitation to the deistic attitude of the Founding Fathers’ religious beliefs, to their tenets on the separation of church and state, and to their global tolerance toward all religions. Their basis was the equality of ALL (not only Americans) humans vis a vis their One Creator, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Deists believe that all religious beliefs proceed from the same God and lead to the same God.

Islam’s detachment from vain speculation about the nature of Allah is made clear by the very fact that Islam, unlike Christianity, does not claim to have an infallible guide of orthodoxy, like the Catholic Pope is supposed to be. The only guide is the universal consensus of the ulama, the community of Muslim scholars, a radically democratic concept of religious authority. The only exception to this fundamental attitude is the role of enlightened  mullahs in Shiite Islam. Iran’s Khomeini in Iran, as Shi’ism itself, represents a tragic figure in the history of modern Islam. But, soon perhaps, an Iranian Ataturk will bring the powerful nation of Iran to a Turkey-like replica of a secularized society, the future of all Muslim societies according to experts on Islam. Iran’s educated university youth, like the youth of Kazahstan, is already on its way to Ataturk.

Muslims reject original sin, an extremely difficult notion: how can  a baby who is one-hour old be considered a sinner? Consequently, there is no redeemer, much less a redeemer who is a God incarnated, a blasphemy to Muslims. In Islam, there is no celibate priesthood, no pope, no sacraments, no church.  The Koran introduces us to Mohammed as the exemplar of moral conduct. The traditions about Mohammed complete such characterization. To me the mosque of Cordoba, now a Catholic Cathedral, remains as the symbol of religious tolerance, the ideal of a peaceful harmony of all humans equal to each other in their beliefs and their doubts.

And it is precisely in this aspect that the Islamic model fails in part to fully convince the modern reader. After all, Mohammed’s mission in his lifetime was to lift up the moral code of a tribal society of desert Bedouins. In his harshest commands- as the stoning of women caught in adultery. the punishment of theft,  or the injunctions about lending money on interest (the foundation of modern capitalism), Mohammed’s moral rules were not able to significantly transcend the Semitic vindictiveness of compensatory punishment (an eye for an eye) or the severity of the Jewish Leviticus. Jefferson was totally right in his admiration for Jesus’ never upgraded moral loftiness and noble mindedness.

Both Christianity and Islam have both impeccable and dark pages in their history. The bloodiness of the Inquisition  (originally a French institution better known toady in its horrible Spanish embodiment) and the devastation of the Crusades– initially led by a saint that is venerated as an icon of Christian kindness, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux — have little to do with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mountain. Islam, too, has had and is having at this very moment, a history of violent intolerance. As leader of the Muslim community of Medina, however, Mohammed tried very hard  (not always successfully) to keep peace with Jews and Christians, both of whom eventually would be free to practice their religion provided they paid a special tax. The sections of the Koran that deal with the Medina period are rich in moral precepts.  The fragile peace of Medina was, however, reenacted in the Spanish el-Andalus (Andalucia) all the way from the ninth to the twelfth century, a time when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in peaceful and creative harmony, a harmony that transformed the cultural landsca- pe of  pre-Renaissance Europe..

Human beings of all cultures cannot permit that the hostility between the West and Islam lead to mushroom clouds in the sky of our planet. It is our deepest obligation to bring back the tolerance of the Founders, to change American foreign policy in the world. I think Obama can do it, and I am sure that McCain (“a man of the previous century,” as a French journalist characterized him last week) cannot even think about it,

I am an 83 year old man, and I have been happily married to my wife for 44 years. During those years I have always thought I was a model sleeper. I had some problems going to sleep, but that was radically remedied by a pill of Triazolam.

After 44 years of sharing my bed with my wife, she revealed to me she was worried about the apparent intervals of no breathing following bouts of almost operatic snoring. The snoring part was no surprise to me: I have been haunted all my life by complainers who slept near or in my room, including my twin brother. But I simply could not believe that I would frequently stop breathing during my sleep. Apnea patients, like myself, lack any memory or awareness of such experience. That is one of the dangers of apnea: the last person to know that he or she has a serious disease – a disease that can kill you— is the very apnea patient. Unfortunately, some of the symptoms that might alert even your doctor to the presence of apnea are frequently outsourced to other diseases, such as an enlarged prostate, prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, or just plain old age.

My wife’s revelation directed me to my primary physician, — a very prudent, caring, and knowledgeable gentleman, who, as a colleague of mine in the university used to say, belongs without any doubt to that legion of doctors, nurses, and others in the health care business who are “the unsung heroes of our civilization.” My doctor sent me immediately to a sleep disorders specialist. That visit, and the ones that followed, have in many ways changed my perception of old age. I will explain how.

The sleep disorders specialist ordered a nightlong test of my sleep. Machines of all kind were attached to my body by a dozen or so of electrodes to monitor brain waves, sleep configuration, blood pressure, sleep position, breathing stops, etc. The next day I was shown a chart of my sleep patterns: I had a severe case of mixed apnea caused by a blockage of the airways and  by a failure of the brain to control breathing, resulting in high blood pressure, episodes of apnea (a word that names the disease and its episodes), time without breathing, etc. I was shocked: in an eight-hour sleep I had almost four hundred interruptions of breathing. No wonder I felt fatigued and very sleepy during the day. The nurse said that “it was not a pretty picture,” a nice euphemism.

How could that happen without me having the slightest consciousness of it? My experience (or absence of it), however, is not unique. About 85% of people with apnea don’t even suspect they have apnea, are never diagnosed with apnea and are never treated for it.  And here comes the most startling part of the story: the treatment of apnea is simple, inexpensive, totally painless, hardly invasive, and almost 100% effective.

All you have to do is to sleep with a mask attached to an air compressor and vaporizer that constantly send into your nose waves of humid air that maintains your airwaves open from the nose to the lungs all night long. It amazes me to hear from doctors that many people refuse to use the mask and the air compressor (although it is paid 100% by Medicare!), because they are uncomfortable or the machine is slightly noisy. Some people think that only 50% of people urged by the doctors to use their mask, actually use it. Not a compliment to American resilience and determination.

I want to be absolutely honest with you: I hate discomfort and can hardly tolerate severe pain, but I have never failed to use the mask or the compressor since the doctor told me to use them every night, almost four months ago. I admit that occasionally the ‘machine’ leaks air and becomes abnormally noisy.  In my own case a persistent nasal congestion aggravated the problem. But the congestion is (slowly!) fading away. Furthermore, for the first 45 minutes the machine gradually increases the pressure. By the time it reaches the pressure decided by the doctor, a normal apnea patient is already happily sleeping.

The effects of such treatment are quite incredible. While I used to go the bathroom eight to twelve times every night, I only go  now TWICE ! It is a joy to wake up for the first time in the night about 3am or even 4am. Doctors tend to blame an enlarged prostate for that problem, a problem that is solved by having air forced through your nose into the lungs. But that’s only the beginning.  Mask treatment diminishes your daytime sleepiness and fatigue, lowers your high blood pressure, increases the oxygen content of your blood, significantly depresses your appetite for food, helps to prevent heart attacks and congestive heart failure, controls depression and irritability, improves insulin resistance, and — are you ready for this? — actually increases your alertness and your recall memory.  More importantly, the mortality index of apnea patients who are treated for it. reverts to the same levels of those people who never had apnea in their life.

If you want more details about my own case write to me at norena@cruzio.com or to my blog CGNoreña Weekly.

I am an 83 year old man, and I have been happily married to my wife for 44 years. During those years I have always thought I was a model sleeper. I had some problems going to sleep, but that was radically remedied by a pill of Triazolam.

After 44 years of sharing my bed with my wife, she revealed to me she was worried about the apparent intervals of no breathing following bouts of almost operatic snoring. The snoring part was no surprise to me: I have been haunted all my life by complainers who slept near or in my room, including my twin brother. But I simply could not believe that I would frequently stop breathing during my sleep. Apnea patients, like myself, lack any memory or awareness of such experience. That is one of the dangers of apnea: the last person to know that he or she has a serious disease – a disease that can kill you— is the very apnea patient. Unfortunately, some of the symptoms that might alert even your doctor to the presence of apnea are frequently outsourced to other diseases, such as an enlarged prostate, prostate cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, or just plain old age.

My wife’s revelation directed me to my primary physician, — a very prudent, caring, and knowledgeable gentleman, who, as a colleague of mine in the university used to say, belongs without any doubt to that legion of doctors, nurses, and others in the health care business who are “the unsung heroes of our civilization.” My doctor sent me immediately to a sleep disorders specialist. That visit, and the ones that followed, have in many ways changed my perception of old age. I will explain how.

The sleep disorders specialist ordered a nightlong test of my sleep. Machines of all kind were attached to my body by a dozen or so of electrodes to monitor brain waves, sleep configuration, blood pressure, sleep position, breathing stops, etc. The next day I was shown a chart of my sleep patterns: I had a severe case of mixed apnea caused by a blockage of the airways and  by a failure of the brain to control breathing, resulting in high blood pressure, episodes of apnea (a word that names the disease and its episodes), time without breathing, etc. I was shocked: in an eight-hour sleep I had almost four hundred interruptions of breathing. No wonder I felt fatigued and very sleepy during the day. The nurse said that “it was not a pretty picture,” a nice euphemism.

How could that happen without me having the slightest consciousness of it? My experience (or absence of it), however, is not unique. About 85% of people with apnea don’t even suspect they have apnea, are never diagnosed with apnea and are never treated for it.  And here comes the most startling part of the story: the treatment of apnea is simple, inexpensive, totally painless, hardly invasive, and almost 100% effective.

All you have to do is to sleep with a mask attached to an air compressor and vaporizer that constantly send into your nose waves of humid air that maintains your airwaves open from the nose to the lungs all night long. It amazes me to hear from doctors that many people refuse to use the mask and the air compressor (although it is paid 100% by Medicare!), because they are uncomfortable or the machine is slightly noisy. Some people think that only 50% of people urged by the doctors to use their mask, actually use it. Not a compliment to American resilience and determination.

I want to be absolutely honest with you: I hate discomfort and can hardly tolerate severe pain, but I have never failed to use the mask or the compressor since the doctor told me to use them every night, almost four months ago. I admit that occasionally the ‘machine’ leaks air and becomes abnormally noisy.  In my own case a persistent nasal congestion aggravated the problem. But the congestion is (slowly!) fading away. Furthermore, for the first 45 minutes the machine gradually increases the pressure. By the time it reaches the pressure decided by the doctor, a normal apnea patient is already happily sleeping.

The effects of such treatment are quite incredible. While I used to go the bathroom eight to twelve times every night, I only go  now TWICE ! It is a joy to wake up for the first time in the night about 3am or even 4am. Doctors tend to blame an enlarged prostate for that problem, a problem that is solved by having air forced through your nose into the lungs. But that’s only the beginning.  Mask treatment diminishes your daytime sleepiness and fatigue, lowers your high blood pressure, increases the oxygen content of your blood, significantly depresses your appetite for food, helps to prevent heart attacks and congestive heart failure, controls depression and irritability, improves insulin resistance, and — are you ready for this? — actually increases your alertness and your recall memory.  More importantly, the mortality index of apnea patients who are treated for it. reverts to the same levels of those people who never had apnea in their life.

If you want more details about my own case write to me at norena@cruzio.com or to my blog CGNoreña Weekly.