That's a Lot of Big Macs!
While McDonald’s CEO Jack Greenberg makes a healthy $7,331 an hour, young people are toiling away, often for minimum wage, which hasn’t even kept pace with inflation. If it did, the federal minimum wage would be at $8.65 an hour, and if it was pegged to productivity, our lowest paid workers would be netting $16.55 an hour.
["Eyes on the Fries: Young People are Coming of Age in the Era of the McJob", by Elana Berkowitz.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Gay Agenda Unifies
So frequently "gay rights issues", and most recently marriage equality issues, are portrayed as divisive — needlessly divisive, since we schismatic homos could so easily stay tucked away in the closet where nature intended us to stay.
But wait! Here's validation of the gay agenda from, of all sources, the New York Times! ("Clerics Fighting a Gay Festival for Jerusalem".) Yes, it seems that if we try hard enough, the militant homosexual lobby can actually be a unifying force.
There are plans for a giant gay-pride festival to take place in Jerusalem. Really big. The major religions of the world are not happy about this.
International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great religious traditions.
Now major leaders of the three faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable.
There you have it: proof that the homosexual agenda is really a unifying force. Can you name one other group that has been able to bring together representatives of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism with such a single-minded vision? Forget that Anglican schism crap — it's just a diversion from our major accomplishment here with "the three faiths".
There's even photographic confirmation, with a sheik, a couple of patriarchs, and a couple of rabbis, all in their most festive religious drag.
There is one point that I found curious about the photo, which shows these guys lined up behind a table pretending to like each other. Here's the caption:
Religious leaders met on Wednesday in Jerusalem in a united protest against a gay pride festival planned there in August. From left: Sheik Abed es- Salem Menasra, deputy mufti of Jerusalem; the Rev. Michel Sabbagh, the Latin patriarch; the Rev. Aris Shirvanian, the Armenian patriarch; Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi; and Rabbi Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi. The man at right was not identified.
This is the New York Times, and "the man at right was not identified"? Hey, that's really professional journalism, isn't it? You'd think that the Times people might have heard about cropping photos, but maybe they just liked the way his beard looked (although I don't think he's as hot looking as Rabbi Metzger).
Against Positive Selection
My usual complaint: it's too far past bedtime to write sufficiently about this topic. It's true, but it's also true that I think the topic is much bigger than I can adequately attend to at this bleary-eyed hour. Nevertheless, I'll sleep better if I jot down a few sentences. (I've alluded to this idea before, here and here.)
In short, I've long wondered whether many hard-core Darwinists have made a slight error in perception that has led to possibly major errors in application and deduction. I want to examine the idea more fully, partly because I don't want to be misunderstood, and I certainly don't want to be immediately labelled as a crank (or worse: a fringe scientist!). In fact, in these troubled times of "faith-base pseudo-science", I've undoubtedly gone from Darwinist to staunch Darwinist: scientific extremism in response to adaptive pressures.
It all has to do with the manner of operation of natural selection. I believe that the summarizing phrase "survival of the fittest" has inadvertantly come to mean, in most people's mind, that natural selection operates as a positive force on evolution, a force that somehow selects for certain characteristics: those that confer survival advantage (to the individual or to the species, depending on point of view). I also believe that most of the error is linguistic, at least originally, but that the error has persisted and (dare I say) evolved into a trope that leads to misadventure when it comes to understanding adaptation and the causes of specific adaptations.
My slightly revised gloss on "survival of the fittest" goes like this: natural selection, as a mechanism of evolution, selects against undesirable characteristics. The key difference between the two (since I reject the "law of the excluded middle" in this context) is that natural selection is, therefore, benign or neutral when it comes to the question of neutral, non-negative characteristics. By "non-negative characteristics" I mean those characteristics that are neutral to survival — annoying and useless, perhaps, but not a selective detriment.
Said differently: natural selection does not select for positive characteristics, is selects against negative characteristics. This seeming quibble over syntax ("isn't it just a kind of double negative?") has serious implications for the consideration of benign characteristics if their existence doesn't require a positive explanation.
As an example, if the human appendix is not causing a problem, then natural selection is indifferent and the appendix remains as a vestigial organ, possibly available for some other use on the road to evolving some other function. Pointedly, I do not see the reason to spend a lot of wasted effort on trying to imagine unnecessary reasons that would explain why the appendix is still there (i.e., what it is "good for"), as though it must be needed for something simply because natural selection has not disposed of it.
Now, I've already included a few entries earlier in the blog that I claim support my contention that people mistakenly think of natural selection as a positive force, but I've harbored anxieties that some of the evolutionists that I'd read may not have thought so, even though I thought I remembered many who did. I need to review a lot of literature, starting with Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, since that seems to be the source towards which these lines converge. That's one more reason why I've been circumspect about saying anything too provoking. Oops — too late!
So it was with some surprise that I read this very bald statement by Richard Dawkins, one of the important Darwinian voices, that professes the positive viewpoint about natural selection:
“Anting” is the odd habit of birds such as jays of “bathing” in an ants’ nest and apparently inciting the ants to invade their feathers. Nobody knows for sure what the benefit of anting is: perhaps some kind of hygiene, cleansing the feathers of parasites. My point is that uncertainty as to the purpose doesn’t—nor should it—stop Darwinians from believing, with great confidence, that anting must be good for something.
[Richard Dawkins, "What Use is Religion?"]
In: All, Hermeneutics, It's Only Rocket Science
You Go, Roger Ebert!
The Panda's Thumb suggests "One Thumb Up for the TalkOrigins Archive?" over this startlingly frank piece by Roger Ebert: "Film about volcanoes falls victim to creationists", on the basis on the final paragraph:
[…]
Surely moviegoers deserve the right to decide for themselves what movies to see? "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," according to the AP, "makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes." It says that if life could evolve under such extreme circumstances, it might help us understand evolution all over the planet.This is not a controversial opinion. The overwhelming majority of all scientists everywhere in the world who have studied the subject would agree with it. Although discussion continues about the mechanics of evolution, there is no reputable doubt about the existence of DNA and the way in which it functions.
Yes, there is "creationist science," an attempt to provide a scientific footing for beliefs that should be a matter of faith. Creationists say evolution is "only a theory" and want equal time for their theories, one of which is that God created the Earth from scratch in six days, and man on the seventh.
Evolution is indeed a theory. Creationism is a belief, not a theory. In science, a theory is a hypothesis that has withstood the test of time and the challenge of opposing views. It is not simply somebody's notion about something. The creationist belief cannot withstand such tests and challenges; it exists outside the world of science altogether.
[…]
An industry has grown up around the "science" supporting the "argument for intelligent design." It refuses the possibility that evolution itself is the most elegant and plausible argument for those who wish to believe in intelligent design. If you are interested, you might want to go to www.talkorigins.org, where the errors of creationist science are patiently explained. And you might want to ask at your local IMAX theater why they allow a few of their customers to make decisions for all of the rest.
That's a nice mention for talkorigins, sure, but look at what he says:
…where the errors of creationist science are patiently explained.
After all the time I've spent reading journalistic pieces by "real" journalists who go out of their way to avoid anything that might look like a fact as they rush to maintain "journalistic balance" by quoting non-scientific yobs about this silly creationist pseudo-controversy, hearing Roger Ebert (who is, after all, only a movie reviewer and not a "real journalist") refer to the errors of creationist science is such an amazing blast of fresh air that I can hardly breath.
A fact, in fact. What a review! Two thumbs up for Roger Ebert!
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Splenetics
"Science" a Dirty Word?
Behold the British Press, willing to say what the American Media apparently prefer not to mention:
For Bush, science is a dirty word
In America's right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism
Admittedly, the piece was written by Tristram Hunt, a visiting professor of history at Arizona State University. Is it significant that his opinion was published not in America?
I'll quote the thesis, and then suggest that you read the rest — it's got too much good writing about really bad things.
Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word. The American century was built on scientific progress. From the automobile to the atom bomb to the man on the moon, science and technology underpinned American military, commercial and cultural might. Crucial to that was the presidency. From FDR and the Los Alamos laboratory to Kennedy and Nasa to Clinton and decoding the genome, the White House was vital to promoting ground-breaking research and luring the world's scientific elite. But Bush's faith-based, petro-chemical administration has reversed that tradition: excepting matters military, this presidency exhibits an abiding aversion to scientific inquiry that is in danger of affecting the entire country.
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Pseudo-Science & Schools
Some things just make you want to throw your hands up in the air, or scream and punch a brick wall or something. Somebody kindly pointed out this transcript of a report on yesterday's Newshour with Jim Lehrer called "Creation Conflict in Schools", reported by Jeffrey Brown.
Here were a few comments made by students — high-school students, in Kentucky:
I believe that God created the Earth and put life on this Earth. I don't really believe in the whole evolution theory.
I believe that God also made us. I just think it's a lot easier to believe than the big bang theory, or any of the other theories about apes.
I believe God molded man from the dust and he breathed life into it, and I believe we came out with two legs and thumbs and the thought capacity better then any other animal.
To say that this was all some big cosmic dice roll, and we went from fish to frogs to monkeys and monkeys to humans. It's just kind of almost ridiculous.
I don't think a human body could have just come about. I think God definitely had everything to do in it, it's so complex, I don't think it could have just come.
These were students in a science class. I am breathing deeply right now, and keeping my hands on the keyboard. There are some things I don't understand, and then there are the things that I really, really don't understand, like this whole anti-rational, anti-science, Darwin-spawn-of-Satan stuff.
In another post I might make clever, ironic comments about how it's science, and not the bible, that keeps the IPod playing, keeps the cell phone transmitting and receiving, and keeps the airplanes from falling out of the sky. Later. This? This I just don't understand.
Later in the piece (as reported in the transcript), neo-creationist Ken Ham (I'm sure he'd insist on being called an "Intelligent Design Advocate", further insisting that ID has nothing to do with creationism) says some stupid things about the unknowable past. We even get a preview of his "creation museum" where one of the dinosaurs has a saddle on it, because how can we really know that humans and dinosaurs didn't coexist?
You know, when I read that statistic that revealed that nearly half (42%) of Americans "can't answer correctly when asked if the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs" (2001 National survey conducted by the California Academy of Sciences & Harris interactive), I thought that maybe they just got confused over the issue, despite the fact that it was a rather noticable 65 million years after the last dinosaur died before humans appeared (unless one is a young-earth creationist, then it's still true, just not noticable). I didn't know until today that some people actually promote the idea that humans and dinosaurs actually coexisted. All trying to cast a "shadow of doubt" over Darwinianism, I guess, as though they were amateur debaters fantasizing themselves making closing arguments in a cosmic courtroom of science.
Fortunately, there were some sane voices in this piece as well, but one despairs whether they will be heard and heeded.
First, Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education , remarks on the absurd notion that "Intelligent Design" should be taught as though it were an actual, credible scientific opponent of evolution, so that students could decide the issue:
"Teach the controversy" is a deliberately ambiguous phrase. It means 'pretend to students that scientists are arguing over whether evolution took place.' This is not happening.
I mean you go to the scientific journals, you go to universities like this one and you ask the professors, is there an argument going on about whether living things had common ancestors? They'll look at you blankly. This is not a controversy.
Exactly. It is manufactured pseudo-controversy, a non-scientific controversy, stirred up to cast doubt on science.
Finally, Chris Barton, biologist at Centre College (also Kentucky):
Part of it is a failure to really understand the scientific process. Unfortunately, the United States falls far behind in terms of our scientific appreciation and scientific understanding.
Soon, the IPod may stop playing and the cell phones may go silent (metaphorically speaking, of course, since we'll always be able to import technology from other, far-less God-fearing countries who still practice basic research and technology development).
It's one reason, maybe the main reason, that I founded Ars Hermeneutica (see the links) last winter: to enlighten the public about the methods and meanings of science. The task looks bigger and bigger every day.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
How Could They Be So Stupid?
The following exhilarating exchange was reported by Media Matters as taking place "On the March 28 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, host Joe Scarborough interviewed Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine Terri Schiavo pursuant to an October 2001 appellate court mandate."
[Lisa] DANIELS: Doctor, was a CAT scan — Doctor, your critics would ask you [oops! she almost asked it herself], was a CAT scan used? Was an MRI taken? Were any of these tests taken?
CRANFORD: You don't know the answer to that? The CAT scan was done in 1996, 2002. We spent a lot of time in court showing the irreversible — you don't have copies of those CAT scans? How can you say that?
The CAT scans are out there, distributed to other people. You have got to look at the facts. The CAT scan is out there. It shows severe atrophy of the brain. The autopsy is going to show severe atrophy of the brain. And you're asking me if a CAT scan was done? How could you possibly be so stupid?
I'm extremely impressed by Dr. Cranford ("Cranford is a member of the American Academy of Neurology, an organization that has a published ethical code for medico-legal expert witnesses, and established the guidelines for persistent vegetative state." according to one comment writer at Media Matters), and gratified to see his annoyance at these so-called journalists. I don't know where they've been, but even I have seen the CAT scans, even I have seen that a good deal of the important and useful bits of her brain are no longer existing, and I profess a mostly studied indifference to the Schiavo story.
It would appear that the stupid Lisa was trying the troll that an MRI hadn't been done, an approach which some disingenuous people try to use to convince the credulous that there's doubt about the state of Terri's brain, when in fact there is absolutely no doubt.
And the surprise that the "reporters" evinced (see the transcript) that Dr. Cranford just didn't roll over and let them get on with quoting some quacks with no standing (pseudo-doctors that Fox loved to describe as "Nobel-Prize nominated"!) as though they were stating facts was also, I'm afraid, more gratifying than politeness allows me to confess.
In another context, since I've been reading and thinking a great deal about the current fundamentalist-christian insurgency against rational, reality-based thought and scientific method, I would write at length about Dr. Cranford's very pointed and well-deserved "You have got to look at the facts." How, in any sensible world that most of us would like to live in, could these people even be called journalists without occasional resort to facts? The larger context, of course is the anti-intellectualism (not to mention anti-humanism) that is the standard bearer for the fundamentalist crusade.
How could they be so stupid? Indeed!
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Key-Word-Based Science
I was reading an interesting article at Science Blog, "Changes in Earth's tilt control when glacial cycles end", about a new report (written by "Peter Huybers, a postdoctoral fellow in the WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department, and coauthor Carl Wunsch of MIT") suggesting that changes in the tilt of the earth's axis may indeed be the cause of periods of glaciation and other large-scale climate changes. Fascinating stuff, but not what this post is about.
This post is about the advertising. There's a box on the page that has links provided by amazon.com, evidently chosen by matching subject key words, which in this case must have included "climate" and "warming". At least when I loaded the page, they suggest two items:
- A book called Global Warming, by John Houghton, and
- A Panasonic, window model, 5,200-BTU air conditioner
Rather in poor taste, I thought, and showing a keen insensitivity to the second law of thermodynamics, not to mention several of the probable causes of global warming all represented by one device (that would be the air conditioner, not the book).
Were they suggesting that better air conditioning might be a tonic that would reduce the problem of global warming? The idea puts me in mind of all those people who don't yet understand (we'll get to it sometime, folks) why you can't cool the apartment by leaving the refrigerator door open. Which, by the way, is significantly different from the reason why you shouldn't heat the apartment by running the gas oven. Oddly, though, you could heat the house by leaving the refrigerator door open, but it would not be very efficient.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Melting Pyjamas
I just love reading The Scotsman.
Get me to hospital, my pyjamas are melting
Nicola StowMELTING pyjamas and a brush with an alligator were among accidents which put almost a million Britons in hospital last year, figures revealed today.
A host of bizarre incidents were littered in the statistics of accident and emergency admissions unveiled by the Government.
[…]
Acts of nature were not thought to be involved in the 22 incidents involving the "ignition or melting of nightwear", with stray cigarettes and faulty electric blankets likely to blame.
[…]
Meanwhile, it emerged today a Czech tractor driver died under eight tons of manure in a bizarre accident that has baffled his employers.The 34-year old man, identified only as Martin T, suffocated after the load fell on him while he was dumping it in a field near the western Czech city of Karlovy Vary.
"It absolutely beats me how this could happen," said Vladimir Erps, chief of the company employing the victim.
"The truck is operated from the tractor cabin, using hydraulics. There was nothing for him to do under the truck, but it’s tough to blame him now that he is dead."
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
To Win at Any Cost
They may not have the votes to make this happen. Many of the wisest Republicans are well aware that their leaders are playing a dangerous game and that they are doing it for frivolous reasons. The judicial nominees can easily be replaced. But the sense that there are certain rules that all must play by, whether to their advantage or not, is something that cannot be restored. Senators need only to look at the House to see what politics looks like when the only law is to win at any cost.
The Senate, of all places, should be sensitive to the fact that this large and diverse country has never believed in government by an unrestrained majority rule. Its composition is a repudiation of the very idea that the largest number of votes always wins out. The members from places like Rhode Island, Maine or Iowa know that their constituents are given a far larger say than people from New York simply by virtue of the fact that each state has two votes, regardless of population. Indeed, as a recent New Yorker article pointed out, the Democratic senators who have blocked that handful of judicial nominees actually represent substantially more Americans than the Republican majority that wants to see them passed.
["Walking in the Opposition's Shoes", New York Times editorial.]
Doilies & Chaos Theory
Kriston, at Grammar.police posted a fantastic picture of a crocheted sculpture in yarn: "Crocheted Model of Hyperbolic Plane" (1970s) by Daina Taimina. (He references this original article: "Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane: An Interview with David Henderson and Daina Taimina")
His reaction:
When I saw the images of Taimina's crocheted hyperbolic figures, I was immediately struck by how instructive it could be as an applied tool to teach non-Euclidean geometry, because—well, I don't know anything about crochet, but I get the sense that this is true—one could viscerally experience ultraparallel lines or even space curvature. It turns out that Taimina, in fact, invented the first workable model of Lobachevskian, i.e., hyperbolic geometry by abandoning paper and turning to crochet. Certainly makes a great deal of sense after the fact, doesn't it?
Now, I'm quite serious in what follows, although it may not appear so.
He's quite right about Taimina's crocheted geometrics — they are fascinating and instructive as well. They suggest that there indeed could be more mathematical possibilities along the lines he mentions, regardless of whether one knows anything about crochet or not.
People who know me know that I know a bit about crochet, although I prefer working in thread rather than yarn. I crochet doilies. Obsessively. It serves the purpose of keeping my hands busy and productive when I'd otherwise just fidget. These days, since we watch television so rarely, I make most of my pieces in the car, when Isaac is driving. The problem is that, after doing this for some 10 years, one ends up with a lot of doilies — let's say several hundreds — which is really more than one household can make use of. (Some of my work is displayed, for sale, at The Pansy Forest; there are still lots more for me to put up, however.)
Anyway, I'd never thought about making crocheted hyperbolic figures, although it's a brilliant idea. I have, however, designed some of my own doily patterns, and the experience gave me the idea for a book about it. (This started several years ago now.)
The tentative title for the book is Doilies, Chaos Theory, and the Origin of the Universe. Seriously.
I don't want to go into the entire story here, but I discovered what I felt were interesting and illuminating connections between chaos theory (concerning which I did some reasearch in my early graduate-student and post-doctoral days) and creating doily patterns.
Most doilies are chrocheted "in rounds", worked successsively in thin rings from the center to the outside. Traditional doily patterns, particularly those that make use of a motif called a "pineapple" (sometimes "acorn"), typically develop their patterns over many rounds — that is to say, the patterns emerge one round at a time over the course of completing, say, 10 or 20 rounds.
Now, at the same time the pattern is emerging, it is necessary that the number of stitches in each round increase (relative to the previous round) in fairly strict geometric ratios. There can be a bit of fudging for a round, maybe two further from the center, but one cant't get away with it for long.
Doily patterns, therefore, are highly constrained systems, and to set out to create a pattern over the course of many rounds requires planning, good luck, and a cooperative pattern. They don't always go the way one wants.
Another way to put it is to say that doily patterns can show extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: what is allowed to happen on round 25 can depend critically on what happened on round 6. Sensitivity to initial conditions is a defining characteristic of some "chaotic systems" (at least it characterizes the motion of the systems through its phase space, but that's a longer version of the story.)
Nevertheless, doilies do not look chaotic. Instead, they are amazingly developed mathematical patterns in many cases. How they can look so organized and yet share these characteristics with certain types of chaotic systems interests me. As for the origins of the universe: contemplating the constraints on how doily patterns emerge brings one pretty easily to considering the anthropic cosmological principle (which I tend to think is mostly bunk) and such topics.
I will be the first to admit that there may not be a big cross-over audience for a book that covers antimacassers and modern ideas about dynamical systems and self-organized complexity and such, but that may not stop me. If only I could figure out how to type the manuscript while I crochet the doilies.
In: All, Hermeneutics, It's Only Rocket Science
Cow State Hallucinations
Yet the media’s response to all of this nonsense [in the Left Behind books] has been remarkably polite. In America, of course, with commercial success comes a degree of cultural respectability. If millions of consumers succumb to a childish revenge fantasy that takes the Christ out of Christianity and treats the Bible as a cosmic Daily Racing Form, we dare not scoff at the merchandise. Indeed, the religious right is the biggest beneficiary of the “political correctness” it affects to deplore. Views H. L. Mencken once derided as the “idiotic hallucinations of the cow states” now command respect more or less proportionate to their market share.
[From "The Apocalypse Will Be Televised: Armageddon in an age of entertainment", Gene Lyons' excellent review of the Left Behind series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.]
Good-News Recruiting
One notes, in passing, that these are the people who [erroneously] believe that homosexuals recruit (evidently proven by the fact that we "cannnot reproduce"):
Good News Clubs are sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a national group that seeks to convert young children to fundamentalist Christianity. At the weekly meetings, children are divided into groups of "saved" and "unsaved." "Unsaved" children, who may be as young as 5 or 6, are pressured weekly to make faith professions.
[Via TheocracyWatch.org (their story on The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party called 'Texas Republican Party Platform: "The Republican Party of Texas affirms the United States of America is a Christian Nation …" '), mentioning schools, then over to Americans United for Separation of Church and State and their 2001 article about the Supreme Court case involving after-school time for "Good-News Clubs".]
Oh, and by the way, the recruiters won:
A Supreme Court decision in 2001 upheld the right of Child Evangelism Fellowship to hold Good News Clubs after hours in public school buildings. The high court ruled 6-3 that religious clubs such as CEF, which had contact with 4.9 million children last year, couldn't be prevented from meeting after hours if other private groups also are allowed to gather.
To Be Gay Every Day
Looking into the Schiavo affair, Arthur Silber (in "Necrophiliac Spiritualism") discovers the hidden (alas, not unexpected) homophobia, and then quotes Dick Cheney:
You want to know something? Bush and the Religious Krazies brigade that he’s unleashed have made gay-bashing so common—and so “respectable”—in America that my day is never complete until I feel I’ve been beaten into a pulpy mass for an hour or two by a marauding gang of rabid Jesus freak hysterics, who are convinced that my being gay is going to destroy decency, the family and every achievement of Western civilization. I keep myself on guard all day, every day, knowing that it will happen at some point.
And I am never, ever disappointed. Not one single goddamned day.
It’s a truly wonderful feeling. I just can’t express how truly, deeply wonderful it is. Thanks, George! Oh, and George? How can I say this? What are the right words? Oh, yeah:
Fuck you.
While you're there, read his "Gay History — Some Personal Notes", too.
Trading Places
I think the Democratic campaign philosophy in the next few elections should be obvious: smaller government. A government that is more responsible, less intrusive, more humble. Under the Bush administration, the national debt has escalated alarmingly; we have become aggressively unilateralist abroad, alienating people worldwide; protections of the privacy and human rights of citizens have been steadily eroded; and the federal executive and legislative branches have been increasingly willing to trample on prerogatives of the states and the judiciary. It's time to put some grownups in power who know how to balance a budget and will keep their noses out of people's personal lives.
[Sean Carroll, "More unsolicited campaign advice", at Preposterous Universe.]
Sometimes I quote because I'm lazy; more times, like this one, it's because I have nothing to add to a lovely word bagatelle.
A Federal Case
If it weren't that the issues are rather serious, as are their implications, one could almost chortle with a gleeful sense of schadenfreude at the way some Republicans are revealing so clearly that their sanctimonious rhetoric is just so much hot air.
This past week, against the backdrop of the attempted emotional exploitation in the Terri Schaivo affair, we've seen that the party of liberty and restricted government are happy to toss "sanctity of marriage" and "state's rights" to the wind and — literally! — make a federal case of it. In fact, I was quite pleased to understand the "make a federal case of it" platitude so clearly at last, although I could have done without the actual federal case.
The next to fall is one that's been irritating for longer than we remember: the anti-social experimentation argument. You may recall from the previous election (seems so far away already) that gay marriage (it was claimed) should not be rushed into because marriage as an institution was just too important and fragile to be the laboratory for "social experimentation".
But I can remember now that the argument was key to those who could not abide the idea of gay people serving their country in the US military: the military was too important an institution to allow it to be a laboratory for "social experimentation".
Nathaniel Frank ("Bush Team Theme — 'We Were All Wrong'"), while discussing this curious phenomenon of TeamBush inviting everyone under the big tent when it comes time to admit a mistake ("Welp, I guess we were all wrong on that one!"), mentions this:
Indeed, Democrats have been saying for years that there is too little evidence to justify trickle-down economics — the theory that cutting taxes for those who earn the most would encourage business investment, thereby increasing both jobs and tax revenue. Bush's unprecedented tax cuts have produced the notorious "jobless recovery" and historic budget deficits. Yet Greenspan says he'd do it all again.
Now, if something like "traditional" marriage is so delicate that it should be protected against "social experimentation" (from a "threat" that would really have no effect on "traditional" marriages), you'd think that the entire US economy might be an important enough institution that, gosh, maybe it shouldn't be the laboratory for untried "social experimentation"?
Evidently not, as we've seen. The economy is something that everyone has an interest in, something that affects every citizen, and yet Republicans have continued their claims that we must continue cutting taxes — if only we'd do it enough, revenues will sky rocket! One thinks of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and that football.
If ever there were a persistently stupid idea that should not be forced upon all of America as a "social experiment", that should be it. But, but….
Not that I want to make a federal case of it.
The Homosexual Agenda
I have, for more years than I can remember, been part of the Homosexual Agenda; I can even remember back more than 20 years when it was the militant homosexual agenda. I don't think we were ever very clear at the time just what was on the homosexual agenda — lists have surfaced from time to time, but it was clear that they never came directly from homo headquarters — but it sure sounded like fun.
We had lots of fun, too, scaring fundamentalists with claims about the homosexual agenda as a way of 1) trying to keep them confused about something that didn't exist but that was their greatest nightmare; and 2) trying to maintain our own sanity in the face of inexplicable hatred, one of those if-you-don't-laugh-you'll-cry sorts of things.
But now I have right here a very authoritative statement about the "Homosexual Agenda" from an authoritative thinker in a position of great authority and power:
In his [Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia] dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the sodomy case, he wrote, "Today's opinion is the product of a Court which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct."
[Quotation via skacktivist via the New Yorker.]
So there we have it. I'm not so sure it was worth waiting for, either. The quest on the part of militant homosexual activists everywhere (at least, "some" of them) that has terrorized upstanding, moral, normal people for decades: the desire to eliminate "the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct". Pretty terrifying, if you ask me, and definitely worth shredding the constitution for.
I wonder which agenda is being promoted by those other homosexual activists, the ones not trying to eliminate society's opprobrium? Maybe I'll give that one a try: it's got to be more interesting than the one I've been working on for so long.
In: All, Eureka!, Splenetics
Cliches Fell
By late Sunday, when the debate [on the Terri Schiavo bill] had reached the House of Representatives, Barney Frank stood almost alone in opposing the bill. Cliches suffered. Here was an openly gay Democrat, the Massachusetts liberal of all Massachusetts liberals, defending the Founding Fathers, federalism and the American tradition of keeping the government's nose out of a family's business.
Not to mention: the sanctity of traditional marriage!
[From "Where Are the Democrats?", by Richard Cohen, from the Washington Post.]
Fat Hairy Tinkerbelles
PZ Myers writes a fabulous blog called "Pharyngula". One day, he wrote an enthusiastic critique of a rather stupid opinion piece in the Washington Post: "Uncritical journalism from the WaPo".
This isn't about that at all. This is entirely about an off-hand comment that he made in the piece:
Intelligent Design creationism is a fat hairy Tinkerbelle.
There's a sensible reason why he wrote that, but I won't spoil your fun in finding out what it was.
Nevertheless, the image was … provocative.
I was just distracted there for a little bit with the instant mental reaction that many of my friends (a longish disquisition on "bears" to follow someday) would be quite enchanted, if not positively driven into a rutting fever, by a "fat hairy Tinkerbelle". No real problem there.
The only bit of friction comes then from realizing that, since "Intelligent Design creationism" is a dintinctly unsavory thing to be avoided at all costs, that that apparently is what we're to think of a "fat hairy Tinkerbelle".
Now, I'm not going to start a bunch of pseudo-PC nonsense about the differently hirsute or anything. Plain speaking is fine with me and a good number of my objects of desire as well: I tend to be attracted to fat hairy men with beards, and some of them definitely fit into the "Tinkerbelle" category.
So even though I don't want to weaken the fanciful association that reinforces the notion that "Intelligent Design creationism" is definitely undesirable, I did want to put forward the idea that, in some cases, "fat hairy Tinkerbelles" can be on the desirable side of the scale, although most people will just have to trust me on this one.
Nevertheless, point taken. Now read his article.
Erring for Future Life
This past weekend, I've heard the phrase "culture of life" quite a bit more than before, not to mention quite a bit more than I'd like.
We've also seen the introduction of the Bush Doctrine of Erring: with tough questions, one should err on the "side of life" (which is all for the best in this best of all possible worlds).
Well, it just struck me that this has been my own philosophical bearing for awhile about an important question, just not one dealing with the "culture of life": it deals more with the "culture of future life".
I've watched the controversy about "global warming" for a number of years, indecisively, from the sidelines. I'm not really that type of scientist, so I don't have environmentally expert views to offer. Overall, my sense is that it is too hard to say definitively whether we face global warming based on only a century's worth of data, since I'd expect fluctuations to dominate on that time scale, obscuring any real trends.
On the other hand, I am easily convinced that humankind's presence is significant enough to influence long-term weather on the Earth significicantly. The indications that we may be doing so to our detriment are suggestive, if not conclusive in my mind.
Out of prudence, then, I'd decided to err on the side of future life and think that we should be taking steps to reduce our environmental impact. Perhaps the President, now that the scales have obviously fallen from his eyes, will start "erring on the side of future life" and support a "culture of future life" on the planet.
In: All, Eureka!, Splenetics