Encyclopaedia Billtannica

Skeptic. Not Cynic

2012-01-24T20:54:00.005-06:00

I'm not a cynic. Sometimes I'm sad, but I am rarely bitter or pessimistic enough to be truly cynical. Skeptic? Sure, that's a better label. My skepticism flows from my optimistic belief that we can actually learn and discern the truth with a good enough toolkit. I don't see that as cynical.

Sexism among Atheists

2011-12-28T12:14:00.009-06:00

The question of sexism is an open controversy among atheists. There are those who claim and cite examples of the kinds of sexism that they are exposed to within atheist communities and how it discourages female participation. There are those who claim that the complaints are overblown and that atheists are if anything more likely to oppose sexism as irrational. I've seen an argument that goes a little something like this: any idea ought to stand on its own merit without regard to gender and if atheist communities are mostly male that is the fault of women for not being more rational.

Look. I come down squarely on the side of those who complain that there is indeed sexism among atheists. No, it isn't everyone nor is it always overt nor is it as bad many religions, but it is present. I am male but that does not mean that I am immune from observing the kinds of behaviors that strike me as at best rude and all too often as hostile. Moreover, though I think I can parse the arguments that deny the magnitude of the problem, that does not mean that I agree with them, especially when they are themselves examples of the problem. See above.

Recently, a young woman posted on the Atheism forum at Reddit a picture of herself holding a book by Carl Sagan that she had received from her religious mother for Christmas. This ended up becoming a flash point for the ongoing controversy about the prevalence of sexism among atheists. A controversy I should note that has been boiling to some extent for much of this year.

Some feminist, atheist bloggers have expressed their disappointment in the atheists who posted sexist, demeaning things in response to that young woman's picture. They've cited this as yet another example of the kind of hostility women face that discourages involvement in the atheist community. This has sparked replies defending the community as a whole from the charge of sexism, arguing that the problem is contained in only a few bad apples. And the debate kicked off anew.

What I do not think those who are denying the severity of the sexism problem seem to understand is that whether it is a few bad, but vocal, apples causing the problem or not -- by giving them a pass on their behavior we are as a community giving tacit approval of their unwelcoming stance towards female involvement. This creates a feedback loop that reduces the gender diversity of our community, which in turn emboldens the sexists to think they can continue to get away with being hostile, which makes our community seem hostile to women even if the majority of us aren't, which keeps gender diversity low, and so on.

I happen to think that overt and hidden sexism are both an impediment to our community. I think that women have valuable contributions to make, not the least in a chance to promote self reflection regarding sexism and male privilege in ourselves and in our communities. Some of those who refuse to examine potential sexism or refuse see it in themselves are pushing back against women, but they do not represent my views on this matter. I would be happy to see that as active, female participation grows in our community that the sexists get pushed further to the margins as unwelcome social pariahs.

There is some karmic justice in that, given how they insist on treating women now. But as more and more young women like Lunam on Reddit get involved, our community will change, for the better in my opinion. So my advice to the old guard with misogynist tendencies is to be aware that the demographics are shifting. Things are going to be different than what you've grown accustomed to and you are going to have to adapt to remain relevant.

To ~~young~~ women who want to be more involved: I'm sorry that it can sometimes seem like too many atheists are sexist. It isn't fair but I do think it will change -- slowly. And a major driver in that change will be ~~young~~ people like you. So please hang in there. Your presence and contributions to the community are actually valued by most of us. As you ~~and other young women~~ get openly involved, we can all push the sexists further to the margins of our movement.

[edit: As was pointed out by my perceptive wife, my use of "young women" could be construed as sexist in itself. I do mean women in general ought to be made more welcome, not just young women. Though what inspired this post was the treatment by atheists of a young (fifteen year old) woman and my last paragraph was meant to be read as though addressed to her and other young people.]

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

2011-12-16T17:30:00.000-06:00

Last night, one of my favorite authors and speakers, Christopher Hitchens, died.

He was a profoundly influential atheist and cultural commentator. I've lost count of how many eulogies for Christopher Hitchens I've read today. I've enjoyed most of them, especially the thoughtful ones that gave me pause to reflect on the flaws and triumphs of the man. Which I think is a fitting tribute to him, that even in death he inspires and challenges us to think critically, dammit.

Rebecca Watson's article on him has been one of the better ones and includes some good links worth following.

Someday I will face my own death. I would like to have the courage and conviction of Mr. Hitchens. Though I know I'll lack his eloquence, I do hope I have wit and strength enough to send proselytizers who dare come to my death bed running in shame.

I'm glad that I was able to write to Mr. Hitchens, thank him for his work, and tell him that I appreciated him before he was gone. Mine was among thousands of letters that he received in the past year along with a series of touching tribute videos. He will be missed and the world is a less interesting place without him.

On Christmas

2011-11-29T20:46:00.002-06:00

The idea that Christ is the true purpose of Christmas gets to be a theme around this time of year and that's fine if that is the central point of the holiday to you. However, that does not mean that the holiday is now and has only ever been about Christ. Nor does it mean that ignoring the various historical influences of a given holiday is automatically disrespectful or disingenuous.

History and forgotten religions are filled with Winter Solstice holidays and traditions. There are two ancient Roman holidays that predate Christianity by centuries. Saturnalia was celebrated in December and featured among other things gift giving and a break from school. Sol Invictus celebrated the virgin birth of the Sun god, Mithras, on December 25th. So popular were those two holidays that 4th Century Christians borrowed from them to create their own holiday, Christmas. It doesn't stop there. Ancient Celtic and Germanic cultures celebrated Winter Solstice holidays that featured mistletoe. It is from Norse mythology that we get the name Yule to describe the holiday as well as caroling, the Yule log, and ham as part of the traditional meal.

In fact we owe a lot of our holidays, dates, and names for things to ancient cultures, traditions, and religions. We rarely give those origins a second thought, let alone feel guilty about simultaneously ignoring those meanings while continuing to utilize the names and traditions.

Easter and its symbols are heavily influenced by an ancient Germanic holiday for the fertility goddess, Ēostre. January is named for the Roman god of doorways, Janus. February is named for the Roman holiday of purification. March is for Mars the Roman god of war. April is for the Greek goddess Aphrodite. May is for the Greek fertility goddess Maia. June is for the Roman Goddess Juno. Sunday is named for the Sun and Monday for the Moon, both were worshiped by many ancient cultures. Tuesday is for a Germanic god of war. Wednesday is the Norse god Odin's day. Thursday is the Norse god Thor's day. Friday is for a Germanic goddess. Saturday is named for the Roman god Saturn which brings us back around to Saturnalia and Christmas again.

Christmas is a wonderful holiday with a rich history of influences from past Winter Solstice holidays like Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, and Yule. A great many of us really enjoy the traditions, decorations, gift giving, and gatherings with family and friends. We love the holiday without need or want of the various religions that have shaped it, including Christianity.

Air Cannon, Year 3

2011-11-23T14:59:00.001-06:00

This past Summer, some friends and I got together at my farm to once again play with the air cannon. We used a different, faster actuating valve to fire the cannon and definitely got more velocity out of the projectiles.

Todd shot some fun footage and compiled those clips with some from the high speed video cameras into a great video. I think he really captured the highlights of the day and the fun we were having shooting potatoes and lead cannon balls at water jugs, lines of fruit, an XBox, etc.

Enjoy!

Year 1

Year 2

NaNoWriMo 2011

2011-11-10T08:01:00.003-06:00

This is actually my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month and I'm really enjoying it. Because it is a good artificial motivation to write fiction, but also because I'm really enjoying this story. It is based on a role playing game I organized with some friends a few years ago.

I've taken the characters they made for the game and condensed them into just three main characters for this story, mostly to make my job of author easier. I also made some various tweaks to their backgrounds to mesh them together as close friends with shared histories, but I do hope that enough of the original version of each shines through to be recognizable.

Rather than make a separate post for each section as I write it, I'm going to dump it all here. I'll continue to revise this as I go and add to it.

A casino should have layers of hazy cigarette smoke to give it atmosphere, thought Raymond Quinn as he regarded the cards in front of him. Instead this river boat casino was brightly lit and garishly decorated in a style that was probably intended to pay homage to the golden age of Las Vegas, condensed down to fit on boat, semi-permanently tied to a riverside dock in East Peoria, IL. A place where older people on fixed incomes could try to beat the house and the odds to buy a little excitement amid the mismatched sounds of slot machines without an expensive flight to the desert.

Raymond liked the place anyway. To him the sights and sounds felt like luck and he was definitely having some good luck that night. A couple of hours ago he had bought $50 worth of chips and had already grown that to $400 in a series of blackjack, craps, and roulette games while he waited for the poker tables to open. And now he was looking at a potential “four of a kind” if the dealer would just turn up the another “five” to go with the two Ray was dealt and the one already on the table.

“Son, the bet is to you,” said the older man seated next to him who looked remarkably like Wilford Brimley. He and the other players looked tense and mildly impatient. Which wasn't surprising given that there was over $2000 in the pot on this hand. That “ace” and “king” in the “flop” was encouraging his table mates.

“Umm... OK.” said Raymond as he dropped a few more chips, most of what he had left, onto the pile in the center of the table. “I'll match it. Lets see the 'river.'”

The dealer reached out with the last card and started to turn it over when Raymond's phone started to buzz. Reaching into his pocket to mute the phone before it started to ring loudly, he missed seeing the moment the card was placed on the table, but his fellow players all began talking excitedly at once.

Raymond looked back at the table and saw the last card was another “king” not the “five” he needed. The other players were turning over their private cards and working out who had won the hand. The Wilford Brimley clone had built a “three of a kind” on that last “king” beating the various pairs that the other players had and the three “fives” Raymond had. Letting out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, Raymond watched the winner pull the chips in from the center of the table.

A quick look at what was left revealed Raymond had $90 in chips. He was still up almost double from what he had started with, but that last hand of poker could have gone better. He grabbed his short stack of chips and stood up.

“Thanks, gentlemen. That was a great game, but I'd better leave before you get my gas money too,” he said with a smile that only felt a little bit forced and still elicited friendly goodnights. With a congratulatory pat on the winner's shoulder, Raymond turn and walked to the cashier window, checking his phone on the way.

The call was from one of his two best friends, Sarah Clarke, and the icon on the screen indicated she had left a message. He played it back while cashing out his chips and heading for the door. “Ray, it's Sarah. Call me back. Binx is here.” Then after a short pause and in a softer voice, “She told her parents. It didn't go well.”

Raymond poked the call back button to dial Sarah as he crossed the parking lot to his aging, mustard yellow jeep that Sarah had dubbed the 'short bus' when he bought it years ago. She answered on the second ring, “Ray, can you pick up a bottle of wine?”

“Sure, I can be there by eight” he said checking his watch, “but maybe something stronger to drink is in order.”

“No, Binx wants wine,” replied Sarah and in the background Raymond heard Bianca say, “Something red.” Even over the phone from across the room, Ray could hear the rawness in her voice. His other best friend, Bianca Flores, had definitely been crying.

“I'm on the way now. I'll be there in a bit.”

A few minutes and a quick stop at a liquor store later, Raymond was knocking on Sarah's apartment door carrying three bottles of red wine. At the store he had been faced with a dizzying array of variation on the red wine theme so he grabbed three different kinds at random and hoped for the best. Wine was something he'd always intended to learn more about, but had never gotten around to it.

Sarah opened the door letting soft candlelight and music spill into the hallway. “Hey,” she said in greeting. Her tone was soft as was the velvet she was wearing.

Raymond stepped into the apartment and the little kitchenette just inside the door that was open to the small living room where Bianca was sitting on the couch with her arms around her legs and her chin resting on the knees of fashionably worn jeans. Her eyes were red and blank with exhaustion.

“Give me those,” Sarah said reaching for the paper sack of wine bottles. “I'll pour some glasses.”

Ray sat down on the couch, “Hey, Binx. How are you doing?”

Bianca unwrapped her arms from around her legs, leaned against him, and mumbled, “Shitty.”

“I'm sorry. I'm here for you,” said Raymond giving her a gentle hug.

“And he came with wine,” said Sarah as she popped the cork on a bottle of Merlot. She poured three glasses and carried them over to the coffee table in front of the couch.

Bianca sat up, reached for her glass, and took a large sip that bordered on being a gulp. Sarah plopped into the stuffed chair facing the couch, crossing her knee high, booted feet on the coffee table. Behind Sarah was a wall of bookshelves packed with some of her ever growing and eclectic collection of books. Another wall in her bedroom was similarly dominated by a set of packed bookshelves.

“Binx, can you tell me what happened?” Asked Raymond.

She took another drink and said with a catch in her voice, “My parents disowned me.”

“They kicked you out?”

Bianca shrugged an answer, “Yeah and they aren't going to help me with school anymore,” she said with fresh tears. “I don't think I'll be able to go back to Chicago this Fall.”

“Oh, Binx. You worked so hard to get in there,” said Sarah.

“August is a ways off, maybe they'll ease up by then,” offered Raymond.

“I don't know. They were so angry,” said Bianca.

Mrs. Flores in particular had a very sharp tongue that Raymond had been on the receiving end of on more than one occasion when the three of them had gotten into some form or another of childhood mischief.

“It sounds like they really hit the roof. How did this come up?” asked Raymond.

“We were talking about my cousin's wedding. Momma was going on and on about all handsome boys that were going to be there and how I should find a good husband and settle down. Raise a family. Give her grandchildren like Sophia and Miguel have. I guess I sort of snapped a little.”

“Maybe not the ideal conversational opening you hoped for but you've been meaning to talk to them about this for years,” said Raymond.

“Maybe if I'd been more gentle about it...” said Bianca staring at nothing in particular. “I just sort of sprang it on them at the kitchen table.”

“You didn't do anything wrong. You just told them the truth. Would they rather you lied?” said Sarah. Her pale face flushing a little in sympathetic anger.

“They want me to not be a lesbian and have that be the truth.”

“But it isn't,” said Raymond.

“Well that was an insightful declaration of the obvious,” said Sarah with a smirk.

Bianca snorted a little as she tried to swallow a bit of wine.

“I meant that the cat is out of the bag now and either Mr. and Mrs. Flores have to accept the truth or we have to concoct a believable lie that stuffs the cat back in there for them.”

“Well, yeah. The lack of stuffed pussies does seem to have become a central problem,” deadpanned Sarah. Causing Bianca and Raymond to both to cough around failed attempts to a drink wine. Sputtering turned to laughter and in moments they were all three trying to catch their breaths.

“I love you guys,” said Bianca. “I really needed and good laugh and this wine is pretty good, Ray.”

“When I'm not laughing it up my nose, I kind of like it too.”

“What it is?” asked Bianca getting up from the couch and walking to the breakfast counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room where Sarah had left the bottles and opener.

“I don't know. Red. I just grabbed three different bottles because I couldn't remember which one you liked best.”

“These are from the bottle of Merlot,” said Sarah indicating their glasses.

Bianca refilled her glass emptying the first bottle and carried another back to the living room. She walked with an easy, dancer's grace. She had olive skin and tussled, brown hair cut long on the sides and short in the back that framed her dark eyes and face. Bianca was beautiful enough to have been approached by modeling scouts more than once, but she dreamed of being a singer and refused to get sidetracked from that goal.

Not for the first time Raymond reflected on the contrast between these two women who had been his best friends since childhood. Each had grown into lovely women in very different ways. Sarah was pale, petite, and thin featured with piercing blue eyes gazing out under the sharp, angular cut of her shoulder length, glossy, currently black hair. She favored dark clothes of a mildly goth fashion, like the short, dark blue velvet dress she wore that night.

Where Bianca had an outgoing, warm nature and loved to perform, Sarah was more reserved and introverted but with an wickedly acerbic and snarky wit. Each was thoroughly entertaining in her own element and the three of them had been largely inseparable since childhood. Their joint friendship had weathered the storms of puberty, the cliques of high school, and boyfriends or girlfriends who sometimes liked the rest of their little gang and sometimes didn't. They even visited one another regularly when Sarah and more recently Bianca left home for college.

Sarah was back in Peoria full time now, having graduated and accepted a job doing archival research for a local company. Bianca and Raymond had stayed in town after high school, going to the local community college and working. It had only been a year ago that Bianca had begun attending a prestigious music school in Chicago to finish her last two years of school there. Despite the prodding of both friends and all their parents, Raymond was still working temporary jobs and taking the odd class now and then, being unable or unwilling to pick a major, a university, or a career. It was Summer now and Bianca was home. Well, homeless apparently, but back in Peoria with Sarah and Raymond at least.

“So, not to put a damper on your partially raised spirits, Binx,” said Raymond, “what are you going to do now?”

“I don't know, Ray,” replied Bianca sitting back on the couch.

“Well for the time being, you are going to stay here,” said Sarah. “My couch is comfy and you're welcome to it for as long as you need.”

“Thanks and I'll take you up on that, but at some point soon I'm going to have to figure out my next move. Your couch is comfy, but I can't stay here all Summer,” said Bianca with a smile that disappeared as she continued, “And I don't know how I'll be able to afford to go back to school without their help.”

“Maybe it won't come to that. Give your parents a few days and maybe they'll calm down,” said Raymond.

“I hope so, but you didn't see them tonight or hear them,” said Bianca. “They both think my school is a bad influence. Momma said I was imperiling my immortal soul with my evil choices and Daddy looked me right in the eye and told me that no daughter of his would be so hateful of God. Then he told me to get out of his house.”

“Wow,” said Raymond. “They really laid into you with the God stuff, huh?”

“It's real important to them,” said Bianca and then more quietly. “I guess I'm seeing how much more their Catholicism matters to them than me.”

“You matter to them, Binx,” said Sarah. “They love you. It's just their beliefs getting in the way of remembering that.”

“I just wish they'd act like it more. I wish who I was and what I am didn't have to get in the way of that,” said Bianca pouring herself another glass of wine.

“It doesn't have to, Binx,” said Raymond. “I mean look at Sarah and I. We don't care. We don't think there's anything wrong or bad about you because you're into girls.”

“Yes you do cause I won't sleep with you,” said Bianca her tone at once sad and playful.

“So what? Neither will Sarah and she's not gay,” replied Raymond in smirking, mock outrage.

“Hey, leave me out of this,” said Sarah.

Raymond continued, “If I'm going to hold that against you, then I've got to hold that against girls in general.”

“Oh please,” said Bianca and Sarah together rolling their eyes.

“What? I'm a paragon of involuntary virtue,” said Raymond struggling to contain a smile.

“Ooo... Paragon. Good word, Ray. Was it on your word-a-day calendar?” quipped Sarah prompting another snort of wine from Bianca.

“OK, OK. Let me have it,” said Raymond motioning towards himself with both hands. “I've got broad shoulders.”

“No, Ray,” said Sarah, “you don't.”

“Hey,” complained Raymond looking to Bianca for support.

She crinkled her nose and shook her head a little, “Sorry, sweetie, not so much.”

“Yeah, well I was speaking metaphorically anyway,” said Raymond shooting Sarah a glance as he used another 'big' word. “Besides I thought the skinny, nerdy look was hot these days.”

“Are you a multi-millionaire computer company executive? Do you play a hot, nerdy scientist on TV? No? Then good luck with that,” said Sarah with a raised eyebrow.

“Wow, you two are a harsh crowd,” said Raymond and then after a pause, “Wait a sec. Are you guys saying you would sleep with me if I changed my look?” He asked making a funny face.

“No, silly, I'm still gay. If anything, gayer after that face,” said Bianca. “Maybe a makeover would do the trick for Sarah, though.”

“Uh... leave me out of this,” said Sarah taking a gulp of wine and blushing a little.

Bianca looked at Sarah for a second or two and then said to both of them, “OK. The repeat performance of our mock sexual tension game is getting in the way of my pity party and our drinking.”

“Right.”

“So I propose a toast,” said Bianca raising her glass over the coffee table. “Here's to the Summer. To getting the gang back together. And may the worst of the season's drama be behind us.”

“Here. Here”

“I'll drink to that.”

Raymond woke on Sarah's stuffed chair with dawn sunlight streaming into the apartment, a crick in his neck, and the start of a decent headache. He blinked his eyes, stretched his neck, and sat up pulling the crocheted blanket that had been draped over him onto the the thick, soft arm of the chair. Bianca was curled up on the couch across the coffee table from him under a plush blanket with horses or unicorns or something prancing on it. Her fingers were grasping some tissues near her face as she slept and a small pile had gathered on the floor in front of her.

Raymond and Sarah had done their best last night to keep Bianca's spirits up with funny stories and camaraderie. She needed some laughs to offset the pain she felt and that they felt empathetically with her. They also knew she needed to talk about her family and work through the jumble of emotions she was experiencing. So they alternated between listening and comforting, laughing and crying, talking and drinking until the wine was gone and Bianca fell asleep on the couch.

Raymond eased himself up from the chair and glared at the open drapes of the east facing picture window. Sarah liked mornings and had selected this apartment in part because the windows would let in plenty of light and a pretty view of the wooded ravine behind the building. Ever a study in contrasts, bookish Sarah may have fostered tastes that best seemed to fit a night person especially when she was a pudgy, teenage goth, but she had become a young woman who liked dawns, the outdoors, and morning runs.

Being as quiet as he could, Raymond pulled the drapes shut to give the typically late rising Bianca a darker room and made his way to the bathroom. His reflection in the mirror there was a little rough. His sandy brown mop of unruly hair was long overdue for a cut and he hadn't shaved in a couple of days. Slightly blood shot brown eyes stared back at him and stung from the bright bathroom lights that emphasized every wrinkle in the clothes he had been in since yesterday morning and slept in last night. His hangover although not bad was becoming more noticeable and he downed a couple of aspirin with some water from the sink once he had relieved his wine filled bladder.

He heard the front door open and close. Stepping out the bathroom he waved a silent hello to Sarah. She was wearing running shorts and shoes and a fitted tank top that clung to her damply. Her hair was pulled back into a pony tail with a few strands wetly stuck to her sweaty and flushed skin. She removed her earbuds and set her iPod on the kitchen counter whispering, “Good morning,” to Raymond.

They had stayed up half the night and finished all three bottles of wine. Bianca had drunk more than either of them, but still Sarah and Raymond had definitely helped. Yet Sarah had still rolled out of bed and gone for a morning run while the other two slept. Although clearly she had worked up a good sweat, she hardly seemed winded.

“You're amazing,” whispered Raymond.

“What?” said Sarah looking at him startled from the sink where she was pouring herself a glass of water.

“You drank as much as I did last night and you still went for how long of a run this morning?”

“Oh,” said Sarah. “Only a couple of miles. I wanted to get back before Binx woke up.”

“Well I don't know how you do it. You don't even look tired.”

“You put one foot in front of the other and repeat as needed,” replied Sarah with a crooked smile and drank her glass of water.

“Har har.”

“Shhh. Let Binx sleep. I need to take a shower and get dressed anyway.”

“Yeah,” said Raymond imagining and then quickly banishing an image of wet hair clinging to Sarah's neck as warm, soapy bubbles slid over her pale skin down the small of her back...

He must have stared at her a little too long or had some stupid grin on his face because she poked him in the stomach whispering, “You're going to be late for work, Ray.”

“Right,” he grinned sheepishly, “Sorry. I'm outta here. I'll catch you guys later at the Book and Bean, OK?”

“Bye,” said Sarah rounding the corner to her bedroom door.

Raymond let himself out and walked down the steps to the parking lot. That was not the first time he'd had a little fantasy about Sarah or Bianca and gotten busted for it. He was a guy and they were both pretty women. Besides with Bianca it could be in harmless fun because there was no way it could go anywhere that could endanger their friendship. But with Sarah he had to admit this was riskier and scolded himself a little bit for going there and potentially making her uncomfortable.

It's just that Sarah was really looking good lately, like a fierce, little, fitness badass. So he found her image dancing in his erotic imagination a little more often than he thought was right. Especially since his last relationship had gone belly up a few months ago. Caroline had been a lot of fun and the regular sex had been a welcome change for him, but ultimately she was looking for someone with better prospects than a kid who didn't take his own future seriously enough.

Which still didn't seem fair to Raymond. It wasn't as though he didn't care about his future or work hard. It was just that there was so much out there to learn, to try on for size, that he didn't want to choose just a handful of experiences to define the next decades of his life. He wanted to work on all of his aspirations at once but always be able to strike off in new directions if another interest got added to the rest. Which was why his college transcript read like someone who was trying to take as many different classes as possible yet never actually accumulate enough credits in any one specialty to earn a degree. And probably why his longest stint at any one job had been a little over eight months.

He'd liked that job, installing hardwood floors for a local contractor, but it was hard work and became increasingly irregular when the economy took a dive. But he learned a lot and was able to leverage that experience into his current job at one of the big home improvement retailers in town. The pay wasn't as good but was more regular and came with modest health benefits. Which was where he needed to be in less than an hour if he didn't want to be late, just enough time to get home, take a shower, get dressed, and drive to work.

Home was the loft over his parent's unattached garage. He'd finished out the space himself over the last couple of years, with their permission. It was actually rather nice, much larger than Sarah's one bedroom apartment, and the rent was next to nothing. They charged him a little to make up for the additional utilities and he helped them with projects around the house. An arrangement that he suspected they agreed to because he was their only child and they weren't really ready to have him move completely out of their lives. Which was fine, since he rarely had a surplus of cash on hand and paying traditional apartment rent on his own had already proved to be unaffordable. It also didn't include conveniently free leftovers or laundry facilities.

Arriving at home he parked on the street and bounded up the steps to his loft. In just a few minutes he was was back out the door and headed down the steps that ended in the prettily landscaped garden that comprised most of the back yard.

“Late night, kiddo?” his dad called to him from the back porch in good humored reproach. Brian Quinn was a tall, bespectacled, middle aged, man with greying hair who worked as an accountant for one of the local hospitals. He and Raymond's mom, Ruth, didn't actually enforce any kind of curfew or overnight guest rules on their adult son, but did tease him all the same.

“Good morning, Dad,” Raymond replied. “Binx is back home and we all ended up staying over at Sarah's.” Raymond decided to omit Bianca's fight with her parents. He was pretty sure his parents already knew about Bianca's sexual orientation and were OK with that, but it wasn't his place to “out” her to anyone else, especially as poorly as that was going for her right now.

“Well I hope you told her 'welcome home' from your mother and I.”

“I'll be sure to. I'm going to meet up with them after work. Which I'd better get a move on to get to before I'm late.”

“Have a good day, Raymond.”

“You too, Dad,” said Raymond waving over his shoulder on his way down the artful, cobblestone path between the house and garage that lead to the street.

Raymond figured that work was going to be at least a little tiring that day. He hadn't really had enough sleep and although he didn't feel particularly hung over after a shower and a change of clothes, he still didn't relish the idea of a day spent on his feet. And he was right. Saturday was a big day at most home improvement stores and that Saturday was no exception. All day long, lots of people were in the store to get materials and help with their weekend projects. Raymond found himself busily alternating between helping people pick out flooring materials, advising them on some tips for installation, and making sure they had the tools needed to do the jobs. Busy meant tiring, but it also helped pass the hours in what seemed like less time.

His shift was done in the early afternoon. He was able to get home for both a quick snack and a nap before cleaning up, changing clothes, and exchanging a few texts with Sarah and Bianca to arrange a time to meet for coffee at their favorite place, the Book and Bean. It was a house on the main street of Peoria Heights that had been converted into a bookstore and coffee shop. The whole first floor was devoted to the business and was a mixture of mismatched cafe tables, lamps, and chairs among bookshelves with subjects ranging from Baroque poetry to gardening to science fiction. It always smelled pleasantly of old wood, books, coffee, and fresh baked bread.

Sarah positively loved the place and had since the three of them discovered it years ago. When they were teenagers, it wasn't unusual at all for Sarah to be among the very last patrons to leave, even on school nights. She'd bring her homework there and read and sip coffee until the owners had to gently put her out in order to close for the night. Given how much her parents had been fighting back then before their divorce, the Book and Bean was like a second home and refuge for Sarah. The owners, Alan and Liss, even gave Sarah her first job, bussing tables for them, to justify her spending so much time there.

Alan and Liss were really nice people, if a little odd. They were clearly a couple in that they were almost always together and never apparently dated anyone else. But they weren't married and didn't go in for any public displays of affection or other obvious outward signs that they were romantically involved. Alan sometimes looked at Liss with warm affection and she at him with something more complex like sadness or maybe regret, but she was a hard women to read and neither of them ever offered any insights. Regular patrons of the Book and Bean, like Raymond, Sarah, and Bianca, had long since given up trying to seriously figure that situation out even if they continued to indulge in private speculation.

Alan looked like nothing so much as a lumberjack. He was a mild bear of a man with a short reddish beard and hair. He wore flannel shirts with jeans and always looked prepared to embark on a journey to the north woods of Canada with an axe on his shoulder to fell a forest. He had a easy smile and a deep laugh that wrinkled this eyes and rumbled out of him unselfconsciously. Possibly in his late forties with a slight but impossible to place accent, he rarely spoke much about himself but knew his regulars by name and really had a talent for engaging them in personalized small talk.

By outward appearances Liss looked a little like a hippy approaching middle age. She favored long cotton skirts and loose, flowing blouses decorated with embroidery. Her hair was a straight dark blonde and typically worn very long in a variety of loose braids, often past her waist. That is where any valid comparison to a flower child ended, because Liss did not act like any hippy Raymond had ever met or seen on TV. She was a striking, tall woman, taller than Alan, who rarely spoke more than a few sparse words usually delivered in a terse but not necessarily unfriendly way. She moved with strength and efficiency, like an athlete or maybe a soldier, not at all like someone who might enjoy dancing around a drum circle. Her face was sharp featured and a little severe with attentive grey eyes that could be at times menacing as she seemed to size up potential trouble.

Not that there was ever really any trouble at the Book and Bean. It sat in a nice neighborhood of cute boutiques connected by sidewalks and surrounded by some of the more expensive homes in the Peoria area. Patrons there tended to be from the neighborhood and a eclectic mix of people who would drive there from other parts of town to enjoy the atmosphere of one of the last surviving local bookstores or coffee shops in town. The place was not only managing to survive in somewhat hard times, but seemed to be thriving even against the Amazons and Starbucks of the world. Perhaps that was a testament to the easy friendliness of Alan or the outstanding breads Liss baked that could be smelled from a mile away if the winds were right. Or maybe it was some ineffable combination of a thousand little things that added up to a shop that enough people liked and some really loved.

Raymond parked on the street and walked in. The tiny, old fashioned bell on the door chimed as he opened it and took in the scents of bread, books, and coffee. He let the door close behind him and glanced about for Bianca and Sarah. They waved at him from a window table along the side and he took another step into the room. Above him the light fixture on the ceiling just inside the door flickered for a moment before returning to casting a steady, even glow.

Seeing Alan rounding the counter at the other end of the room on his way to clean off a recently vacated table, Raymond said, “Alan, I'd be happy to take a look at the light fixture for you. It's flickering again.”

“Is it?” asked Alan with a good natured smile and a glance at both Raymond and the no longer flickering light. “I've checked it twice on your advice and there never seems to be anything wrong with it. I think you're pulling my leg.” He finished with a chuckle.

Liss stuck her head out of the kitchen, took in the room, nodded hello to Raymond, and returned to whatever it was she had been doing.

“I'm not,” Raymond protested. “It flickered.”

“I'll tell ya what, Raymond,” said Alan. “If you'll go over and spend time with your friends who've been waiting for you, promise to try the soup, and be honest with me about it, I'll check the light again tonight after we close.”

“Fair enough,” replied Raymond with false solemnity which elicited a hearty laugh and a clap on the shoulder from Alan.

“I'll bring you and the girls out some soup, bread, and some fresh coffee.”

“Thanks, Alan,” said Raymond. The mention of soup and the smells of Liss's bread made Raymond's stomach remind him that he hadn't eaten a real meal all day.

Raymond joined Sarah and Bianca at their table and said, “Before I forget, Binx, my mom and dad say hi.”

Bianca smiled back at Raymond and replied, “How are they? Is your mom still giving piano lessons?”

“They're good and yes. You should come over some time and sing with her. I know she'd like that,” said Raymond adding with an impish grin, “So what'd the two of you do today? Pillow fights in lingerie?”

“No, you goof,” said Sarah taking a swipe at his upper arm. “Girls don't actually do that.”

“Sarah drove me over to my parents' house to get some of my things,” sighed Bianca.

“Oh,” said Raymond his demeanor switching over to sympathy. He took Bianca's hand and asked, “Did that go... OK?”

“Sort of. No. I don't know,” said Bianca her eyes welling up with tears but her jaw set in anger.

“Mrs. Flores wasn't home and Mr. Flores pretty much ignored us,” said Sarah. “We weren't there long.”

“When I told Daddy I loved him and asked how Momma was, he just said she was at St. Thomas praying to the Madonna for me,” said Bianca angrily.

“We got her things from college. Most of it was still packed,” said Sarah then turning to Bianca and taking her other hand she continued, “You've got your essentials and like I said you can stay with me for however long.”

Bianca nodded as tears began to stream down her cheeks. Raymond let go of her left hand and got her a napkin from the table. Bianca dabbed at her eyes and looked up at each of them saying, “I don't know how I'd get through this without you guys. Thank you.”

“Your welcome,” said Raymond sincerely, then, “Now can we go back the part about pillow fights in lingerie? Cause I don't believe that isn't a thing.”

Bianca hiccuped a sudden laugh and Sarah rolled her eyes before joining the other two in laughter. They were still trying to compose themselves when Alan arrived with three bowls of soup, a basket of steaming bread, and a fresh carafe of coffee including a mug for Raymond. He smiled at each of them as he placed things on the table in front of them and then produced a small cupcake that he placed in front of Bianca saying, “Welcome home.”

“Oh, thank you, Alan,” Bianca said beaming up at him. “And thanks to Liss too.”

“You are very welcome, child,” said Alan with a warm smile adding, “I hope you'll sing for us one of these nights.”

“I sure will,” Bianca promised and Alan walked away to tend to other patrons.

They dived into their meals. Raymond burnt his fingers a little on the still hot bread and alternated between blowing on his fingers and blowing on his bread to cool it enough to eat. The soup ended up being a creamy split pea that Sarah commented might have been made with peas from Alan and Liss's garden. It was excellent and they made certain to tell Alan so on his next trip past their table. The Book and Bean was busy that night so that as much as they loved hanging out there, they made plans to leave when they finished their dinner to give other patrons waiting for a table a place to sit and eat.

“So where to from here?” asked Raymond adding his share to the money the other two had placed on the table to pay for dinner.

“Well, Binx and I had talked about all of us going out to Jubilee to look at the stars,” said Sarah, referring to a state park not far out of town.

“And sing at that pond with the great echo,” chimed in Bianca enthusiastically, almost bouncing in place.

“I'm sold on the idea. The weather is supposed to be nice. Are we going to stay out there all night and camp?” asked Raymond.

“Sure,” said Sarah. “I've already packed some stuff in my car. We can just walk from the campground to the pond Binx likes.”

“Alright. Let me run home and get a change of clothes and whatnot.”

“OK. We'll pick you up there. No sense in taking two cars,” said Sarah.

“And we'll pick up some beverages on the way,” said Bianca and then, “What?” when the other two exchanged a look.

“Just one bottle of wine tonight,” said Sarah.

“Yeah, my liver isn't really evil, just naughty, and I punished it enough last night,” quipped Raymond.

“Lightweights,” teased Bianca, but agreed to the one bottle limit.

Raymond dashed home and threw a few things into a duffle bag. And then stuck his head into his parent's back door and called out, “I'm going camping at Jubilee with Sarah and Binx.”

“OK, Ray. Have fun. Take bug spray,” called his mother, Ruth, from somewhere inside the house.

Sarah's small, black, four-door car pulled up in front of the garage and Raymond jogged over to it. He opened a back door and followed his duffle bag in. “Onward, to adventure!” he exclaimed dramatically over the music blaring out of the stereo.

Within a few minutes they were pulling into the camp ground area of the park. No one came out of the camp office to greet them, but the park was obviously open with the gates unlocked and the open signs up. Raymond got out and looked in the window of the camp office.

“OK. Where's the dude?” asked Bianca from the passenger seat.

“I dunno,” said Raymond. “Maybe he ran and errand.”

“Well, can we just leave a note in the drop box?” asked Sarah. “I'd like to get our camp set up before dark.”

“Yeah,” said Bianca.

“I don't see why not,” said Raymond. “Got a pen and paper?”

“Yep,” said Sarah handing over a small notepad and pen. “According to the sign we'll owe $30 including firewood.”

They pooled their money and Raymond jotted down a quick note telling the campground attendant where they were going to set up and what time they got there. Then he folded their money into the note and put it through the slot of the drop box. In another minute he had loaded two small bundles of firewood into the trunk and they drove off deeper into the park.

As they rounded the bend in the park's road to first parking lot, they noticed a large silver sedan backed into the space closest to the trail that led to the camp site they planned to use.

“Oh, poo,” said Sarah. “It looks like someone is already there.”

“There are plenty of campsites up there, Sarah. Let's at least take a look. Maybe they won't be near us,” offered Bianca.

“Yeah, don't be so anti-social,” teased Raymond.

“I'm not,” pouted Sarah parking next to the other car. “I just don't like other people.”

They got out and walked the short distance to the campsite they wanted in a wooded clearing along one of the trails leading to the pond that Bianca liked so much just a few hundred more yards into the woods. It was empty.

“See, they're someplace else,” said Bianca happily. “We've got the place to ourselves.”

It wasn't dark yet as they finished carrying everything from Sarah's car. With hardly a cloud in the sky it promised to be a good night to see some stars and maybe some meteors.

The sun settled into a warm glow on the western horizon. It's fading light filtered through the trees around them casting diffused shadows on their campsite and an even deeper gloom in the undergrowth among the trees. Sarah was nearly finished putting up the tent they could use to escape mosquitoes as they slept. Bianca was carefully arranging firewood in the little ring of rocks that defined the fire pit of their campsite, while Raymond shook the flashlight and banged it against his palm in a vain attempt to get a little more power out of the batteries.

“It's no good,” he finally admitted. “The batteries are dead.”

“Well then we'd better get the fire going,” said Sarah.

“I'm on it,” said Bianca, striking a match into the bed of dry grass she had arranged among the sticks and split firewood she'd placed. In moments the fire was reducing the grass to blackened straws, spreading onto the kindling, and curling the splinters of the firewood. “There we go,” she said leaning back from the flames and adding another piece of wood to the top of her growing fire.

“With no flashlight, maybe we ought to just visit the pond in the morning,” suggested Raymond sitting at the campfire.

“Yeah,” said Sarah wryly joining them. “We can all get up at dawn, go for a run, and Binxs can sing at the pond after.”

“Yes, to singing tomorrow,” said Bianca popping open the bottle of wine and then making a face at Sarah, “But no way, to getting up at dawn or running.”

The firelight flickered and jumped among the gathering shadows, casting an orange glow about them as they sipped wine. The Sun's light became just a faint haze, low in the west, cradling a tiny sliver of the setting crescent moon, barely brighter than the light pollution of Peoria to the east. The three of them sat around around the fire and gazed up at the sky, which continued to darken, passing into a deep blue dotted with at first just a handful of stars and then an increasing number as the fainter ones stood out against the fully dark sky.

“There's one,” Raymond pointed at the fading streak of a falling star.

“I saw it too,” said Bianca excitedly. “Did you catch it, Sarah?”

“Just out of the corner of my eye, I think. It was kinda that way,” Sarah gestured, “Moving from north to west, right?”

“Yeah,” said Raymond after a moment of consideration. “If that's north,” he said pointing in a vaguely northern direction.

“Yep,” confirmed Sarah.

“Well then, we all saw it,” announced Bianca. “We have to make a wish.”

“OK, what will we wish for?” asked Sarah and then added a sharp, “No!” shaking her finger once at Raymond as he opened his mouth to speak.

“What? I was just going to suggest-” he said with his tone and face expressing as much innocence as he could muster around his grin.

“Don't go there, Ray,” Sarah interrupted. The beginnings of a smile betraying the humor behind her preemptive scolding of his unspoken innuendo.

“Adventure,” said Bianca.

“Adventure?” asked Sarah. “Like what?”

“You know. Excitement. Opportunity. Like Ray said earlier, 'Onward to adventure!'”

“Did I say that?” asked Raymond.

“Yep, when you got in the car,” replied Sarah.

“Well that doesn't sound like me at all. What are we, pirates looking for buried treasure?” Raymond teased. “Let's wish for-”

“No!” laughed both of the girls.

“OK OK,” laughed Raymond along with them, throwing up his hands in defeat. “Adventure it will be.”

“Yeah. Adventure,” said Bianca and then adding with her eyes drifting off a little, “Just a little distraction from life's problems.”

Sarah reached out to Bianca and took her hand saying quietly, “We're with you no matter what. Everything will be OK.”

Raymond held Bianca's other and reached out towards Sarah around the fire, “Absolutely.”

Sarah took his outstretched and they all three stood and held hands in a circle around the fire and whispered, “Adventure.”

They stayed like that for a few heartbeats as crickets chirped in the trees and their campfire popped and hissed between them before starting to smile at how silly they were beginning to feel. Then Raymond said in a Marvin the Martian voice, “Adventure. We said adventure. Where is the Earth shattering adventure?”

They all three dropped hands and bent over in peals of laughter that left them gasping for breath. Just as they were starting to recover from Raymond's well timed joke, there was a bright flash of light from the north followed by a tremendous bang that literally shook them off their feet. Moments later, muddy water rained down on them as they struggled unsteadily to their feet, looking in the direction of the explosion.

“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Sarah.

“It came from the pond,” said Bianca pointing up the trail in the direction of the pond where she liked to sing.

“I think that was the pond,” said Raymond wiping dirty water from his eyes and pointing at a fish flopping weakly on the ground nearby.

The woods went silent around them as the last of the pond water fell. The only sound was the hissing of their damp campfire and their own breathing until the night air was pierced by a discordant, roaring shriek that reverberated in their chests and hurt their ears. It was even louder than the explosion that preceded it and sounded like all the rage and pain of the world had been given a single inhuman voice to cry into the dark. Driven to their knees with hands over their ears, Raymond, Bianca, and Sarah trembled in fear and pain as the horrible sound slowly relented its assault, trailing off like a mournful lament that brought tears unbidden to their eyes.

Bianca stood first and stepped towards the trail leading to the pond.

“Binx, where are you going?” demanded Sarah, still crouched near the sputtering fire.

“Some... thing needs help. Can't you hear it? It's in pain and it's afraid,” said Bianca urgently.

Raymond wobbled to his feet looking with uncertainty in the direction of the pond and the explosion and that terrible scream. “Maybe, but it also sounded... pissed. What on Earth makes that kind of sound anyway?”

“It was like a lion,” said Sarah standing up and then shaking her head, “Or maybe an eagle.”

“Like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park,” said Raymond his eyes wide.

“Yeah, sort of, but scarier and... at the end it was...” said Sarah.

“Anguished,” said Bianca finishing Sarah's thought. “Come on. Let's go.”

“And do what? Help a T-Rex in distress? How are we supposed to do that?” demanded Sarah.

“I don't know,” said Bianca over her shoulder starting up the trail. “But you heard it. We can't just do nothing.”

Sarah and Raymond exchanged a quick look and started after Bianca. The trail quickly got hard to follow as they left the weak light of their dying campfire behind. It was dark in the woods with the canopy of leaves overhead blocking even the feeble starlight. Clustering together, they stumbled a little way up the trail, trying to rely on their outstretched hands to guide them as much as their eyes. Until Raymond stopped suddenly.

“Hold up,” he said digging into his pocket. He pulled out his cell phone and opened its home screen.

“Who are you calling?” asked Bianca impatiently.

“No one,” said Raymond pointing his cell phone as makeshift flashlight at the trail ahead of them.

“Clever, boy,” said Sarah patting Raymond's head as she and Bianca did the same.

“I have my moments,” said Raymond with a nervous smile and started up the trail adding, “I just wish I had brought fresh batteries for the flashlight.”

“Well, the phones aren't perfect, but this is better than groping in the dark,” said Sarah as the continued forward.

“Oh, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss a good grope in the dark,” chuckled Raymond over his shoulder.

“You walked right into that one,” said Bianca to Sarah with a wide smile.

“Yeah, well, better one of Ray's corny jokes than a tree,” said Sarah stepping around a low branch at the edge of the trail.

The three of them continued through the woods by the weak electric glow of their smart phones. In minutes they were only yards away from where the trees opened up around the pond. The ground was treacherously slippery and the leaves around them were coated in dripping mud. As they approached, they could see faint light through the trees and hear low voices too indistinct to understand.

“What's going on out there?” whispered Sarah.

“I don't know,” answered Raymond coming to a stop, his voice low too.

“I can't see from here,” Bianca said, putting her phone away and creeping forward to peer around the last of the underbrush and trees blocking their view of the pond.

“Binx!” Sarah exclaimed, her voice rising a little.

“Shhh!” hushed Bianca then turning back towards her friends she whispered, “Look at this, you guys.”

Raymond shrugged and held out his hand to Sarah who took it. Together they eased up to where Bianca was crouched and tried to make sense of the scene before them. The pond was unrecognizable. Its former banks, irregularly shaped and gently sloped, had been replaced by the vaguely circular, steep walls of a muddy crater. Almost all of the water was missing, blown away perhaps by the explosion they heard earlier. Only a relatively small pool of muck remained at the bottom, littered with what looked like a jumble of oddly shaped, radiantly burning timbers. Steam and smoke rose, under lit from below, casting dull light on the area.

Part way around the gaping hole were a group of six people. One stood a little away from the rest, holding a pearlescent glowing sphere about the size of a basketball. The rest were milling about around a shape on the ground and talking in low, weary tones. After a brief conversation, two of them bent over and came up holding a limp body, its head dangling and throat open in a deep slash. They carried it to the edge of the crater between them.

“Oh, no,” gasped Sarah covering her mouth with the fingers of her left hand. Raymond swallowed heavily, gripping her right hand.

“I think that was the campground attendant,” whispered Bianca in horror.

“Yeah,” agreed Raymond hoarsely.

Swinging it in unison between them a couple of times the two men threw the dead body into the center of the boiling, burning crater below. While the rest were distracted by that, the man holding the gently swirling ball of light was backing away from the rest. He had covered more than half the distance to the trail where Raymond and the girls crouched when a commanding male voice called out to him loudly.

“Lidmann, where do you think you are going?”

The man holding the sphere, apparently called Lidmann, replied, “Sorry, Wedolian. A dragon's soul is just too valuable to simply hand over to you,” he said patting the ball of iridescent light. “But thank you for your help, I couldn't have captured it without you and your Warlocks. You've made me a very wealthy man.”

Lidmann raised his hand and made a chopping gesture through the air. Immediately the space between him and the others erupted in a series of smokey flashes and concussive thuds that knocked most of them off their feet, sending the rest coughing and scrambling for cover as Lidmann sprinted away. Right towards Bianca, Raymond, and Sarah.

“Oh, shit,” said Bianca.

Someone on the far side stood up and pointed a thin object at the fleeing man. A crackling bolt of bright light shot from it narrowly missing Lidmann, explosively splintering the trunk of a tree as he ran past clutching the iridescent ball in both arms.

“Be careful, you fools. You'll destroy the orb,” shouted the commanding voice. “After him!”

“Oh, shit is right,” said Raymond standing up. “We better get out of here.”

“You think?” asked Sarah sarcastically as she and Bianca got to their feet too.

The running man noticed them standing across the trail at that moment and slid to a stop, blinking at them in confusion from only short distance away. Behind him the splintered trunk of the tree creaked and groaned as it gave way, beginning to fall towards the mouth of the trail.

“Who are you?” gasped Lidmann breathlessly. His drawn, narrow face flushed from exertion and fear, illuminated by the swirling, pearlescent orb cradled against his panting chest.

“Look out,” screamed Bianca, pointing at the falling tree and drawing the attention of the other people.

He glanced over his shoulder and seeing the tree rushing down at him tried to start running again. His feet slipped on the muddy ground sending him sprawling. Instinctively he put his arms out to break his fall, letting go of his prize which arced away as the heavy limbs of the falling tree came crashing down upon him. The glowing ball of writhing light was battered by smaller branches, adding to its momentum and sending it bouncing along the ground to land at the feet of Raymond, Bianca, and Sarah.

Sarah's face was paler than usual as she stared at the crushed, twisted body under the tree. “I think he's...”

“Dead,” finished Raymond.

Bianca nodded numbly.

“He dropped it and he's got help,” yelled someone from the far side of the crater.

“Kill them all! Get my orb!” shouted the commanding voice angrily.

A flash and bang went off in the branches of the fallen tree that partially shielded them from their nearest pursuers, followed immediately by a narrow beam of orange light that sizzled through the air from the far side, igniting leaves and low branches over their heads.

They screamed in alarm and ducked down, swatting burning leaves from their hair.

“There are three of them,” shouted a harsh female voice.

“We've got to get out of here!” said Sarah, staying low and backing down the trail behind them.

Bianca turned as though to follow and then hesitated.

“Binx, let's go,” said Raymond gesturing for Bianca to follow Sarah.

Bianca reached down and pulled the glimmering orb from the mud.

“Come on, hurry,” urged Sarah.

A brightly sparking bolt of light smashed into a nearby tree, showering Bianca and Raymond with splinters.

“You OK?” asked Raymond.

Bianca nodded, “I think so.”

“Then, run,” said Raymond pushing Bianca ahead of him towards Sarah.

They all ran away, down the trail towards their camp. Sarah led the way, setting a rapid pace and waving her cell phone wildly in front of her to light her path. Bianca and Raymond followed as quickly as they could, relying on the light from the orb Bianca was carrying to stay on the trail.

There were sounds of smashing wood coming from behind them and shouts of impatient anger.

They broke out of the woods and into the little clearing where they had planned to spend the night. Raymond stumbled to a stop, breathing hard. Bianca took a few more steps and collapsed, sitting on the ground, the orb still clutched in her arms.

“Keys,” panted Raymond, bent over with his hands on his knees.

“Go, go to the car,” Sarah motioned at her friends. “I'll get them.”

Raymond nodded breathlessly, pulling Bianca to her feet and towards the short trail that led to the parking lot. Together they hurried tiredly onward.

“Why did... you take... that?” asked Raymond between labored gasps, glancing at the orb.

“I don't... know,” said Bianca. “Didn't seem... right to... leave it... with them.”

There was a rapid series of bangs and shouting from behind them. Running footsteps closed in on them and in another surge of adrenaline they pushed harder, sprinting the last of the distance to the parking lot. They turned at Sarah's car, looking behind them, just as Sarah charged out of the trees, her keys held out in front of her.

The car lights flashed as the doors locks clunked open. “Get in, get in,” called Sarah running towards the driver door.

Raymond threw open the two doors on the passenger side and practically dived into the rear seat once Bianca was in the front. Sarah jumped behind the wheel and jammed her keys into the ignition. The automatic headlights shone on the trail head in front of them as the car started, where a woman appeared, running towards them. Each of her hands was curled around a blazing fireball, her mouth widening in a sadistic smile.

Bianca and Sarah screamed, then Sarah slammed her car in reverse. The car tires spun in the gravel of the parking space as they accelerated backwards. They bounced onto the asphalt road, the front end of the car swinging wildly around as Sarah twisted the wheel. Raymond was tossed around the back seat, first to one side and then the other. The car lurched to a sudden stop and Sarah flung the transmission into 'drive.' Looking out the left window he saw the woman outside pull back an arm as she ran past the silver sedan towards them.

“Go, go, go,” yelled Raymond.

The woman threw a fireball just as Sarah stomped the accelerator and the car sped forward. The flame splashed against the side of the car, spreading orange fire over the rear door and window. The flash of light and sudden radiant heat caused them all to scream. Sarah nearly lost control and the car pitched about as she fought to keep it on the road.

Raymond looked out the rear window and saw the woman stop in the road behind them, two of her allies joining her. She paused for a moment and then threw another fireball in a high arc at them. It fell erupting on the road in front of the car. Instinctively Sarah wrenched the wheel to the side to avoid the flames, putting the car halfway off the road. As they passed the fire, a narrow beam of orange light sliced at the car, severing the driver side mirror from the door in a shower of sparks.

“Shit, shit, shit,” muttered Sarah, gritting her teeth in concentration.

Ahead the road curved. Sarah jerked the wheel in tiny movements as she fought to steer the car back onto the road. The car bounced and weaved as all four tires regained traction and she aimed the car around the bend, leaving their attackers behind and out of sight.

The flames on the side of the car sputtered out as Sarah drove quickly along the park road to the highway that would take them back to Peoria.

“I don't see anyone behind us,” said Raymond looking out the rear window and then leaning forward between the front seats. He asked, “Is everybody OK?”

“I... I think so,” said Bianca.

“Yeah,” said Sarah.

“That was...” said Raymond.

“Crazy,” said Bianca her face aglow from the cracked orb in her lap.

“I was going to go with 'scary as hell' but crazy works too,” said Raymond.

“Well, we did wish for adventure...” said Sarah dryly, prompting tension relieving laughter among the three of them as they put distance between themselves and the terror behind them.

No, you cannot copy or use any part of this prose without my expressed, written permission.

The good ideas of Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-10T23:13:00.001-05:00

Here is the list of demands by the Occupy Wall Street people. These don't appear to be the thoughts of an unorganized mob of mindless hippies to me. That list makes a lot of sense. I applaud their efforts to reform the intersection of money and government. Such reform is badly needed.

LIST OF PROPOSED "DEMANDS FOR CONGRESS" *

CONGRESS PASS HR 1489 ("RETURN TO PRUDENT BANKING ACT" http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-1489 ). THIS REINSTATES MANY PROVISIONS OF THE GLASS-STEAGALL ACT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_Act --- Wiki entry summary: The repeal of provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999 effectively removed the separation that previously existed between investment banking which issued securities and commercial banks which accepted deposits. The deregulation also removed conflict of interest prohibitions between investment bankers serving as officers of commercial banks. Most economists believe this repeal directly contributed to the severity of the Financial crisis of 2007–2011 by allowing Wall Street investment banking firms to gamble with their depositors' money that was held in commercial banks owned or created by the investment firms. Here's detail on repeal in 1999 and how it happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_Act#Repeal .
USE CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY AND OVERSIGHT TO ENSURE APPROPRIATE FEDERAL AGENCIES FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis in the following notable cases: (insert list of the most clear cut criminal actions). There is a pretty broad consensus that there is a clear group of people who got away with millions / billions illegally and haven't been brought to justice. Boy would this be long overdue and cathartic for millions of Americans. It would also be a shot across the bow for the financial industry. If you watch the solidly researched and awared winning documentary film "Inside Job" that was narrated by Matt Damon (pretty brave Matt!) and do other research, it wouldn't take long to develop the list.
CONGRESS ENACT LEGISLATION TO PROTECT OUR DEMOCRACY BY REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF THE CITIZENS UNITED SUPREME COURT DECISION which essentially said corporations can spend as much as they want on elections. The result is that corporations can pretty much buy elections. Corporations should be highly limited in ability to contribute to political campaigns no matter what the election and no matter what the form of media. This legislation should also RE-ESTABLISH THE PUBLIC AIRWAVES IN THE U.S. SO THAT POLITICAL CANDIDATES ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME FOR FREE AT REASONABLE INTERVALS IN DAILY PROGRAMMING DURING CAMPAIGN SEASON. The same should extend to other media.
CONGRESS PASS THE BUFFETT RULE ON FAIR TAXATION SO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE & CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOP HOLES AND ENACT A PROHIBITION ON HIDING FUNDS OFF SHORE. No more GE paying zero or negative taxes. Pass the Buffet Rule on fair taxation so the rich pay their fair share. (If we have a really had a good negotiating position and have the place surrounded, we could actually dial up taxes on millionaires, billionaires and corporations even higher...back to what they once were in the 50's and 60's.
CONGRESS COMPLETELY REVAMP THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION and staff it at all levels with proven professionals who get the job done protecting the integrity of the marketplace so citizens and investors are both protected. This agency needs a large staff and needs to be well-funded. It's currently has a joke of a budget and is run by Wall St. insiders who often leave for high ticket cushy jobs with the corporations they were just regulating. Hmmm.
CONGRESS PASS SPECIFIC AND EFFECTIVE LAWS LIMITING THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATING THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION THAT ENDS UP ON THE FLOOR OF CONGRESS.
CONGRESS PASSING "Revolving Door Legislation" LEGISLATION ELIMINATING THE ABILITY OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS GOING TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS THAT THEY ONCE REGULATED. So, you don't get to work at the FDA for five years playing softball with Pfizer and then go to work for Pfizer making $195,000 a year. While they're at it, Congress should pass specific and effective laws to enforce strict judicial standards of conduct in matters concerning conflicts of interest. So long as judges are culled from the ranks of corporate attorneys the 1% will retain control.
ELIMINATE "PERSONHOOD" LEGAL STATUS FOR CORPORATIONS. The film "The Corporation" has a great section on how corporations won "personhood status". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SuUzmqBewg . Fast-forward to 2:20. It'll blow your mind. The 14th amendment was supposed to give equal rights to African Americans. It said you "can't deprive a person of life, liberty or property without due process of law". Corporation lawyers wanted corporations to have more power so they basically said "corporations are people." Amazingly, between 1890 and 1910 there were 307 cases brought before the court under the 14th amendment. 288 of these brought by corporations and only 19 by African Americans. 600,000 people were killed to get rights for people and then judges applied those rights to capital and property while stripping them from people. It's time to set this straight.

http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-please-help-editadd-so-th/

* As of 10/10/11. That list is a work in progress and has been through several revisions as of the time of this writing.

Here is a short video of Alan Grayson on Real Time with Bill Maher talking about why the Occupy Wall Street people have legitimate complaints and cause to protest on behalf of almost all Americans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhrwmJcsfT0&feature=colike

Creationism at the Founding

2011-08-30T08:00:00.001-05:00

Many of the Founders of our nation were probably creationists by today's standards.

Yes, creationism was a staple of education for many, many years before evolution by natural selection was proposed to the Linnaean Society in 1858 by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, who would publish On The Origin of Species the following year. Then it took several more years before the majority of biologists would accept the theory as one valid working model among several and another few decades before it became accepted as the best working scientific theory by biologists.

It is absurd to think that the founders of our nation would have been able to take into account scientific developments that would not happen for 80 years or more. So no, they did not forbid the teaching of what was to them the working model of biological understanding. We no longer have that excuse as the theory of evolution by natural selection has been accepted biological science for many decades.

So in deciding what can be taught legally in science classrooms in publicly funded schools, we can't look to the Founders to teach us science but we can follow their strict rule against government endorsement of religion. Which is what getting creationism out of science classrooms is about. Creationism is not an alternative scientific theory, not even in the eyes of the law, let alone among the overwhelming majority of biologists.

See the decision of the Federal court from the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial: "In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

The Bible has been and remains a profoundly important book. Christianity has been and is a profoundly important influence on our culture. It would be foolish to ignore those facts and raise children in this country to be ignorant of them. So I'm actually in favor of teaching the Bible as literature or as an important influence on history or in a comparative religion class. This is literature or social studies though, not science.

Not All Extremist

2011-08-29T16:37:00.002-05:00

Despite living in a secular country with laws and founding principles that forbid theocracy, there is still a significant, well funded, very loud, and influential Christian movement that is actively working to bring their Christian theology into daily American life via local and national government. They achieve successes because they claim to represent Christianity as a whole and therefore a large majority of Americans. Although one might characterize these theocrats as being fringe elements of Christianity, that is not how they present themselves or solicit help from their fellow Christians.

Pointing out that these groups exist and are dangerous to the liberty of non-Christians is not an indictment of all Christianity. I am personally sorry if self professed mainstream Christians are offended by atheists like me discussing the activities of fundamentalist Christians without constantly emphasizing the distinction between the theocrats and them. Look, I get it, it sucks to be lumped in with those people and I am sorry to inadvertently imply a connection among you that you don't like. I imagine moderate Muslims can relate to that. But how are we supposed to know that religious moderates oppose the extremists unless they actually oppose them loudly and consistently. Otherwise it is not unreasonable to be concerned that the silence is perhaps tacit approval of the goals of the fundamentalists if not the tactics.

A Better Budget Analogy

2011-08-08T22:21:00.012-05:00

The budget, deficit, and credit problems of the United States are complex, being made up of many interconnected issues. In an attempt to break down the overall series of problems into more easily discussed topics, a lot of political writers have been indulging in analogies. A popular version has been to compare the American budget to a family's budget.

What they come up with goes a little something like this:

Imagine that you earn $50,000 per year, but that you spend $75,000 per year. How do you solve that problem to avoid building up so much debt that you go bankrupt? You cut your spending and live within your means. The government needs to cut spending and be responsible like you would with your personal budget.

That is a bad analogy. It serves to illustrate the conservative point of view very well, namely that the solution is to cut federal programs as much as possible. But as an analogy of the issues facing the United States government it is a failure because it does not account for the actual behavior of our government that lead to the crisis we now face. We have been cutting taxes while simultaneously increasing spending. We have voluntarily reduced the "income" of our theoretical family in the analogy.

Let me see if I can come up with a better analogy:

Imagine that life is treating your family very well. You make more than you spent so you decide to cut back on the hours you work and therefore reduce your income. Meanwhile your family expenses keep going up and you start renting two very expensive vacation homes. In short order, you are not earning enough money to pay for all of that and are borrowing money make up the difference. Your debt is climbing out of control. What should you do to fix it?

Firstly, get back to full time work. Maybe you should even pick up some extra hours at work to earn some extra income, at least until you can get your debt under control. Then cut any extra unnecessary expenses, like those vacation homes, so that you can maintain the family essentials like safe food, health care, clean water, housing, education for your kids, retirement savings, investment in the future, etc. No you might not be able to expand those essentials in this time of crisis, but you can preserve them if you go back to work.

Like my theoretical family, our government needs to earn more which means raising taxes. It means raising taxes a lot to wipe out the deficit and to get debt under control. This should be the very first order of business, just as returning to full time work and putting in extra hours would be in the family analogy. Then cut out the unnecessary, expensive, vacation homes; the ridiculous war mongering in the Middle East that we can not afford to sustain. Then cut other bits from the budget with an eye towards doing the least harm to the citizens of America, especially those who really need help like the children in the family analogy.

No, even my analogy isn't perfect. No analogy ever really is and in this case we are trying to draw comparisons between the budget of the United States to that of a family. Yeah, that is a quite a stretch. But at least my analogy takes into account the voluntary reduction of income that tax cuts represent and that makes it better than the conservative version.

Birtherism is not Rational

2011-08-07T21:26:00.010-05:00

Whether or not the President was born in America has never been a matter of genuine controversy among reasonable people because the facts and documents do not cast doubt on the issue. That hasn't stopped "birther" conspiracies from popping up, but none of them are any better supported by the evidence than "moon landing" conspiracies and are a tool of the irrational or the obtuse.

The State of Hawaii releases to citizens a copy of their certificate of live birth which has been called a short form document. If you are a citizen of Hawaii and request a copy of your birth certificate, that is what they give you and that is all that is required by law to prove citizenship in the state, get a passport, run for office, etc. That is what the President provided way back in 2008 during his campaign for office. In fact, the Obama campaign allowed reporters to examine his copy. Here are some pictures of it. Also, reporters researching this found that two newspapers in Honolulu ran birth announcements in August of 1961.

Not satisfied with any of that, birthers demanded to see the original document on file in Hawaii. The state of Hawaii does not release that document, but the director of Hawaii's Department of Health verified that it existed, that she had seen it, and that there was no doubt that then Senator Obama was born in Hawaii. Yet the conspiracy theory that the President was not a citizen continued, no matter how absurd it seemed.

More recently, the President asked for a special exemption of Hawaiian law so that a copy of the long form certificate of live birth that is kept by the Hawaiian Department of Health could be released. This was very unusual and would not have been done if not for the lunacy of birtherism in America. Which I am sad to say is still not gone, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the President is indeed a natural born US citizen.

I've embedded a lot of links to supporting information in this post. Please follow those links and read those documents. In some cases those web pages have embedded links of their own, so read those too. When I refer to the evidence of the President's citizenship being overwhelming, I'm not indulging in hyperbole.

Does The Universe Have Purpose?

2011-08-05T23:36:00.001-05:00

I can ponder the tiny portion of the universe that I can perceive and find within it order. I can postulate that this order must have a purpose that applies to the whole universe imparting on it meaning. I can do these things from the prejudices and limitations of my mind thereby anthropomorphizing the universe, but I try not to.

The universe is. Within it are aspects that have or seem to have purpose. I think that I have purpose, even purposes that I have adopted, nurtured, and in some cases abandoned. But why should the universe as a whole share my motivations or what possible evidence would I have to assert that my motivations are somehow literally universal?

In short, no, I do not think that the universe has purpose in a human sense of the word.

Mythbusting Organic Ag

2011-07-27T08:35:00.004-05:00

Christie Wilcox has an excellent article over at Scientific American on the unfounded myths surrounding organic agriculture. This is not a comprehensive article on every scientific study that relates to the issue, but it summarizes the basic fallacies at work in how organic foods are marketed and some incorrect perceptions of how they are produced.

The first myth dealt with is that organic crops are grown without the use of pesticides. Pesticides that are derived from plants and fungi are used and often in higher concentrations than their non-organic competitors.

"What makes organic farming different, then? It’s not the use of pesticides, it’s the origin of the pesticides used. Organic pesticides are those that are derived from natural sources and processed lightly if at all before use. This is different than the current pesticides used by conventional agriculture, which are generally synthetic. It has been assumed for years that pesticides that occur naturally (in certain plants, for example) are somehow better for us and the environment than those that have been created by man. As more research is done into their toxicity, however, this simply isn’t true, either. Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential – or serious – health risks."

Next up is the myth that organic foods are healthier. They aren't. I've written about that before.

"They found absolutely no evidence for any differences in content of over 15 different nutrients including vitamin C, β-carotene, and calcium. There were some differences, though; conventional crops had higher nitrogen levels, while organic ones had higher phosphorus and acidity – none of which factor in much to nutritional quality. Further analysis of similar studies on livestock products like meat, dairy, and eggs also found few differences in nutritional content. Organic foods did, however, have higher levels of overall fats, particularly trans fats. So if anything, the organic livestock products were found to be worse for us (though, to be fair, barely)."

Then the idea that organic farming is inherently better for the environment. It isn't. Here is just one example from the article as to why:

"But the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones. Organic farms produce around 80% that what the same size conventional farm produces (some studies place organic yields below 50% those of conventional farms!)."

Lastly the idea that any of us, consumer or producer, have to choose only one side or the other. I'm not an organic producer, but that doesn't mean that every organic practice is bad or that every outcome is hurtful. I've been beating the "Buy Local" drum for years and organic producers are very often our local producers.

"In my mind, the ideal future will merge conventional and organic methods, using GMOs and/or other new technologies to reduce pesticide use while increasing the bioavailability of soils, crop yield, nutritional quality and biodiversity in agricultural lands. New technology isn’t the enemy of organic farming; it should be its strongest ally."

Well said, Christie Wilcox.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18/mythbusting-101-organic-farming-conventional-agriculture/

Nice Guys Finish Last?

2011-07-19T14:05:00.004-05:00

There is a cliché that nice guys finish last. This seems to be built on the premise that nice guys are doormats to other people and perhaps even attract people who will abuse their inclination to please. Although I can see how those conditions could be true, I do not think it has to be that way.

Nice doesn't have to mean passive or weak or prone to being taken advantage of. Nice can still be assertive and confident and willing to require fairness, because nice isn't merely agreeableness. It can instead mean to have sensitivity for another's desires while politely insisting on the same consideration.

Madman or Something Worse

2011-07-12T08:59:00.006-05:00

Here is a thoughtful documentary by Peter Brietbart on the failings of Jesus as a moral teacher and therefore the harm that Christianity does. The central thesis can be condensed to "His moral contributions are not original and his original contributions are not moral." It is only about 16 minutes long and is definitely worth your time.

http://www.madmanorsomethingworse.com

Secularization and Moral Progress

2011-06-26T07:10:00.006-05:00

Occasionally I encounter Christians who insist that their religion is morally and ethically superior to other religions, particularly Islam. Although I will readily agree that Western societies are on balance better places to live than Islamic societies, I do not concede that this is owed to the influences of Christianity.

Murdering heretics is profoundly uncommon among modern Western Christians. However that is not because Christian doctrine doesn't allow it. It is owed to the secularization of those Western societies. A process of moral progress that has been (and still is) hard fought by Christian leaders at each step. Yet it has happened, dragging Christianity kicking and screaming out of the Dark Ages and eventually into the 21st Century, while denying religions much political power.

Islam is a different case. Yes, we can find secular Muslims, but overwhelmingly Islam is intermingled at every level of those societies that are predominately Muslim. This lack of secular influences on politics and social expectations is preventing the advancement of most Muslim societies, leaving them mired in obsolete ethical systems, very much like Christian societies of medieval Europe. Pretending otherwise is drawing a poor distinction between religions that if taken to their fundamentalist extremes uncorrupted by secularism are little different from one another. Which is a danger of religion in my view. Even in moderate forms, its literalist and unethical roots lurk within the theology ready to be embraced by fundamentalists.

The process of secularizing Western societies is only a few hundred years old, starting slowly in the Renaissance and picking up steam in the Enlightenment. With a few noteworthy but brief confluences of time and place, the various ages of civilization before the Renaissance are largely indistinguishable from one another in a moral sense. Local or religious flavors of the same barbarity, cruelty, and tyranny that almost universally defined the wielding of power. Power that was so intertwined with religion that it is hard to separate where the church ended and the state began.

Or to put it another way, religions as we recognize them today, have had at least 3000 years in which to progress ethics to the betterment of humanity. Which they all failed to do, despite possessing enormous resources and influence. It wasn't until religion began to be intellectually and politically marginalized that the process of developing humane societies began to see any real progress. Which is not to say that social progress is anywhere near completion or that there have been no setbacks. But on balance, Western civilization has come further in the last 200 years than in the previous 3000.

Free speech, even for Jones

2011-04-25T20:12:00.006-05:00

Pastor Terry Jones attempted another of his inane protests, this time in Dearborn, Michigan, where there is a sizable Muslim population. He got arrested for it. So now I find myself in the sickening position of defending that religious bigot.

I've been critical of Pastor Jones in this blog. For the record, I consider him to be an asshole. I hate the motivations he has for the things that he says and does in these protests. He is pretty much in a pissing contest with Muslims over who has the better imaginary friend. What an insufferable prick.

But he has the right to speak. He has a right to burn books he owns. He has a right to be offensive. He has those rights because free speech, especially unpopular speech, is protected. No one has to like a thing that ignorant fuck has to say. We can and should exercise our right to free speech to speak out against him. But I'm not comfortable with the government denying him his rights, even though he makes me angry.

A poor argument has been made that Pastor Jones will incite violence and murder if allowed to insult Muslims, which misapplies the blame. Does Jones promote harmony? No. But the incitement to violence that led to the murders of UN workers earlier this month was undertaken by imams in Afganistan who took advantage of Jones' idiocy to whip crowds into a murderous frenzy. I think Jones is foolishly playing with fire, but I'm not comfortable accusing him of inciting violence. At least not within the narrow confines of criminal incitement as a legal restriction on free speech.

Ugh... I've in a way just defended the religious bigot Terry Jones. I feel dirty, but upholding the principle of free speech isn't about what feels good.

What if I'm wrong

2011-04-11T23:10:00.003-05:00

By way of a thought experiment, what if I am wrong and the Christian god exists? What if I discover this in time to save myself from eternal damnation by worshipping this god?

If the Christian god exists and is more or less in alignment with Christian doctrines of salvation and damnation -- then this is a supremely malevolent being. Evil is too small and insignificant a term to fully grasp at the capricious sadism of a being that would use limitless power to make possible all the suffering in this world and not satisfied with that would go on to create unimaginable, eternal suffering as an afterlife for any who did not love him for it.

To conflate love with fear to such a degree that worshiping your tormentor becomes proper is submission to a form of slavery I can barely wrap my mind around and will never join so long as I possess a shred of decency or self respect.

An Atheist on Judgement Day

2011-04-10T06:00:00.003-05:00

An Atheist on Judgement Day
by Adrian Barnett

The line seemed to stretch back forever. Hundreds of millions of souls, waiting patiently for their turn before the throne. The date... Well, the day is Judgment Day, so you won't find it on any calendar. The queue of people winds its way down the mountain, through the valley and off into the far distance. Everybody in the queue can see the final destination at the mountain peak. A hundred miles away, they can see it perfectly clearly. And they wait, moving forward a couple of steps at a time. Towards God, and the Decision.

At the head of the we find a young Christian, wearing an expression of awe and joy. Behind him, an atheist, looking slightly astonished, examining a leaf she has picked from a nearby bush, trying to decide if it is real or not. Heaven, she thinks, should be whiter, with more dry ice swirling about; not look like a Welsh hillside on a hot day.

The Christian steps forward for judgment.

"Hello Martin". God's voice is calm and gentle as He speaks.

"Erm.. Hello. Lord". Martin's voice is nervous, as a dozen emotions fight for room in his mind at once.

"This is it. This is where I decide what shall happen to you, Martin. In life, you were a Christian". It was a statement, not a question.

"I was, Lord. I still am. I have been all my life. I have dedicated myself to your service."

"Tell me, Martin. Why were you a Christian? Why did you believe in me?"

"Why? Well... Because you are God! I've always believed in you."

"That is not what I want to know. Why did you believe?"

"Because I knew it was true. You were always there for me. You helped me through the bad times. You answered my prayers. You gave me the strength and courage to get through life. I could feel your presence with me all the time."

"No."

"Pardon, Lord?"

"I said no, Martin. I have never helped you. You seemed to be doing perfectly alright by yourself. I heard your prayers, but never answered a single one. Your belief in me definitely helped you on occasion, but I have never intervened in your life. Certainly, you gave me credit for all the good times, but they were your own doing, not mine. You did not feel my presence, because it cannot be felt. The only actual proof you have that I exist at all is here and now. Again, tell me why you believed."

"I.. I had faith, Lord. Since I was a child I have been to church, prayed and sang every Sunday. My faith in you never wavered. Even when my mother died, I had faith that it was your will, that it was a blessing from you that she passed peacefully. I was raised to believe in you, and as I grew I read the Bible for myself, and learnt of your miracles, and all the saints and martyrs, and the good done in your name. I read the works of great philosophers and they merely strengthened my faith. I knew it was true. "

"No, Martin. Your mother died of natural causes, and she died peacefully because of the actions of the hospital. I watched and saw, but that is all. As for the rest - the saints, martyrs and philosophers had similar reasons for their belief in me, just as dictators and murderers have had. People have done great good and great harm in my name, and in the names of a thousand false gods. The Bible was written about me, not by me, and was written by people who had similar reasons as you for their belief, just as a thousand other Holy Books have been written about the false gods, or different versions of myself. I ask for the third and final time. Why did you believe in me?"

Martin looked shocked and ashen, but pulled himself together. His Lord was testing him, and he had lived his entire life for this moment.

"I believed because I could feel in my heart it was true. You sent your son to die for us, and I gladly accepted Him as my saviour. I.. I just knew it was true, and now that I see you, my faith has been vindicated. I no longer need to believe - I can see for myself the truth and majesty of my religion."

Quietly, God spoke again. "Martin, you have impressed me". He paused.

"But... not enough. You believe because you were taught to believe. You believe because you mistakenly attribute to me anything positive that has happened in your life, and discount anything negative. You believe because it is comforting to believe, and because you are frightened of the consequences of my not existing. You believe because... you believe. I'm sorry, Martin, but there is no place for you here."

God gestured briefly with his fingers, and Martin vanished. His shadow lingered where he had stood, fading rapidly to nothingness.

The atheist, somewhat shaken by what she had just seen, stepped forward.

"Hello Eve. I like that name."

"Ah. Hello, God. Thanks", said Eve, not entirely sure how to address a being she had, until now, considered fictional.

"Yes, you may call me God. Eve, in life you were an atheist. You doubted my existence, even objecting to the very concept". Again, a statement, not a question.

"Yes, I did. Clearly, I was mistaken."

"Clearly. Tell me, are you still an atheist?"

"I suppose not. I'm not a Christian, Jew or anything else. I guess I'd have to be called an involuntary theist. Ah ha ha", Eve laughed nervously, hoping the very real and solid-looking deity before her had a good sense of humour.

"Mmm... Tell me, Eve. Why did you not believe in me?". God's voice was kind and gentle once more.

"At one point I did. I was raised as a Christian, and often went to church, and prayed every night before bed. When I was feeling down I would read the Bible. The act of reading it seemed to comfort me, even though the words themselves didn't seem much help. I think, like Martin, I believed because I believed."

"And then you lost your faith? You decided I did not exist, and you knew better than those around you? You knew better than your pastor and family?" The voice was losing its kindly edge a little.

"That is one way of looking at it, yes. What I believed did not seem to fit with other things I knew. The Bible clearly could not be literally true, word for word. I knew from biology and paleontology that humans had evolved like all other life, and were not special creations. How life or the universe began, I still don't know, but could not just merely accept 'God did it' as an explanation. I learned about other religions, and how they all claimed a monopoly on truth, happiness and morality. I saw the good done in your name, but I also saw the oppression, genocide and wars. I saw that if people were in need, it was up to us to deal with it, not to rely on heavenly aid.". Eve felt a little braver, but was expecting the traditional thunderbolt any moment. The people behind her, now at the head of the queue, were slowly moving backwards, trying not to draw attention to themselves.

"Yet here you are, before your God, on the final Day of Judgment. Why should I allow you in - a heretic, a disbeliever, an infidel - when your predecessor, devout and faithful, full of love for me, was consigned to Oblivion? Tell me why. Justify your entry to my Paradise."

Eve straightened up, looking God in the face. "Why should you let me in? Because I am better person than you."

If Eve had looked round, she would have seen the entire line of souls, perfectly still and wide-eyed, staring at her in shock.

"What did you say?", enquired God. His voice, though barely audible, caused tremors in the mountain.

Surprised at still being alive, her mouth dry, Eve continued. "I said, because I am a better person. You have shown it yourself already. You told Martin that you watched as his mother became ill and died. You destroyed him for believing for no good reason, when his whole life had been shaped by that belief. Your preachers on Earth encourage unquestioning faith, yet you do not tell us whether that is what you want. You give people no rational basis for belief, and then when they make up their own that is not good enough for you. You listen to our prayers, yet do not answer, leaving people to rationalise events for themselves. People kill and slaughter over trivial differences in doctrine, and you look on. In the churches and temples raised in your glory, children are mentally and physically abused - in your so-called House! All over the world, throughout history, people have murdered each other for believing the wrong thing about God, for believing in the wrong God, or for not believing in any God. The poorest and most helpless people are relentlessly targeted, being told to give what little they have now, for the promise of eternal bliss later. When a person is at his lowest ebb, that is when the smiling missionaries appear, knowing that his life will probably get better naturally and they can give you the credit. In your name, the ends justify the means as long as souls are saved". Eve paused for breath, and continued.

"And you? All-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing? You just sit here and you watch it all... Any person in this line, had they your power, would show greater compassion and morality. You may be God, but you are far from Godliness."

God smiled. "Are you finished? Good. Eve, you have impressed me". He paused. Eve held her breath, shoulders tensing.

"You have impressed me a great deal. You may have believed in me for all the wrong reasons, but you disbelieved for the right reasons. You led a good life, and used the intelligence I give to everybody in the correct way. Even though you came to a conclusion about me that was hopelessly wrong, you came to it in a way that cannot be faulted. You may pass into paradise, Eve, with my blessing."

Eve did not step forward. Instead, she spoke once more. "No, I will not".

"No? You refuse Heaven? You defy my will?" The smile had left God's face again.

"Do you think I would want to spend one more minute, let alone eternity, in your company? You allow people to suffer, sometimes for their entire lives, for no purpose, and then judge them on their reaction. You hide yourself from the world and allow your creations to persecute each other over differing interpretations of the lack of evidence. You see all the pain and ignorance caused in your name, and just sit there as this queue grows daily? And then you have the audacity to punish good people for believing in you 'for the wrong reasons'?"

"Eve. Enough of this. The gates to Paradise are open to you. Be silent now, and enter."

"No. If it is a choice between oblivion and an eternity with a monster like you, I gladly choose oblivion. I ask only one thing, before you destroy me."

"And what is that?" asked God, getting impatient.

"That, if you can, you look me in the eyes as you do it."

Shortly afterwards, the next person in the queue stepped towards the top of the mountain, and Judgment.

For those who hate government

2011-04-09T06:00:00.003-05:00

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

Then, after spending the day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, I drive back to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and the fire marshall's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log onto the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

[I didn't write this and have been unable to find out who did. I'd love to attribute this to a source, but I guess it is just an anonymous gem of internet cleverness.]

Deciding what to believe

2011-04-08T19:06:00.008-05:00

How do you decide what to believe? Do you use different standards of plausibility depending on the topic? Are your beliefs informed by evidence or by preference? Do you think that where you live has influenced what you find believable?

If you were born and raised in the United States, odds are that you were raised Christian. Depending on how religious your family was, you might have been taught that the bible was the infallible world of God. You were probably taught that Jesus really lived and performed miracles. However, your views on these things were almost certainly influenced by accident of birth. For example if you had been born in India instead, odds are that you would have been raised Hindu and believe in many gods.

Knowing that more than one religion exists and that the doctrines of these religions are not only in disagreement, but are often mutually exclusive, one is presumed to have chosen among them. But that isn't really the case is it? People tend to believe what they were raised to believe, with exceptions of course, but there is no mass exodus of American Christians becoming Hindus or vice versa. So why is that?

I submit to you that the primary reason is that people apply very different standards of proof and evidence when it comes accepting religious claims that they want to believe. The key here is in what they want to believe, since adherents to a given faith are perfectly able to apply critical thinking about the claims of other religions. Hence Christians are willing to dismiss the religious claims of Hindus as unsupported by evidence and Hindus are willing to return the favor.

Perhaps this line of thought is uncomfortable, so let me provide a working example that is completely fictitious.

I have a strong personal conviction that there are unicorns in my fields. No, I cannot produce one of these unicorns to be studied or provide any incontrovertible proof of their presence in my fields. Perhaps they don't want to be studied. They must have supernatural powers that allow them to hide very effectively from skeptics and leave no testable trace of their existence. One must have faith as I have faith in them. Besides, no one can prove that there aren't unicorns in my fields. Do you believe me?

If I had claimed that there were dirt clods in my fields, that would be consistent with past experience and it would be no strain on credulity to accept my claim as true at least provisionally. Instead, my claim was about a mythological creature of which no verifiable evidence has ever been found. Most reasonable people would not be so gullible as to believe me. They would understand that it is not up to them to disprove my unicorns. Instead it would be up to me to provide proof given how outlandish my claim was.

To an outsider, religious claims are of that outlandish sort. Even the religious see it that way about other religions. And yet when asked to provide proof of their own religion's claims, the response is more often than not to be offended at the rudeness of such a request.

"That which can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."
-Christopher Hitchens

"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-Stephen F Roberts

Tim Minchin's Storm

2011-04-08T07:39:00.000-05:00

Tim has released the animated version of his poem, Storm.

On Religion It Is

2011-04-03T20:26:00.008-05:00

"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years." -Bertrand Russell

That idiotic, fundamentalist Christian preacher down in Florida who threatened to burn a Koran, Terry Jones, went through with it. When idiotic, fundamentalist Muslims in Afghanistan found out about it, they rioted. A mob of thousands formed, intent on finding an American to kill in retribution. Failing at that, they settled for killing foreigners working at the local United Nations office.

Burning a copy of the Muslim holy book as Terry Jones did was offensive to Muslims. It was disrespectful to Muslim traditions. It was likely to provoke a violent reaction among Muslims. Even a fundamentalist Christian bigot like Terry Jones should have shown more decency.

However, murdering people to take revenge for the burning of a book is not even close to being an acceptable reaction. Not even if they were murdering the people who actually burned the book. And most certainly not when they were murdering innocent people who had absolutely nothing to do with the burning of that book.

It is absurd that it ever crosses our minds that destroying a copy of a certain book is almost certainly going to get people elsewhere in the world killed. That it might spawn protests and strongly worded letters, I could understand that, but murder I simply cannot fathom.

Yet this is the power of religion in our world. It justifies fundamentalist Christian bigotry and foolishness. For fundamentalist Muslims it justifies the brutal murder of innocent people. A way of life that encourages the faithful to snuff out the life, hopes, and dreams of someone because someone else, half a world away, burned a book… this is a pathology of the mind that we would be better off without.

The idea for the text on this picture came from these advertisements.

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” -Steven Weinberg

Worried about GM foods?

2011-04-01T22:52:00.004-05:00

Please keep in mind that humans have been conducting genetic engineering via selective breeding for thousands of years. All of the food most people eat is a result of being heavily modified from its original, undomesticated form. Those breeding techniques have turned wild grasses into wheat, teosinte into corn, and invented the banana which is unlike the wild fruit it is based on. Those same techniques have made drastic changes in domestic animals too like turning wolves into chihuahuas. And in each of those examples many unwanted, unpredictable, weirdly recessive traits popped up that had detrimental effects that could not be bred out for untold generations if at all.

With modern genetic engineering the changes made to the target DNA are in a very specific place and add a single very specific gene. Scientists aren't also randomly adding thousands of other genes with unknown effects or unknown recessive traits at the same time, which is what traditional breeding does. That isn't to say that an unexpected characteristic never happens, it can, it does. If undesirable, it can be removed or just not added in another lineage or inserted in a different place on the DNA which might fix the problem -- the point is that geneticists are usually only effecting one small part of the organism's genome and it doesn't take thousands of generations to correct errors.

There are more than 6 billion people on Earth right now. That number could be as high as 10 billion in twenty years, maybe sooner. Suitable agricultural land has been decreasing and will probably continue to decrease from urban expansion and fresh water unavailability. Productivity must improve and GM crops will be a major part of what makes that possible.

None of this means to be credulous about food. If the idea of GM foods makes someone uneasy, I can sympathize with that. Really I can. That can be a good motivation to continue looking into things and promote deeper understanding. Perhaps good studies will find serious previously unknown problems or uncover a corporation brushing bad data under a rug. Well, let's look into things and if we can put together good empirical data that suggests change is required, then let's make the needed changes. Evidence based reason will serve us better than hyperbole or ideological hysteria.

Women are not livestock

2011-03-20T14:18:00.003-05:00

A bill aimed at restricting abortion clinics in Illinois has recently been unanimously passed through committee in the Illinois General Assembly. The bill was sponsored by Republican Representative Darlene Senger of Naperville and will require clinics that provide abortions to be regulated as surgical outpatient clinics.

Many if not most such clinics would need to undergo extensive remodeling and purchase a lot of expensive additional equipment. This is very obviously intended to cause the closing of clinics that cannot afford to meet these new regulations and to make abortions much more expensive in those clinics that remain open. This would also serve to disproportionately effect clinics in poorer areas, that are already underserved in Illinois.

However, the part of this I find most disgraceful is that this human health, medical regulatory bill was not submitted to a legislative committee that commonly deals with such matters but was instead submitted to the Agriculture and Conservation Committee. This bill was submitted and passed unanimously by a committee that works on legislation for livestock, hunting, and soil conservation -- not human medical health laws.

This bill had no Earthly business being considered in the Agriculture and Conservation Committee when there are more appropriate health specialized committees available. I am ashamed of my state's Assembly for this stunt. I am ashamed of that committee which I am connected to by virtue of being an Illinois farmer for passing that bill unanimously instead of refusing to consider it as inappropriate for their committee.

What the hell is wrong with these people? What the hell was Representative Senger thinking when she purposefully submitted this bill to the Agriculture and Conservation Committee instead of the Human Services or Health Care Licenses committee? Can't any of them see how dehumanizing, disrespectful, inappropriate this is? Women are not livestock.

Teach the controversy

2011-03-15T17:37:00.000-05:00

Teach the controversy?

What do you mean by controversy? That evolution is controversial to some of the public? Yes, clearly it is. That the theory of evolution is controversial among scientists who study it? No, it isn't. The general concept of evolution by natural selection is accepted science.

Creationism versus evolution is no more a controversy in modern science than is alchemy versus chemistry or astrology versus astronomy. Scientifically these debates were settled long ago.

There is no scientific controversy to teach.

[Images borrowed from: http://controversy.wearscience.com/]

Science saved his soul

2011-03-15T14:15:00.002-05:00

If you read a lot of science or skepticism websites, you might have already seen this video by philhellenes. It is entitled "Science Saved My Soul" and it is a well crafted 15 minute film of personal thoughts about big ideas. Please take some time to watch it, listen to it, and perhaps be inspired to thought by it.

FOX News Isn't Just Biased

2011-03-14T11:12:00.016-05:00

Fox News has a well known bias towards reporting the news that conservatives prefer. That isn't something I'm inclined to rant about since it is usually an editorial bias concerning which stories to run. So they skip coverage on things that embarrass their allies or emphasize coverage of their enemies, big deal.

Where I have an issue with Fox News is when they intentionally misrepresent the facts of a story, distorting the news to align with their political agenda. That isn't just editorial bias. It is deliberate misinformation being passed off as news. It is lying.

Today's example of "creative use of the truth" concerns the tragic case of Canadian Baby Joseph who is dying of a neurological condition and has been transferred to a hospital in the US. Fox is presenting this story as a clear case of the evils of socialized medicine, with a brave American pro-life group stepping in to rescue the baby from certain death by bringing him to the US for medical care that the Canadian system refused to perform.

Here is a quote from the Fox News article: "Priests for Life staff toiled through the night for many nights, working in concert with dozens of people to make this possible," Father Pavone said in a statement. "Now that we have won the battle against the medical bureaucracy in Canada, the real work of saving Baby Joseph can begin."

The trouble is that the FOX News angle on this story is incomplete and very misleading. Some quick research into other sources reveals a different story that despite being covered by many journalists still produces a consistent narrative of verifiable facts that is at odds with the coverage by Fox News.

For example, Baby Joseph's parents aren't currently disputing that their little boy is dying. The procedure they wanted was not intended to be life-saving. The dispute between the parents and the hospital apparently revolved around whether or not to do a tracheotomy which the parents feel (against medical advice) will help Baby Joseph's inevitable death be less traumatic.

The hospital in Canada was refusing the tracheotomy, but had offered to bring Baby Joseph home while still connected to life support systems. So that there at home he could be disconnected and die in the arms of his parents. But the parents still wanted the tracheotomy and have accepted the financial help of Priests for Life who transferred Baby Joseph to SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center in St. Louis, Mo. It is unclear whether Baby Joseph will now get the procedure his parents wanted.

This is more than a case of interpreting the news in a different way. This is more than simple bias. FOX News left out important facts and created a completely new narrative in line with right wing politics. This degree of misinformation isn't harmless. It isn't just poorly researched journalism. It is deliberately dishonest. It is propaganda that cynically takes advantage of a family's tragedy to promote an ideology with lies.

[Note: I've used screen captures of websites in this post, so that you can refer to the articles I read as they were when I read them. Sometimes articles get rewritten or revised and a link would go to the most up-to-date version, which might be very different from the version originally I saw.]

Free unions and collective bargaining

2011-03-10T17:36:00.007-06:00

"They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost."

-Ronald Reagan Labor Day Speech at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey, September 1, 1980

You can fast forward to 7:30 to hear the quote above.

Let us keep in mind that what happened last night in Wisconsin was not intended or even able to save the state money, balance the budget, or solve a fiscal crisis. All of those parts of the legislation had been removed, so that the anti-union and anti-collective bargaining parts could be passed through the Wisconsin Senate to the Wisconsin Assembly despite the absence of quorum.

"After stripping the bill of fiscal measures that require a 20-member quorum for action, Senate Republicans abruptly passed the measure 18-1. Republican Sen. Dale Schultz cast the lone no vote. Analysts say the bill would cripple most of the state's public employee unions."

Crippling the unions is the whole point of this exercise and pretending otherwise has become untenable. In the words of Wisconsin Republican State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."

Pale Blue Dot

2011-03-09T15:38:00.007-06:00

In 1990 at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned the camera of Voyager 1 back towards the inner solar system to capture an image of Earth. Already beyond the orbit of Neptune the Voyager 1 craft was at the end of its primary mission and was over 3.5 billion miles from home, from us, from the tiny point of light that is Earth in the photograph it took.

Dr. Sagan would later write a book in which he composed the following passage as inspired by that photograph. In my opinion, rarely have more meaningful words been assembled.

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Where is Voyager 1 now? It is plunging into the vast darkness of interstellar space.

Let The Right One In

2011-03-01T22:27:00.005-06:00

What follows is a brief comparison of the novel Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, with the original Swedish film adaptation Let The Right One In directed by Tomas Alfredson, and the American film Let Me In directed by Matt Reeves. There are some spoilers below, so be warned.

I've had a chance to see both films as well as read the novel that inspired the original movie. I liked them all. There are some differences in the plot with the American version having a more condensed, tighter story that utilizes fewer characters. The important events remain similar enough and the emotional content has largely the same impact. But the American version is a remake of the Swedish film, not a reinterpretation of the novel that the Swedish film is based on, which I mean as an observation not a complaint.

For example, in the American film the old man who cares for the vampire is clearly indicated to be a former little boy that the vampire befriended years ago. That is definitely not the case in the novel where the old man was pedophile that was "adopted" by the vampire just a few years before the story. The Swedish movie could be interpreted either way. The book also makes the back story and sex of the vampire explicitly clear. The Swedish movie gives less back story but still provides strong clues that the vampire is a mutilated boy. The American version retains the line by the vampire saying that he/she isn't a girl, but that is it.

The little girl actress in the Swedish version portrayed a much more creepy, inhuman, and isolated character than the little girl actress in the American version who came across as much more vulnerable and sweet. But overall the American version had better acting, even taking the subtitles of the Swedish version into account. It certainly had much better special effects. But I was pleased to see that the style of the cinematography used in the American version paid some homage to that used in the original film. Despite the differences, the overall mood carries through the various versions of the story.

Thumbs up for all three versions.

Civil unrest and internet kill switches

2011-01-28T08:23:00.009-06:00

Mass protests against a corrupt government in Tunisia resulted in the ruling family being run out of the country. As with the Iranian protests following that country's latest presidential elections, protestors in Tunisia used internet enabled mobile phones to organize and tell the rest of the world what they were doing.

The Tunisian government in an attempt to disrupt the protests tried to censor their citizen's access to the internet. First a few web sites became inaccessible. Then the Tunisian Internet Agency began harvesting account passwords for social media websites, like Facebook, and with stolen accounts deleted protest groups and gathered information on protestors.

In the end the Tunisian efforts to cut their citizens off from the internet didn't work well enough and the country is undergoing a change in government right now. No sooner had the dust settled in Tunisia then another mass uprising of citizens fueled by rage over government abuses and corruption flared up in Egypt.

The Egyptian government wasted no time in tightening their control of the internet. Since protestors were using their mobile phones to organize, the Egyptian government cut off mobile phone services from the internet. Which resulted in Egyptian citizens opening up their home Wi-Fi security, allowing protestors within range to use their internet access to get around the government blockade.

As with Iran and Tunisia, much of the news the rest of the world got about the protests in Egypt was coming from the citizens there who were using the internet to upload videos and first hand accounts. Even the foreign press relies at least partially on the internet to file their reports.

As of yesterday, the Egyptian government has taken the radical step of cutting off their country from the internet. You can follow the link below to a web page that will try to contact internet servers from all over the world, including the now inaccessible Egypt.

http://www.just-ping.com/index.php?vh=yahoo.com&c=&s=ping!&vtt=1296171901&vhost=_&c=

This has been a chilling development, but it was inevitable that a government under pressure from the people it oppresses would one day suddenly cut itself off from the internet. No doubt the Egyptian government saw this as a necessary step to deny protestors a means of communication before the government suffered the same fate as Tunisia. We in America can at least rest assured that our own government could never do that to us.

Well… actually there is a bill in the Senate right now that would grant the President the right to shut down the internet in part or as a whole in America. It is called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. These powers would be at the sole the discretion of the Executive Branch without any judicial oversight such as first obtaining a court order. I'm at a loss to adequately explain the purpose of such powers short of censoring the American people in a time of civil unrest or mass protest against our own government.

Some Thoughts on Food and Grain

2011-01-23T23:18:00.003-06:00

I'm no expert on crops grown for direct human consumption as that is outside of my specific occupation. From what I do understand, I can say that I'm of the opinion that highly processed, industrialized food is cheap but not necessarily in our long term health or economic best interests, once as many factors as possible are considered. I participate in the production of indirect human consumption commodities (corn and soybeans) not because I have a burning desire to play a role in Food Inc., but because there are no other viable alternatives in which I can reasonably expect to see to my financial stability and that of my parents -- responsibilities that require caution and already entail great annual risks.

I cannot speak for vegetable growers in the Midwest or anywhere else, nor can I speak for livestock producers anywhere. But grain producers like myself have a lot invested in specialized equipment and procedures that in some respects lock us into a cycle of typically narrow margin, high production grain agriculture. There are theoretical incentives to diversify into other crops, but little opportunity given the combination of a lack of marketing opportunities and the high investment costs of purchasing additional, highly specialized equipment, assuming such equipment even exists. Most vegetables are not planted, grown, or harvested via machinery, but rather by hand, requiring a large, expensive labor force. Which doesn't even mention alternative crops that would not produce anything marketable in the first year, reducing income while simultaneously demanding more input costs. This is very risky in the best of years (which cannot be predicted) and potentially financial suicide in the rest.

As fuel and transportation costs increase I do expect to see more Midwestern land go into vegetable crop production so that more food can be grown locally. But the drivers here will be economic, not ideological. As food gets more expensive and the margins for growing field corn become even more narrow, the profit per acre growing vegetables will rival field corn, making a partial switch to "alternative" crops much more likely. But until then we are unlikely to see any major shift in the Midwest away from field corn, soybean, and wheat commodity production.

Colbert on Palin

2011-01-22T11:11:00.001-06:00

Stephen Colbert might be the most talented satirist working in television today. He is painfully good at imitating Right-wing blowhard pundits, taking their methods and messages just a step or two further into absurdity. Occasionally his observations can be so pointed that we can experience a stunned moment of shock that he got away with it. Which might be the greatest gift that Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have for us, they can use humor to speak blunt truths.

One such bluntly truthful analysis was aired by Colbert recently in the guise of giving MSNBC news personality Mika Brzezinski some encouragement in the face of Sarah Palin doggedly injecting herself into the news again. This is one of the best rants about Palin I've ever witnessed.

Mika Brzezinski Experiences Palin Fatigue - The Colbert Report - 1/18/11

Here is the transcript of Colbert's rant:

Mika, you need to buck up. I know you think this story has no purpose other than keeping Sarah Palin’s name in the headlines for another news cycle. I know you think she has nothing to offer the national dialogue and that her speeches are just coded talking points mixed with words picked up at random from a thesaurus. I know you think Sarah Palin is at best a self-promoting ignoramus and at worst a shameless media troll who will abuse any platform to deliver dog-whistle encouragement to a far right base that may include possible insurrectionists. I know you think her reality show was pathetically unstatesmanlike, and at the same time I know you believe it also represents the pinnacle of her potential and that her transparent, transparent desperation to be a celebrity so completely eclipsed her interest in public service so long ago that there would be more journalistic integrity on reporting on one of the lesser Kardashian’s ass implants. I know, I know that when you arrive at the office each day you say a silent prayer that maybe, just maybe Sarah Palin will at long last shut up for ten f@#king minutes. I know because I can see it in your eyes. Well guess what, Mika. That’s the gig. And it’s only January of 2011, kiddo. And you have a minimum of 2 more years of this ahead of you. You want to stay in this game? You dig deep. You find another gear. You show up to work every day, get your hair and makeup done, you slap on a smile, get out there on TV and repeat what Sarah Palin said on Hannity last night right into the lens. You know – news. I have faith in you kid. You can do it! I’ll see you in New Hampshire … I’ll buy.

Cheney's Endorsement of Obama

2011-01-19T10:06:00.008-06:00

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has recently commented on how President Obama has shifted to the Right in terms of the War on Terror. Cheney has in some respects taken the policies of President Obama as vindication for the policies of the previous administration saying, “I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate”

I too think that our President has adopted strategies that he used to speak out against and has failed to live up to his promises to restore our image as a champion of human rights, end official assaults on our civil liberties, advocate more transparency and accountability in government, and stop spending money we do not have on expanding the ill conceived War on Terror.

Where the former Vice President and I disagree is that I think the President is wrong about his shift towards embracing Bush policies. That isn't why I voted for him and all of the ways in which he has disappointed me as President center on how he has (more or less) acted as President Bush did.

Peter Bergen has written that Afghanistan is the longest war in our history. Given the policies of our President, there is no end in sight to that war or the larger War on Terror. Bergen even thinks that we'll be there for the long term, much as with Korea. If that is to be the course of our nation, then I don't think it is unreasonable to ask for proof that this is the best possible plan. That we must endure these policies indefinitely with little more than platitudes as an explanation does not inspire confidence.

The President is privy to information that I am not. It might well be that he has no choice, given what he knows, but to do as he has done. But how are we to know that? Are we to take it on faith that it is justified that his policies are 180 degrees in opposition to the principles he campaigned on -- principles that got him elected?

An Uncomfortable Political Fact

2011-01-10T20:10:00.010-06:00

Language has power and can create context. In light of the terrible events of this past weekend, Americans have begun talking about the tone of the language we use, its contexts, and its consequences. I think we should all be more thoughtful about how we craft our messages -- not to remove the passion and meaning, but to construct them in the knowledge that our political opponents are also our fellow citizens with whom we share this great nation.

In an attempt to practice what I preach let me say that I consider political Conservatism to be a valid and valuable contribution to good governance. Though I tend to side with the Left more often, that does not mean that I consider those on the Right to be bad Americans with nothing worthwhile to contribute. There are soundly reasoned points of view to be found on the Right.

David Frum is a Conservative author that I read once in a while because I've come to appreciate how he thinks through a position, even if I don't agree with all of his points or conclusions. In this article by him, I do agree with his final position that we need to voluntarily tone down the language in politics: "This crime should summon us to a quiet collective resolution to cease this kind of talk and to cease to indulge those who engage in it."

No one should exclude those on the Left from criticism when violent language is used. A few examples have been brought to light and those are just as wrong as examples from the Right. But the reason that so many instances of dangerous, vitriolic language are attributed to the Right is because that is where the majority of this kind of thing has been coming from lately. Even the examples in Frum's article were from the Right.

Please take the time to read this article by Melissa McEwan at the following link: "…although violent rhetoric exists among US leftists, it is not remotely on the same scale, and, more importantly, not an institutionally endorsed tactic, as it is among US right-wingers."

And this editorial by Paul Krugman at The New York Times: "Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right."

Pointing out where the violent rhetoric tends to come from is not an attack on all Conservatives. I certainly do not intend it to be that way nor do I want to intensify discord among my fellow Americans. But we cannot begin to understand the issue until we are honest with ourselves about it.

Violent Language in Politics

2011-01-09T00:26:00.006-06:00

I am increasingly of the mind that the most serious problem we face in America right now is in the vitriolic rhetoric of politics. I feel compelled to write on this subject by the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. At the time of this writing she is in stable condition, but sadly several others were shot alongside her and some of them have died.

Before continuing I want to state something very clearly. I do not think that any politician is directly responsible for those terrible events today. The young man who fired those shots was apparently emotionally unstable and may have suffered from severe mental illness. Unless it can be shown that someone deliberately encouraged Jared Lee Loughner to commit murder, he acted alone out of the twisted motivations of his unhealthy mind.

That said, the way in which the political Right has used incendiary language and threatening imagery has shifted the nature of acceptable political norms in America towards violence. They do not do this in order to incite violence. I understand that and am not accusing them of that. They are speaking to their base of political supporters in ways intended to evoke passions and enthusiasm. But the language they use is redefining what constitutes their core supporters and is pandering to unreasonable political extremists.

It is not a wise approach in beneficial political discourse to carelessly use incendiary language or the imagery of violence in the ways that leaders on the far Right have been indulging in. Sarah Palin's reloading language, her target crosshairs, etc. Sharron Angle's Second Amendment remedies. Michelle Bachmann's breaking the arms of Blue Dog Democrats. Beck, Limbaugh, Representative Steve King of Iowa -- they all use vitriolic language, painting those who disagree with them as being unAmerican subhumans.

This must end. Conservative, Libertarian, Liberal -- our elected officials ought to be people who talk to one another, who hammer out compromises built upon the best ideas from many points of view. They shouldn't be using the language of exclusion and hatred against one another to score points with their base. Instead they ought to be moderating influences on their parties. They should recognize that the other political factions have value by serving to represent their fellow citizens of this large, diverse country. Demonizing one another is counter productive to good governance and incites the extremists. I would expect our political leaders to possess the maturity to know that.

Our political system is far from perfect but among its faults I would not list a dearth of violent rhetoric

CNN, Science News, and Belief Blogging

2011-01-02T21:09:00.005-06:00

At the end of 2008, the cable news network CNN announced that it would cut its entire science department. The plan was to roll their coverage of science related news items into other news departments if the story was relevant to that department's content. But since there would no longer be a group of science experts on staff, any coverage of scientific topics on the network would not be produced by reporters who specialized in science reporting.

http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/cnn_cuts_entire_science_tech_t.php

CNN has experts in finance on staff to report on economic news, sports experts to report on sports, specialists on politics to report on political news, etc. Networks and newspapers have specialist reporters because having a nuanced understanding of a complex topic can be vital to producing good content on that subject. Science is a large and complex topic. I don't think it would be overstating things to assert that science is the largest and most complex of subjects.

What sorts of expert reporters and how many of them a department has can be a good indication of a news organization's priorities. CNN has chosen to eliminate a department dedicated to understanding and explaining science news. However they do have a small department and staff of experts in religion to handle the Belief blog on CNN's website.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/

The Belief blog is tasked with covering a faith perspective on the day's news, including science news. This is an editorial blog of the opinion section on CNN's website and I'm not suggesting it is a major news department at the network. I don't even mind that the Belief blog exists. If they think there is a market for that kind of thing, then fine. What bothers me about this is that there is a full time staff of two editors and a part time author for the Belief blog, but no dedicated science department and no expert science staff at the network -- which strikes me a serious misapplication of resources and priorities at CNN.

Too many large networks and newspapers have cut back or eliminated their science reporters and science reporting. Oddly this is happening at a time when scientific topics are growing in relevance to our everyday lives. Yes, there are many great science journalists and publications out there, but major news outlets have far more public reach. We as a society rely on the news to keep us informed and encourage a scientifically literate population.

End Times... Wanna Bet?

2010-12-30T22:23:00.010-06:00

Forget about 2012 and the Mayan calendar. The good folks at Family Radio Inc. have carefully studied the bible and announced that Jesus will return on May 21, 2011 heralding the end of the world on October 21st, 2011.

They aren't being shy about their prediction either. They've begun putting up billboards announcing the good news and thoughtfully published a website that details the prediction. It even has a handy count-down timer in the upper right corner.

This is just one of a nearly countless number of religious predictions about the end of the world that have been made over the years. This one, like the rest of them, will turn out to be bunk. But I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. Are you?

If you really believe that Jesus is returning on May 21st of 2011 and that the end of the world will come on October 21st of 2011 as detailed by the Christians of the We Can Know group I will pay you $100 on April 1st of 2011 on the condition that on October 22nd of 2011 you have to pay me $2,000.

I am an atheist. I reject the holy spirit, in that I don't believe in such a thing. I cannot be saved or raptured. Barring a perfectly natural accident of some kind between now and then, I will still be here on this Earth on October 22nd of 2011. I also expect to have just as much use for money on that day as any other. Since you think that you'll be taken to Heaven on May 21st and that the world we be destroyed on October 21st, you have nothing to lose by agreeing to pay me $2,000 the day after the world is supposed to be destroyed.

If any Christians are actually willing to take me up on this offer, we'll hammer out some legal details and draw up a binding contract. Such a contract might include the use of an escrow account or have provisions to prevent you from liquidating your assets before the May 21st Rapture Day or the October 21st End of the World Day, so banish the idea of trying to cheat me. I will pay you, but you must agree to pay me in the spirit of our agreement.

I'm not made of money, so I'm only willing to make this deal with a total of five believers. Why only five? Because in my experience people who are religious enough to believe that their god is going to destroy the world soon are not trustworthy and I'm unwilling to risk more than $500. Why only demand $2,000 from believers and not everything they own? Because I expect they will have to live in this world on the 22nd just as I will and I'm not trying to ruin lives.

[Edit #1. I've changed the dates to more accurately reflect the predictions made by the We Can Know people. May 21st is the predicted Rapture Day, but the predicted end of the world isn't until October 21st.]

[Edit #2. Well April 1st came and went. No one contacted me to accept my wager or even inquire about it. In a way I am relieved, because I actually would have felt badly to take the money of people so delusional.]

21st Century Sit-Ins

2010-12-13T16:48:00.001-06:00

I guess there is no point in trying hard to avoid writing on the topic of WikiLeaks and its associated controversies. I can't seem to stop myself from composing things on the subject, so I might as well publish my thoughts here.

WikiLeaks has not broken the law. Just as the New York Times did not break the law when it published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Journalists can publish secrets if they get them and that is protected under the Constitution.

MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal all stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks. Given that WikiLeaks had not been found guilty of breaking the law, there was no legal self-protection to cite as a reason for refusing to process donations to WikiLeaks.

So why discriminate against WikiLeaks or people who want to donate to WikiLeaks? Maybe those companies were motivated by moral or ethical reasons. Well if that's the case I can't help but wonder what the standards are since MasterCard and Visa process payments to all sorts of organizations that most people would find morally repugnant, like white supremacists.

So in what way can people make their anger at these companies known? Protest. Which is what happened, a massive and organized protest in the form of a 21st century sit-in. Not unlike the protests at Woolworth's during the civil rights battles of the 60s, the virtual counter space would be taken up, preventing regular business.

Does that make Anonymous right? Does that mean that anytime a few people get upset with some company that they ought to DDoS attack that company's presence on the Internet? No and no. But it is worth noting that this sort of thing on this kind of scale doesn't happen very often and in this case it is all over. The protesters made their point and faded away into the anonymity of the Internet.

Anonymous, Ion Cannons, and Hacktivism

2010-12-13T14:45:00.009-06:00

This has been an interesting and enlightening week. With just vocabulary alone, I've learned a few things. Hacktivism? LOIC? DDoS? Personally I feel like I've been scrambling to get a handle on the background information so that I could make some sense of the news about Anonymous, WikiLeaks, and the internet protests of the past week. This post is about some of the things I've learned and some of the sources I've used to learn them.

Anonymous.

I've heard of them before and long had the impression that Anonymous was a merry mob of pranksters, largely motivated by their own amusement and not ethical concerns. Which is usually true, but the controversy around WikiLeaks stirred up that particular hornet's nest as few other things ever had. Why? It seems to me that Anonymous is a little bit like the Internet's anti-censorship immune system.

YouTube - A Letter from Anonymous, 9th of December 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpwVfl3m32w&feature=player_embedded

More WikiLeaks: The 24-hour Athenian democracy | The Economist

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks

Inside the World of Anonymous Attacks | Brave New World

http://blogs.abs-cbnnews.com/mariaressa/inside-the-world-of-anonymous-attacks/

Inside 'Anonymous': tales from within the group taking aim at Amazon and Mastercard | Technology | guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/13/hacking-wikileaks

Anonymous clarifies: We are not hackers | Geekword - Technology Blog

http://www.geekword.net/anonymous-pr/

Anonymous explains self amid WikiLeaks drama | The Digital Home - CNET News

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20025288-17.html

http://dump.no/files/467072ba2a42/ANONOPS_The_Press_Release.pdf

http://i.imgur.com/ksIqj.png

Hacktivists.

We know what activism is. If we watch a news documentary about the 60s, we get to see the cliches of activism in countless news clips. Hacktivism is a later generation's version of activism, the 21st Century version, I suppose. Instead of staging a sit-in to effectively shut down a business that is doing something ethically wrong, hacktivists stage their protests on the Internet. Using tools like the LOIC, these modern protesters attempt to prevent any customers from getting through the virtual door into an Internet store. And that is what Anonymous did to MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal as a result of those companies preventing donations to WikiLeaks

Operation Payback - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Payback

Internet, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, hackers: New breed launched cyber counterattack in support of WikiLeaks - latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cyber-disobedience-20101211,0,6077681.story

Continuing pro-Wikileaks DDOS actions, Anonymous takes down PayPal.com - Boing Boing

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/08/in-pro-wikileaks-act.html

Having DDOsed Mastercard.com to the ground, Anonymous sets sights on VISA - Boing Boing

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/08/having-ddosed-master.html

Low Orbit Ion Cannon.

LOIC is the program used by hacktivists to work in concert to stage their sit-in like protest. What it does is flood a target computer with data and requests for data. If enough activists are involved this can effectively cut off a target computer from being able to communicate with anyone else. This is called a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. But it soon became known that LOIC was leaking information about those who used it.

LOIC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOIC

Joining Pro-WikiLeaks Attacks Is as Easy as Clicking a Button | Threat Level | Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/web20-attack-anonymous/

Anonymous isn't: LOIC leaks internet address of user - Boing Boing

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/11/anonymous-isnt-loic.html

WikiLeaks fans should think before they botnet | InSecurity Complex - CNET News

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20025373-245.html

Study: Anonymous hacktivists not very anonymous | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20025419-71.html

Wikileaks: Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs, starts dropping science - Boing Boing

http://boingboing.net/2010/12/09/anonymous-stops-drop.html

Screw You, Amazon

2010-12-09T08:55:00.005-06:00

I was ready to put the whole WikiLeaks controversy behind me on this blog. Two back to back posts on essentially the same subject struck me as a bit excessive. Even though other WikiLeaks news items cropped up, my responses were pretty well encapsulated in what I had already written here. To keep at it would be to belabor my points, right? Probably, but something has happened that I cannot let slide.

Not long after WikiLeaks and its affiliated newspapers began releasing the cable documents, it came under massive Internet attack and political pressure designed to shut down its website. In an effort to stay online and a step ahead of its enemies, WikiLeaks changed hosting services several times. One of the hosting services that WikiLeaks moved to was Amazon.Com. Almost a week ago, Amazon.Com dumped WikiLeaks off of it servers amid the rising storm of controversy and heavy handed government pressure being brought to bear on any companies associated with WikiLeaks.

Amazon claimed that WikiLeaks had violated the terms of service by publishing documents it did not author and did not own. Amazon claimed this had nothing to do with pressure from the US State Department or Senator Joe Lieberman, both of which have been threatening anyone with ties to WikiLeaks to sever the relationship or else. Senator Lieberman has been leading what can only be characterized as censorship campaign.

Into this whole mess has now come a piece of hypocrisy so ridiculous I would be laughing about it if I wasn't so incensed. Amazon.UK is selling a Kindle version of some of the WikiLeaks cables that have been released. That's right, the company that refused to host WikiLeaks on it servers is more than happy to make money off selling the materials they would have been hosting. Behold a screen capture I took this morning: [see edit below]

OK. To be fair, it was Amazon.Com that dumped WikiLeaks off its servers and Amazon.UK that is selling the WikiLeaks cables. They are technically different companies, but they are linked together with marching orders coming from California often enough to blur the lines between them except in the most pedantic of legal ways. That little disclaimer out of the way...

Screw you, Amazon, you hypocritical bastards.

[edit -- Apparently either Amazon.UK or the merchant has altered the text for this product. If you can get through the heavy Internet traffic to the product page, it now says that this book does not contain the actual cables, only commentary on them. I figured this would get changed or disappear which is why I took a screen capture of it, in which we can clearly see it claimed that the cables are in this e-book. It is hard to erase your mistakes from the Internet.]

Thank you, Christopher Hitchens

2010-12-08T20:49:00.002-06:00

Christopher Hitchens, a man I have enormous respect for, is battling cancer. Before I missed a chance to do so, I wanted to write a letter to him and express my thanks to him for his impressive career.

Mr. Hitchens

I wanted to take a few minutes to thank you for the intelligence and passion you have expressed in your career. Your seemingly easy, characteristic wit is enviable to say the least. Though I look down on the notion of hero worship, I cannot deny that you are an inspiration to many who value free and rational thought, myself included.

The world is a richer and more interesting place for your influence. At the risk of being overly dramatic, my own mind is a richer and more interesting place from your influence as well. A condition for which I have no words adequate to express my gratitude.

In leu of eloquence, please accept my genuine though simple thanks.

The Cost of Being Kept in the Dark

2010-12-03T16:09:00.011-06:00

WikiLeaks is revealing more than just bitchy diplomats and uncomfortable negotiations. There is also information about the how our government is treating innocent people who have been kidnapped and tortured in the war on terror. Egregious wrongs have been brought to light providing evidence supporting the claims of victims.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/wikileaks-and-the-el.html

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-90007831

Making civilians disappear with dubious legal rationale is not the kind of behavior I expect out of my government, regardless of where in the world this is happening. You know what we call other groups who do that sort of thing to our private citizens? Terrorists. That kind of action is not morally defensible and if this must be the cost of doing business, then perhaps we ought to get into a different line of work.

Even if we still occupy a position on the moral scale somewhere north of Al-Qaeda, that is not good enough and sets the bar way too low. I don't expect perfection either, but when mistakes are made they must be admitted to and a heartfelt apology must be made. Then there must be accountability and investigations into the procedures and policies that got us into the mess. This is how we ought to preserve our high ideals and to do so it is essential that we citizens be informed, by the press if our government won't do it voluntarily.

Yet we have not been kept informed. The traditional press in America has been too obedient to the government, happily feeding on whatever Washington tells them so they can regurgitate it up for us. Reporters are supposed to investigate, stick their noses into what the government is up to, discover things, find whistle blowers, and then tell us so that we can make informed decisions hopefully producing an ethical government we can be proud to have represent us. The press is our advocate and the natural adversary of a government keeping secrets from its citizens or rather it ought to be.

Instead we have WikiLeaks and its editor, Julian Assange. A man who might very well be an asshole. I don't care about that beyond basic curiosity. The value of WikiLeaks is not in the character of its founder. It is in the information leaked. It is in the destruction of delusions upheld through secrets kept from us. It is in the uncomfortable truths revealed that should outrage us and foster change in how we want our government to conduct itself.

I am no friend of Islam, radical Islam, or Al-Qaeda. I do believe that Islamic terrorism should be opposed. I've no desire to help them in their war on Western civilization. But I care deeply about how we go about opposing the terrorists. The ends do not justify the means, especially if we trample our own freedoms and the freedoms of other innocents in our quest to protect our... freedoms.

WikiLeaks

2010-12-01T09:21:00.008-06:00

It looks like those folks at WikiLeaks are at it again, uploading government files onto the internet for all to see. Once again there is a great uproar of heavy rhetoric from public figures and the public alike. What is different this time is that the documents are embarrassing to many nations, not just the US, and the outcry over their exposure has been even more bloodthirsty.

Pubic figures have been calling for the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, to be brought up on treason charges, never mind that he isn't a US citizen. Others are advocating just killing Assange outright, notably Sarah Palin and some conservative writers like John Hawkins. Even the American press is making a bigger deal out of the fact that the leak happened than they are about what the leak contained.

I really think this outrage is misguided at best and more likely dangerous. America, you have your priorities screwed up. Whistle blowers whose consciences drive them to reveal secrets to us through the press can often be the only means we have find out what is going on in companies and our government. This has historically been seen as so valuable to the public interest that we have laws in place to protect sources and the press. WikiLeaks is undertaking the role of the press and being shamelessly lambasted by the traditional press for it.

Yes, a government has a need for secrets, but in order for a democracy to function properly its citizens need to know what their government is doing in their name. When a government employee is so bothered by what is going on that he/she feels compelled to leak the truth to the rest of us, thinking we'd be just as disturbed, then it is worth looking into the information leaked. There is a very real chance that the leak is the only way we'd ever find out about these things. If the information is as upsetting to us as it was to the whistle blower, then it is worth considering if our government is deserving of our trust.

No, I don't need to know everything that my government does. I don't even think I ought to know some things, because secrets can indeed save lives. But when leaks happen, we tend to find out that our government wasn't just keeping secrets from our enemies, but they were keeping secrets from us explicitly. Someone, most likely some group of people, in our government decided that if we knew the truth, we would be outraged and angry with their behavior, so they kept it a secret. It is in knowing those kinds of things that we have any hope at all of being able to have a ethical government by electing sound leadership to oversee what is done in our names.

When people call for the death of the WikiLeaks founder, what they are signaling is that they don't want to know what their government does. They don't want anyone else to know either. That we ought to be content in our ignorance and that the unquestioned authority of that government will be enforced with murder if necessary. To them I say, I am not a subject of my nation. I am a citizen and together with my fellow citizens we are the authority to be informed, obeyed, and respected.

Welcome back to the Bronze Age

2010-11-12T11:13:00.004-06:00

In a time when information is more readily available to more people than ever before, we might expect to be better informed and perhaps even smarter these days. The modern age is not having those hoped for effects. Instead the internet and news outlets are the mediums of choice for consuming super-sized helpings of misinformation, superstition, and spectacularly poor thinking for unimaginable numbers of eagerly credulous minds. Instead of experiencing the dawn of a golden age of widely disseminated facts, reason, and thoughtfulness, we are instead obstinately clinging to Bronze Age conflation of the factual and the fanciful.

What characterized the ancient Bronze Age in terms of information was that very little of it was vetted through any kind of fact checking or critical analysis. Instead truthfulness was decided based on local popularity which was in turn based on local superstition coupled to a profoundly bad understanding of the world. A charismatic storyteller could create new truth out of thin air. The strength of his conviction was the first and often only test of truthfulness, especially if the story was endorsed by whatever authority held grip over that society. Without widely practiced critical thinking, the Bronze Age can rightly be thought of as an age of credulity.

Though the average citizen of an industrialized society today has much more knowledge about the world than our ancient ancestors, this is mostly just an absorption of facts, believed but not understood. Choosing what to believe is still primarily subject to in-group popularity and source authority instead of individual analysis and understanding. For all of our technological achievement, we remain a collection of societies that is built upon bronze age foundations, in which all too few value or apply critical thinking to the “facts” they encounter.

Here are just a few examples of currently circulating beliefs, unsupported by the balance of the evidence yet persistent and often growing in popularity. Our President is a foreign born Muslim. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were actually a US government run conspiracy. There was a missile fired over southern California, probably by a hostile nation. The moon landings were faked on a soundstage somewhere. Vaccines cause autism, are a plot by the government to poison us, or are corporate profit mongering based on engineered diseases. A few thousand years ago people rode on the backs of domesticated dinosaurs. Galileo was wrong because the Earth is flat and at the center of the solar system. Modern climate science is a conspiracy to force a hoax on the world.

Ideas like those flourish not because people are stupid. Very often it takes some spectacularly creative mental gymnastics to justify those beliefs. These ideas take root because our societies not only undervalue critical thinking, we all too often scorn it as being rude, disloyal, or a dangerous threat to cherished faith. Compounding the problem is that we have turned our technological tools of mass communication into instruments of belief proclamation that do not empower people to think so much as reward them with expected bias confirmation. So, like our Bronze Age ancestors we continue to judge our beliefs based on misinformation, superstition, and spectacularly poor thinking. We just have more voices in the cacophony.

Great Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear

2010-10-31T13:06:00.001-05:00

This last one is my personal favorite:

I grabbed most of these pictures from an article on the Huffington Post website and a few from the LA Times website.

Blaming Atheism

2010-10-31T09:48:00.003-05:00

History has recorded some truly terrible events. Perhaps the worst of them are the mass murders orchestrated under the regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. Which has resulted in a oft cited proclamation that atheists have more blood on their hands than all other religions combined.

To begin with, atheism is not a religion. It is the absence of a specific belief, the belief in the existence of a God or gods. That's it. That's all it means. In order to build a philosophy or worldview from that point one needs to add something. Humanism, naturalism, or perhaps one of the classic philosophies like Stoicism would be necessary to then provide some kind of guidance/framework for behavior. Which are themselves not religions either, though they do act as substitutes to some aspects of religion in ways that atheism alone simply cannot.

Stalinist and Maoist communism became such a substitute philosophy, imposed from the top down upon the Soviet and Chinese peoples. That the architects of those atrocities happened to be atheists is not actually relevant, because it cannot be shown that it was their atheism that motivated them to commit mass murder. Saying that the great purges of the 20th century communists were caused by the atheism of Stalin or Mao is no better supported than saying they did so because of their shared hair color. Stalin and Mao both had dark hair (before age caused greying and/or balding), so are we then free to conclude that it was their hair color that inspired their purges? No, not without evidence to support such a statement.

Instead their purges were conducted under a known set of justifications and paranoias that revolved around the individual mental unhealth of those men and their Soviet/Maoist philosophies. These were deeply irrational men who employed/empowered psychopaths against their own people to horrific effect. It ought to serve as a warning to us all that irrational beliefs and people are profoundly dangerous.

Moreover it can be shown that the presence of religious beliefs does not prevent similar inhumanity. One need look no further than Hitler and Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler was a Roman Catholic. He was not an atheist and enacted policies that persecuted atheists. The overwhelming majority of the Nazi Party officials that carried out the Holocaust were Lutheran or Roman Catholic. Not only did their Christianity not prevent them from committing genocide, it served as a twisted justification for doing so. No, Nazi atrocities cannot be blamed on atheism either.

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"

-Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941

In the Spring of 1933, Hitler outlawed atheist and freethinking groups in Germany.

BERLIN, May 13. - In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership.
The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had about 500,000 members ..."

-New York Times, May 14, 1933

"The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others."

-Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12

"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life...."

-Adolf Hitler, Berlin, February 1, 1933

"In the ranks of the movement, the most devout Protestant could sit beside the most devout Catholic, without coming into the slightest conflict with his religious convictions. The mighty common struggle which both carried on against the destroyer of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutually to respect and esteem one another."

-Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 10

The Value of Animal Life

2010-10-23T20:52:00.000-05:00

Do you consider the value of a human life to be greater than the value of an animal life? I was in an online conversation about this topic not long ago in which the relative values of various kinds of life were debated. Though I argued that my personal ethics placed the value of human life way above that of animals, that did not mean that I thought we ought to mistreat animals or that sadistic cruelty ought to be tolerated in our societies.

I personally feel a responsibility for the animals under our care, to provide for them a life that recognizes suffering and seeks to limit it. Likewise with wild animals, I think we should take steps to prevent human caused extinction. But that does not mean that I would place a greater or even equal value on an animal's life as compared to a human's under normal circumstances.

In a general sense, the value of an animal's life, its right to life, is a human concept not one derived from Nature. What right to life has the zebra being eaten alive by a clan of hyenas? None. Nature is harsh, cruel, and unfeeling, if you must personify it. Concepts of rights come from us, from our desire to be humane, which I applaud. But those human origins of the right to humane treatment represent values that flow one way, from us to them. We have no right to expect similarly compassionate treatment from the rest of the living creatures on Earth.

That we consider such things and make our moral choices based on such things makes us the responsible party. I think it makes us obligated to some extent. But that general obligation in no way implies a moral equivalency to humanity between the value of a human life versus an animal life. Nor should it.

Iman Feisal Abdul Rauf

2010-09-26T19:59:00.001-05:00

Iman Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man who is trying to get the so called Ground Zero Mosque built, was just on 60 Minutes and had some interesting things to say.

When asked why he is working to build this community center:

"Because we wanted to prevent another 9/11. We wanted to -- we wanted a platform that would enable us to speak, to strengthen the voice of the moderates."

When asked why build the community center at the proposed location and not somewhere else:

"If another 9/11 happens again, I want to be the first to die. Muslims want to stand right there to say that we are here. It's my duty as an American Muslim to stand between you, the American non-Muslim, and the radicals who are trying to attack you."

This doesn't at all sound like a radical Islamist. He sounds like a patriotic American and moderate Muslim. Beyond those two quotes, his background supports the idea that he is working to rob power from the radicals in Islam. It seems to me that we need brave men and women like him to win the contest against the radicals within their faith. Instead of bickering with our fellow Americans over this building, we ought to be encouraging them in their efforts to forge a post Age of Enlightenment version of Islam. Or at least not getting in their way.

Air Cannon, Year 2

2010-09-12T11:17:00.003-05:00

How did I forget to put this into my blog?

Once again this Summer some friends and I got together to fire our air cannon. You can see a short video I assembled of last year's mayhem here. This year, one of our number included a videographer and editor who shot footage and put together the following video.

Our plans for next Summer are to rebuild the cannon with a faster valve to make it more efficient and to set up some high angle shots to simulate meteorite impacts. There has also been some talk of making sabot encased, fin stabilized, steel rods to... well... shoot at stuff.

The Discovery Channel Gunman

2010-09-02T07:25:00.007-05:00

Although I consider myself to be a left-leaning moderate, I have been accused by some conservatives of being a leftist loon. Fair enough with opinions being what they are, but I won't quietly accept a label by the fringe right as being safe to lump in with the fringe left. Truthfully, I don't really care all that much about ideology and I certainly have no loyalty to one. I care about evidence based reason and rational discourse. So when a perspective is blatantly, offensively wrong, it must be spoken out against regardless of the political "side" it came from.

The fringe environmentalist movement is an example of something that I will not associate with and will speak out against. Why? In short because their ideology is neither based upon nor acted upon out of respect for rationality. This sad fact attracts unbalanced people whose behavior is all too often sociopathic.

The Discovery Channel's Washington DC area headquarters were the setting of a hostage situation this week in which a very disturbed man used the threat of violence to change policy at the Discovery Channel and its network.

James J Lee entered the building with a firearm and explosives. He took three employees hostage and demanded that the network change its programming to better fit his own beliefs. Beliefs that can be summed up as, "Humans are evil. We must save the planet from ourselves. I'll use violence as a means to my end." You can read his list of demands here: Washington Examiner article.

The man was mentally deranged. His beliefs were extremist and his behavior was disgusting. He needed to be in treatment for his unbalanced mind, not formulating or executing an attack on a TV network.

[Picture is from CBS News]

Penn and Teller on Vaccination

2010-08-30T17:46:00.000-05:00

Penn and Teller have sounded off on vaccines on their show, Bullshit. As is typical of that show this clip is rude, direct, and pointed. It is not safe for work.

It is good to see that there are celebrities out there who do not join in on the anti-vaccination hysteria and even better to see that there are a handful who are actively speaking out against the misinformation surrounding the unsubstantiated dangers of vaccines.

Biased News and Public Discourse

2010-08-27T20:39:00.009-05:00

It is tough to get fair or balanced or unbiased news, but I submit to you that those aren't worthwhile goals.

Every media outlet has bias. This is unavoidable as news organizations are made up of reporters and editors who have various biases. Moreover we, the information consumer, have our own biases and tend to judge the degree of bias around us through our own standards. In order to appear fair, news organizations attempt to show both sides of every issue so that they can claim to be balanced and therefore unbiased in how they present the news.

This is why extremism seems so prevalent. It isn't necessarily that a greater percentage of people are being pulled to the extremes on issues. It is that the extremists are being given national voices and bestowed some legitimacy by the nightly news. It doesn't matter that these people often have opinions that are demonstrably false or intended to sow misinformation. That they have opinions at all and are willing to talk about them, means that news outlets present those views in the name of fairness and balance.

I contend that in most cases this practice is folly. News should be biased. It should be biased towards facts, evidence, and reason. Very often the counter opinion, if there is one, is so far to the fringes of a political extreme that there is nothing to it but hysteria and hyperbole. Such a view need not be presented in the name of balance and ought to be excluded as irrelevant in reasoned discourse. Although, I will concede that there are some news stories about matters of opinion in which showing both sides is the story. Like in local news when two sides of a proposed highway expansion are interviewed ahead of a coming referendum.

The drive to be unbiased by creating debate where there isn't any reasonable debate to be had is nurturing insanity in public discourse. When faced with such lunacy, I still contend that the best response to extremists is to respond with rationality, even if I personally fail in that sometimes. Because if we make a habit of responding to what we consider extremism with extreme counter-points then we are no longer discussing anything, we are just yelling at each other.

High Fructose Corn Syrup

2010-08-23T15:05:00.001-05:00

Dr. Jim Laidler has a blog post over at Science Based Medicine that gives a summary of actual evidence concerning high fructose corn syrup (HFCS.)

As a corn farmer, I am partially responsible for HFCS since I help grow the corn that makes production of this sweetener so inexpensive and therefore omnipresent. So I care about the scientific evidence that ought to drive whatever debates revolve around the use of HFCS. I care because this can effect a use for the product I grow and therefore can potentially effect me financially, but even more because I cringe at the accusation of helping to produce something that is inherently harmful to my nation.

Much of the debate about HFCS has struck me a playing off public fears and providing little more than correlative comparisons between Europe and America, that have never struck me as being compelling arguments. Dr. Laidler's article takes a different approach, comparing the actual content of various "sugars" including HFCS and its alternatives like cane suger. The whole article is absolutely worth reading and I recommend you do so. But I'm going to spoil the ending by quoting from it below:

So, what are the take-home messages from all of this?
HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have essentially the same amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as honey, sucrose (cane or beet sugar) or maple syrup/sugar (to be agonizingly precise, HFCS has slightly less, and HCFS 55 has slightly more).

HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have an equal or smaller amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as many commonly consumed fruits.

Agave syrup has higher fructose content than any type of HFCS except HFCS 90.

For people who are worried about their health or their children’s health — and who isn’t, these days — the data suggest that the best choice is to reduce intake of all sweeteners containing fructose. That includes not only the evil HFCS, but also natural cane sugar, molasses (which is just impure cane sugar), brown sugar (ditto) and honey. Even “unsweetened” (no addedsugar) fruit juices need to be considered when limiting your family’s fructose intake.
Finally, the best nutritional advice is to eat everything in moderation — and that includes sweets. While a diet high in fructose may increase your risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — maybe — a fructose-free diet is not guaranteed to prevent those diseases. Eat a variety of foods, including a small amount of sweets, get enough exercise, watch your (and your children’s) weight and see your doctor for regular health check-ups.
And stop worrying that HFCS is poisoning you and your children.

Vaccines and the Value of Herd Immunity

2010-08-21T14:17:00.005-05:00

Many vaccine preventable diseases are all but unheard of here in America. When was the last time you saw a child with polio? Unless you work in epidemiology or travel overseas a lot, you probably haven't seen a child with polio or any of a number of other vaccine preventable diseases. The reason is that for decades our vaccination rate was 90% or more. Although those diseases did (and do) exist overseas, America had very few outbreaks of those diseases. Our herd immunity was great enough that even most of those who didn't or couldn't get vaccinated were still protected.

The problem is that because people aren't seeing these diseases as any kind of real threat, the perceived danger of not vaccinating is considered negligible. If no one in the community has had measles in recent memory, why bother with the vaccination, is probably a common thought. Add into the equation that the anti-vaccination movement has made very real inroads into public consciousness and we can see why some parents weigh the risks as they perceive them and opt out of vaccines.

If one or two families out of a few million decide not to vaccinate, it is really no big deal. Herd immunity will protect them. But as the percentage of unvaccinated children rises, that herd immunity is threatened. Especially if we realize that the unvaccinated aren't equally distributed throughout the country. They tend to clump together geographically to some extent as some whole communities have dangerously low vaccination rates. These are the places where epidemics can catch hold. And where epidemics probably will run amok before people again see these diseases as real dangers and start taking vaccinations seriously again.

So a few people get sick? Big deal, right? Well, yes, actually. Many vaccines cannot be given to infants or some people with compromised immune systems. So at any one time we cannot have a 100% vaccinated population. Even if their parents will vaccinate them as soon as they can or the adults would get vaccines themselves if they could. All of those babies and adults rely on the herd immunity that the rest of us who get vaccinated provide for them. When our societal vaccination rates drop, we endanger them. And this is a major contributor to what is happening right now in California with the babies dying of whooping cough.

We as a people are far more mobile than at any other time in history. When it comes to disease transmission we really are a hair's breadth from being a truly global community. So the diseases that do run amok in other countries are a real threat right here in our own communities. Because we are probably never more than five degrees of separation from most diseases in the world.

Traveled overseas recently? Been to an airport recently? An international airport? Been on an airplane, or a bus, or a train? Interact recently with someone who has? What about the people they know? Those are all potential vectors of transmission that can bring what we might think of now as exotic diseases home. So it is actually more important than ever to keep our societal vaccination rates up. And disheartening that we aren't.

Video of Phil Plait's TAM 8 Speech

2010-08-17T16:52:00.001-05:00

When I got back from TAM 8, I wrote up my impressions of Phil Plait's speech. http://billtannica.blogspot.com/2010/07/tam8-watershed.html

The JREF has put up their video of that speech on their Vimeo site.

Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

I want to encourage you to watch that speech, especially if you couldn't be there in person, and see if your interpretation is at all like mine.

Riding Again

2010-08-01T15:35:00.006-05:00

In February I broke my arm. I fell while roller skating and broke the end of my radius in my elbow. The bone itself healed quickly, but the soft tissue damage in my elbow reduced my strength, mobility, and dexterity for several months. As a motorcyclist, this injury was really awful. It just hasn't been safe or comfortable for me to ride throughout most of this season.

A few days ago, my bike had accumulated fewer than 200 miles this year, way down from a typical year when I'd have ridden at least 5000 miles by now. Although my arm continued to improve every month, I seem to have reached a point where it wasn't getting much better. I still can't straighten it all the way.

The trouble has been that even though most of my strength and motor control returned, with my arm stretched out as pictured, it hurts. It feels like I am already pushing it past the locked position of the joint and into mild hyper extension. And the riding position on my bike puts my arms almost that straight. I just don't have much more extension left to use and what there is hurts to use.

So I settled on a solution. I installed a small part on my motorcycle to raise and move rearward the handlebars. This makes a small change to how much I have to bend my elbows in ordinary riding, helping me remain more comfortable and giving me some arm extension in reserve.

In this picture they are the grey bit directly above the top triple clamp, right under the bottom bracket for the handlebars. It isn't a huge change. Perhaps moving the bars 3/4" closer to my shoulders. But that is enough to change the bend in my elbows a little bit. Although I'm still not 100% comfortable, this one little change does prevent my arm from getting really sore in just a few minutes. I'm probably not up to a cross country trip, but I can ride.

Letter to my Senator

2010-07-31T09:51:00.002-05:00

Senator Richard Durbin

309 Hart Senate Bldg.

Washington, DC 20510

Senator Durbin,

I am writing to urge you to oppose our President’s proposed change to the law designed to make it easier to obtain internet usage information without a court order.

As I understand it, these additional powers are intended to be used for counterterrorism and are related to the extraordinary authority given to law enforcement by the Patriot Act. As with the Patriot Act, this is too great a threat to our civil rights to be reasonable.

I do understand the very real threat that terrorism represents. I applaud the hard work and dedication of our local and national law enforcement agencies as they strive to protect us and our way of life. But our way of life also includes protection from unreasonable search and precludes such without a court order. To circumvent those principles in the name of expediency is to change the very nature of our nation.

I would also like to urge you to support genuine internet neutrality. Just as I think it is in the best interests of my nation to prevent its government from censoring and monitoring the internet, so to do I think that it is in our best interests to prevent companies from doing the same.

Whether telecommunication companies like it or not, the internet has become the wonderful, unruly, stream-of-consciousness of the world. Though we may pay them for a doorway into this often obnoxious place, the content is ours and how we use it is not something they should be allowed to manipulate with impunity.

Thank you for your time and consideration of these issues.

Distracted Driving

2010-07-24T08:02:00.003-05:00

We are all busy with many things we either want or need to do. Multitasking has become a way of life for many of us as a way to squeeze 26+ hours worth of activities into a mere 24 hour day. Not all of our obligations in life are good candidates for multitasking. Imagine chatting on a cell phone in the midst of a funeral service… nope, not acceptable. But there are plenty of other opportunities that are both socially acceptable and legal, like driving, right?

The daily commute is a routine that uses up so much time in an activity that many consider to be so mind numbingly boring that it can be a perfect opportunity multitask. Having some breakfast on the way to work saves real time. Checking the paper for last night’s sport results can make the drive a lot less monotonous. Modern smart phones let us check our email, watch a movie, send messages, and of course chat on the phone. Sometimes the drive is so undemanding that it can be a chance to paint fingernails.

The truth is that all of those activities take attention away from the road, perhaps for only a moment at a time, but that can be enough for something catastrophic to happen. For example, last year Lora Hunt was driving in a northern suburb of Chicago while painting her fingernails. She approached an intersection at speed, failing to notice that a motorcyclist, Anita Zaffke, was stopped there. The resulting accident claimed the life of Anita Zaffke and sparked a debate in Illinois about whether to treat distracted driving as a criminal offense, like driving intoxicated, or continue to issue a ticket and a small fine, even if the result is a death.

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=378819

The debate is likely to continue, but the legal precedent has been set. Lora Hunt was found guilty of reckless homicide in May and sentenced to 18 months in the Lake County jail this past week. Circuit Judge Fred Foreman said before passing sentence, “In our society, distracted driving is becoming an epidemic. People don't appreciate how dangerous that vehicle is or what they could do to other people.”

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=395852&src=3#

If the thought of causing an accident and taking a life isn’t enough for you to stop multitasking while driving, perhaps the idea of a reckless homicide conviction and jail time will be.

The TAM8 Watershed

2010-07-12T19:09:00.006-05:00

There were many speeches, presentations, and ideas that covered a diverse range of topics at TAM8. I would love to be able to recount them all with perfect clarity and understanding in this blog, but I have neither the memory nor the depth of knowledge to do them justice. The James Randi Educational Foundation says that videos of the speeches will be available soon, so I want to encourage people to watch the videos and perhaps even purchase the DVDs when they are available.

And here is the video of Phil's speech:
http://vimeo.com/13704095

There was a theme that developed over the weekend in some of these speeches that I think will be remembered as an overall tone for the conference and perhaps as a watershed moment in the skepticism movement. Although Carol Tavris and Steve Cuno had similar things to say, I am referring most to Phil Plait’s speech, in which he implored us, all of us, to craft our message with the goal of effectively promoting skepticism, not just expressing ourselves. It seems that his speech has ended up being informally entitled the “Don’t Be A Dick” speech.

Early in the speech, Phil asked the audience how many of us at one time believed something we now consider silly. He rattled off some examples of things like horoscopes, flying saucers, etc. A lot of us raised our hands, which didn’t seem to surprise anyone. Then Phil asked us how many of us changed our minds about those things because someone insulted us into sharing their view by calling us stupid. Not very many hands stayed up after that. Which is the public relations problem we skeptics are having that he highlighted in his speech.

Phil related a story that I thought was particularly poignant. He was giving a talk at a school somewhere in the South. Being an astronomer, he talked about the age of the Earth, our solar system, the universe, etc. A particular teenage student was a young Earth creationist and had prepared some questions for him. She had clearly gone to websites like Answers in Genesis to research and prepare for this chance to set him right. *

Her ideas were wrong. He explained how her questions about the Moon do lead to the conclusions of a young Earth until all the variables are taken into account. What he didn’t do was berate her, insult her, or mock her beliefs. He took the time to encourage her to pursue all the information on the topic and how those facts were discovered. She was clearly a bright kid. She had the basic tool kit of a good scientist in that she was curious, knew that she needed to research her position, and then did so. That her sources were poorly informed isn’t her fault and poking fun of her would not have encouraged her to expand her knowledge or critical thinking skills.

It is tempting to loose our patience with irrationality. Hearing the same tired and long debunked concepts trotted out time and time again is frustrating. Phil acknowledged that, but stressed that we skeptics would be better served by being diplomats for reason rather than warriors. Since being aggressive and insulting, however satisfying it might feel, alienates potential future allies by pushing them away from skepticism altogether and into the open arms of familiar irrationality.

If we are to set for ourselves the goal of reaching people and helping reason become valued, then our tactics need to be taken into account. I think the following analogy demonstrates this TAM theme: If we want to carve a beautiful sculpture from block of stone, we will be more successful by carefully chipping away at the unwanted stone to reveal the statue within, than to blast the block with a single dramatic explosion.

Skeptics have been debating this for years and honestly there is nothing groundbreaking here. What makes Phil Plait’s speech important is that it illustrated with eloquence a theme that was expounded upon at TAM8 by other speakers and guests alike, becoming an important talking point there that has already reached far beyond conference itself and perhaps will influence our outreach for years to come.

* I've made a change in that paragraph. Originally I had written that the girl in the story was in elementary school. Phil tweeted me with the correction that she was in high school, so older than I had implied. That was a memory and comprehension failure on my part. Sorry folks.

Pascal’s Wager

2010-06-13T21:51:00.007-05:00

There is an argument used by some theists against atheism that since there is nothing to lose by believing in God and much to lose by not believing, it is better to believe than to disbelieve. This is called Pascal’s Wager after the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal who formulated that conclusion in some notes that were assembled and published after his death in 1662.

Though as a child that argument frightened me, as it was intended to do, I have come to regard it as little more than a mostly pointless intellectual exercise at best or a harmful bit of nonsense at worse. It is a flawed argument that relies on unfounded assumptions that leads irreconcilable conclusions. In short, it has no practical function and despite being dressed up as logic, it is merely an appeal to fear.

The biggest assumption at work here is that there is a God, but since the Wager it is commonly used as an argument in favor of belief in that God, I’ll just let that one go so that we can proceed to the next assumption, the afterlife. The big penalty for disbelief is an eternity of suffering in Hell after death and the reward for belief is an afterlife in Heaven. Actually that is really three unfounded assumptions: that we possess a soul that continues on after our deaths, that there is a Hell with a specific set of entrance prerequisites, and a Heaven with another set.

Given the utter lack of any verifiable evidence for those assumptions we are left to simply accept them on faith. No, near death experiences are not evidence of a soul, they are evidence of the brain’s effect on the mind. The only support for those assumptions comes from the theology making the claims and that does not constitute evidence anymore than the argument that says, “My religion is true because my holy book says it is true and my holy book is true because my religion says it is true.” That kind of circular thinking gets us nowhere.

And since I’ve brushed upon the idea of a true religion let’s address that issue as it pertains to Pascal’s Wager. If it is a valid application of risk assessment to the matter of choosing to believe in the Christian God, then why doesn’t it apply in the same way to all the other gods that humans have worshiped over the millennia? Not all of those other gods supposedly provided a reward after death for belief or punished disbelief, but ruling out those who didn’t, one is still left with a substantial list of potentially angry deities to avoid offending with disbelief. The logic ought to work in otherwise identical applications should it not?

If one takes the Wager to heart, then the only reasonable course of action is to believe in all of those deities. Which is fraught with impossibilities, not the least of which is compiling the list. Surely there were deities worshipped by tribes that have long since gone extinct, whose religion we now have no record of or ability to reproduce. Then there is the problem of deities that demand to be worshipped singly or religions that have beliefs that would be taboos in another. It is not possible to believe them all nor is it possible to use the logic of the Wager to choose among them.

To me that is where Pascal’s Wager falls on its face, it’s logic leads to untenable conclusions. So long as there is a reward for belief and a punishment for disbelief, the Wager demands that to be on the safe side we ought to believe. If I sit here and dream up some vindictive absurdity, you’d better be prepared to believe it, just in case I was divinely inspired. What manner of scams and injustices could be, I dare say have been, perpetrated upon the gullible when credulity is treated as a virtue?

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

2010-05-20T07:42:00.002-05:00

Why draw Mohammed? Because Muslims say I can't. I am not a Muslim and do not need to follow Islamic social taboos. Because murder, intimidation, and threats by Islamists should not influence us to give them what they want. Because free speech is a non-negotiable foundation of Western civilization. Because I'm participating in a day of solidarity for free speech advocates around the world in the face of religious extremism.

One will notice that my depiction of Mohammed is simplistic say the least. I'm no artist. It is also by any reasonable standard inoffensive. There are no embellishments or editorials designed to insult the memory of Mohammed. There is no need for such, since my intention is not to actually insult anyone. Really. I'm not being sardonic. This is an exercise, a demonstration, of free speech. A simple stick figure gets the point across without any need to go further with the drawing. To make the picture pornographic or something would be going far beyond the stated purpose and needlessly offend people.

Just because I have the legal right to do something doesn't mean I ought to do it. I agree with that in most instances. However, Muslims have killed people over drawings of Mohammed. Newspapers have refused to show readers the pictures that cause violent riots, even as the riot is reported, for fear of Muslims. Television networks refuse to air comedy programs, or dramatically censor them, for fear of Muslim reactions. Artists are issued death threats, even the organizers of this event have been threatened by Muslims on Facebook. All of this is wrong. My participation in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is to assert with my single voice, joined in chorus with thousands of others, that free speech belongs to us all and it will not be muted.

A Teacher

2010-04-23T18:19:00.009-05:00

My Mother used to be a teacher. When she graduated from college she taught elementary school for years. She gave up that career when I came along so she could be a full-time mom for me and later for my sister. But that by no means ended her role as an educator.

After my sister and I had been in school for while, Mom embarked on another career, founding a crafts and arts business. It was successful and it wasn’t long before she was teaching employees how to paint, construct, and sew her various items so that she could concentrate on selling. I mean to use employees in the loosest meaning possible, as these women were friends and neighbors who worked from home. The business model was as much an excuse to socialize as to make money and I think it is fair to say they all had fun. In particular, Mom enjoyed going to the craft shows to sell. Her skill at doing so bordered on being a calling. This also became a great excuse to travel around the country going to craft shows as far away as Arizona or New York.

As the years marched by, the hectic pace and long hours of craft shows got to be more difficult. There also started to be some shifts in Mom’s personality as she developed a growing concern with her health. We all change as we get older and with so many of her friends undergoing various treatments we didn’t think it too unusual for Mom to worry a little about her own health.

That worry slowly turned into a growing obsession. Soon she was seeing doctors of one specialty or another nearly every week and amassing a collection of medical books of her own. These things so concerned her that it was nearly all she would talk about with us. I suppose in a way she was trying to teach us what she considered to be valuable information that would save our lives. Creeping in around the edges was a worsening memory loss. Dad would tell stories of how Mom would forget the names of people she had known her whole life. This didn’t happen often at first, but it did contribute to a sense of unease in our family.

Mom too knew there was something wrong. She worked hard to mask her problems and exercise her memory. She had read somewhere that playing checkers is good for the brain. So playing checkers with Dad became a daily ritual. Actually the word ritual can be applied to a lot of the things she did. She had very specific ways of getting through daily life such as: alarm clocks that were scattered around the house and her car to remind her to take medications at very specific times or to remember to eat; or tables that would be set for events, weeks in advance to be a daily reminder to prepare for that upcoming meal.

Her methods of coping with her memory loss were clever and effective. Looking back on it now, I am so proud of her.

Eventually though these changes she underwent came to crisis moment. This past March she ran a red light and was pulled over. This event wasn’t part of her plan and she was unable to adapt to it appropriately. The officer knew there was something wrong and called for an ambulance and backup. She was uncooperative to say the least and the police called me to try to help calm her. So I went to the scene and tried to reassure her while she was in the ambulance before they took her to the emergency room to be certain she wasn’t having a stroke.

Those hours in the ER will haunt me. The stresses of that day’s events were too much for her to continue to maintain her masks and her self control eroded away in fits. No words from her family or doctors could reach any part of her mind that could be reasoned with. She had to be restrained for everyone’s protection and sedated before they could diagnose her altered state. Mom was just not herself.

Over the next few days she was seen by a parade of neural specialists of one kind or another and each in turn decided that she hadn’t had a stroke or similar sudden catastrophe. Instead this seemed to be some form of dementia. When she finally got a psych consult, he explained to us that she definitely had dementia and needed to be moved to another hospital where there was a mental health floor, so that he could try to treat the symptoms with medications and diagnose her condition more accurately.

The next three weeks were hard for Mom. She was so afraid for her health. All of her rituals and routines were disrupted. She felt she needed to get home and back to her good diet to save her life. Physically she was in excellent condition for a 68-year-old woman and daily tests confirmed that, except for her. Medications did help her think a little more clearly and calmly. But not as well as her psychiatrist expected and he continued to look for an answer while we made arrangements to get her out of the hospital and into a nice assisted living home.

Then Mom’s psychiatrist had a eureka moment and pieced all of her symptoms over the last few years with her brain images and slow response to medication. I got a call from him a few nights ago in which he explained that Mom has a rare, specific form of dementia called Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia. In his whole career he has seen it less than five times, but in reviewing the literature, Mom’s case is a textbook example.

This is a particularly aggressive dementia with an average survival of eight years after the onset of symptoms. Mom had first shown signs of this nearly ten years ago. It was good to finally have a firm diagnosis, but heart rending to discover that Mom’s prognosis was so bad. I suppose we all hoped that the medication would help her enough to come home for a few years. That isn’t to be. So we’ll move her soon to the nice place we’d arranged as a transition from the hospital that will now be her home until the end.

It has been arranged with her psychiatrist to do some MRI scans of her brain to chart the progress of her decline. So rare is her condition that little is known about the stages and how that relates to the physiology of the brain. We’ve all decided to help so long as Mom isn‘t upset. Mom knows that once we get her moved into her new place that she’ll have appointments with her doctor once in a while to have a new MRI so they can see how she is doing. She thought that sounded nice.

This one last time Mom gets to be a teacher.

[edit: Mom will not be part of a study or have any more MRI scans that aren't needed for further diagnostic purposes. Her psychiatrist has neither the students nor the funding to assemble such a study at this time.]

Who are you better than?

2010-04-04T16:39:00.002-05:00

One of the things that I have come to really enjoy about the internet is that it allows so much overlap among my various interests. One of the motorcycle forums that I visit has an active politics section and there are some real gems of political analysis posted there from time to time. What follows is a post made on the forum ADV Rider by a writer who uses the name Jinx.

Jinx named this "...who are you better than?". He started it with a quote by the character Agent Rupert Anderson from the crime drama Mississippi Burning. Then he continued on with his own thought provoking article that I will reproduce in its entirety below. I found this to be an amazing critique of the motivations behind some of the more extreme Tea Party activists and what this says about politics and racism in our country today. Thank you, Jinx, for letting me quote you here.

"You know when I was a little boy, there was an old negro farmer that lived down the road from us, named Monroe. He was ... (subtle laugh), I guess he was just a little more luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule.

It was a big deal in round that town. Now my daddy hated that mule. Cause, his friends were always kidding him about, "They saw Monroe out plowing with his new mule and Monroe is going to rent another field now he had a mule."

One morning that mule showed up dead. They poisoned the water. After that, there wasn't any mention about that mule around my daddy. It just never came up. One time we were driving down that road and we passed Monroe's place and we saw it was empty. He just packed up and left, I guess, he must of went up north or something.

I looked over at my daddy's face, I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and said, "If you ain't better than a nigger son, who are you better than?"

- Agent Anderson, Mississippi Burning

And welcome to the Tea-hadist mindset. With Barack Obama in charge...who are you going to be better than?

And don't think some of us recognize the symptom because we are a pack of condescending know-it-all asshats. We are...but that has fuck-all to do with the observation.

It's just that we have seen this before. Up North...in our so-called "enlightened" neck of the woods.

Want to know the difference between North and South? Well, a man once told me that up North, it is OK to have a Black as your boss, but you will be damned if you will have one for a neighbor. Down South, it is OK to have a Black neighbor...but you will damned if you will have one as a boss.

So we went through all this Tea Party nonsense up North, about 20-30 years ago. And the reaction was just as vehement, inarticulate, and dumb as what is being spewed now. If you want to see hate and spittle, you should have seen how South Boston reacted to school integration.

But you would not have seen it 24/7 as you do today. It happened...but not in a perpetual echo chamber. And thank Christ for that.

And if you think the enlightened liberal North embraced integrated housing with open hearts, think again, It was called "white flight" and it damn near emptied some cities. "Sure, we support integration...now excuse us while we move to the suburbs where those Zulus won't be able to spear us with their assegais."

But white flight was a safety valve. It kept the pressure at reasonable levels. It also prolonged it and led to new levels of stupidity, but you could, after all, vote with your feet. Many did. Many still do.

OK, the job front was a bit stickier. Northern Industry has always been (at least since the 1950's) largely integrated. Steel Mill owners don't give a fuck what your skin color is. Besides, you could only tell on the way into work, on the way out everybody pretty much looked the same.

But you always knew what hand you were playing, because the cards were mostly dealt face up. Your boss was still white. Your union steward was still white. Your mayor and your chief of police were still white. And, as much as it pains me to tell you this, Michael Steele did not run the GOP. And even if he did, at least up north, you went home at the end of the day to your own private Idaho in the suburbs, and played golf on the weekends at a club where Michael Steele was never going to get in. Well, not the front door

The workforce may have been integrated, but you still knew who you were better than. Nobody dared yell "You Lie!!" at a white boss.

Over time, most of that has changed (but if you take a shot every time you can name a Black mayor of a predominantly white New England city...you are going to bed sober). But it took a very conscious effort to change it. Acceptance of diversity does not come easy when the question is: "who are you better than?"

And now the way the cards were dealt 18 months ago has upset a huge segment of the population. They no longer know who they are better than. They are lashing out. And there is fuck-all for a safety valve and it does run 24/7 in a perpetual echo chamber.

They say it is about "freedoms"...but they can point to no freedoms that have been lost over the last 14 months.

They say the Constitution is being destroyed, but when you ask them what parts of The General Welfare Clause or Congresses' power to regulate Interstate Commerce are being violated...they stand mute with rage

They say it is about taxes...but they can find no drastic tax increases in the last 14 months.

Come to think of it, I don't really remember anyone getting speared with an assegai thirty years ago either. But that didn't stop people screaming about the danger.

And they say they want their Country Back.

Well, Bing-fucking-O.

Now we have it. They want to return to a time and place where they at least knew who they were better than.

And the fact that most of this spittle is flying from the mouths of the poor, the semi-educated, the low information voter, and from By-God Dixie...well, that is only because it is your turn. A lot of the rest of the Country has already gone through this exercise 20-30 years ago. And the same spittle flew from the same confused lips when it was our turn.

So we don't look on Tea-hadists with scorn because they are alien and unfathomable. We do so because we recognize these very traits as ours and those of our neighbors."All in the Family" wasn't the most popular show in the Northeast because Archie Bunker was despised. It was popular because he was comfortably familiar. But at least he was a character. Nobody tried to run him for President.

And it ain't just President Obama. It is a lot else: If your job can be done on the Indian sub-continent, who are you better than? If China can launch a spaceship, who are you better than? If the world looks at the mighty Dollar as little better than an American Peso, who are you better than? If an immigrant can work your ass into the ground, and do it smiling for a lot less money, who are you better than?

A whole lot of life has been shaken and stirred the last couple of decades.

This whole Tea-Party nonsense will eventually pass. Because there is no "going back". OK, you can move to Idaho, or Montana, and it will feel like you have found what was missing. And you might even be happy. As long as you never watch the POTUS on the national news while you are trying to answer the question: "Who am I better than?"

But Jesus wept, people are going to keep asking that damned question. Soccer may be watched for it's beauty...American Football is about who is better. We are more of a class society than people want to admit. There is still a very strong vein of Scotch-Irish pride that runs through this Country's character. Unfortunately that pride is seldom based, at least lately, on personal or collective achievement...just who you are better than. You can hear it every time a factory closes in this Country and people cheer. No, they really don't believe that closing the Auto Factories will make America stronger. But it adds a whole bunch of people to the list of those they are better than.

Still...what the fuck. 600 years of violence and oppression was bound to warp the Scotch-Irish a bit. Hell, you can even consider them heroically well adjusted given their, and my, history. And history will eventually change us again once all the dogs adjust to the new Alpha Male reality and find their place again in the pack. Until then we live in the land of flying angry spittle.

PS - I never wanted to be better than anyone else. Just faster.

Cheers

Jinx

Science Is

2010-03-02T09:50:00.006-06:00

Science does not rob the emotion from my perceptions. I find knowledge to be uplifting. With scientific literacy, I can see more and can be astounded by more. I live in a much larger universe that contains more majesty than I could have imagined as a child.

I find that being within and a part of this vast universe fills me with a sense of awe. Understanding bits of astronomy does not reduce my sense of amazement when I gaze at the stars. Instead I'm filled with childlike wonder to know that a telescope is a visual time machine.

Understanding the evolutionary past of my species doesn't make me think less of my fellow people. It makes me proud to be connected to them. We are the product of countless generations of clever survivors who have from such humble beginnings managed to literally reach for the stars.

Knowing that learning something means discovering more questions, connecting us to an infinite web of facts, is exciting. It is fascinating that the sum total of our understanding is both constantly growing and forever incomplete. Our science shifts endlessly to incorporate the new, discard the unsupportable, and in that way empower us all with the truth.

I don't find science to be cold or dehumanizing. Its facts aren't destroying my cherished mysteries. Instead it is giving me more of them. It opens my mind to new curiosities, to an infinity of wonders. The more I have learned, the more breathless I am at the grandeur of this knowable universe.

Symphony of Science has a beautiful video that elegantly distills much of what I’ve just spent hours trying to compose and expands on my little commentary above with the thoughts of a few of the greatest minds of our age.

Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010

2010-02-28T16:11:00.005-06:00

So far in 2010, the anti-vaccination movement has suffered a terrible blow in the discrediting of Andrew Wakefield's faudulent autism claims and homeopathy has been defined as nothing more than a placebo by the United Kingdom's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which will probably result in homeopathic remideies no longer being funded by the UK's National Health System. So barely two full months into 2010 and we already have some victories for evidence based reason over woo.

What will be next? It is possible that the $24 billion dietary supplement industry is going to be on the defensive soon. There is a bill being proposed in the United States Senate that will place the supplement and vitamin industry under the supervision of the US Food and Drug Administration in order to sell their products here.

Link to S. 3002

What this will mean is that these products will be treated as food additives and/or drugs which will subject them to much tighter rules and restrictions under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. In order to market these products legally in America, any adverse side effects must be disclosed to the FDA, any beneficial claims must substantiated, and each product will be subject to potential recall as determined by the FDA.

The Senate is very busy right now debating various economic plans, budgets, and of course health care. So it is unlikely that this bill will get much public scrutiny anytime soon. But it has at least been submitted and you might be surprised to learn by whom. The Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 was submitted by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and North Dakota Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan.

That's right folks. A Republican is leading an arguably skeptical, pro-science charge against the woefully unregulated supplement industry. Moreover this Senate bill is bipartisan in nature, having been coauthored by a Democrat. This is gearing up to be an interesting year and I, for one, would like to extend my thanks to both Senator McCain and Senator Dorgan.

I don't know

2010-02-26T11:27:00.004-06:00

Does the statement "I don't know" make you vaguely uncomfortable? Do you try to avoid using it? Have you ever been tempted to invent an answer rather than admit that you didn't know?

"I don't know" can be an uncomfortable truth, but it is also a necessary one. It is found at every limit of human understanding, beyond which is all too often someone's lie.

"I don't know" is not an excuse for someone to fill a gap in current understanding with a fanciful tale that happens to be appealing or convienent. Passing such a story off as the truth impedes knowledge and stifles curiosity.

"I don't know" does not have to remain a permanent condition. If we are honest about what remains to be discovered, we can more easily search for answers. We cannot cast light into the dark shadows of our ignorance if we aren't honest about where they are.

I think any shame we feel over this should be reserved for pretending to know. Being honest about not knowing is just the first step towards real understanding, since what we really mean to say is "I don't know, yet."

The Road

2010-02-22T17:39:00.002-06:00

I saw The Road this weekend. Having read the book I was watching the film looking for deviations from that story. And I have to admit that they did a remarkably good job sticking to the events in the book, capturing the feel of the book, and visualizing the setting. The acting was fine. The scenes that were supposed to hurt did hurt. The pacing of the story seemed fine, mixing foreshadowing, overwhelming dread, hopelessness, and desperate action scenes well.

There were two major differences between the book and the movie, that I don't not feel hurt the movie at all. One is a missing scene (that I would prefer not to think about in order to describe) and the other is a change to the end -- giving it more hope than the book provided. Which was nice, really, since neither the book nor the movie suffers from a dearth of hopelessness. So having something good to latch onto is welcome.

I'm giving this a thumbs up with the caveat that this is not a "feel good" movie. It is a very dark, post apocalypse movie that was fairly faithfully adapted from a very dark, post apocalypse book. Look for it on DVD or find it in a small independent theatre if you like the genre.

Germ Theory

2010-02-19T11:12:00.008-06:00

"Our God is a loving God. He loves his people so much that he gave us rules to live by, rules that help us be moral. He loves us so much that he sacrificed his only Son, who gave us the concept of the Golden Rule. How better could God show his love for us?"

Hmm... Let me see... In what better way could an all knowing, all powerful, loving entity care for humanity? How about germ theory?

It is absurd to think that the ancient Hebrews knew nothing of morality or societal rules that would allow a large group of people to live together and cooperate. What do Christians think, that before the Ten Commandments humans were monstrous beasts? According to Biblical mythology, Moses and the Hebrews came out of Egypt where there was already an ancient and accomplished civilization. Egyptians would have been ignorant of God's special rules, yet they managed to cooperate enough to create a civilization that lasted for thousands of years and architecture that has survived to this day.

Instead of wasting time carving out some rules that people already knew or didn't need, why not sit Moses down and explain a few simple aspects of germ theory? Surely there ought to be a way to get some basic and life saving concepts across to Moses and his people. It still could have even been carved into stone to form The Ten Useful Lessons.

Most sickness comes from tiny living things too small to see called germs.
Germs can be killed or avoided before they can harm you.
Never allow your waste into your drinking and bathing water.
Boiling water will kill the germs in it.
Soap will kill many germs.
Soap can be made from animal fat and ashes.
Clean your body daily when possible.
Wash your hands before handling food or tending wounds.
Clean wounds and cover them with clean cloth.
Different germs cause different sicknesses, learn the differences.

Think of the countless lives that could have been saved if early Bronze Age people had been taught those concepts instead of rules about how to keep God happy. Think of the higher quality of life societies would have had, the longer life spans, the better infant mortality rate, fewer epidemics and plagues.

Think how far along medical science would be if a god had jump started germ theory thousands of years ago. We would all be reaping those benefits today. And with the last Lesson being a commandment to learn, those people might have developed hospitals, schools, and universities before the founding of Rome! Then God's only Son could come along later to explain antibiotics, if the chosen people hadn't already figured that out.