Here’s the definition of “reaction formation” from Wikipedia:

In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. This mechanism is often characteristic of obsessional neuroses.

Here’s the example given on Wikipedia:

A man who is overly aroused by pornographic material who utilizes reaction formation to take on an attitude of criticism toward the topic may sacrifice many of the positive things in his life including family relationships by traveling around the country to anti-pornography rallies. This view may become an obsession, whereby the man eventually does nothing but travel from rally to rally speaking out against pornography.

Based on this story about Republican Congressman Mark Foley, we now have a clear-cut real-life example of a reaction formation:

Congressman Mark Foley, Republican from Florida, resigned today just hours after ABC news questioned him about a series of sexually explicit instant messages involving current and former underage male Congressional pages. Foley used the login name Maf54.

Maf54: Do I make you a little horny ?
Teen: A little.
Maf54: Cool.

Foley was the chairman of the house caucus on missing and exploited children and has long crusaded for tough laws against those who use the Internet for sexual exploitation of children.

How interested was Foley in this issue?  Here’s an excerpt from a press release issued by Foley (Foley’s own web sites are not accessible any longer):

Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL), Co-chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus, applauded Senate passage of legislation he authored and introduced overhauling our nation’s sex offender registration and notification laws.

“For too long our nation has tracked library books better than it has sex offenders.  That day is coming to an end,” said Foley.  “Senator Hatch and Leader Frist have been resolute in keeping this legislation on track.  We are closing loopholes that sex offenders and pedophiles have used to prey on children.”

This story makes me wonder how many other crusading conservatives have skeletons in their closets.  My operating assumption: where there’s sanctimonious crusading about morality, there’s fire.

The hypocrisy is actually systemic, according to this story by the NYT:

Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

If Foley had been a liberal gay Democrat, he would have been in prison last year, needless to say, and his actions would have been blamed on the fact that he was a liberal gay Democrat.

According to this post by George Soros on Huffpo, four factors ensure that the alleged “war on terror” cannot be won.

Calling the problem a “war”

1. Invites killing innocent victims;
2. It prevents the U.S. from differentiating among organizations that should be treated differently. 
3. It overemphasizes the need for military action and
4. It invites us to paint ourselves as entirely blameless for everything we do.

In short, pre-defining our sharp political differences “wars” means that we will treat them as wars.  In wars, we dehumanize the other side, call our opponents crazy and we drop bombs on them, it’s just too bad that we sometimes need to separate their innocent children from some of their limbs.  Treating all conflicts as “wars” causes us to lose sight of alternate approaches for resolution.

I agree with Mr. Soros, that the “war on terror” is a bad metaphor.  Terror is a tactic, not something identifiable on which we can drop bombs–though that hasn’t stopped us from trying.  Since terror will always exist (people who are angry enough at the U.S. to do violent things will always exist), the “war on terror” will never end, by definition.  Using this label of “war” justifies massive domestic deprivations and a ever-lasting gorging of the military-industrial complex.  Using the label of “war,” in conjunction with “terror” is a narrow, useless and bloody frame of meaning.

It can often be useful to posit a thing for a process; in Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson, refer to metaphors like this as ontological metaphors.  “Inflation” is an example of such an ontological metaphor. But ontological metaphors are not necessarily truths in the sense that it is true that 2+2 =4 or that it is true that I have a stomach.  All metaphors are models.  All models emphasize certain aspects of reality to the neglect of others. 

The “war on terror” metaphor overemphasizes and makes salient exactly those things that Soros sets forth in his well-written post. 

It was after dark.  I was walking to my hotel in a big intimidating city, Chicago.  Then I turned a corner and I saw them.  I was so horrified I almost retched.   I kept my composure, though, and called the police.

While I waited, I forced myself to glance again.  All of those poor people had been decapitated.  Rigor mortis had set in, keeping them in their lifelike positions. Their skin was blanched.   But as I stood there, trembling, several young adults strolled by and they didn’t even look concerned. In fact, they were laughing . . . partying! Joking!  Such a grotesque insensitivity to the plight of others! Such an unseemly juxtaposition! But what was that over to the right?  I spun around and I saw even more victims.

I shook as I took these photos, constantly looking over my shoulder in case the fiends who committed all of these murders might return to decapitate me. (more…)

Ask most Americans, and they will say they are proud to be Americans.  They might not be proud of its current government, but they will say they are proud to be Americans.

But what, exactly, does this mean?

Pride is usually something that is earned by accomplishing a goal:  I’m sure we can all think of people who are proud to have graduated college, proud to have earned a promotion at work, proud to have raised good kids, proud to have made a positive difference in someone else’s life, etc.

But what does it mean when someone says he is “proud to be an American” — something he achieved not by accomplishing anything, but simply by the circumstance of being born in America?  To some extent, Americans can claim they are “proud to be an American” because they have helped accomplish the goal of creating the nation we see today, which, despite its many flaws, has many good qualities.  Nevertheless, do Americans actually think about this when they say they are “proud to be an American,” or are they merely gloating about their nationality — something they did nothing to earn and, indeed, had nothing to do with?

The next time you hear someone say he is “proud to be an American,” ask him what he means.  See if he mentions anything that he actually accomplished.

In past months, President Bush has repeatedly touted the “good news” whenever the Iraqi people displayed their purple fingers with big smiles and exercised their right to vote.  Bush argued that we should trust in the voice of the Iraqi people.

As far as I know, Mr. Bush hasn’t acknowledged this recent unofficial vote by the Iraqis:

About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year, a poll finds.

This poll was conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and it involved interviews with 1,150 Iraqi people.

This same poll also found that almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military presence “provokes more violence than it prevents.”

I know who Mrs. Cain was.  We don’t talk about her or her family much, but things just wouldn’t have been paradise without her or them.

She was one of the many illegal immigrants in Paradise that did the actual work of tending the Garden of Eden–you know, the hoeing, planting, weeding, landscaping.  And later, when Adam and his family needed a new roof on the hovel or new siding, it was Mrs. Cain’s family that put it all up, underpaid of course to keep costs down.  When Cain took a fancy to one of the comely daughters with the exotic foreign accent and Abel went all homeland on him, the altercation…

Well.  That’s one explanation.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, in 2000 there were between seven and eight million illegal immigrants in the United States.  Growth of that population is roughly half a million a year.  INS estimates–for the use of Congress to pound pulpits with–about eleven million today.

We, according to Congress, have to Do Something about this.  We’ve had to for a long time and nothing effective has ever been done.  How come?

The CIS site has some useful material debunking popular myths.  They don’t come here to get on welfare, they don’t come here to get free medical attention.  They come here for jobs.  Always have.  And the biggest magnet is that there are jobs for them.  So we occasionally hear about new laws to target businesses that hire illegals. 

But the problem never goes away.  In one of the only lucid policy initiatives Bush came up with, was the suggestion that we admit the situation, issue guest worker visas, and bring it all out in the open.  Publicly, a lot of people hate that idea because “It will take jobs away from Americans.”

They say that with a straight face.

Here is the thing that no one I’ve heard yet will actually talk about.  Why are Americans not filling those jobs?  Why will businesses hire illegals, with the concommitant risks, rather than Americans?  Is it that there are no Americans to take such jobs?

The actual phrase ought to be:  “We can’t find Americans to fill those jobs at the wages we wish to pay.“ 

No one says that.  They never finish the sentence.

And who, (he asks rhetorically) is the We who do not wish to pay those wages?

Pretty much all of us.

The low price of vegetables and fruits at the supermarket are kept low because of poorly paid illegal workers.  The siding on your house doesn’t cost twice as much because, industry wide, a lot labor is being done (underpaid) by illegals.  Menial factory jobs keep a variety of material costs low because Americans aren’t in them getting paid $12.00 an hour.

We, the United States, subsidize paradise on the labor of undocumented workers who work for a hell of lot less than resident Americans would accept.

And that’s the problem.  We don’t want to pay to fix it.  Everything would cost more if we did.

So we use this as a campaign issue, an issue to get exercised over, to vent about, and play a blame game. 

But if we enacted laws that dictated minimum wages per job and enforced them, Americans would probably fill those jobs, and force out the illegals now doing them.

But then it wouldn’t be paradise anymore–it would cost too much.

The Bill passed by congress on the detainee and interrogation issue is one of the more frustrating examples of Democratic cowardice and political expedience.  It does not substantively change anything.  Personally, I feel the only utility in having a law in the first place is to use as a cudgel in case certain parties get caught doing something nasty.  It won’t prevent the nastiness, because the concerned parties will just get cagier in how they go about doing what they want.  But now we have a law that is vague where it needs to be clear and clear where it doesn’t matter and once again everyone just fell into line with the Administration.

Why?

Mid-term elections.

The Democrats could have filibustered.  But they don’t want to risk the chance that Bush’s approval ratings don’t really mean what they suggest.  They don’t want to risk blowing what may be a popular referendum on Bush that could conceivably return a Democratic majority to congress by doing something they know the public can’t stand.

Besides–and here’s the scary thought–what if their take on the president’s ratings is wrong.

Not that the numbers are wrong.  No, I think they’re pretty accurate.  But what they mean…do they mean the public is fed up with Bush or with his ideas?  Both?  Neither?

See, this is an issue of some concern, because while the approval ratings suggest that Bush is unpopular that does not mean the people who put him there in the first place have changed their minds about why  they put him there.  And if the Democratics go all left wing on this issue, it might backfire, because maybe, just maybe, those approval numbers are about Bush’s implementation and management of his policies–not the policies themselves.  People may see him as lousy manager, one who has botched oversite on ideas and policies his former supporters actually like.

See, people now seem to think Iraq is our biggest problem.  Do they want to pull out?  Look at how members of congress behave, one gets the impression no.  They want Iraq handled better and they no longer think Bush can do it. 

On a whole list of other policies, the public seems to contradict itself.  Roll back the tax cuts?  No, that doesn’t seem to be popular either.  Running up the debt is also not popular.  Immigration?  Talking tough is popular, but the worker pass idea is not.  Minimum wage?  Well…

Homeland Security?  Talk of rolling back the Patriot Act seems unpopular, but we have a schizo reaction to how it is implimented–don’t spy of Me, use it on Them.  Bush’s wire tapping is unpopular, but the Guantanamo situation is less clear.

So the Democrats didn’t challenge this piece of drivel, because they don’t really know what part of Bush people don’t like, and they’re too spineless to challenge him where he’s weakest–policy morality.

Bush is so typical of a kind of Cold War mentality that it’s sickening.  He talks about how great America is, but he has virtually no faith in the strength of our ideas, of our principles, of our potential.  The simple expedient of applying the moral and ethical–and legal–standards we reserve for our own citizens to anyone who comes under our sphere of influence would be the best way to combat the rabid anti-Americanism driving global disaffection with us, but he doesn’t believe it would work.  He doesn’t have faith in the idea of equality, of justice.  Doesn’t believe it and, from what we’ve seen vis-a-vis his domestic spying policies, doesn’t believe in it for Americans, either.  That alone should mark him as at least worse than Nixon, possibly the most unsuited occupant of the office of president we’ve ever had.

Challenging him on that, though, would be risky, because maybe–just maybe–that’s the way his original constituents feel, too.  The only mistake they made was putting Bush in office rather than someone who could “manage” things better.

I was reading the back page of the October Smithsonian, and I was inspired to do some further reading about the Moon Landing Hoax.

One can guess my position, as a son of an astrophysicist who worked summers for NASA.

Here are a bunch of simple and clear rebuttals to a couple of dozen Hoax points, written and illustrated for non-scientists: http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/index.html

But the Smithsonian gave me the best answer:

We were in the midst of the Cold War. The Soviets would have given anything to somehow embarrass the U.S. as they were racing us to the moon.

Once we got there, the Soviets never once cried, “Hoax!” Their scientists knew the state of the art as well as ours, and how to test the supposed evidence we returned.

So, why didn’t the Russians ever attempt to expose this hoax in the decades between the moon landing and the end of the cold war?

Relevance? Apparently, some 10% of Americans believe that NASA faked the 6 moon landings, and (presumably) the failure of Apollo 13. I wonder how many of them think that Saddam planned 9/11 in cahoots with Clinton?

Galileo Galilei, known as “the Father of Science,” was a high achiever whose accomplishments have withstood the tests of time.  There is no denying that he was a truly brilliant man.

In 1633, The Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy because Galileo demonstrated that the earth revolved around the sun, something at odds with the Catholic Church’s belief system. One hundred eight years later, Galileo was formally rehabilitated by the church; 17 years after that, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, the church formally acknowledged that the earth did in fact rotate around the sun. A few hundred years later, the church apologized (well, “apologized” as much as a Church is able to muster an apology–must not show weakness or they will attack the doctrine of virgin birth next): 

In October 1992, Cardinal Paul Poupard presented the Pope with the findings of the Galileo study commission, which declared, “From the Galileo case we can draw a lesson which is applicable today in analogous cases which arise in our times and which may arise in the future. It often happens that, beyond two partial points of view which are in contrast, there exists a wider view of things which embraces both and integrates them.” By Vatican standards, this rotund language was an apology. The Pope responded by saying that Galileo’s realizations about the sun and earth must have been divinely inspired: “Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions.” Through its 1992 ceremony, the church finally lifted its edict of Inquisition against Galileo, who went to his grave a devout Catholic, despite the church’s treatment of him.

It appears that Stephen Jay Gould’s “magisteria” will “overlap” whenever religion flunks science.  It’s happened before and it MIGHT be happening right now . . .

Therefore, if the position of a church disagrees with your own, this doesn’t mean that you are necessarily wrong.  You just need to be patient.  Give it a few hundred years before drawing any conclusions.

Charles Anderson served in Iraq, but he doesn’t want to be thanked.

I did nothing in Iraq I consider honorable. I was a scared kid riding into a battle I didn’t understand. Our convoys streamed past thousands of starving children and people needing medical attention. Our tanks fired into villages and we battled among civilian populations that had committed no crime aside from being born in Iraq. There was no honor in this, only destruction and suffering saddled on a people that had already suffered more in the preceding fourteen years than most Americans suffer in a lifetime.

The above excerpt is from Anderson’s post on Huffpo. One way to understand what’s happening on the ground, according to Anderson, is to go see the newly released movie, “The Ground Truth.”  Here’s how the filmakers describe the film:

The filmmaker’s subjects are patriotic young Americans - ordinary men and women who heeded the call for military service in Iraq - as they experience recruitment and training, combat, homecoming, and the struggle to reintegrate with families and communities.

I noticed this quote at Freedom from Religion Foundation:

“The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.”
– Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762

FFRF is a site that is loaded with good information.  They offer numerous quotes by and articles about freethinkers, many of which I hadn’t before seen. Here are a few more of their quotes of the day:

“A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
– Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when a man has only one idea.”
– Alain (1868-1951), Propos sur la religion, 1938. Alain is the pen-name of Emile-Auguste Chartier, a French philosopher and exponent of French radicalism and individual rights, daily newspaper columnist and co-founder of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.

“I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, ‘thou shalt not,’ or ‘thou shalt.’ I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.”
– Gene Roddenberry (born Aug. 19, 1921, d. 1991), cited by Susan Sackett (http://www.InsideTrek.com/)

“Of all learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.”
– H.L. Mencken, American journalist (1880-1956), Minority Report: Notebooks, 1956

“My parents did not practice any organized religion, although my father was raised Roman Catholic and my mother was Jewish. But there was always an ethical context to our lives, a very strong notion of individual moral responsibility.”
– Harrison Ford, Parade, July 7, 2002

“In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the bible. It was hurled at us on every side.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton, An Interview with the Chicago Record, June 29, 1897. For more on Stanton, read Women Without Superstition.

Here’s the video. Lots of heat and no light.  That seems to be Bush’s strategy these days.  He gets himself all bent out of shape over a question that was not asked.

I’ll translate the gibberish you hear out of Bush’s mouth: “Did I hold any such meetings? No.”

What you actually hear Bush saying on this video are things like this:

“We must be on the offense against an enemy that wants to do us harm.”

and

“I don’t have enough time to finger-point.”

As I’ve argued before, the press should have to courage to point out when politicians refuse to answer clearly stated questions.  In this case, I would be delighted if the press reported Bush’s answer as follows:  “Bush refuses to answer whether he held any meetings regarding Bin Laden for nine months after Bill Clinton left office.”

Here’s a new website worth taking a peek: www.sefora.org, Scientists and Engineers for America. A group who are trying to activize (um activate?) because of what has been happening to science in the public eye and the administration.

They are dedicated to removing theology from science teaching, and ideology from purportedly scientific reports used to decide public policies.

All forms of birth control are immoral, according to many Christian conservatives.  We’ve previously written about this absurd position here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a formal conservative effort to prohibit all forms of birth control:

Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement’s success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal group of Christian conservatives is arguing that it’s time to mount a concerted attack on contraception.

Their voices were raised in Rosemont on Friday and Saturday at an unusual anti-abortion meeting that drew 250 people from around the nation to condemn artificial birth control. Experts at the gathering assailed contraception on the grounds that it devalues children, harms relationships between men and women, promotes sexual promiscuity and leads to falling birth rates, among social ills.

If immorality is not a good enough reason to ban all birth control, check out the “logic” of this argument:

“I think it’s great that more pro-life people are finally speaking up about it,” said Helen Mazur, 27, who flew in from Philadelphia with her husband for the conference . . . “It’s always been a touchy subject, but you have to stand strong on your beliefs. Contraception is the root cause of the explosion of the amount of abortions in the world,” Mazur said.

What?? 

I’m often asked for real life examples of how religious beliefs threaten society.  This is a good example.  Some might write these people off as an irrelevant fringe, but the views they voice are held by millions.  These same views underlie the oftentimes successful efforts to invite individual pharmacists to deny birth control to pharmacy customers.  See here and here.

As I’ve set forth previously, banning all birth control (other than the totally ineffective guessing game known as “natural family planning) is the focus of many, if not all, of the dozens of pregnancy resource centers that dot the country.

I can assure you that these pregnancy resource centers have the ear of government, at least in Missouri, where I live.  Two months ago, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt signed a bill inviting Missouri citizens to take a tax credit (we’re not talking about a deduction, but a credit, which is a write-off of one’s tax bill) of up to $25,000 for donations to these outlandishly fraudulent organizations (in the bill they are called “Pregnancy Crisis Centers”).

Just connect the dots, then.  Just follow the admonitions of “fringe” goups to the passage of laws that use tax dollars to support organizations that do their best 1)  to present themselves to be medical centers when they aren’t and 2) to actively work to prohibit all forms of effective birth control.  Then top it off by denying abortions to those who are not attempting to have babies, then cut Medicaid to those same people as they struggle to survive.

Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters.  Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:

• The physical lock of your voting machines can be picked in 10 seconds.
• Your voting machines can then easily be infected with a computer virus, since they are general-purpose computers running specialized election software.
• It only takes about one minute to infect one of your machines using a single memory card.
• The virus can easily be spread among numerous voting machines by innocent users updating the software with a memory card.
• Virus software can easily make all of the diagnostic and double-checking software in your machines illusory and meaningless, therefore dangerous.
• The infected machine can be made to spit out (electronically or on paper) any faked election result, regardless of the voting conducted on the machines.
• Your machine, which is already in use in some jurisdictions, thus has serious design flaws.

If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here.  Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed.  You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.

Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at Princeton:

Dear three Princeton guys:

Thank you so much for bringing the design flaws of the Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine to our attention. We at Diebold are shocked and embarrassed to have manufactured such a flawed machine.  We are taking immediate steps to make sure that this machine is redesigned from the ground up.  

We would like to start submitting other models and modifications of our products to you guys at Princeton (and to other disinterested third parties) to make sure that our machines count votes properly.  In the meantime, we are now sending warnings to all government officials to cease using these machines, because paper ballots have far more integrity. 

Our democracy is safer, thanks to your skillful work.

The President of Diebold

The problem is that Diebold, upon learning how dangerous their machines are, did not show any such gratitude.  Instead, check this link to see Diebold’s incredibly petty, vindictive, evasive and ad hominem attack on the Princeton team. 

The bottom line is that Diebold fails to give any assurance that anyone should rely on its machines for accurate election results.  Diebold’s attitude is clearly that of a money-driven bully that truly doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the integrity of elections.  How could that be (I ask rhetorically)? (more…)

“Macaca,” that is. 

Salon.com is reporting that Sen. George Allen is denying the claims in a separate Salon article by three of Allen’s former football teammates that Allen used a racial epithet and demonstrated racist behavior during college.

Within hours of Allen’s denial, though, two additional acquaintances of Allen’s had come forward to claim that they knew Allen had uttered the word “nigger.” 

The New York Times, the New Republic and the Post reported that Christopher Taylor, an anthropology professor in Alabama, said Allen used the word in the early 1980s when Taylor visited a pond near Allen’s then home in Virginia. Taylor told the news outlets that Allen had spoken of turtles in the pond, saying, “Around here” the only people who “eat ‘em” are black, whom Allen described using the racial epithet.

Allen brought all of this on himself, of course.  Apparently, all of this couldn’t have happened to a more bigotted guy.  As reported by Think Progress:

At an August 11 event, Sen. George Allen (R-VA) ridiculed a South Asian-American man who worked for his political opponent. In front of a large audience, Allen called S.R. Sidarth “macaca” (a racial slur), and said to Sidarth, who was born and raised in Virginia, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!”

You can view Allen’s bizarre (August 11, 2006) speech here.  I cringe every time I hear it.  Note, especially, Allen’s opening line:  “My friends, we’re going to run this campaign on constructive positive ideas. “

How bad is it getting for Allen, whose double digit lead over Democrat challenger Jim Webb has evaporated? This bad, according to Salon.com:   

On Sunday, Salon reported that Shelton said he remembered several incidents of Allen’s racist behavior during their college days, in addition to Allen’s use of the epithet. Shelton said Allen told him that he preferred Virginia to California because “blacks knew their place” in Virginia. He said Allen gave him the nickname “Wizard” because Shelton shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America….

So what about damage control?  According to Salon, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has described the recollections in the Salon article as “scurrilous charges.”

Curious, I looked up the word “scurrilous.”  Here what I found at dictionary.com:

1. grossly or obscenely abusive: a scurrilous attack on the mayor.
2. characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive: a scurrilous jest.

Interesting, how something can be “scurrilous” without being false.  That choice of word says volumes.

In this lively 9-minute interview, Dawkins discusses his new book, The God Delusion.

The interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, asked Dawkins what he intended to accomplish with his book.  Here’s Dawkins’ answer:

I hope to persuade . . . a substantial number of middle of the road people that there’s nothing wrong with a disbelief in God … there’s nothing outlandish about it.  It’s probably what they’re like anyway, whether or not they admit it to themselves.

What is the downside to religion?  For starters, it’s highly unlikely to be true, according to Dawkins. Why live a lie?  But Dawkins urges that religion presents actual dangers.  For instance, he points out that many of the followers of President Bush actually long for nuclear war (this is a point we’ve discussed at this site –many Christian fundamentalists are almost orgasmic about the coming end of the world, an event they claim to have figured out in extraordinary detail).

Dawkins addresses whether those scientists who are religious are religious in more than an “Einstein-ian sense” consisting of a recognition that the universe is a “deeply mysterious place” (Dawkins says no).  He also discusses what gets him personally “through the night” in the absence of any belief in God. 

I highly recommend viewing this interview.  Dawkins has a extraordinarily probing intellect, yet he is also highly cognizant of human limitations.  This is such a drastic change of pace from the pronouncement of many know-it-all fundamentalist preachers. 

Worms are fascinating critters.  There’s no getting around it.  Or maybe they’ve just seemed fascinating, ever since I first read Gary Larson’s hilarious 1999 book, There’s a hair in my dirt!  A Worm’s Story. 

Now, though, worms have made it to the big screen.  Last week I took my two young children to a movie called “How to Eat Fried Worms.”  We all enjoyed the movie, which provided some lessons on eating earthworms, as well as a lesson or two on getting along.  Click here for more information on the movie, which features a large cast of youngsters, along with Tom Cavanagh and Kimberly Williams.

There’s an interesting side story here. I was surprised that the book on which the movie is based has been the target of censors: 

Because of the novel’s content, the idea of eating worms as part of a bet is thought to be disgusting by some, it has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number ninety six.

Amazing, eh?  But back to the main topic of my post. I’d like to tell you the story about how I ate worms . . . but I can’t.  I didn’t even come close. 

Watching “How to Eat Fried Worms” reminded me of the time I was visiting Guangzhou, China in 2001 with my wife and our newly adopted daughter.  We were traveling with a large group of adoptive parents, accompanied also by a translator who recommended that we eat at a very nice restaurant in town.  I don’t recall the name of the restaurant, but I do remember that you could choose from a wide variety of dishes, including some specialties involving worms and bugs.  In fact, the live worms and bugs were on display at the front of the restaurant.  You could pick out the worms and bugs (or snakes or lobsters or other critters) and the chefs would then prepare them. 

Here’s a photo I took at the time.

As you can see, customers could select worms, beetle-looking bugs and other types of bugs.  I really wanted to try out some of these exotic foods, but there was absolutely no one in my group that was encouraging me. In fact, the suggestion that I might eat anything out of the ordinary was met with horror and gasps.  I remember looking at my wife for encouragement.  She didn’t try to dissuade me, but she gave me a look I interpreted as “do you expect me to ever kiss you again if I have to watch you eating worms?”   Bottom line:  I wimped out.  We did order a deep-fried pidgeon, which was presented with its head still on.  Yes, it tasted like chicken. 

While sitting in that restaurant that night, I remembered something a friend named Tim once told me: Morality starts with what one puts in one’s mouth. (more…)

A Young Earth Creationist with whom I often discourse pities me my small view of the universe. You see, I apparently cannot see the vast immensity and perfection of a 7,000 year old universe created and micromanaged by a spoiled-child-like deity. He is sure that I cannot conceive of how time might mean different things to God than to man. Or how mutually exclusive states of being (God and Man) might have existed simultaneously and yet separately in a single organism here on Earth about 2,000 years ago, and never anywhere else.

My tiny universe is about 15,000,000,000 years old, and I watch it unfurl from a curdled cloud of mesons and quarks to chill and congeal into lumpy proton soup in a quark broth. As it cools it further clumps into first generation stars that are huge, bright, and short-lived: On the order of 10 million years from ignition (when fusion begins) until explosion (when the Hydrogen-Helium cycle breaks down, and gravity collapses it into a mild nova that creates more Helium, and a few of the other light elements. Much of the residue clouds of these stars collect into clusters of smaller stars , galaxies. When they burn out and die, they form and expel the whole periodic table in the hotter, tighter crucibles of their bright supernovae. Then these clouds condense and we get third generation stars, like our sun. The remnants around it also cluster into smaller chunks that are not heavy enough to sustain fusion, although some of the heavier elements are doing the fission thing down in the core of even the smaller planets, like the Earth.

In the recent and local view, I can see one planetoid bump our planet and splash off the divot that we call the moon. (more…)

Take a look at this Ellis Weiner post on Huffpo. His main point?  He claims that something has been long overlooked, despite its current obviousness:

The reason Americans think the Democratic Party is “weak on terror” or “weak on security” is because Democrats don’t stand up to Republicans.

Could anything be more (retrospectively) obvious? (I’m not saying no one else here has realized this. But I hadn’t, and I haven’t read anyone, anywhere, making as big a deal about it as should be made. So indulge my enthusiasm.) This picks up on everyone’s ecstasy over Bill Clinton’s sharp and, really, pretty unrelenting retort to the odious Chris Wallace recently.

Weiner energetically develops his main point with some good sharp writing. 

This comprehensive list pretty well captures it for me, at least as a description of those Republicans who still strongly support Bush.  Here’s a few of my favorites:

• You must believe that folks who work for their money should be taxed at a high rate, but those who get their money for nothing should be exempt from taxation.
• You must believe that being “morally upright” means hating gays and liberals, and anyone else who doesn’t hate gays and liberals.
• You must agree that racking up huge amounts of debt and handing it off to future generations is worth the few thousand extra in tax breaks given to your wealthy “investors.”
• You must believe that government should stay out of people’s financial lives, but should socially engineer any behaviors deemed “unacceptable.” That the government should stay out of our checkbooks, but feel perfectly at home on our bedrooms and doctors offices.

This article by John Kerry, published today by the Wall Street Journal, is right on target. 

Current U.S policy toward Afhanistan is grossly negligent and dangerous, as we’ve previously argued at this site.

Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.

Here’s the basic conclusion of this article: “People do not know how happy or satisfied they are with their life in the way they know their height or telephone number. The answers to global life satisfaction questions are constructed only when asked, and are, therefore, susceptible to the focusing of attention on different aspects of life.”

By the way, surveys conducted over many decades in many countries indicate that, on average, people do not report any greater happiness despite large widespread increases in real income per capita. Will money really make you happy? Only temporarily. (more…)

“In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.” - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

Check out this article from Media Matters:

Despite the obvious signs it exists — and has for nearly 20 months — the pervasive buyer’s remorse that hovers around President Bush’s second term, as measured by public opinion polls, remains off limits for the press. The topic is all but banned from polite discussion among elite Beltway press players who seem to be deeply invested in the success of the Bush administration.

Some good historical context for Bush’s alleged 42% “bounced” rating is presented by this article.