When I see how this war of words is going on, it depresses me.  As reported by DailyKos:

The GOP is trying to frame Murtha’s plan of requiring improved troop readiness as the exact opposite.

According the GOP: Murtha’s plan

• is to “cut funding”,
• is a “strategy to pull the rug out from under our troops”, and
• is a “slow bleed” approach.

RESPONSE
If we don’t make sure to hammer the point that Murtha’s plan calls for the very opposite soon and often, the GOP lies will prevail.

Murtha’s plan calls for

• Sufficient soldier training,
• Sufficient equipment, and
• Reasonable deployment and leave time 

–

The only way all this frantic GOP spinning could be useful is if a substantial number of Americans were feeble-minded apathetic nincompoops.  Truly.  

The GOP approach is to argue that properly preparing and protecting the troops is harming the troops.  How is it that any intelligent person reading Murtha’s plan could believe that Murtha is planning to take away the equipment of the troops while leaving them defenseless in the field?

Mitt Romney proudly stood up for himself today. He boldly told a large Florida crowd what kind of president we need to elect in 2008:

“One of the great things about this land is that we have people of different faiths and different religions, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country,” he said, as the audience gave him a standing ovation.

Romney’s statement really makes me wonder because, by all accounts, we already have a “person of faith” serving as president.  And our current “person of faith” is an unmitigated disaster.  In fact, Bush has qualities that remind me of most of those other swaggering shallow-minded Muslim and Christian “persons of faith” who are busy leveling the Middle East in an attempt to save it.  If they keep at it, these “persons of faith” will eventually pull the entire world order into a war that will so obviously be a religious war that we will no longer be able to pretend it’s something else.

That a person is a “person of faith” means nothing to me.  That one should be a “person of faith” to be president is certainly not a prerequisite found in the U.S. Constitution.

When someone brags to me that he or she is a “person of faith,” I hold onto my wallet.  People of true and deep reverence don’t go around bragging that they are people “of faith.”  They are silent about their beliefs.  They show who they are, rather than telling.

For the upcoming presidential election, how about replacing the current “person of faith” with a good-hearted person of competence?  Someone who doesn’t start needless wars. Someone who will preserve the environment for future generations and also manage the economy.  How about electing someone, whether or not a “person of faith,” who is not a dry drunk? 

How about electing a president who doesn’t wear his religious bigotry on his sleeve?  How about electing a president who shows respect for all of the good-hearted people of the world, regardless of whether those people honor his God or whether they have joined an ossified bureaucratic religion–a county club with a steeple?

I can think of many qualities we desperately need in our next president.  Striving to elect another “person of faith” to replace W doesn’t guarantee that our next leader will have any of those qualities.

February’s Big Read in Missouri has selected a surprising novel–Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I should not assume everyone today has read it, so briefly it is a novel about a future in which it is illegal to read books.  The fire department, because all houses are built of fireproof materials, no longer puts out fires, but burns books when it finds hidden caches.  A fairly decent film was made of it in the Sixties.  The reasoning behind this future is the eventual, clinical “rationalization” of history by a technocratic elite who have decided that fiction–and dreams–are inimical to peace and productivity and happiness.  The scientific age did this, with its hyper rationality and impatience with anything that cannot be measured or controlled.  It is a parable much of its times–the Fifties–and a terrifying landscape to anyone with half a brain and an ounce of independence.

But…

Ray Bradbury got it wrong, but when I first read Fahrenheit 451 I believed him. He scared me to the core with that book. That and the related stories, like The Exiles and Usher II, chilled me and set me on schemes of hiding my books from the sterile-suited, cold-eyed rationalists bent on doing me good for my own sake. Scared me terrifically, but in the end he got it wrong.

I was eleven when I read both 451 and The Martian Chronicles.  I was in parochial school, among people ready to protect me with great spiritual warmth from a world that seemed determined to do away with God. Somehow in that strange time in the middle to late Sixties, communism and science had gotten entwined. It’s clear now. Most of the sf films of the Fifties and Sixties depicted the scientist as an emotionless drudge, all consumed with reason and facts. Communists were likewise shown to be people who would sacrifice their parents in the name of the state, the collective, the greater good of the proletariat. There was no room for love or faith or kindness. It was an aesthetic alliance, a tone and pervasive comparison that we just took for granted. We were children, we didn’t know.

And most didn’t care. There was baseball and muscle cars, rock’n'roll and miniskirts, and Johnson, whose Texan drawl was anything but literate and scientific, was going to make the country povertyless and free. Science was going to moon, not learning how think. Communism was “over there” in rice paddies and Red Square and the quickest way to get a punch in the eye was to call somebody a “Commie.”

But I was reading these stories of how in the name of the orderly society all the books were going to be collected and burned and it was going to be the scientists–the rationalists– who were going to do it. After all, it wasn’t rational to believe in alternate worlds or aliens or ghosts or Atlantis (even though archaeologists were searching, but they weren’t after all scientists–were they?–scientists worked in laboratories and wore white smocks…); it wasn’t rational to dream about John Carter or Tarzan, pretend to be Horatio Hornblower or James Bond; it wasn’t rational to prefer reading fantasies about other stars rather than textbooks about them.

Was it?

I wasn’t sure. Even while I made preparations, hidey-holes in which to squirrel away my books, something nagged me about the whole premise. For one thing, while I was reading Bradbury, I was also reading Clarke.

The thing about Arthur C. Clarke, especially at that age, is the impossibility of coming away without a sense of his profound faith that science–Reason–will give us the stars. And everything else in between. Clarke’s work shares a pervasive confidence–not loud and splashy, but quietly insistent, just there in the background–that the true spirituality of humanity is expressed in its ability to solve problems and realize dreams.

Wait a minute. Dreams? But scientists aren’t dreamers, are they? I mean, the books I love, the novels and stories, they’re dreams on paper, made living by the reading…they aren’t rational. They won’t solve problems or give us the stars…will they? The scientists will burn them…won’t they?

Like most things at that age, obsessions come and go. I recovered from my fright. I didn’t think about it for a long time, until I ran into committees organized to pull books from library shelves, people who published lists of banned books, boycotts against bookstores designed to get rid of certain books. Then all the fear Bradbury had evoked in me as a child came back, full force.

But they weren’t scientists. Or communists.

They were people who believed in ghosts. People who believed in devils and plots with communists. People who were afraid of scientists. People who, if they read books at all, only read the books they are told to read by those who make promises they cannot deliver.

Bradbury got it wrong. Partly, at least. The book burners don’t know anything about science, nor do they want to. If they win they will not be clean, sterile technocrats. They won’t be burning the Bible along with Narnia and the Galactic Empire. They won’t go to Mars. They won’t go anywhere. Science is a dream, too.

Clarke understood.

I’m glad I read them both.

I was sent this New York Times article in which a Young Earth Creationist gets a real PhD in paleontology.

How does he do it?

Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

This reminds me of the official church view on the heliocentric model of the universe between the time of Copernicus and Galileo: In the rarefied view of math, the planets move around the sun, but in truth the Earth is the center of creation. Well before Galileo, the church accepted sun-centered orbital dynamics. But not from the pulpit. Galileo then pointed his lens upward, noticed moons orbiting some of these planets, and mocked the pope in the media for his public position. Hence his censure.

It seems that schizoid tendencies are revered in Christianity. You couldn’t be a Saint unless you demonstrate what are now known to be several symptoms of Schizophrenia: Hearing voices and knowing them to be real, projective charisma, supernormal strength or agility, preternatural sensitivity to other’s thoughts, and so on. The bible and chronology of Saints document many textbook cases of schizophrenia. It usually manifests in women at the onset of adolescence (e.g: Joan of Arc) or men at the end of adolescence (pick anyone from Moses forward).

Back to Dr. Ross, paleontologist. (Not the one from TV.) He has managed to compartmentalize his personal belief in a Young Earth safely away from his apparently quite competent scientific mind. Comparing mosasaur migration data, radiography, stratigraphy, and so on for sound scientific analysis of their age and habits has no effect on his belief that the world is really 3,000 years younger than the oldest excavated middle-eastern city. Much less 65 million years younger than the age he himself attributes to the subjects of his degree.

I don’t mind scientists who have invisible friends. However, Dr. Ross has expressed his intent to use his credentials to further the teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Not his skills, his credentials.

Perhaps I was too optimistic in my recent response to The Evangelical War on Evolution.

This is one of those much talked about microscopic stem cell “babies”:  

This photo was published in the Feb 2, 2007 issue of Science.  

What are stem cells? 

Embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are unlike any specific adult cell. However, they have the ability to form any adult cell. Because undifferentiated embryonic stem cells can proliferate indefinitely in culture, they could potentially provide an unlimited source of specific, clinically important adult cells such as bone, muscle, liver or blood cells.

Therefore, the “baby” in this photo has no specialized cells.  No bone cells, therefore, no bones.  No blood cells, therefore, no blood.  No liver cells, therefore no liver.   No organs at all, becuse organs are made out of specialized cells.

This “baby” also has no nerve cells (neurons) and, consequently, no neural activity–no brain.  It would be physically impossible for this “baby” to have any thought or feeling without nerve cells.  All scientists who study nerve cells know this:  in the absence of nerve cells, there can’t be any nerve function, Without nerve cells, there can’t be sentience.  Without nerve cells, the qualities of awareness, emotion, cognition, hope, dreams, pleasure and pain that we associate with human animals simply cannot be.  

That is why we declare adults dead when their brain cells cease functioning to the point where that person’s body is longer sentient.  A full-grown human without any nerve cells is no more a functioning human being than is a wax museum replica of a human being.   On the other side of the scale, a microscopic clump of living human cells that totally lacks neurons cannot do any of the things that neural networks allow humans to do.  Not until those cells multiply and develop into millions of highly organized neural networks can such that organism have any form of sentience.  

People who disagree with me are those who believe that sentience can happen without brain cells.  Without any evidence, these people believe there can be thinking and feelings in the absence of the biological machinery that enables thinking and feeling.  Presumably, such people would believe that the brain has no significant cognitive function or, at least, that that brain cells have a function that is redundant to the function of an invisible undetectable soul floating around somewhere. 

What do these believers in the soul think when they are reminded that certain types of damage to the brain (due to a car accident or brain tumer, for example) always result in specific and predictable types of mental impairment?  They can’t deny this causal connection because it is too well documented.  It is noted in hospital emergency rooms every day.  But these people refuse to connect all of the dots.  They hold out hope that there is a soul out there that somehow empowers all higher cognition and sentience.  Some sort of invisible Guardian Brain that looks after the real brain.

These people who believe in souls are consequently believers in essentialism.  They seek to endow living tissue with qualities that the tissue doesn’t yet have.  It is the equivalent of endowing Terry Schaivo with “feelings” at the end of her life, even though she had none.  

These believers in souls argue that even though a clump of undifferentiated stem cells cannot be sentient, we must protect that tissue as though it already has human function.  

These people are practicing magic, not science.

Bill Moyers has recently written on the meaning of Democracy on TomPaine.com.  First, he presents an illustration of the problem.  As is the case with many overarching social issues today, this one starts with a media almost entirely controlled by a few large corporations:

Jesus would not be crucified today. The prophets would not be stoned. Socrates would not drink the hemlock. They would instead be banned from the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages by the sentries of establishment thinking who guard against dissent with the one weapon of mass destruction most cleverly designed to obliterate democracy—the rubber stamp.

A stock broker who makes bad picks doesn’t last too long. A baseball player in an extended slump gets traded. A worker made redundant by cheaper labor abroad or by a new machine—well, she’s done for, too. But four years after the invasion of Iraq—the greatest blunder in foreign policy since Vietnam—the public apologists and advocates of the war flourish in the media, while the costs of their delusions accrue in body counts and lost treasure. A public that detests the war is relegated to the bleachers, fated to watch from afar the playing out by political and media elites of a game that has been rigged.

Yet the salvation of democracy requires a public aroused by the knowledge of what is being done to them in their name.

And now the solution: taking back our government:

We cannot build a political consensus or a nation across the vast social divides that mark our country today. Consensus arises from bridging that divide and making society whole again, the fruits of freedom and prosperity made available to the least among us. What we have to determine now, as [Woodrow] Wilson said in his day, “is whether we are big enough…whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven’t had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance, in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our delegated authority.”

Here’s the story of one marine.

The comments following this video at YouTube substantiate the huge cultural divide that exists in the U.S.

The comment that haunts me the most is about the day-to-day job: breaking down doors and terrorizing numerous innocent people. This occurs because our soldiers can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys–the bad guys don’t have “Bad Guy” stamped on their foreheads. And our soldiers are asked to make these wild guesses day after day after day. It’s like asking a brain surgeon to remove a brain tumor when he or she can’t tell the difference between the “good” cells and the “bad” cells. Would you proceed with surgery in that scenario?

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), the organization to which this marine belongs, was founded “to give a voice to the large number of active duty service people and veterans who are against this war, but are under various pressures to remain silent.” IVAW stands for:

• Immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq;
• Reparations for the destruction and corporate pillaging of Iraq so that ordinary Iraqi people can control their own lives and future; and
• Full benefits, adequate healthcare (including mental health), and other supports for returning servicemen and women.

For more about what it’s like on the ground, consider this interview of Paul Rieckhoff by Keith Olbermann. We’ve written about Paul Rieckhoff before. He authored Chasing Ghosts after serving a tour of duty in Iraq. Paul, who I met at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, now heads the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

If you want to know what Bill Maher is up to, check out this article at Salon.com. I found the interview to be equally thoughtful and frank–the antithesis of political talk. For instance, on McCain and Iraq Maher says:

It’s already a partitioned country. What are we fighting for over there? Why are we fighting to keep Iraq together? . . . Why are these drawn-on-a-map borders worth one more American life? I have no clue. And I don’t think [John McCain] does, either… We’ve already lost our honor over there. We lost it at Abu Ghraib, and a lot of other places. The honorable thing to do would be to acknowledge our mistake and get out.

According to the writer, Joan Walsh, Maher is currently working on

a documentary on religion with “Seinfeld” creator and “Borat” director Larry Charles, titled “A Spiritual Journey.” No, he hasn’t found religion; Maher will be spoofing it, although he insists he’s not an atheist. “Religion to me is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need. But I’m not an atheist, no,” he told the Onion AV Club in a 2002 interview. “I believe there’s some force.”

I don’t know.   We were down from about 6 pm last night until about 9 am this morning.   This crash coincided with an unusually intense flurry of spam and some other problems (including some random characters appearing in some of the posts).   I’d like to think that we were hacked by the White House, but I seriously doubt that.  Maybe it was an act of God. 

In case you unsuccessfully tried to check in with Dangerous Intersection over the past 24 hours, that’s what we know . . .

Teen pregnancy is down. Is it because of those abstinence pledges?  As indicated in this article from the BBC News,  “88% of those who make the pledge break the pledge, so it must be down to condoms and safe sex education.”

The Guttmacher Institute recently released its own survey showing that most of the decline in U.S. teen pregnancy rates is the result of the teens using birth control, not abstinence:

Eighty-six percent of the recent decline in U.S. teen pregnancy rates is the result of improved contraceptive use, while a small proportion of the decline (14%) can be attributed to teens waiting longer to start having sex, according to “Explaining Recent Declines in Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States: The Contribution of Abstinence and Improved Contraceptive Use” by John Santelli et al., published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health. This study raises serious questions about the value of the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that prohibit information about the benefits of condoms and contraception.

There is a wealth of information regarding reproductive health available at the Guttmacher Institute site.   I will visit the site regularly to stay updated.  Here is the Institute’s Mission Statement. 

The Guttmacher Institute advances sexual and reproductive health through an interrelated program of social science research, policy analysis and public education, designed to generate new ideas, encourage enlightened public debate, promote sound policy and program development, and, ultimately, inform individual decision-making.

The Institute envisions a world in which all women and men have the ability to exercise their rights and responsibilities regarding sexual behavior, reproduction and family formation, freely and with dignity. Essential to this vision are societal respect for and protection of personal decision-making with regard to unwanted pregnancies and births, as well as public and private-sector policies that support individuals and couples in their efforts to become responsible and supportive parents, maintain stable family structures and balance parenting with other roles. Equally vital to the Institute’s vision are the eradication of gender inequality worldwide and the attainment of equal status, rights and responsibilities for women.

From today’s press conference at the White House: 

Reporter:  Slides from a prewar briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?

Tony Snow: I’m not sure anything went wrong . . .

One of our earlier posts concerned the efforts of evangelicals to relegate early hominid fossils to the back room of Kenya’s National Museum.   That post recently drew this comment from James Davenock:

It seems that many here could simply replace the name Sam Harris, with Jesus, Newton or Sullivan in their writings. Many keep quoting others in an attempt to get their point across rather than just trying to get their point across. You could say “Dave, I admire Jesus’ viewpoints” or “Dave, I admire Sam Harris’ viewpoints” or “Dave, I admire Newton’s viewpoints”. . .

 The difference between Science and Religion is Science has a process by which to prove its ideas while Religion does not and requires you to simply accept or excommunicate. I have found the same smugness in both religious and science types and that is a bit disquieting.

The wise man first says “I do not know”

I started responding to James Davenock’s comment at the location of that earlier post, but it grew long enough to justify posting at this separate location.

Davenock raises a good point.  I suspect that there are many non-believers out there (all of us, some of the time), who “hero-worship” people like Richard Dawkins just like many theists hero-worship James Dobson or Jesus. You can quickly spot these folks by their writings, which essentially amount to “Way to go, Charles [Darwin]!”  Or “Way to go, Jesus!”  This lack of thoughtful content is no more informative than the rote prayers many people utter in churches.  “Amen!”

Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to write a “me too!” comment.   Such comments don’t add much to the conversation.   I suspect that most “me too!” comment writers could tremendously enhance their contributions by adding even one extra sentence to let us know what motivated the “Me too!”   But, alas, many of them don’t give us that extra sentence or two.

Maybe they can’t.  Some “Me too!” comment writers who admire scientists or freethinkers might not be sufficiently intellectually engaged with the ideas of those they purport to admire to write that additional sentence.  Maybe they can’t yet articulate why they are attracted to a writer.  Or maybe what attracts them is only the ultimate conclusions of a Richard Dawkins or the panache of Sam Harris, rather than the intellectual path that those writers have mapped out.  Or maybe those comment writers are driven by frustration with the theories offered by believers and they are essentially rebelling without a well-articulated reason for rebelling.  Perhaps they are engaged emotionally, but not intellectually.

On the other hand, there are also lots of thoughtful readers who have carefully reviewed the arguments of people like Dawkins/Harris before giving their fully-informed consent.  When those people say “Way to go, Sam [Harris],” they have read, pondered, critically analyzed and only then approved of Harris’ writings.  Unfortunately, they sometimes don’t add an extra sentence to their comment to let us know that they are truly intellectually engaged.

In short, a “Me too!” comment might mean a lot and it might mean not much.”  Approval and admiration fall along a continuum.  “Me too!” might constitute only the mindless name-dropping by someone who amounts to a groupie or it might be the too-quick and too-short work of someone much more intellectually engaged.   Each “me-too” comment needs to be judged individually.  Again, there’s often not enough information in the comment to evaluate the extent to which the me-tooer is mindlessly me-tooing.

As a general rule, I don’t mind providing space to me-tooing skeptics.   In a world where Jesus is promoted on every fourth billboard, as well as on t-shirts, books, political speeches and all of those Bibles I find in my hotel rooms, the interests of skeptics have traditionally been underserved. (more…)

Here’s a good essay about the need to face reality in Iraq, written by a retired Army general who now teaches at Yale.

Today ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Bush whether Iraq was embroiled in a civil war.

Bush:  “It’s hard for me living in this beautiful White House to give you an assessment, a first hand assessment . . .”

Bush continued on:

I haven’t been there. You have, I haven’t. But I do talk to people who are and people whose judgment I trust and they would not qualify it as that. There are others who think it is.

Recent reports of the discovery of a new element which has been called “Bushcromium” have been discredited by the recent discovery of a nearly identical form of the element which is called “Poppium” It appears that the characteristics of Bushcromium and Poppium are nearly identical, with both sharing some of the same morons, peons, assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons.

Scientists now posit that Bushcromium is an isodope of Poppium or they both are an allotrope of the element Hegemonium. Hegemonium, unlike Poppium or Bushcromium is not inert but, aggressively bonds with other elements in a random and sometimes pre-emptive manner. Hegemonium has an Atomic mass of 9/11.

Here is the previously posted report: “Bushcromium, A New Element.” 

Below is a link to a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.  It is a blog about writing and actually does have a list of reasons to stop, which, when one considers the amount of verbiage being generated by the human race, might seem like an impossible challenge.  Those of us with presumptions to actually be  writers–professional, that is, receiving coin for our sentences–are afflicted, I think, with a singular mix of obsession and insecurity. 

There is, however, no Twelve-Step Program for us, and even if there were, the initial admittance–that we are powerless to control the urge to run out streams of words on the off-chance someone might actually read them (or, more, enjoy them)–means for us that we are subsequently powerless to continue with the 12-step.  But, on the other hand, explaining our affliction, paradoxically, feeds the monkey–more words.  And explaining to each other about our affliction sustains us in times when we feel ignored by those who only read what we write.  We are subject to puzzled bemusement by people who “don’t understand”; made sometimes to feel guilty by people who want us to come out and play who, when told we are busy writing, complain that we’re not doing anything.

Writing requires both solitude and congeniality–to write about people, we must know them, but we are by nature prone to misanthropy.  The more we know people, sometimes, the less we like them, yet we must be sympathetic lest we ostracize the very public we need to support our habit.

But enough about me.  I have fiction to write.  I shall leave you all with the analysis.

We know the military has been struggling to meet its recruiting goals, so it should come as no surprise that Uncle Sam wants you, even if you are a convicted felon.  Theft?  That’s OK.  Drugs?  Yup, that’s OK, too.  Writing bad checks?  Check.  If you’re willing to go to Iraq and fight George’s war, then Uncle Sam is happy to look the other way and let bygones be bygones.  But you’d better not be homosexual.  No, that would make you unfit to serve your country, unfit to get shot at and unfit to salute the Commander in Chief.  Even if you speak fluent Arabic and could supply The Decider with what he has been conspicuously lacking since he began this war:  intelligence.

This is a 13-minute presentation Carlin delivered on August 28, 2006.

According to Carlin, as the country continues to deteriorate, “Nobody seems to notice.  Nobody seems to care.”

Comment posted at the video site:  “As in feudal days, it seems that the jester is the only one left allowed to speak the truth openly.”

I do love quotes!  A novel in every sentence, as I see it.  

I’ve been collecting quotes for years. These are quotes that I noticed or noticed anew over the past six months.  There’s no particular theme here, though many of these do concern education/enlightenment:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

I don’t mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don’t understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Albert Camus

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

Henry Ford

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

B. F. Skinner , New Scientist, May 21, 1964

Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public.

Edgar Watson Howe

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

A. J. Liebling

“We do not inherit the world from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”

Navajo proverb (more…)

[Reprinted with permission from Jeff Koterba] 

The Missouri legislature will soon consider Senate Bill 285 to protect the right of pharmacists who refuse to dispense birth control pills.  Here’s the text of the bill:

This act protects the conscience rights of pharmaceutical professionals. Such pharmaceutical professionals shall not be required to perform, assist, recommend, refer for, or participate in any service involving a particular drug or device that they have a good faith belief is used for abortions. In these instances, the pharmaceutical professional shall be immune from civil or criminal liability and will not have their license suspended or revoked.

As I’ve discussed before, many conservatives argue that birth control pills cause “abortions” because it is possible that they could cause a fertilized egg to fail to implant.  This is the reason that the hundreds of “Pregnancy Resource Centers” that dot the country refuse to tell their clients about the existence of birth control pills (and see here).  Instead, such fake pregnancy clinics recommend only “natural family planning” (formerly known as rhythm), which has a failure rate of 20% per year.  Is that the kind of birth control you want for your wife, girlfriend or daughter?

It’s important to note that anti-abortion sites freely admit that the “vast majority of women” using birth control pills are not causing “abortions,” however defined.

This proposed Missouri law, if passed, would invite the following conversation between an adult woman customer and a pharmacist:

[Woman]:  I’d like you to fill this prescription for birth control pills.  My doctor wrote this prescription for me.

[Pharmacist]: I won’t do that.  I have a good faith belief that you are using those pills to have abortions.  I’m the only pharmacist on duty at this store, so that’s the final answer.

[Woman]:  This is ridiculous.  Tell me where I can find another pharmacy that will fill this perfectly legal prescription.

[Pharmacist]:  I refuse to refer you to such an evil place, as I am entitled to do pursuant to Senate Bill 285.

[Woman]: I need to talk to your boss.

[Pharmacist’s Boss]:  I’d like to fire this guy, but Senate Bill 285 provides that if I fire him, he can sue me for triple damages plus attorneys fees.

To top off this insanity, many women take birth control pills for reasons other than avoiding pregnancy.

The hormones in “the Pill” can be used to treat some medical conditions, such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, adenomyosis, anemia related to menstruation, and painful menstruation (dysmenorrhea). In addition, oral contraceptives are often prescribed as medication for mild or moderate acne. 

For Wikipedia’s article on the main mechanism of birth control pills, click here.  

This bill is likely to be heard at the following place and time:

Hearing on Bills Regarding Reproductive Healthcare
Senate Judiciary and Civil and
Criminal Jurisprudence Committee
Capitol Building, Jefferson City, MO
Monday, February 19th, 6:00 pm

Salon’s War Room presents Fox’s coverage as a case of especially shoddy journalism regarding Iran’s alleged provision of arms to forces hostile to the US in Iraq:

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the administration is right on two key points: that Iranian arms are indeed flowing into Iraq and that it’s happening with the approval of the Iranian government. Even if that’s true, there’s still a big logical hole in the reasoning of much of the press’s reporting on the issue. That’s especially true of this article, beginning in just the first sentence: “The White House stuck to its guns Monday, insisting it had clear evidence that Tehran approved the shipment of weapons — including deadly bomb-making materials — to Shiite militants for use against U.S. forces in Iraq.”

What’s the problem there? Well, simply that weapons supplied by Iran to Shiite militias would be far more likely to be used in sectarian violence against Sunnis than against U.S. troops. As Salon contributor Juan Cole has already pointed out on his blog, the majority — by far — of U.S. deaths in Iraq are caused by Sunnis, not Shiites. Beyond that, the weapons allegedly supplied by Iran are flowing to U.S. allies in Iraq.

Here’s another problem with the current Iran/Iraq coverage.  Why are so many media outlets letting the White House frame the allegedly inevitable consequences?  Why are we so happy to assume, along with the White House, that IF the Iranians are providing arms to our enemies, that the only logical response would be war against Iran?   As though there are no other options . . .

And who is providing all of those handguns that are killing so many Americans in American cities?  Big American corporations, you say?  If providing arms that kill Americans justifies war, isn’t it time for the U.S. to declare war on Smith & Wesson?

This website contains a handy timeline of the Bush Administration’s lies…er, propaganda campaign…to push America into an unnecessary, disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Today is also known as Evolution Sunday.   Many church congregations celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin today. 

I celebrated Darwin by going to the St. Louis Zoo with my six-year old daughter. The zoo has a terrific ape exhibition area.  We focused on gorillas, and they put on a great show.   The scenary inside, including the murals on the wall might fool you into thinking the photos were taken outdoors–they were not. 

I brought a Canon S1-IS camera with me and captured some wonderful images.  For camera buffs, I didn’t do anything fancy.  I just turned off the flash and braced myself against walls, shooting through thick plexiglass.

I’m dedicating these photos to today’s army of Creationists, those intrepid souls who bravely dare to assume that the overwhelming phenotypic and genetic similarities of human animals and gorillas result from the piddling of a Creator, i.e., that these similarities are mere accidents.  Such a strange bunch, those Creationists who disparage fruitful “accidents” only when attributed to the systematic ratcheting effect of natural selection, not when when they have no rigorous explanatory basis at all!

But, I digress.

I was in awe at these marvelous creatures today.  I’m posting these photos here with the hope that they will inspire you, too.

           (more…)

A man who conducted interrogation of Iraqis as a contract employee for the U.S. military tell us how it really was in the Washington Post.  Here’s an excerpt:

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.