This post on Ebonmuse’s site “Daylight Atheism” and a caption contest sponsored by Hemant the Friendly Atheist, combined with a lull at work and a low-grade fever, inspired me to create the above Hitchens macro. (Sorry to subject you all to this type of thing again, folks!)

Ebonmuse describes the “kerfuffle” caused by Sam Harris’ recent advice to atheists to stop calling themselves atheists:

Harris’ main point, as best as I can summarize it, is that the term “atheism” already comes with negative stereotypes attached to it, and by using it to describe ourselves we are playing into the hands of our opponents. He says that we are “consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture” and that we have “walked into a trap” by so doing. When we call ourselves atheists, religious people who already think they know what atheism is and how to refute it will assume they know all about us already and can dismiss our arguments without further notice.

Atheism is a perfectly good word that means “without a belief in god or gods”. Yes there are some negative stereotypes attached to it, many of which have to do with the people who harbor the stereotypes rather than with the people who call themselves atheists. There are others, such as the belief held by some religious people that atheists want to pry the Bibles from their tightly clenched sweaty little hands and force-march them into evolutionary biology re-education camp, that might (just possibly, perhaps, I dunno, going out on a limb here) have been encouraged by sound bites like “science must destroy religion” and “moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics — and are every bit as delusional.”

Be that as it may, Sam is totally missing the point here. The fact is, people are rallying around the word “atheism” already. This is the basic building block of social and political change - the affinity group. People - young, highly educated, articulate people who could potentially play a big role in pulling our country out of its rightward slide into the abyss - are organizing themselves into more or less formal networks around this principle. Sam you have their attention, and in these days of information overload, that is the sociopolitical motherlode.

His response to the criticism he received was completely ham-fisted. He tries to make a point by sprinkling the words “as an atheist” through a reasoned defense of stem-cell research and asking if adding the words made the statement any stronger. (This is about on the par with his brilliant rhetorical strategy of substituting the word “witchcraft” for “religion” in some quotes from reviewers critical of his writing.)

The “as an atheist” thing just makes no sense to me, as an ignostic. Surely the idea is that arguments based on logic and reason stand on their own merits, without reference to one’s “metaphysical commitments” (as Mike C. would put it.) The point is not that everyone who becomes a formal member of an atheist group or just signs up to receive email action alerts needs to drink the koolaid and wear the t-shirt (or the backwards baseball cap.) The point is, you have an infrastructure for organizing.

Despite Sam Harris’s swipes at liberals, and the “barbarians at the gates” mentality of some neo-atheist ditto-heads, I think the political initiation of non-believers can only be welcomed as a good thing by anyone on the leftward side of the political spectrum.

Someone had some fun fishing through some old record album covers. Or, at least, I assume these are the covers of actual albums. Good for a chuckle.

Cop-out:  a feebly transparent excuse or explanation for refusing to face up to something. 

We constantly hear that the Ten Commandments are the highest achievement of moral law.  We even hear this claim from public officials who can’t even name the Commandments.  They want to hang the Commandments everywhere, as though their display will cause bad people to stop being so BAD. Despite this barrage of pro-Commandment spin from conservatives, the Ten Commandments are horribly lacking in moral guidance. 

For instance, (I’ll refer to the Catholic version of the Ten Commandments), the first four Commandments have nothing to do with morality.  The vague Commandment against “murder” has lots of problems.    And speaking of vagueness, does the Commandment against adultery prohibit the serial monogamy prevalent in most of the Western world that honors the Commandments?  No stealing?  Tell that to the big banks and financial institutions that own Congress and the rest of America. How could the poor steal when they themselves are so often victims of predatory lenders?  No lying?  Are you kidding?  We’d be killing each other if we always told the truth.   And I’ve always wondered about the alleged harm caused by coveting.  Maybe we need more coveting and fewer bad acts. 

Consider also that violating a Commandment often doesn’t correlate with harm.  Even though lies often prevent us from knowing the truth, consider whether an occasional lie can sometimes spare someone needless pain.  Consider whether adultery is sometimes a symptom that one of the participants is engaged in a horribly dysfunctional relationship that should be ended.  And what about when I covet my neighbor’s wholesome and generous qualities and I then set out to act more like him or her?

But there’s a bigger problem with the Commanments: what does love got to do with any of them?  Where is tiniest hint of generosity or patience in the Commandments of the Old Testament?  How are these Commandments any improvement over the Golden Rule, which long pre-dated the Commandments?

Sam Harris has suggested that it would be quite easy to improve the holy Commandments. 

Consider the possibility of improving the Ten Commandments. This would appear to be setting the bar rather high, as these are the only passages in the Bible that the Creator of the universe felt the need to physically write himself. But take a look good look at commandment #2. No graven images? Doesn’t this seem like something less than the-second-most-important-point-upon-which-to- admonish-all-future-generations-of-human-beings? Remember those Muslims who recently rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons? Many people wondered just what got them so riled up. Well, here it is. Was all that pious mayhem nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity? Yes, come to think of it, it was nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity. Almost any precept we’d put in place of this prohibition against graven images would augment the wisdom of the Bible (Don’t pretend to know things you don’t know? Don’t mistreat children? Avoid trans fats?). Could we live with all the resulting problems due to proliferating graven images? We’d manage-somehow.

When Christians tout their Commandments, they usually speak as though Bible thumpers are the only organizations with a meaningful set of moral rules.  How incredibly not true.  Although they aren’t “commandments,” compare the lists of Buddhists and Secular Humanists, for example.  

When I first started Dangerous Intersection (about 1 1/2 years ago), I tried to create a new improved set of Ten Commandments. I still like some of my ideas, though I’m afraid that some of these are much too wordy.  Someday, I might try to trim these down to something more eloquent.   It is difficult, however, to compile the important lessons of life into a mere ten sentences.  Packing a lot of ideas clearly into only a few words is the plight of every writer.

Ben Franklin cheated by coming up with 13 “virtues.”  He developed this list of thirteen virtues when he was only 20 (in 1726) and continued to practice them throughout his life.  I like Franklin’s list of virtues because they are simply worded and they make good sense:

1. ”TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”
2. ”SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.”
3. ”ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.”
4. ”RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”
5. ”FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.”
6. ”INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”
7. ”SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.”
8. ”JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.”
9. ”MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.”
10. ”CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.”
11. ”TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.”
12. ”CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.”
13. ”HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

[Note:  “venery” is the pursuit of or indulgence in sexual pleasure.]

I’ll mention one other well-honed list of moral precepts that has impressed me: the Desiderata.   I learned of this list when I was a teen-ager in the 1970’s because the list took the form of a pop song entitled The Desiderata.  It’s origins are not entirely clear, but the advice is thoughtful.  Here is an excerpt:

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Compared to the top-down heavy-handed Commandments, the lists of Ben Franklin and the Desiderata appear to be written by people who seem to know and trust other human beings. And that is how it should be.  Those who dish out advice on how to get along with others should be the sorts of people who strive to see goodness in others and try to overlook human foibles. The styles of each of these lists of advice reveals much about the authors’ attitudes toward other people.  Whenever the list takes the form of “commandments,” it reveals that the author thinks of other people as untrustworthy and that others need to be bossed around as though they were unruly children or dogs.

It seems to me that there is no substitute for articulating one’s own set of rules for living.  No one fully speaks for anyone else.  Each person needs to build his or her own bridge across his or her lifespan.  To be authentic and worthwhile, this bridge-building takes much effort; throughout one’s life it will remain a work-in-progress.

Even thoughtful and good-hearted people will only agree with each other regarding the most general principles.  To assume otherwise, that anyone–including ancient people–have figured out all of the meaningful advice (much less commandments) for living one’s life is a cop-out, an abdication of personal responsibility.  It is an desperate attempt at a concept George Lakoff labels objectivism:

“There is a major folk theory in our society according to which being objective is being fair, and human judgment is subject to error or likely to be biased.   Consequently decisions concerning people should be made on ‘objective’ grounds as often as possible.  It is the major way that people who make decisions avoid blame.   If there are ‘objective’ criteria on which to base a decision, then one cannot be blamed for being biased, and consequently one cannot be criticized, demoted, fired, or sued.”

[Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Preface, p. xiv, (1987).]

In sum, it seems to me that when people embrace a set of rules as “the” rules, they are trying to find a simple way to excuse themselves from responsibility.  They want to believe that they are OK, simply by the fact that they go to church and refrain from having sex with the neighbor’s spouse.   Too bad the Bible doesn’t have an “Eleventh Commandment” that reads thus:  “The pits of hell are full of people who carefully obey the Ten Commandments.”

The San Francisco Mime Troupe was in my hometown last weekend with its hilarious new show “Making a Killing” described by the San Francisco Chronicle as the “Mime Troupe’s most direct grapple yet with the war in Iraq”

Before you start imagining white-faced figures soundlessly miming a battle scene, let me reassure you that the SFMT is quite vocal and that their new show is packed with “more song and dance than a Bush press conference.” The Mime in SFMT refers to an ancient Greek form of theater which appealed to the common people and often made fun of the authorities. As the troupe’s web site states:

The San Francisco Mime Troupe does not do pantomime. We mean ‘mime’ in the ancient sense: to mimic. We are satirists, seeking to make you laugh at the absurdities of contemporary life and at the same time, see their causes. We’ve done shows about most of the burning issues of our time, generally shows that debunked the official story. We perform everywhere from public parks to palaces of culture, aiming to reach the broadest possible audience.

Last year’s show was title “Godfellas” and featured a “syndicate” of mobsters, nuns, preachers attempt to take over America. The clip below has very poor sound quality, but it’s a great scene. Our heroine, an atheist schoolteacher who has lost her job and her lover when a faith-based group takes over her after-school tutoring center, teeters on the verge of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. But she and the other characters, a religious couple who have lost their son in the war and an Indian immigrant, find a new purpose in life - reclaiming “reason and liberty.” I especially like the park ranger with his “Suicide Prevention for Dummies” book.

(BTW, the big red book the teacher is clutching is a collection of the sayings of Tom Paine.)

According to this article at Alternet (”The War on Pot: America’s $42 Billion Annual Boondoggle“) we should “regulate marijuana just as we do beer, wine, and liquor.”  Why?  Consider the human toll:

The new FBI stats show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005. That’s like arresting every man, woman and child in the state of North Dakota plus every man, woman, and child in Des Moines, Iowa on marijuana charges … every year. Arrests for marijuana possession — not sales or trafficking, just possession — totaled 738,916. By comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.

If that amount of arrests doesn’t concern you, then consider the economic toll.  The war on marijuana is costing the United States $42 billion per year.   What could you do with that kind of money?  You could hire “880,000 schoolteachers at the average U.S. teacher salary of $47,602 per year.”

Is the war on marijuana saving the lives or health of Americans?  Far from it, according to honest medical information.

I’m not advocating the use of marijuana (or any other mind-altering or mood-altering drug).  I believe in natural highs, the type triggered by good health and an active intellect. 

On the other hand, the “War on Drugs” is horribly counter-productive and it is devastating to the lives of good and decent Americans and their families.  And because that “war” is a massive drain on the national economy, it hurts people like you.

The New Yorker recently published an article by Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author, with an update on an equally famous patient: Clive Wearing, a British musician who suffered an attack of viral encephalitis in 1985. Although Wearing recovered, the infection destroyed the areas of his brain associated with storing memories. As a result, for the last 22 years, Wearing has been living in an eerie, amnesiac void - unable to make any new memories, unable to remember anything beyond a few moments ago.

Sacks gives us a startling glimpse of Clive Wearing’s effort to comprehend his condition - which, of course, he cannot learn the truth about any more than he can learn any other new information. At times he seems aware that something is dreadfully wrong, but he can never tell what it is. So severe is his amnesia that he continually believes he has only just awakened after being unconscious for an extended period:

Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.
This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages.

What I found most amazing is that Deborah, Clive’s wife, has stayed by his side despite his incurable memory loss. The love and devotion she’s showed to her husband in the face of their 22-year ordeal beggars belief; if there are such things as saints, she is surely among them. As she wrote:

“Clive was constantly surrounded by strangers in a strange place, with no knowledge of where he was or what had happened to him. To catch sight of me was always a massive relief—to know that he was not alone, that I still cared, that I loved him, that I was there. Clive was terrified all the time. But I was his life, I was his lifeline. Every time he saw me, he would run to me, fall on me, sobbing, clinging.”

Notwithstanding his wife’s devotion, Clive Wearing does have one other “lifeline” - his musical skill, which was not taken from him by his illness. Dr. Sacks notes that only when playing does Clive seem truly in the present:

Clive’s performance self seems, to those who know him, just as vivid and complete as it was before his illness. This mode of being, this self, is seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even though his autobiographical self, the self that depends on explicit, episodic memories, is virtually lost.

To find out, take the short test here.

Here are some terrific video clips of President Eisenhower and, more recently, of former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel. 

As Gravel plainly states, no president since Eisenhower has dared to talk about the elephant in the room, the military industrial complex.  Our leaders rarely speak of it because it has so thoroughly corrupted our foreign policy and our leaders. 

I know that I’m going to get into some trouble with some people as a result of this post.

Yesterday, my family visited an art fair where more than 100 artists displayed a wide variety of art.   One of the artists, an adult man, offered the following abstract paintings:

The painting on the left was offered for $3,200 and the one on the right for $1,300.   I don’t “get” much modern art. I never have. It amazes me that there is a market for much of it.  As you might correctly guess, I wasn’t tempted to buy either of these paintings.

Now, consider the following article from Salon.com:  “Here’s looking at you, “Kid”: Is 4-year-old Marla Olmstead a painting prodigy or the instrument of a hoax? “My Kid Could Paint That” The documentary “asks fascinating questions about art, family and journalistic ethics.”  This article concerns a new documentary about a young girl (Marla) who became a modern art phenom.  At least things were going well until the maker of that documentary, Amir Bar-Lev, started digging deeply:

As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman discusses in the film, Marla’s story appealed to two contradictory popular prejudices. First of these is the idea of prodigal artistic talent as a lottery prize handed out to random toddlers by God. Second is the notion that modern art (at least in its abstract or nonfigurative guises) is a pseudo-intellectual con game that has no standards and conveys no meaning, so the apparent success of a 4-year-old debunks the whole enterprise.

I know that I’m not the first person to cry that the Emperor has no Clothes, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to cry out. I do wonder how far one could go as a modern artist with a pristine resume, assuming that the abstract art you presented as your own was actually art created by non-artists.  For instance, how easily or often could the scribbles and doodles of children pass as the creations of an adult “artistic genius?” To look at it another way, imagine that a traditional painting (e.g., Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”) was accidentally destroyed. Compare the pain the world would feel to the pain it would feel at the loss of a piece of abstract art prominently displayed in one of the world’s modern art museums.

To make it clear, I’m not dissing all modern art.  There is some that consists 99% of unchannelled energy as opposed to creative effort.

I look forward to viewing the aboved-described documentary.  To listen to Bar-Lev’s podcast regarding his video, go here.

I wish I could have taken credit for writing an article I just read:  The presidential primary scam: Why the game is rigged, and why true democracy is only a secondary factor in the nation’s rush to nominate the next president.   The author is Michael Scherer. Here a taste of the article:

The whole stinking process was designed by dead men in smoky parlors and refined by faceless bureaucrats in hotel conference rooms. It is a nasty brew born of those caldrons of self-interest known as political parties. At every stage, advantage is parceled out like so much magic potion.

. . . This election cycle, a top Democratic candidate shaking someone’s hand in Miami before the end of January is breaking the rules, unless that someone is handing the candidate a check at the same time. To put it another way, Democrats’ communicating with voters has been barred in Florida, but taking money from voters is OK. To put it a third way, the system is not only irrational but offensive to the nation’s most basic values. “The only way that you can hear a candidate campaign is if you are willing to pay a campaign contribution,” explains Steven Geller, Florida’s exasperated state Senate Democratic leader. “It is astounding.”

They don’t teach all of this in school, because even a fourth-grader would get up from his desk and walk out of the classroom in protest.

The devil is in the details and this article provides plenty of details. 

Here a meta-aside.  Have you ever seen a parent dealing with an obstreperous three-year old?  A time-tested parent trick is to offer the child trivial choices, making the child believe that she is empowered with regard to the endeavor (“Would you like to clean your room before lunch or after lunch?”).  The trick is that the choices function as distractions, whereas the basic outcome is fixed from the get go. 

It’s the same thing with voting.   By the time Election Day rolls around, all of the deal-making has already occurred, much of it according to Byzantine political party procedures detailed by this article.  By the way, political parties are not even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.  Good luck voting for a candidate who doesn’t ally himself with a political party.  The bottom line is that you get to vote for this corporate money corrupted candidate or that corporate money corrupted candidate.  It’s your choice!   That is the essence of the “freedom” to vote, that you have a choice that is not much of a choice at all.  

Why isn’t it a wide open field?  Because the whole process is corrupted by money (And see here and here). And because most highly qualified people want nothing to do with politics. And because even good people can be swift-boated into ignominy.  I recently disparaged the belief in free will.  The faux vote is a good example of how things feel wide open free when they are anything but (I can vote for this candidate or that one or I can throw away my vote on a write-in candidate).  The political system treats adult voters like three-year-olds.  

Mark Liberman of Language Log offers an  interesting perspective on innumeracy in two disparate cultures:

The Pirahã language and culture seem to lack not only the words but also the concepts for numbers, using instead less precise terms like “small size”, “large size” and “collection”. And the Pirahã people themselves seem to be suprisingly uninterested in learning about numbers, and even actively resistant to doing so, despite the fact that in their frequent dealings with traders they have a practical need to evaluate and compare numerical expressions. A similar situation seems to obtain among some other groups in Amazonia, and a lack of indigenous words for numbers has been reported elsewhere in the world.

Many people find this hard to believe. These are simple and natural concepts, of great practical importance: how could rational people resist learning to understand and use them? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that we can investigate a strictly comparable case, equally puzzling to me, right here in the U.S. of A.

[...]

Until about a hundred years ago, our language and culture lacked the words and ideas needed to deal with the evaluation and comparison of sampled properties of groups. Even today, only a minuscule proportion of the U.S. population understands even the simplest form of these concepts and terms. Out of the roughly 300 million Americans, I doubt that as many as 500 thousand grasp these ideas to any practical extent, and 50,000 might be a better estimate. The rest of the population is surprisingly uninterested in learning, and even actively resists the intermittent attempts to teach them, despite the fact that in their frequent dealings with social and biomedical scientists they have a practical need to evaluate and compare the numerical properties of representative samples.

If we project this state of affairs onto the scale of the Pirahã society, with roughly 300 members, we arrive at something like 0.05 to 0.5 people out of 300 who understand how to count and compare quantities in ways that have become essential to the culture. In this respect, I submit, we are exactly like them.

Before 1900 or so, only a few mathematical geniuses like Gauss (1777-1855) had any real ability to deal with these issues. But even today, most of the population still relies on crude modes of expression like the attribution of numerical properties to prototypes (”A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000″) or the comparison of bare-plural nouns (”men are happier than women”).

Sometimes, people are just avoiding more cumbersome modes of expression — “Xs are P-er than Ys” instead of (say) “The mean P measurement in a sample of Xs was greater than the mean P measurement in a sample of Ys, by an amount that would arise by chance fewer than once in 20 trials, assuming that the two samples were drawn from a single population in which P is normally distributed”. But I submit that even most intellectuals don’t really know how to think about the evaluation and comparison of distributions — not even simple univariate gaussian distributions, much less more complex situations. And many people who do sort of understand this, at some level, generally fall back on thinking (as well as talking) about properties of group prototypes rather than properties of distributions of individual characteristics.

If you’re one of the people who find distribution-talk mystifying, and don’t really see why you should have to learn it, or perhaps think that you’re just not the kind of person who learns things like this — congratulations, you now know exactly how (I imagine) the Pirahã feel about number-talk.

Does this matter? Well, in the newspapers every week, there are dozens of stories about risks and rewards, epidemiology and politics, social trends and psychological differences, with serious public-policy implications, which you can’t understand without understanding distribution-talk. And usually you won’t just feel baffled — instead, you’ll think you understand, and draw the wrong conclusions.

In fact, the people who write these stories mostly don’t understand distribution-talk themselves, and in any case they believe that they need to write for an audience that doesn’t understand it. As a result, news stories on these topics are usually impossible to understand correctly unless you go back to the primary sources in order to recover the information that’s been distorted or omitted. I imagine that something similar must happen when one Pirahã tells another about the deal that this month’s river trader is offering on knives.

It’s getting harder and harder to sell recorded music, though live concerts are still viable, according to this article by the London Times.

What looks like commercial suicide is, in today’s reality, sound business sense. Records, CDs or downloads now have all become downgraded to the status of promotional tools – useful to sell concert tickets and fan paraphernalia. While there is still good money to be made in music, and particularly on the concert circuit, the record business – blame it on piracy, too many CD giveaways or the advent of the recordable CD – is a busted flush.

What’s the preferred treatment for Major Depressive Disorder?  According to this study by a large team of researchers, anti-depressant medication and exercise led to comparable results.  The exercise consisted of 10 minutes of warming up, then 30 minutes of jogging or brisk walking, enough to get to 70% of maximum heart rate reserve.

How many Blackwater incidents like this are unreported?  I am just amazed when I hear repeated  Republican claims that things are going well in Iraq.  Until I know that reporters can wander out of the Green Zone un-escorted, I’ll continue to assume that no news is bad news. 

New research reveals even if only one or two members of a group repeats an opinion, it is likely to be seen by others as representative of the whole group.

Why does this occur? It boils down to availability and memory.  Compare this to the famous social psychology experiments run by Soloman Asch in the 1950’s.   Remember to speak up, because your silence might be construed to be a vote against your own actual opinions.

Make sure that you scroll down and look at the photos of all the other phony soldiers too. The reason for Rush’s deferment puts it into even better context.

Nothing like going to Washington D.C. to promote preemptive war with the support of your 50 million supporters.  That organization is Christians United for Israel (CUFI). 

They do nothing with more energy than they divide the world into us and them, good and evil.  They’ve got the support of many members of the U.S. Congress, as documented by this video report by Bill Moyers.

They, led by John Hagee, are pushing hard for a preemptive military strike on Iran.

The end game?  Israel and the U.S. “need” to attack Iran, then Russia and Middle Eastern countries will attack Israel, resulting in the Battle of Amegeddon.  This all needs to be done to please God.  Nothing like a clear conscience to enable wartime atrocities. “It’s time to get ready to meet the Son of God.”  According to Hagee, the “Rapture” is imminent. 

In public political gatherings, however, Hagee shows his hypocrisy:  he denies that his support of Israel has anything to do with religion or Bible prophecies.  See Moyers’ documentary for the proof.

Here’s more on the fundamentalist approach to the end of the world.  And see here and here.  For you unbelievers, here is a diagram of the end of the world, made simple.  

If you knew nothing at all about Christianity, after watching the speeches of these “Christians,” you would bet your house that the founder of Christianity had said things like “Hate you enemies” and “Never turn your other cheek,” and “Start a war before someone starts a war against you.”   It all makes me feel so very alien in my own country.

Here’s an article presenting nine questions by a Christian about Christianity. Good questions, such as:

2. How have the words of man (e.g. Virtually the entire Bible, minus direct quotes from Jesus) become equal with what we believe to be the words of God? How is what Paul said equal to what Jesus said? I must have missed the footnotes where the writers of what we call the Bible claimed to be infallible.

4. Where is the historical evidence of even just one miraculous happening from the OT?

Last week, a dear friend asked me if I had an iPod.  I told her I did not.  She knows that I like to listen to lectures and interviews and so does she.  She told me that numerous interviews can be downloaded for free through Apple’s iTunes site. She gave me a tour of the site and convinced me that you can, indeed, download thousands upon thousands of intriguing sounding interviews from NPR and numerous other sources. 

She saw that I was intrigued with this possibility.  She also knew that I ride a bike to work and I therefore was not able to listen to live radio during my commute.  She suggested that if I had an iPod, I could listen to all kinds of interesting things as I pedal to to work.  In fact, she went so far as to ask me whether I would promise to use an iPod if she gave me one.  I said “sure.” She ducked into the next room and emerged with a small box containing an iPod Shuffle, a device that is about as big as a postage stamp.  The shuffle holds 20 hours of music or interviews in its 1 GB memory.  The tiny kit comes with a charger/USB port that allows you to drag tunes and interviews into the Shuffle through the use of the iTunes interface.  It is all incredibly slick and easy to use.  I accepted this tiny though generous gift, only half-expecting it to work when I got home (it just seemed to small to do the things that it supposedly did).

But work it did, and the Shuffle is now a regular part of my life.  I “subscribe” to numerous news and information sources and I drag these interviews and speeches into my Shuffle.  I have also imported a dozen of my musical CDs into iTunes and then dragged many of those songs onto the Shuffle as well.  The Shuffle does not have a display, but it has transport controls that are easily operated by your finger.  I don’t yet know how long the battery lasts, but I’ve been playing music for two hours at a time without a problem-perhaps it will go a lot longer than even that.  The musical fidelity is outstanding.  The Shuffle comes with two earbuds which fit comfortably into the ears.  Truly, I don’t make a dime off of Apple products but I’m writing this post because I am so incredibly impressed by this technology.  By the way, the Shuffle kit costs only $79.  The Apple’s iTunes software is free.  Within 30 minutes of opening the Shuffle, you will be almost an expert at using iTunes along with your Shuffle.

Today I was listening to jazz while riding a light rail train.  I was noticing all the people milling around at the station while I privately listened to George Gershwin compositions.  It was then that it occurred to me that the high fidelity music I was listening to was making everything I saw seem like a transitional scene in a movie.  It was a bit disorienting.  It made life seem like a movie, except everything was a transitional scene and there were no talking parts, because I could not really hear them with music playing.  While listening to music, everything you notice takes on the ambience of your music.  It’s the same effect that you can see in this comedy piece, a takeoff on Mary Poppins.  Then again, if you’re playing happy music, those non-orchestrated scenes of people you notice on the trains and in the train stations all look much happier than they otherwise look. (more…)

People who are asked to rate the importance of various traits for romantic relationships, a good sense of humor is consistently at or near the top of their lists. Geoffrey Miller has concluded additonal work on the importance of a sense of humor to attract mates, resulting in a paper entitled, “The Role of Creativity and Humor in Human Mate Selection.” One of Miller’s main conclusions:  “Women seemed to be viewing humor production ability as a reliable cue of many other desirable fitness-related traits.”  It is important to note, though, that men and women mean different things by “a good sense of humor.”

Men prefer women who appreciate their humor, while women prefer men who make them laugh (Bressler, Martin, & Balshine, 2006). This is consistent with Provine’s (2000) analysis of over 3,000 singles ads, in which women were more likely to offer good humor appreciation, whereas men were more likely to offer good humor production ability. Furthermore, Bressler and Balshine (2006) found that women rated humorous men as better potential partners, and as more friendly, fun, and popular. Women did not show any such preference for humorous women as potential friends. Additionally, a man’s view of other men’s or women’s personality attributes was uninfluenced by how funny such others were.

Although much additional work is required, it is clear that a sense of humor plays a key role in attracting mates:

In sum, mounting evidence supports the view that sexual selection favored the evolution of humor production ability as a fitness indicator, and humor appreciation ability as a mate choice mechanism. In particular, males and females value different aspects of humor in potential mates (females like funny males, and males like appreciative females), female and male brains respond to humor differently (females process linguistic aspects of humor more efficiently and show greater activation in reward centers), and females near peak fertility are especially attracted to males who display creativity and humor. These sex differences and cycle shifts build upon the basic psychometric distinctions between humor production, comprehension, and appreciation, which are related to each other and to intelligence and creativity in ways that are also consistent with sexual selection theory and fitness indicator theory. Since mating intelligence consists of the cognitive arsenal used to attract and retain mates, the findings so far suggest that humor, as an indicator of both creativity and intelligence, is an important part of that arsenal. 

I’ve often read about split brain patient demostrations, but I’ve never before seen them. This video also includes explanations by Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in this field.

I have a friend who wrote a song to me. (Free mp3 download courtesy of Anderson Productions, Ltd.) “Dear Friend” appeared on Russ Anderson’s 2003 album, “Arsenal Street”. All his CD’s are Available here. I recommend listening to the song before proceeding.

This nice, eerie, and sometimes psychedelic song is a heartfelt plea for me to discard my narrow, science-informed view of the world and just try to accept the ultimate truth of his favorite, ancient, re-translated book.
When my very Christian 11 year old nephew heard the song, he worried that it would anger me. He is fond of both Russ and myself, and the song conveys a basic disconnect. Conversations I’ve had with other Absolute Biblically Literal Truth Christians indicate that these are common misperceptions of atheist ideology.

Let’s examine some of the contentions in the song:

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“If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow.”  Mario Andretti

Like most people I know, I try to keep quite a few balls in the air.   Those balls represent things such as prosecuting lawsuits against large unscrupulous businesses.  

Today, for instance, the two lawyers who constitute my firm’s consumer class action practice area (I’m one of the two) sued a large corporate dairy that has been distributing “organic milk” to large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target.  The problem is that the milk was not organic.  A federal investigation recently determined that the dairy engaged in willful violations of organic dairy farm standards.  Our plaintiffs are asking that the customers who paid big premiums for the “organic” milk should be refunded their money, at least the difference in cost between the price of the organic milk and the plain milk.  The plaintiffs in our suit are both mothers of small children.  They both reached deep to pay the extra money so that their children would not be exposed to the hormones and antibiotics of conventional cow milk.  One of the women is a chemist and the other is a biologist.  They had detailed reasons for paying the extra money for the organic milk.  Another reason is that they didn’t want cows to be mistreated in order to provide milk.  These women (and the thousands or millions of other customers in this potential class) were cheated out of substantial sums of money.  Just add up the cost of several gallons of organic milk per week for several years. 

At the law firm where I work, some of us operate on a sad assumption.  If there is a way to cheat customers and probably get away with it, some business, somewhere, will try to cheat its customers.  Cheating customers is not fair to the customers, of course.  But it’s also not fair to those other businesses that play by the rules.  In this dairy farm case, we suspect that the big dishonest dairy probably put some honest organic dairy farmers out of business.  That would be a terrible shame, and that is part of our motivation for suing dishonest businesses. 

Here’s another thing.  This case makes me wonder how many other “organic” foods are not organic.  My gut feeling is that half of the organic food out there is not appreciably different in the way it was grown compared to non-organic, yet people are paying big premiums for it, often to protect their children who are in neurologically sensitive development windows.

Filing lawsuits is only one aspect of my life.  It takes enormous numbers of hours to file and try lawsuits.  It’s can also be physically exhausting work, but it feels compelling and important.  We try to do things right, so we would be proud if anything we did appeared on the front page headline of the newspaper. 

Here’s a problem, though. Doing this demanding work drains hours from other important parts of my life.  I am the father of two young children who are bursting with thoughts and insights, with joyous curiosity.  They still enjoy spending time with their father–I understand that this won’t be the case in a few more years when they are teenagers. I want to take advantage of this time, to spend many hours with them so that I can look back someday and believe that I was a real parent.  There is nothing more important to me than spending time with my children and actively listening to them.  Doing the work of a parent doesn’t allow shortcuts.  A few hours of good quality time here and there doesn’t substitute for the many hours required to be a real parent. I am married to a wonderful woman who makes me laugh and makes me try extra hard to run my life in a way I am proud of.   I wish I could spend many more hours with my family than I do.  We do have bills to pay, though . . .

There are also the other things that are important to me.  We need to keep a household running, which requires cleaning and fixing the house and bill paying and cooking.   Sometimes, believe it or not, we lose things and we have to look for them!  

What are the other important things that require my energy?   Being part of the community, and supporting do-gooder organizations.  We support organizations like Free Press and Public Citizen and Children International.  All of this takes time and money.

What else takes time?  Exercising.  I do that by combining bicycling and commuting.  It’s one attempt at efficiency.  And oh, yeah.  Blogging.  That’s a big commitment.  For whom do I do it?  I won’t pretend.  I do it because it forces me to think more clearly before I hit that publish button.  I makes me analyze ideas more closely than I did before I blogged, because I don’t want to be embarrassed and I don’t want to confuse people.  I do it for because it helps me think more clearly, though I’m honored that others come to visit this site.  I’m amazed and honored, plus I really enjoy the interactions.  I think that blogging has changed me for the better.

What else is important to me?  Playing music (I play guitar and keyboard, occasionally performing in public).  It’s fun but also therapeutic.  Each of these things is a big part of me, but they sometimes tug at me at the same time and this disorients me.

I’d like to spend more time doing each of these things (and many other things I haven’t mentioned), but there are no additional hours.  Every hour at work is an hour away from my family.  Every hour writing is an hour not sleeping. Here’s a danger of trying to live multiple lives: if you take on one thing too many it doesn’t just feel as though you are failing in doing that one additonal activity. Instead, it can feel like everything you do is inadequate, faulty, defective.  But you often don’t know that you’re over that edge until you actually step over to the other side and feel the pain.

I’ve often try to be more efficient.  Sometimes I almost become almost obsessed with efficiency but I truly can’t think of many more ways to squeeze more life out of each week.  There are only 168 hours in each week.  That number is burned into my mind because it feels like a modest handful of time.  It wasn’t always that way. (more…)

You can now attend lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, for free. Here’s the site to visit to attend the courses.

“UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life: academics, events and athletics,” said vice provost for undergraduate education Christina Maslach.

The University plans to continually add videos to the channel, which officially launched Wednesday with about nine full courses consisting of approximately 40 lectures each.

Here are two of the current offerings:

Integrative Biology 131 39 Videos
Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy. Fall 2005. Professor Marian Diamond. The functional anatomy of the human body as revealed by gross and microscopic examination.  The Department of Integrative Biology offers a program of instruction that focuses on the integration of structure and function in the evolution of diverse biological systems. It investigates integration at all levels of organization from molecules to the biosphere, and in all taxa of organisms from viruses to higher plants and animals.

Physics 10 - Physics for Future Presidents 26 Videos
Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents. Spring 2006. Professor Richard A. Muller. The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events. Topics covered may vary and may include energy and conservation, radioactivity, nuclear physics, the Theory of Relativity, lasers, explosions, earthquakes, superconductors, and quantum physics. Credits: lecturer:Professor Richard A. Muller, producers:Educational Technology Services

You can also take a course called SIMS 141 - Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. It is taught by a group of teachers that includes Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google.

Stewart is a talented interviewer, but this one is especially good. It was satisfying, indeed, to see Stewart expose the amoral and clueless Matthews.