Nazis In My Neighborhood

This morning I opened my front door to find a flier lying on the porch.  I thought it was another local contractor ad or announcement of a barbecue-and-rummage sale, so I scooped it up to glance at it before dropping it in the recycle hopper.  Instead, I find in my hand a vile piece of unconscionable poison.  And it seemed like it would be such a nice day! I’m not going to dignify this crap by citing the source.  The header of the two-side sheet reads: The Holocaust Controversy  The Case For Open Debate.  What follows is a putrid example of revisionist nonsense designed to suggest that six million Jews were not systematically slaughtered by the Third Reich.  In tone, it is reasonable.  It does not  make many strident claims with exclamation points, just calmly asserts one bullshit “fact” after another (plus a photograph of an open pit containing the skeletonized remains of concentration camp victims labeling it a photo of typhus victims) to lay the groundwork for the claim that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that it is all a Big Lie assembled by a Zionist conspiracy to advance the cause of sympathy for stateless Jews in order to get them a state. [More . . . ]

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Famous Bible verses that never actually appear in the Bible

People make all kinds of claims about Bible verses that don't actually appear in the Bible. These phantom verses are the topic of this CNN article. Here's an excerpt:

These phantom passages include: “God helps those who help themselves.” “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” And there is this often-cited paraphrase: Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden. None of those passages appear in the Bible, and one is actually anti-biblical, scholars say.

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Will China’s moonshots rejuvenate America’s respect for science?

China has already sent two unmanned lunar probes to the moon, and China has bold plans to send several astronauts to the moon by 2017. While those Chinese astronauts are on the moon, they plan to mine helium 3, an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion.  We can assume that when Chinese astronauts step onto the moon, video cameras will be bringing beautiful images back to the world, which will then applaud China’s great technological achievement, to America’s begrudging dismay. Thus, China is about to a space exploring nation in a dramatic and visible way. This is exactly what American needs. Why? China’s highly visible lunar program comes at a time when American is dramatically cutting its space ambitions (including the Shuttle program). America is being subjected to systematic campaigns disparaging science, much of it driven by religious leaders, corporate disinformation and government attempts to manipulate data.  At the same time, anti-science religion is thriving in many American classrooms. The United States is essentially a warmongering nation; we lurch from war to war. Americans apparently need an enemy to make sense of things. For us to get our heads back into science and math, we apparently need a math and science “enemy,” someone to intellectually challenge our standing as a technologically "advanced" nation. [More . . . ]

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The filtered Internet

It used to be that people were subject to the whims of old media, human gate-keepers who decided that type of information we should see. The Internet was supposed to change all of that, but we are now seeing startling examples that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo News among many other companies, are using algorithms to please us by giving us what they deem to be “relevant.” Author Eli Pariser, executive director of Moveon.org, asked several friends to search the same term (“Egypt”) in Google, and they received dramatically different results. It turns out that there is no longer any standard version of Google. The new version uses dozens of bits of information about you to give you what it thinks you want. Facebook also employs such relevance algorithms to weed out information, and even “friends” that it has decided that you don’t want. In the case of Pariser, whose politics are progressive, Facebook edited out information from his conservative “friends.” What would be the advantage to giving us what we want? Certainly, some of us want to live in a world where everyone appears to think the same. But such filtering would also have a commercial purpose—giving only “relevant” hits might facilitate Internet sales. In this excellent ten-minute TED talk, Pariser tells that the Internet is increasingly geared to giving us what we want to see rather than what we need to see. In this talk, Pariser has challenged the new Internet gatekeepers to make this ubiquitous filtering of information transparent and to give user control over it. We will all be better off, he warns, when we get information that makes us uncomfortable, and information that is important, as well as information that challenges us, rather than simply giving us what they think we want.

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Melanoma is Sneaky

Much to my surprise, I recently was diagnosed with melanoma. Fortunately, I was suspicious of a skin spot, and showed it to a dermatologist. He shrugged and said, "probably not," but cut it off for a biopsy. A week later he called and told me to see a surgeon ASAP. I now am scheduled for minor surgery and further biopsy. The prognosis is, "Don't worry about it." Then a friend from high school shared this video with me, and told me that he's been inspired by my post to see a dermatologist to check out his spots. What you don't know can kill you. Had I ignored the spot, I might have lived another decade before it killed me. I knew a fellow who had a mole burned off, a couple of times, before someone bothered to biopsy it. By then, they gave him 6 months. But he was an athletic individual who wouldn't quit, and lived five years. But those last couple of years were hardly living, in terms of quality of life.

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