Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo?

Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo? Andy Worthington has compiled a four-part series telling us their stories. Here's the disturbing bottom line:

[A]t least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

I don't pretend to know enough to know whether these accounts are totally accurate, but they are filled with details, personal anecdotes, statistics and reports regarding individual court cases. It has a strong ring of authenticity. Further, these individual accounts corroborate general accounts produced elsewhere. I have no reason to disbelieve any part of Andy Worthington's work. He is a well-reputed journalist who has published elsewhere, such as this post at Huffington Post. I am proud to be an American. America does much right in the world and has the potential to do much more that is admirable. This account by Andy Worthington, however, describes America at its shameful worst.

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Susi Neunmalklug explains the evolution!

Tis a pity we don't make things like this in the U.S. Neun = 9, Mal = times, Klug = smart. So Susi Neunmalklug translates into Susie Smartypants. Yeah. Ask a linguist or etymologist about the evolution of vernacular. So, imagine a religion teacher coming in to your class and explaining where we come from to kids who were raised to know better. Anyway, this video is wa-ay cute, and has English subtitles. Tip of the mustache to Pharyngula

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George Will’s irresponsible article denying climate change and the Washington Post’s irresponsible fact-checking

George Will has written an irresponsible article denying climate change (AKA global warming). Here’s the basic problem with George Will’s writing, as stated succinctly by The Wonk Room:

In “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will attacked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for discussing a worst-case scenario of California drought caused by the decimation of Sierra snowpack, falsely claiming Chu predicted this will come to pass “no later than 10 years away.” Will also incorrectly claimed that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ — based on a 45-day-old blog post by Daily Tech’s Michael Asher, one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.

Will’s article is riddled with falsehoods. The radically untrue nature of Will’s article is beyond dispute. Confronted with Will’s cauldron of conservative climate denial propaganda, the Washington Post was faced with a stark choice. It could either A) confess that it failed to do any competent fact-checking or B) compound Will’s lies with its own by claiming that it did real fact-checking. It chose “B.”

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Can Science Trump Religion?

This is not a question of whether science can or should prove or disprove the existence or non-existence of God or gods. Some of us believe that we are living in an era of rationalism, or enlightenment. Some, like Dawkins, even hope to see rational thinking purge religious clap trappings from society. The question is, can rational thinking ever purge society of silly ideas? I was reading the Dale McGowan post Best Practices 4: Teach engaged coexistence and he obliquely gives the answer. Consider:

  • Coperincus (ca. 1500) decisively proved that Astrology was unfounded.
  • Avagadro (ca. 1800) proved that Homeopathy was bunk.
  • John Philips (ca. 1840) proved that the Earth was at least 90 million years old (before Darwin published, or more accurate isotopic dating techniques were even imagined)
  • Hubble (ca. 1920) proved that not only was our solar system tiny compared to the galaxy, but that our galaxy is infinitesimal compared to the visible universe.
Surely we would no longer find anyone to believe that the stars predict our future, that water has memory, that the Earth is young, or that the Earth is the sole point of all creation. No amount of education of thinking individuals will ever remove the comforting effects of belief in paranormal salvation for the majority of mankind.

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Isaac Asimov talks with Bill Moyers

This video was created many years ago--based on Moyers' description of the American space program, it was probably made in the early to mid 1960's. I had never before seen any video of Asimov (though I have read some of his writings), and I found this video (part of an episode from "Bill Moyers World") to be engaging. The topics: science and education. I also found what appears to be a full transcript of the interview at Harpers Magazine, which contains some additional information, including this exchange on the power and limits of science:

MOYERS: What's the real knowledge?

ASIMOV: We can't be absolutely certain. Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. This works not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it. We don't pretend that we know everything. In fact, it would be terrible to know everything because there'd be nothing left to learn. But you don't want to be up a blind alley somewhere.

As you might assume, Wikipedia has an informative biography on Asimov. After viewing this video, I looked it up. I especially enjoyed his comment on religion:

In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote, "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul." The same memoir states his belief that Hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife of just deserts existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who "slandered God by inventing Hell."

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