Selective separation clause application

Imagine if a group of Muslims wanted to seek state tax breaks to build a Muslim theme park.  You'd hear a lot of squealing.  In fact, you heard lots of squealing regarding the "ground zero mosque" (which was not primarily a mosque and was not at ground zero). Now consider this news from Think Progress:

A group of private investors and religious organizations is hoping to build a Bible-themed amusement park in Kentucky, complete with a full-size 500-foot-by-75-foot reproduction of Noah’s Ark, a Tower of Babel, and other biblical exhibits on a 800-acre campus outside of Williamstown, KY. Their effort got a shot in the arm yesterday when the state approved $43 million in tax breaks for the project. In addition to the tax incentives, approved unanimously by the state’s tourism board, taxpayers may have to pony up another $11 million to improve a highway interchange near the site.

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The depraved soul of Comcast, and the actions of heroic girls

If you haven't heard enough about Comcast to disgust you yet, check out the stunt Comcast pulled regarding a non-profit summer film camp for girls. Comcast displayed raw vindictiveness when one of the girls showed disrespect by criticizing FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker Attwell for taking a high-paying job lobbying for Comcast only four months after approving the Comcast-NBC merger. The details of the story are shocking, and these girls have become my heroes. Here's the account from a letter I received from Free Press today:

When Seattle’s Reel Grrls – an award-winning program that teaches teenage girls to make their own media – criticized Comcast on Twitter for its outrageous hiring of FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, Comcast came after them. A Comcast VP immediately fired off an email saying the company was cutting off $18,000 in funding it had pledged for a summer camp teaching filmmaking, editing and screenwriting. Without those funds, the Reel Grrls camp won’t happen. We need to stand up to Comcast’s censors – and show these young media justice activists we’ve got their backs. Can you give $25 to Reel Grrls to keep their summer camp going without Comcast’s cash? Reel Grrls didn’t back down or delete their tweet. They didn’t let Comcast silence them. Instead, they called their allies and alerted the media. And once the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Associated Press got hold of the story, Comcast suddenly changed its tune. It claimed the threats were "unauthorized" and said it wouldn’t yank the funds. But Reel Grrls are sticking to their principles. They’re telling Comcast to keep its money if it’s going to try to censor what they say.

Here's yet another account of this story that includes the Tweet that started the troubles. After reading these accounts tonight, I was so moved that sent the girls $100 to help them carry on with their education. If you're interested in helping out, click here. This story illustrates the vast power the big telecoms have and the fact that they are all-too-willing to abuse that power. This is an illustration of what the telecoms have in mind for all of us with regard to net neutrality.

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North Carolina caves to telecom attack on community broadband

Free Press issued this press release today:

WASHINGTON – North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue today refused to veto a bill that will hinder towns’ and municipalities’ ability to build their own broadband networks, ignoring of thousands of phone calls and emails from her constituents and others around the country concerned about communities being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide. The bill, pushed through the statehouse by Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink, stifles local efforts to bring faster, affordable broadband to areas of the state under served by the incumbent phone and cable companies. Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron made the following statement: “In refusing to veto the bill, Governor Perdue sided with powerful phone and cable companies and against efforts by local communities to build their own crucial communications infrastructure. Rather than stand up for her constituents, she ignored their voices and thousands of others from across the nation who had urged her to stand up for real broadband competition and choice. “The big cable companies view these municipal upstarts as major threats and are willing to shower local legislatures with campaign contributions to block their way. North Carolina is just the latest example of what phone and cable incumbents are hoping to do across the nation. Though they’re unwilling to invest in their networks or extend them to communities that need them, they won’t allow anyone else to do it. They’re now threatening to introduce similar bills in other states where municipal broadband efforts are poised to provide citizens with cheaper and faster alternatives. “In light of what has happened in North Carolina, we need federal legislation that would protect the rights of communities to build their own municipal networks. Protecting local communities’ ability to build their own networks was a key recommendation of the National Broadband Plan, and such legislation has attracted bipartisan support in the past. Millions of people across the country lack access to broadband Internet because big companies like Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink and AT&T chose not to extend services to where they live. These same companies – and the politicians whose campaigns they fund – should not be able to block local governments from offering the Internet service their constituents need.”

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And now there’s Error Management Theory

Why do people so readily believe in Gods?  Dominic D.P. Johnson presents “Error Management Theory” (the name plays off Terror Management Theory).  This is an excerpt from the abstract Johnson's book, The Error of God: Error Management Theory, Religion, and the Evolution of Cooperation:

“Error Management Theory” is derived from signaling theory, suggests that if the costs of false positive and false negative decision-making errors have been asymmetric over human evolutionary history, then natural selection would favor a bias towards the least costly error over time (in order to avoid whichever was the worse error). So, for example, we have a bias to sometimes think that sticks are snakes (which is harmless), but never that snakes are sticks (which may be deadly). Applied to religious beliefs and behaviors, I derive the hypothesis from EMT that humans may gain a fitness advantage from a bias in which they tend to assume that their every move (and thought) is being watched, judged, and potentially punished by supernatural agents. Although such a belief would be costly because it constrains freedom of action and self-interested behaviors, it may nevertheless be favored by natural selection if it helps to avoid an error that is even worse: committing selfish actions or violations of social norms when there is a high probability of real-world detection and punishment by victims or other group members. Simply put, supernatural beliefs may have been an effective mindguard against excessively selfish behaviour – behavior that became especially risky and costly as our social world became increasingly transparent due to the evolution of language and theory of mind. If belief in God is an error, it may at least be an adaptive one.

I spotted this abstract while exploring a website titled Evolution of Religion. Here's the aim of the project, of which Dominic Johnson is a part:

Religious believers incur significant costs in terms of time, energy and resources that could be spent elsewhere. Religion therefore poses a major puzzle for disciplines that explain behavior on the basis of individual costs and benefits—in particular economics and evolutionary biology. To many scholars, religious beliefs and behaviors appear so bizarre and so costly that they fall outside rational explanation, leading instead to explanations based on psychosis, cognitive accidents, or cultural parasites. The aim of our project is to conduct a scientific examination of exactly the opposite hypothesis—that religious beliefs and behavior confer adaptive advantages to individual believers, and were therefore favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. In other words, religion may have evolved.

For further reading on the evolution of religion, the website offers this reading list.

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