I am extremely depressed right now.

As a first year law student, one of the basic things you learn in Constitutional Law is that the Second Amendment means virtually nothing these days. It is the same with the Third Amendment, actually. The Third states that soldiers cannot stay in your house without your consent. Were we to create a list of the ten most fundamental rights today, no one would even think to put this on the list. The second, similarly, deals with an antiquated militia system that no longer exists. State militias back in the day were composed of all able-bodied men and their personal firearms. The founders wanted to ensure this system continued – particularly that they couldn’t be disarmed by the nasty federal government. When it comes to Second Amendment challenges to gun control laws, virtually every court that has ever considered the issue has concluded that the Amendment has to do with militias. Since we don’t have militias anymore, the gun control laws stay in force.

Fast forward to today. Well, a week ago, in fact. DC v Heller is the first case in nearly 70 years where the Supreme Court has analyzed the meaning of the Amendment. It appears that 7 of 9 justices being Republican appointees has had some effect. The majority of the court seems to be favoring the conservative minority legal opinion – the NRA opinion – the gun kooks opinion – that individuals have a constitutional right to have guns that the government may not infringe (silly us, all concerned about children and safety).

Last week was just oral argument. The decision will not come until June, but this may very well be one of the worst (not to mention dangerous) opinions in the history of the court. Not since Dred Scott will so much blood be on the hands of members of the bench.

Odd side story. Yesterday I hosted a discussion among legal scholars on both sides of the issue. I ended up driving around one of the nation’s leading pro-gun advocates, who was a bit under the weather and not up to drive herself. Talk about awkwaaaaard.

Here is an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that demolishes any notion that guns have anything but a very negative affect on society.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp0800859

Posted by deuce at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Excuse my long absence from blogging. Law school keeps my retinas stapled to cinderblock-like, drivel-filled books of meanderings from senility-bound white men discussing legal theory. Just now, I was taking a break from the more obscure vicissitudes of copyrights when I nearly choked on my latte. Paul Davies, widely respected physicist and cosmologist, just wrote an article in the New York Times excoriating the notion that science is somehow less based on faith than theism. The guy at times makes it sound like the claims of David Koresh are just as valid as Einstein’s. There have been a couple of somewhat similar articles lately, notably by Dinesh D’Souza, the lunatic pseudo-intellectual who recently proved he neither understands Kant nor atheism in his editorial criticizing atheism on Kantian grounds (for another blog if I get the time). But this is different – Davies is respected by sane people! Here are a few of his gems:

“Both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too… the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place.”

What bilge. First, scientists don’t necessarily think the laws exist “outside the universe.” They are part of the universe. Second, the notion of physical law is empirical, not faith-based. When you drop a rock ten thousand times and it falls each time, it starts to seem as if there is a rule that the rock will fall when dropped. It takes a modicum of “faith” that the rock will fall the next time dropped, but this is not the same as religious faith, which embraces beliefs despite absence of or in spite of evidence. If the laws were inconsistent in different places or different times, we would just develop multiple models and not think of the laws as universal. To call a belief based on rigorous induction “faith” badly abuses the colloquial meaning of the word. This is just fuel for Christian nut jobs, who I know Davies despises.

“Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from ‘that’s not a scientific question’ to ‘nobody knows.’… The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational.”

The answer to Davies question might be purely anthropic: the laws are as they are because if there were no laws, or if they were different, life could not exist to ask the question. Physicists have tweaked many of the fundamental constants of the universe to see how an other-verse might behave: almost all variations result in oblivion. A similar idea is that there are multiple universes with different laws, ours just being one with laws suitable for life. He claims this is “dodging the issue.” Sort of, but this is not anti-rational. We accept that generally things have causes, but when you follow the chain of causation back to the start of materiality and its rules, you realize there must be something at the start that was without cause. If the rules necessarily needed an explanation, then the explanation needs an explanation, and so on ad infinitum. There must have been something causeless at the start. People have traditionally called this causeless thing God the creator, but God is totally superfluous: materiality itself may be the causeless thing. If the laws were there from the start, they may literally and inherently without explanation.

The other possibility is that there is a cause for the laws, but any theory about it is not testable, since this cause might somehow “pre-date” the universe. This would categorically mean that the cause is outside of science. But science is the only thing we have that isn’t pulling a belief out of our ass, so understanding the cause with any justification would be impossible.

Also, “nobody knows” is a plainly correct answer, since there is no hope to solve the problem in the absence of a unified theory of physics. Work on getting this theory first, Mr. Davies, then see whether your question makes any sense.

“There is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly....”

Davies is faulting science for being humble about its own limits, basically the opposite criticism as from Christians and postmodernists. This seems inconsistent with earlier concerns in the same article that science had too much confidence in its claims.

There are presuppositions in science, Mr. Davies. Everybody knows that. But this is not the same thing as religious faith – it’s a difference in degree and in kind - and it empowers the enemies of reason to suggest otherwise.

Posted by deuce at 07:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My brother was at Virginia Tech. He had a 9 AM class in his engineering building, shortly after which shooting broke out. Running out of the building, he opened the door to see a man donning multiple firearms – it was a police officer. Yes, my brother survived. Running down the street, hearing shots coming from everywhere, not knowing what was happening, how many shooters there were, and how many people were killed or injured, he made it to a lockdown room where he waited out the incident. As he put it to me, “it was complete chaos.”

Now my brother is very upset. He wants to know why, if there was a multiple homicide that morning, and the gunman was at large, why he had no word of this before going to his 9AM class. He wants to know why there was class at all. He wants to know why this kid was so mentally disturbed in the first place and why of all things he was able to purchase multiple firearms if his mental problems were well known. He came home this weekend, though his usual cheery and laid back persona was replaced with a straight face, wandering eyes and a somber “hello.”

My brother had a life changing experience, and I think I did too to a lesser extent. For one, I’ve completely flipped on my fairly “Republican” stance on guns. I grew up in a gun-toting household. My father has at least 5 guns of various types. He isn’t a Second Amendment repeating gun nut, but he considers guns necessary for the family farm – rats, groundhogs and rabid foxes and the like. My uncle is even a gun collector, keeping hundreds in safes that we practice with when I visit. As a result of being around guns and shooting them myself as a child, I more or less bought the Second Amendment line. When it came to other weapons so inherently dangerous – hardcore fireworks, explosives, chemical weapons, grenades, etc. – it seemed obvious to me that these should be restricted. These are things with which it is incredibly easy to end another human life, and don’t serve much practical use to the average citizen, so it is just common sense that you wouldn’t want just any joe schmoe to be able to get them. Guns were somehow exempted from this line of reasoning in my mind. Even though it is incredibly easy to kill another human being with a gun – just a twitch of the finger – for some reason they didn’t seem an appropriate thing to make difficult to acquire. I suppose guns are a part of our culture, so it seemed unnatural to ban them.

I think I was completely wrong. A gun should be treated like any other highly lethal weapon capable of quickly and easily killing other human beings: not just anybody should be able to get them.

What have I been thinking? Despite overwhelming evidence that guns kept for self-defense cause many many more innocent deaths than “bad guy” deaths; despite our thousands of gun murders every year, making us the only developed nation with such an embarrassing firearm homicide rate; despite the disturbing ease with which school shooter after school shooter is able to get a gun, I for some reason was very wary of regulation. I’m not afraid of regulation anymore, I’m afraid of guns.

Many have said after the Tech tragedy that it shows that we need more guns. I’m trying to imagine what would happen given the “chaos” that my brother described. Imagine you are in class and multiple shots begin ringing out. No one has any idea where they are coming from. Then all the untrained kids in the room start pulling out their handguns and trying to get out of the building. A few brave guys even go into the hallway not really for the purpose of escaping so much as trying to shoot the shooter. So now there is shooting, return shooting, lots of untrained kids with guns pouring into the hallways, not knowing who the shooter is or how many there are, mistaking friends for enemies and enemies for friends, some kids thinking they know who the shooter is and firing, others mistaking the kid who just fired for the shooter, and then the police arriving to the chaos of kids shooting not knowing what is happening – this is Newt Gingrich’s and other gun nut’s solution to the school shooting problem? Arm the all children with devices that can kill another human with just a twitch of the finger? It’s just beyond asinine.

So what should happen? First, I agree more people should have ways to defend themselves. But it seems obvious that those means should be non-lethal. Mace, taser, stun gun, I don’t care. I don’t want 18-year-old frat boys walking around campus with Glocks. If there is a shooting and the gunman gets hit with mace, he will be easy to subdue. If there is “friendly fire” in all the inevitable confusion, no one will die. Also, if we switch generally from a gun-defense society to a non-lethal defense society, and greatly restrict firearm access, these campus gunmen will have great difficulty obtaining the gun to do the shooting in the first place (just like in other developed countries where they don’t have these problems).

What about the Second Amendment? I wrote in a previous entry that I agree with the majority of courts that the only necessary and proper interpretation of the Amendment is that it applies to militias, and its guarantees extend no further.

Then there is the argument that goes something like this: “there is a big black market for guns in the US, and making guns illegal wont change that – it will just take the guns away from the good guys.” I used to basically accept this argument, but I’ve come to realize it is critically flawed. During Prohibition, when the government banned alcohol, it just empowered a huge black market in rum running. Anybody could distill alcohol in their bathtub, so the demand could easily be fed by anyone willing to take a little risk for a big reward. It is the same with marijuana. Anybody can grow marijuana in their basement, so the demand can easily be fed in a manner that is diffuse and extremely difficult to control. Guns, however, require very expensive industrial manufacturing equipment to make. Farmers cant make one in their basement (at least not any gun worth having). The demand is much more difficult to feed. Guns would have to be overwhelmingly smuggled into the country, but they can be detected with metal detectors easily so even that isn’t sure-fire. You look at other developed countries like in Western Europe and they have successfully restrained the black market. And so the flaw in the black market argument is that assault weapons are a different sort of thing than alcohol or marijuana – they cant be made in basements. With weed and alcohol, the black market works inversely to the legal market. If you ban weed, it empowers the black market for it. If you ban alcohol, it empowers the black market for it. With guns, there is a thriving black market already because there are so many guns in the legal market. A gun can pass so easily from being legally purchased to being sold under the table. The black market for guns tends to go with the legal market. Hence, if you make the legal guns scarce, if you do it right you can make the black market guns scarce too. This is why other developed countries have been successful keeping guns away from everyone, including the bad guys.

What about the founders’ concern that we have a “citizens army” in case of invasion? First, this wasn’t shared by all the founders, and second, there aren’t any armies amassing at our borders. The government can just start handing out the guns if we get invaded. This situation is just too improbable to warrant molding national policy around.

Finally, I don’t intend to take my father’s guns away from him. I think there should be exceptions for hunting weapons and farmer’s weapons. Just nothing with too big a clip, too easy to load, and nothing automatic. I also think its reasonable to ban shotgun slugs, hollowpoints, and anything over a certain caliber (.30 caliber comes to mind - I'm sorry but a Desert Eagle .50 is just way over the top). I also think that if someone goes through the proper training, gets a safe and a permit, that regular people should be able to have certain guns for collecting or target practice purposes. I would, on the other hand, ban all concealed firearm laws. The only people who should be able to carry a gun without impunity in public are military, police and certain government agents.

I truly and sincerely hope the deaths of the kids at Tech will be a watershed moment in gun control history. The old attitudes towards guns are smeared with the blood of our children.

Posted by deuce at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (41)

My buddy forwarded me this e-mail, which really got my blood boiling:

INTERESTING STATISTIC

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, here's a sobering statistic:

There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months and a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 for the same period.
That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington

People like Trent Lott have made similar claims, further entrenching my conviction that conservatives care for facts only insofar as they support their dogma. Here is my response:

Right away you look at this and it sounds obviously wrong, and is just a reflection of how people will believe things that dont make any sense without investigating them. DC has 580,000 residents (although this is very misleading because the population effectively swells to several million every day, and has an immense number of hotels, etc, but I'll throw them a bone and use that number). In 2005 there were 195 murders in the city, which is 16.25 murders per month. This is 2.8 murders per 100,000 per month. In contrast, in 4 years in Iraq with 3,267 deaths and 140,000 troop average, this is 49 per 100,000 per month. This means the death rate of US troops in Iraq is at least 17 times that of citizens of DC. When you factor in that DC effectively has a population of several million most of the time, and the fact that the troops dying in Iraq are in body armor and in armored HUM-V's, whereas the people dying in DC are walking around totally vulnerable, it is clear that Iraq is obscenely more dangerous than DC.

Feel free to forward this e-mail to others so they aren't tempted to believe this sort of nonsense.
Deuce

Posted by deuce at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

When I was a kid, I remember being told that the second amendment stood for “the right to bear arms.” I think this is what most of us were told. I accepted that little snippet as representative of the whole amendment without question. I saw my daddy’s gun rack as made possible by that text. Later I saw a little more, which read, the right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Seems straight forward, doesn’t it? And so, when I saw NRA folks saying that gun regulations and assault weapon bans violate the second amendment, there was a time when I was very sympathetic to them. But now I’m in law school, and I’ve come to learn that the little snippet we are taught as children and that is promoted by the NRA is taken hopelessly out of context.

To understand why, we need to go back in time a little bit. During the constitutional convention, the anti-federalists were extremely concerned about federal power infringing upon state rights. At that time in our history, people identified more as the resident of a particular state than as “Americans.” In particular, anti-federalists were worried about the federal government disarming the state militias, which were essential in winning the Revolutionary War. They were worried that the individual states would not have a way to protect themselves, especially if the federal government got out of control. At that time EVERYBODY was in the militia, or, rather, every able-bodied man. People kept their militia guns at home – this way there wouldn’t be one gun store that the enemy could capture. The anti-federalists wanted this system of state security to be protected, and so they pushed for the second amendment’s passage.

This is all well and good, but what is the deal with the words “the people”? “The right of the people to keep and bear arms.” If the second amendment was only to be about state militias, why didn’t they just say, “The right of their people to keep and bear arms”? An unbelievable amount of ink has been spilled and trees killed on what essentially boils down to why the word “the” as opposed to “their” is used. I think the answer is just because, at that time, everybody was in the militia, and so the militia was seen as a sort of manifestation of the people. This is the way it was for a long time, and apparently the way the drafters thought it would stay. The concern of the anti-federalists was thus not that individual people had gun rights per se, but that people who were in the state militias had the right to be armed in order to make effective that militia.

Clearly, not everybody is in the militia today (the militia system has evolved into the State National Guard), so the word “their” becomes more appropriate for modern understanding. With “State National Guard” in place of “militia”, the amendment reads: “A well regulated State National Guard, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of their people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This interpretation makes complete sense considering the concerns of the anti-federalists.

But why should you believe me? There are plenty of court decisions addressing the question of whether the second amendment guarantees individual gun rights, or just protects the states right to arm their forces.

There is only 1 Supreme Court case (US v Miller, 1939) that significantly interprets the second amendment, and to a certain extent it dodges the central question. Nonetheless, the Court in that case upholds the gun restriction statute that was challenged. The law put a $200 tax even on guns that cost about $10, which effectively banned them. This certainly would seem to qualify as “infringement” under the second amendment. The court emphasized that the second amendment should be interpreted in a state militia context, saying, “With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces (militias) the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.” More recently, there have been petitions to the Supreme Court to strike down the Assault Weapons Ban as unconstitutional. The Court has not seen fit to hear any of these cases.

There are also a number of federal circuit court decisions (federal courts right under the Supreme Court) interpreting the amendment in rich detail. There are 13 circuits in total, most of which have directly analyzed the second amendment question. Of those, only one has backed up the individual rights interpretation (not surprisingly, the 5th circuit that includes Texas. US v Emerson, 2002). Every single other decision has consistently held that the second amendment is only for protecting militias (search online for the 9th, 6th, 4th, 7th, 3rd, and 8th circuits’ decisions).

I think one final reason not to interpret the second amendment as guaranteeing individual gun rights is social in nature. With the types of weapons technology we have today, a ban on any “infringement” of firearm ownership would be an absolute nightmare. Guns already cost society $100 billion annually, with about 100,000 people being killed or injured by guns each year. In addition, the strict interpretation the NRA advocates would seem to legalize grenade launchers, bazookas, automatic weapons and other things that shouldn’t be available in a civilized society.

So the next time a gun-nut tells you that they love the second amendment, tell them that you do too, but probably not for the same reason as them. They’ve probably never heard of the dominant legal interpretation of the second amendment. It’s time to burst their bubble.

Posted by deuce at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm currently reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and well-known atheist, and he recites a fascinating study in the book:

"Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli school children, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:

Joshua said to the people, 'Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction... But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.'... Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of a sword... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put in to the treasury of the house of the LORD.

"[The children were asked if they approved of Joshua's actions] The results were polarized: 66% gave total approval and 26% total disapproval, with 8% in the middle.

"Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from the book of Joshua, but with Joshua's own name replaced by 'General Lin' and 'Israel' replaced by 'a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago'. Now the experiment gave opposite results. Only 7% approved of General Lin's behavior, and 75% disapproved... Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it."

Me: I don't think religion is the enemy per se so much as group identification. I think that a group of communist children could be induced to give similar results against capitalists, white South Africans against black South Africans, and Americans against the French. I suspect there is something genetic at work here. I would be surprised if you couldn’t reproduce these results with any culture on earth. I've heard this human tendency called in-group morality vs. out-group hostility. This sort of irrational group identification probably had a Darwinian advantage in our evolutionary past – it led to greater group cohesion and hence better group survival. But today these systematic “us vs. them” double standards, of which religions are the primary manifestations, are probably the single biggest barriers to peace in the world.

Posted by deuce at 08:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

I did some quick-numbering crunch based on election results I found on the web, and I discovered that the election was a bigger gain for the Democratic Party than I had first realized. Note: this is from a longer piece that I'm writing.

Americans sent an anti-Republican message, not an anti-incumbent message. Conservatives have tried to maintain that voters on Election Day were frustrated with Washington politicians, and wanted to “throw the bums out”. This sentiment does indeed play a part; however it was not universally applied, and it appears as of press time that not a single Democratic incumbent in either the House or the Senate was defeated. (The House race in GA-12 remains uncertified, though the Democratic incumbent leads by almost 1,000 votes). Based on data from CNN.com, I calculated that in US Senate elections, Democrats won the popular vote by 12 points.

The sweep wasn’t limited to federal races: Democrats won a majority of state governorships—picking up an additional seven without having a single incumbent defeated. In state legislatures, Democrats picked up 285 seats in various state House of Representatives and 61 in state Senates, while Republicans picked up only 5 state House seats and 8 state Senate seats, based on data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats won control of nine additional state legislature chambers, and the party now controls both chambers in 23 states. This election was, quite clearly, a blowout for the Democratic Party.

Posted by kindig at 11:41 PM | Permalink

Since I started law school, I have obsessed myself with the intricacies of the Supreme Court cases dealing with the treatment of enemy combatant detainees. (Hamdi v Rumsfeld, Hamdan v Rumsfeld, Rasul v Bush) I have been listening to podcasts of panels of legal scholars debate the issues, and I myself am actually right now organizing a panel of International Human Rights Law scholars about the Hamdan decision.

Today on the news there is a big hub-bub about Bush's new military tribunal plan and the opposition from key Republican Senators (McCain, Graham, Warner). The plan basically calls for legalizing Bush's military tribunals, which allow detainees to be tried on secret evidence. The tribunals had been ruled a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice last year in the case Hamdan v Rumsfeld. Since statutes trump treaties, if Congress passes a law saying the tribunals are legal, then the Geneva Conventions get overridden. The problem with overriding the Geneva Conventions of course is that our own troops typically depend on the protections of the Geneva Conventions when they are taken as POW's. We certainly wouldn't want our own troops being tried in foreign courts on secret evidence. Yet the administration says this secret evidence is necessary to keep national security information from terrorists. But as legal scholars on a recent Georgetown law panel pointed out, 95% of the evidence in these trials is from the detainees own statements, and the rest of the evidence is from publicly available news sources like CNN. In the very rare event of actual national security-sensitive information being addressed by the court, already existing court-martial procedures deal with this nicely. The real reason evidence is to be kept from the detainee and from the court is that if there was full disclosure they would have to reveal their interrogation methods. When 95% of your case against an accused terrorist is their own statements, you don't want the fact that you were torturing them when they made the statements known. The problem is that trying people with secret evidence goes against both the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of justice. Detainees cannot produce any defense if they have no idea what evidence is being produced against them.

I was watching Fox News today for shits and giggles, and along the bottom it read: "Debate About Detainees Hurting the War on Terror?" -- basically saying that McCain and others were hurting the War on Terror by even suggesting that we not override the Geneva Conventions and try detainees on secret evidence. Meanwhile, Neil Cavuto had Republican Senator Bill Frist on, who said, "the issue is this: Do we want to give top secret information to terrorists?" I burst out laughing at this absurd stating of the issue. Yet another case of Republicans relying on straight propaganda to push their agenda, and Fox News of course doing everything they can to help.

Posted by deuce at 05:05 PM | Permalink

Hello all. I'm starting law school here this fall so my entries will probably grind to a halt for a while. I'll keep the site up and occasionally throw in something. Keep up the good fight and I'll be back when I can.

Deuce

Posted by deuce at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (149)

A friend visited this past weekend and we hit up my parents little zoo, privileged access of course.

Aldabra tortoises. No he is not giving her a back massage.

A ring tailed lemur goes for a banana.

Coati Mundi. Even brazilians like blondes.

This guy is 90 years old, 450 pounds and in his sexual prime.

One goes for the peanuts the other for the hair.

Servals fishing for carp -- poorly, I should add.

Posted by deuce at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am visiting Boston right now, so I suppose a fitting blog would be to write about a prominent Bostonian. Daniel Dennett is one of the most famous American philosopher's alive. Currently at Tufts, he doesn't seem to have an ontological shtick like the other philosophers I know. From what I can gather, he shuns any questions that would allow his philosophy to be put into a nutshell. So how could he be influential if he dodges positions on the most fundamental philosophical issues? Its mostly because he is a handmaid of the sciences. His reasoning tries to inform scientific investigations into the mind: he is a philosopher that tries to make himself useful! (*gasp*)

I recently finished his book, "Breaking the Spell", in which he proposes the kickoff of a rigorous scientific investigation into religion. This investigation, he says, requires a culture shift within the sciences. Currently there is an agreement of sorts to leave religion alone. But understanding religion, why is exists, why it came into being, why it sprouts so readily and why it persists in the modern age, is critical to understanding humanity itself. Notably, he says this investigation may destroy religion itself, exposing it to the curative sunshine of reason. We must undertake this investigation perhaps most importantly because, as he says, "a toxic religious mania could end human civilization overnight."

He claims he wants religious people to read the book, but he sounds rather intolerant right from the start. He calls atheists and agnostics "brights" -- implying the religious are dull. Sometimes his comments achieve absurdity: "It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective." He's right on the mark with this one though: "[Creationists] have all been carefully and patiently rebutted by conscientious scientists who have taken the trouble to penetrate their smoke screens of propaganda and expose both their shoddy arguments and their apparently deliberate misrepresentations and evasions. If you disagree heartily with this flat dismissal you have two good choices to consider at this point: 1. Educate yourself in evolutionary theory... 2. Suspend disbelief temporarily [for the purposes of the book]"

I don’t want to go through the book point by point, just the nucleus of his listed possibilities as to why religion might exist. Here are the five main theories, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1) The Sweet Tooth Theory. We think sugar and fat taste great because our ancestors would have had chronically little of them, yet they are very helpful for survival. Those that thought sugar and fat tasted fantastic gobbled it up when they could, and their genes survived better for it, so we evolved to find "sweet things" sweet. Today, this feature is actually a liability, as we find ourselves able to indulge in as much chocolate and such as we wish, which leads to high levels of obesity. It is not that we have chocolate and soda centers in the brain, but cravings of these things are side effects of evolutionary adaptations. Similarly, it could be that having a "whatis" center in the brain helped our ancestors survive. Having a tendency to ask, "what is this?" and learning by fiddling and investigating might have helped learn new tricks. It could be that having this tendency created religion as a side effect, because the search for explanation in a world that never gives enough of it might provoke the creation of a simple, overarching, supernatural narrative like God.

2) The Symbiosis Theory. This theory is put in the context of meme theory. Memes are thoughts, ideas and ideologies that spread from person to person -- but with memes you think of these things as bacteria of sorts. Just like real bacteria, they may benefit us, they may be benign, or they may be detrimental. These memes jump from host to host wherever they find a hospitable environment. Religion, as a set of memes, may either be genetically beneficial to adherents, genetically neutral, or a parasitic meme that hurts it's hosts genetic prospects but that evolves sufficiently to make it hard to stamp out. Parasites in the body survive because they appear to the immune system to be benign, though they are not. So your religion may appear TO YOU to be benign, though it may be poisonous to you and others from a genetic or other standpoints. Memes often must evolve to survive. We would expect that longstanding memes have evolved very good tricks to resist destruction. Good tricks with religious memes would be getting adherents to believe that belief is a very good thing, belief that proselytizing is a good thing, belief that many things are mysterious and unexplainable by logic (so as to make memes resistant to rational attack -- "the lord works in mysterious ways"). These are just a few.

3) Runaway Sexual Selection Theory. Sexual selection is the other major influencer of evolution besides natural selection. Think of the beautiful, brilliant, long tail of the male peacock. What is the practical function of that heavy, ridiculous thing? It causes the males to get consumed by tigers that much more often, it costs an enormous amount of energy to produce, and its just generally annoying to lug around. So why hasn't the tail evolved away? Basically because of female sexual preference. Female peacocks look for large ridiculous tails as proof of genetic fitness. After all, if a male can gather enough food to produce a thing like that, and still manage to not get eaten, he must have solid genes otherwise. In the case of religion, it might be the case that it IS positively detrimental to the male adherent. It might be absurdly expensive energy wise to maintain religion -- but perhaps it is proof of otherwise good genetic fitness. This leads to what biologist Richard Dawkins calls "creedal athleticism" -- essentially bragging that "my irrationality is bigger than yours".

4) Money Theories. Religion could just be a good trick because it materially benefits certain members of the community. It could be that A) everybody benefits, B) the elite benefit, or C) individuals may not benefit, but the group as a whole does, which allows it to out compete other groups (group selection).

5) Pearl Theories. A pearl forms when an irritant gets lodged in certain mollusks. The mollusk forms pearl layers over the irritant to make it not so rough. Religions could be something that benefit no one per se, but act merely as sort of explanatory tools around unexplained "irritants" in the world.

Probably none of these theories are completely wrong. While Dennett's overall point I think is good, I doubt this book will attract too much attention. The tone in which it is written makes it difficult to embrace. Scientists are already wary enough from the culture wars; embracing Dennett would only exacerbate the problem. I do hope the culture shift within science towards willingness to study religion does take place, however. I can understand how a moderate religion may persist in the modern world. It is comforting when a relative dies, it's nice to feel that our lives have some purpose written in the stars, and it can provide solace in times of hardship. But the hardiness of fundamentalism -- brands of religion that make outrageous claims about the nature of the world that blatantly contradict scientific evidence and that make seemingly innocuous things like homosexuality immoral, astounds me.

Posted by deuce at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

This is a graphic from the NYT about belief in evolution of citizens of various countries. We just beat out Turkey. Go us. Even conservative Malta beat us. They are so religious they don't allow people to get a divorce.

Posted by deuce at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday night I had the most "primal" experience outside of Gombi. I was concluding a night bar hopping with a few friends in Boston when out in front of our club all hell broke loose. Two guys began fighting apparently for no reason other than maybe one scuffed the other's shoe. As both sets of friends coalesced to intervene, stray fists striking the wrong people eventually sucked every guy on the street into the brawl. I was standing just outside of the rabble agape in disbelief. A few bouncers and I ran in to break it up. I was worried not only of getting knocked out, but about my two female friends accompanying me. One in particular was an intelligent and attractive blonde who unfortunately had far too much to drink. She has the regrettable penchant for attracting guys who try to lure her into the bathroom or a back room, so she couldn't be left alone for long.

For the next 15 minutes, I ran up and down the block pulling people apart, checking on the seriously hurt, and pleading with bloody guys stalking others to drop it and go home. I got others' blood on my clothes and my hands, saw several lips split, broken teeth, and a couple blindsides. One delirious guy was even bleeding from his ears. When it was all over, the police began to arrive and the wounded mostly escaped to passing cabs. A few words kept crossing my lips again and again: "these fucking monkeys!"

It's true. The spectacle I had witnessed is probably best explained by a primatologist. I have some authority in saying this because my parents breed primates. In psychology, the best explainer would be evolutionary psych, which explains human behavior in terms of our ape evolution that produces behavior predispositions. The rough explanation is as follows: males are very sexually eager because they are trying to spread their genes, and because they can have a virtually unlimited number of offspring with potentially low energy cost. Females, on the other hand, can have relatively only a very small number of offspring in their lives, and each one at a high energy cost, so they will be far pickier when it comes to choosing a mate. This isn’t what guys and girls think consciously, of course, but it is the evolutionary reason why men are so horny, and females relatively coy. It is the same not only with us, but with virtually all animals.

Because of this coyness, males find themselves competing with one another for females. The genetic stakes are high for men, because high status males may accumulate multiple female partners. Indeed, most societies in the world allow men to have multiple wives, but it is never the other way around. It is the same with apes: successful males have harems, while lesser males don't get any girls at all. This makes the genetic stakes so high that men would have a predisposition to violently defend their status, even for minor affronts. This fighting would be more successful the stronger the male is, so we would expect males to be physically stronger than females.

So let's sum up these predictions: Men will take almost any opportunity to have sex with a girl (even one obviously wasted, like my friend), whereas women will commonly turn down sex. Men will be more violent than women, physically stronger, and prone to get into fights with other men even over mild insults. Well, now doesn't that explain my evening perfectly! It also explains a lot of primate behavior. I honestly believe it is essential to explaining many world conflicts.

Guys, I have found knowing this stuff very empowering when tempted to take advantage of a drunken girl or slug a guy that made a smart-ass remark. I don't want to act like an ape, even though I suppose I am one. I am better than that. We all can be.

Posted by deuce at 02:24 AM | Permalink

Here is a letter I just send to a postmodern anthropology grad student friend. Such folks tend to like ideas like "science is a religion" or "science is socially constructed". It's strange. They wouldn't deny that science works, but they would dispute that it has any special access to objectivity. They have the strong inclination to never rank any knowledge system higher than any other. Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida (founders of postmodernism and poststructuralism, respectively) are their gods. He's a real interesting guy (currently in Africa doing research, Caucasian and from Alaska but fluent in Swati and Zulu), but I disagree with him about a lot of things. Smart guy, and of course a huge liberal. -deuce

Hey, man. Hope your trip is going well and hope to see you soon. I haven’t gotten your email about your position on science, but I thought Id throw in a few of my thoughts to attempt to induce discussion. I’m not a philosopher of science, so at this point these thoughts are somewhat tentative.

First, I don’t want to argue passionately for a position while ignoring associated problems, although I will take a position. I want to talk about the difficulties with the idea of science as describing objectivity.

Problem of affirming the consequent. When scientists create a theory, they try to verify it via experimentation. If a theory holds out particularly well to testing, it is tempting to say that the theory is "true". But this is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Logically, it is like saying that "If theory X is true then Y will occur in the experiment", and then saying, "Y has occurred in the experiment, therefore X is true". Logic cannot work backwards like that. In fact, it doesn’t matter how many thousands of successful experiments you have, you can never say with certainty that the theory is true. An example of this that occurred in real life is Newtonian mechanics' incredible experimental success for hundreds of years, which led to many speaking of it as the discovered laws of nature. But then Einstein came up with relativity and experimentally Newton's laws were shown only to be very accurate approximations that break down in extreme environments. So affirming the consequent is a persistent danger in science.

Problem of induction. Science seems to rely fairly heavily on induction. For example, science seems to presuppose that the "laws of nature" are static, since it doesn’t seem that they are changing. But just because they don't seem to have changed in the past does not ensure that they won't change in the future, so it automatically presents a problem for claiming certain knowledge of a future event (predictability being a feature scientists pursue in theories).

Problem of subjective experience. In making any claim about the way the external world is, we have the problem that our experience happens via our senses, which aren't 100% trustworthy. This has been an age-old observation in philosophy, from Plato's cave to Descartes' evil deceiver. Plato said that the world that most people perceive is sort of just shadows of puppets, but he held out hope that we could reason ourselves to see objectivity -- the "forms". Descartes asked the question how could I possibly know that all my senses aren’t false -- being fed to me by an evil deceiver? To take a reference from pop culture, how could we know that we aren't a brain in a vat, in sort of like a Matrix world? If this were the case, physics would merely be constructing models of an arbitrary false reality. Even if we can just assume that the world isn't fake, it is extremely debatable that we are passive observers via our senses to begin with. More realistically, people seem to see what they are culturally trained to see, at least to a certain extent.

So, first to the problem of affirming the consequent. The problem, as I said, is going from X -> Y to Y -> X. It's a fallacy to flip them like that. But the contrapositive is not a fallacy. You can go X -> Y to NOT Y -> NOT X. Put in words, it is saying, "If theory X is true then Y will happen. Y did not happen, therefore X cannot be true." This gives us the power to falsify theory X! (Assuming X -> Y was deductively valid) It means that we can never prove anything 100%, but we can falsify theories, so hopefully if we do enough experiments and take enough empirical observations then we can shoot down all competing theories such that only one remains (but even if only one remains, that still doesn't mean it is objective knowledge). In order to falsify, this requires that the theory must have testable predictions. This is why scientific theories that do not make testable predictions are not even considered science (e.g. Intelligent Design). This requirement of falsification was emphasized very much by Karl Popper and is now common sense in the hard sciences. This tool of falsification is so powerful that it doesn't really matter what method you use to produce the theory. Some scientists form theories by "abduction" -- looking at data and trying to produce a theory that explains it. Some scientists, like Einstein did, form theories just by thought experiments. Falsifiable experiments either vindicate these scientists or made them look like quacks.

Continue reading "Social Construction of Science?" »

Posted by deuce at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I’ve just returned from two months in Southern Africa. I drove a total of 3,000 miles, ate Mopane worms, jumped waterfalls, met 4 chiefs, came within yards of every life threatening animal in the savannah, learned village dances, went to a witch doctor to learn my fate in life, traveled to a country with a dictator and hyperinflation, another country that was until recently the poorest on earth, yet another country that until 12 years ago had complete forced racial separation of everyone, got involved in multiple engineering projects and organizations, and learned about more cultures than I can count. Then people ask me, “what’d you do?” expecting a quick response.

I’m interested today in retelling my experience in Zimbabwe, because it is a country that has occupied much discussion on this site. You guys might remember that Zimbabwe has over 1000% inflation right now and a president that is basically a violent dictator (Robert Mugabe). I’m the type of person just stupid enough to go to a place like this, and I was luckily given the opportunity. I stayed in the capitol Harare with the wife of a professor I knew from South Africa named Rachael.

First there was the money. Rachael told us that the land for her house 10 years ago cost $15,000 Zim dollars. Today a doughnut costs about 100 grand. The government is in denial about the whole thing, so the largest bill they have in circulation is a $100,000 bill, which is about a quarter. Imagine trying to do all of your shopping with denominations of a quarter or smaller. People were carrying paper bags stuffed with money to go shopping. Some people even had wheelbarrows. We went and got $140 million Zim dollars on the black market (its the only way not to get shafted on the exchange rate), which is about $300 US. They came in $10 million dollar bundles of $100,000 bills, about an inch thick per bundle. A friend was carrying a large brick of $100,000 bills in her purse wrapped in plastic. I felt like we were bank robbers.

Then there was the gas. There was barely a drop of petroleum in the whole country. The exchange rate was about $450,000 Zim per dollar, but the government was trying to insist that it was actually $90,000 Zim per dollar, meaning they insist that the Zim dollar is worth 5x more than it actually is. Now, the government was also in charge of purchasing gas for the country, so if a barrel of oil cost $50 US they were offering about $10 US worth of Zim money. So of course the oil sellers were like, "screw you buddy," and the government couldn't get any gas from anyone. Everybody drives around with big jerry cans of gasoline in their trunks that they mostly get from other countries. When you go to a gas station, the attendants just assist you in taking out your own jerry can and funneling it into your tank for a tip.

Then there was "Operation Murambatsvina" [Drive out the rubbish]. Robert Mugabe has become known now not only for destroying his country economically, but also bumping off the political opposition and rigging elections to stay in power. Even priests that speak out against the government have very shortly thereafter been in fatal car accidents, or been poisoned. The opposition party is the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). MDC folks tend to be the better educated ones living in the city. So Mugabe last year decided that he was going to bulldoze "informal settlements" around Harare for being "crime and fire hazards". No surprise that the "informal settlements" often turned out to be nice homes in MDC neighborhoods. Rachael took us to one of the neighborhoods. It was just a rubble field with a few brave people staying to rebuild. Nice polished cement foundations were everywhere, along with nice painted stucco rubble, so it was obvious this had been no informal settlement. The most stunning thing was when we talked to a man that had rebuilt his home there, it turned out that he was a die-hard Mugabe supporter! I guess he hadn't been there the day of the bulldozing to show his party card and get a pass or something. An article about this in the BBC is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4620977.stm

Then there was the desperation. The inflation was so steep that as soon as you got Zim money it was a race to spend it. People hungered for foreign currency that retained its value. Zimbabwe has been known for it’s very good education system, and we were surprised to find well-spoken college grads selling ashtrays at abandoned gas stations. As one man put it, “You may think we are beggars, but we are not. We’ve all been to college; we are just hungry.” Zimbabwe has incredible sculptors, all now on the street bartering desperately. One sculptor offered me a large statue for my t-shirt. Another offered me a statuette for my pen! Mozambique was extremely poor, but it had been that way long enough that people were somehow coping. To Zimbabweans being desperately poor was a new experience, a fact that was plainly apparent from their faces alone.

Continue reading "The Destruction of Zimbabwe" »

Posted by deuce at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (252)

I don't even want to try to explain all that is happening here at this point. But here are some more photos.

Posted by deuce at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am in South Africa and Mozambique for about 2 months right now learning about the countries and cultures. I will be working on an organic farm for a couple of weeks, installing rainwater collectors at local elementary schools, and potentially designing a food cooker powered on methane harvested from cow waste.

Ill put more photos up soon.

Posted by deuce at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am not, nor have I ever been, a vegan or a vegetarian. I grew up on a farm where I happily ate the sausage of pigs I used to play with. Though I loved the pigs in a way, I saw food as sort of their ultimate function. It was kind of a quid pro quo; we gave them a carefree life for a couple of years, then it ended in a quick instant and we had delicious food. I of course thought and still think that any animals killed for food should be done so as humanely as reasonably possible, and as long as that occurred meat eating never really bothered me.

My relationship with animal rights activists has additionally been sour. PETA has always struck me as an organization of total loons, as if they would risk getting hit by a bus to get an ant out of the road. They also have a habit of making completely false claims, which you can Google if you are interested. Truth is a casualty in their war against meat eating. It is clear they will do or say anything just to make news, and while it makes their organization well known, I think it has seriously damaged the credibility of the animal rights movement once afforded to it by advocates such as Peter Singer.

But beyond media tactics, the fundamental problem that animal rights activists run into is that many people just don't think that animals have too much inherent moral value, at least not enough to warrant going cold turkey on turkey.

But I think there is a far better argument for not eating meat that could convince any reasonable person regardless of their subjective feelings about the inherent moral value of nature's fauna. That argument is one based on energy.

You could think of nature as a food hierarchy, with plants at the bottom, the herbivores that eat them the next level up, the carnivores that eat them the next level up, and then maybe humans above that. Plants get their energy from the sun, herbivores get theirs from the plants, and so on. An organism's place on the hierarchy is called its trophic level. But the laws of thermodynamics that govern energy place a limitation on this energy transfer: There can never be a perfect transition of energy from one form to the next. When you run your car engine on gasoline, for example, you are converting the gasoline's chemical energy to the car's kinetic energy. In this conversion, you necessarily lose energy to other forms, such as heat energy that escapes to the air and sound energy. So when plants convert the sun's electromagnetic energy to their chemical energy, there is a loss. It turns out in fact that there is a huge loss. Plants absorb less than 10% of the sun's energy that hits their leaves. Herbivores in turn absorb a maximum of 10% of the energy of the plants that they eat, and the carnivores in turn only get 10% of the energy of the herbivores they consume. This ratio is sometimes roughly stated as 100:10:1. In a typical ecosystem, for 100 biomass units of plants, the system will support 10 biomass units of herbivores, and 1 biomass unit of carnivores. This means that our hierarchy of the food chain looks less like a ladder and more like a pyramid.

This rough energy ratio extends to nutritional content as well. An average serving of meat takes about 10 nutritionally comparable servings of plant food to produce. As an example, let's say I could either eat plant food or feed a pig plant food and then eat the pig. It will take me 10 times as much farm land growing plant food to feed the pigs than if I just ate the plants directly, with the same energy gained for myself. This is a huge energy loss to human society that is completely unnecessary. Humans could survive just fine on just plant foods; we just choose to eat meat even though it's immensely energy inefficient. This means that due to our meat habit we must maintain much larger tracts of farmland than we would need if we were all vegans (ironic, that if we were all vegans we would need less farmland for crops, isn't it?). This unnecessary farmland is taking up land that wild animals could be living on, and must be maintained with fertilizer and machines, which contributes to pollution.

So, it seems that humanity could go a long way towards living more in balance with the earth if we all became vegans. But there is a bit of a catch. It can be difficult to get a well balanced diet eating only plants. A principal reason for this comes down to protein. Proteins are made of long chains of amino acids that our body needs. There are only 20 types of amino acids that your body uses, 12 of which it makes on its own. However, the other 8 types we need to consume in our diets. Plants often are severely lacking in proteins composed of certain critical amino acids. Meat, on the other hand, tends to be stuffed with these so-called "complete" proteins -- proteins that contain all amino acids our bodies can't synthesize. Luckily, some plants, most notably soybeans, have loads of all essential amino acids. Additionally, other plants can be eaten in combination such that one plants essential amino acid weaknesses are the other’s strengths. Finally, to make things easier we could simply genetically engineer (gasp!) plants to contain the essential amino acids for which they are currently deficient. If that thought bothers you, please get over it. A strong majority of the food you eat right now is genetically engineered.

As climate change sternly warns us to make our energy consumption less conspicuous, some of the most effective means of conservation may not lie in driving less or turning off lights nearly as much as simply cutting meat from our diets. So am I going to go vegan now? Well, we'll see. Step 1: flexitarian.

Posted by deuce at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This was an alternative title I considered for this blog when I created it about a year ago, and I still think of it when I write some of my pieces. I have become thoroughly tired of aggressive, bullying white conservative males that steamroll well reasoned but weak-kneed members of the left. Multiculturalism is prevalent on the left, so it is not surprising that many liberals behave this way. They generally want to recognize other people's opinions as valid, so they are not quick to talk down to someone that disagrees. I'm not saying that multiculturalism is bad, but I think someone needs to be there to put these self-righteous conservatives in their place. Their ideas are generally inane, irrational, bigoted and naively simplistic... and I tell them so to their face. Tolerance is generally a good thing. Tolerance of intolerance I can't stand. The fundamental motivation for my obsessive study of news, history, science, economics, and culture has become the destruction of the conservative ideology. I am no longer a multicultural liberal. I listen to Rage Against the Machine, my hair stands on end, my brow tightens and my blood boils. I am an angry liberal.

A friend forwarded me an e-mail that a conservative (white male, of course) friend sent her. The discussion was concerning the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe. Zim is currently experiencing an annual inflation of around 1000% -- the highest in the world. Any savings that you might have in the bank very quickly become worthless. It's at the point where to buy groceries you have to carry around bags of money that only a few years ago would have gotten you a decent house. It all happened a few years ago when the government nationalized farming and took a bunch of farms from foreign investors. The investors fled the country, taking their foreign currency with them. Between the lack of investment in the country and subsequent lack of foreign currency, the government began to find it hard to get it's hand's on foreign currency with which to service it's debts. When that happened, supply and demand drove it's exchange rate haywire. The government started to have to pay more of it's own dollars to buy the few foreign dollars that were available. But it didn't have the funds to do this, so it started printing money to pay the debts. Printing lots of money guarantees inflation, so the inflation started going nuts. As the money the government had in it's coffers decreased in value, they just kept having to print more and more to pay it's bills. It's a vicious cycle that can only stop when the government stops printing money. What made matters worse was that the International Monetary Fund, an organization that is supposed to PREVENT financial crises (but is commonly criticized for not doing so), demanded lots of foreign currency from them, which the government provided by printing even more money. It's a total nightmare.

Anyway, this is my friend's original response to the Zim article (let's call her "Eve"), written to her white male conservative friend:
Very interesting article. Is there a solution? I don't know... it seems they have gotten themselves stuck in a vicious cycle. The question is, where do you break out of a vicious cycle in order to cause the least disturbance or destruction.... no matter what, there is going to be fall out. It's almost like, this country really needs to hit the pause button and say "DO OVER"... that would be my solution anyway:)
-Eve

And his response (let's call him "Adam"):

Continue reading "The Angry Liberal" »

Posted by deuce at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Mike Schermer in Scientific American this month. If politicians actually paid attention to what most mattered, I think global warming control would be our number one governmental initiative. He doesn't list most of the implications here, but I encourage you all to do research (for example, at RealClimate.org, or by reviewing relevant articles published in the journals Nature or Science.)

In 2001 Cambridge University Press published Bjørn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I thought
was a perfect debate topic for the Skeptics Society public lecture series at the California Institute of Technology. The problem was that all the top environmental organizations refused to participate. “There is no debate,” one spokesperson told me. “We don’t want to dignify that book,” another said. One leading environmentalist warned me that my reputation would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did.

My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement. Activists who vandalize Hummer dealerships and destroy logging equipment are criminal ecoterrorists. Environmental groups who cry doom and gloom to keep donations flowing only hurt their credibility. As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I learned
(and believed) that by the 1990s overpopulation would lead to worldwide starvation and the exhaustion of key minerals, metals and oil, predictions that failed utterly. Politics polluted the science and made me an environmental skeptic.

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians—the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon—issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for “national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions” in carbon emissions.

Continue reading "A Skeptic Comes Around" »

Posted by deuce at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A buddy and I went scuba diving off Florida over the weekend. He lives down there, and has an old dive boat with a 350 horsepower inboard that we take out and have fun with. We were even skeet shooting with a 12 gauge shotgun off the back at one point. Good times, though my shoulder is a bit sore.

So we were about 10 miles offshore on Saturday looking for a dive site. We had the coordinates and we were in the right area, we were just trolling around looking for the telltale bumps on the depth finder. It was a man-made reef made from the rubble of an old bridge. After the third or so concentric circle the ridges appeared on the digital display. "There it is," he said. "Drop the anchor." I grabbed the light aluminum anchor from the bow and tossed it over. The bottom was about seventy feet down, but I let out about one hundred and fifty feet of line so it would have some give. We suited up and got ready to go, spear guns and all. I had less than 1500 pounds in my tank, which meant this would be a short dive, but we could manage.

With all my gear on, I took a stride off the back of the boat into the water. It was a nice temperature, but even with the wetsuit the initial few seconds are a bit of a shock. We had our vests inflated all the way, so we were just bobbing up and down on the surface.

"Shit, my nose is plugged," I said. Congestion can be a serious problem while diving, because if you can't equalize you can only make it down a couple of feet before your ears feel like they're going to implode. "Snort some salt water," he suggested with a smirk. "It works I'm serious." "Fuck that, I'm not going to snort salt water," I protested. "Aw, c'mon. My buddy said it's the best way to clear your sinuses he's ever used." I was in a silly mood, so I cupped a bit of salt water and snorted it up. As far as I could tell, nothing happened. "Well?" he asked. "I think your friend was snorting something other than salt water," I responded.

Continue reading "My Near-Death Experience" »

Posted by deuce at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (82)

The stage was set. Decade after decade of Middle East conflicts, most fundamentally revolving around oil. Terrorism, oil-soaked blue-bloods, intolerance, misogyny, corruption and barbarity; and our money flooding in to help maintain it, all to satisfy our crude habit.

The stage was set. The Earth warming, ice shelves collapsing, greenhouse gases building, the Gulf Stream weakening, the oceans acidifying, tipping points looming and hurricanes accelerating. The cause? Our crude habit.

Two problems with the same cause. Two problems with the same solution. We need to get the fuck off oil now.

Of course, that means no less than an energy revolution in this country. We use oil for making plastics, electricity, and for virtually all of our transportation needs -- we are utterly dependent upon it. But there are plenty of alternatives available even right now. Biofuels like ethanol and Biodiesel are literally made from crops that suck CO2 out of the air. They are a bit more expensive to produce than petroleum, but that will change with an increase in the scale and refinement of production. Then there are wind and solar technologies, the costs of which are getting more competitive year by year. Then there are new nuclear power technologies that are safe, extremely efficient, and that produce radioactive waste that is safe in 300 years instead of the traditional 10,000. The candidates for replacing oil are all there. All we needed was a kick in the ass to do it. A wake up call. A catalyst. A Pearl Harbor.

Then 9/11 happened. All of a sudden the threat of the Middle East became clear, and how our own monies contribute to it. At the same time, the scientific consensus crystallized on global warming. Burning oil is the chief culprit. The solution is obvious. The means to obtain the solution are there. The stage was set for our energy revolution -- we had the means and the catalyst -- all we needed was a director. And he was.... nobody.

Rather than spearhead efforts to get off oil for the sake of global warming, the US has been the principal laggard. We have gone off to fight random governments in the Middle East, virtually ignoring the root cause of many of these issues. The common solution to our two greatest problems -- the greatest short term threat and the greatest long term threat -- is being ignored.

Where is our Teddy Roosevelt? Our FDR? Our Lincoln? Our Joan of Arc? Our Randian hero? Our Nietzschean superman?

It doesn't have to be an individual, it could be a party. The minority party, seeking to regain control, might no doubt see the solution and parade it as their flagship to victory. "Get off oil! We'll stop terrorism and save the earth!" But instead they are relying on the screw-ups of the opposite party to regain power, not on their own vision.

The energy revolution is desperately needed, but we need someone in politics to pick up the flag. They aren't there. There is a vacuum in this country. Our problems won't get better until it is filled.

Posted by deuce at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (34)

I have a Christian friend that keeps inviting me to his church functions. A few times they have been meetings about falsehoods in the Da Vinci Code (which I already knew was historically problematic). I sent him a slightly less spicey version of this note.

I’ve got a meeting the next time I’m in town on May 20th with my atheist organization (http://nvc.wash.org/). Maybe you could make it. Since you have invited me to your church's meetings, I figured the least I could do is extend you the same gesture. We will just meet and sort of talk about how atheism has fulfilled our lives, and how to make sure our kids are raised with proper atheist values. (We teach the kids to be atheists from a very young age to maximize the chances they will accept atheism into their hearts. The organization then sends kids out door to door when they reach 18 to try to spread atheist teachings.). They even have a school that teaches the groups' children the basics about atheism while the adults meet off by themselves to talk about more serious atheist things.

I think you will be particularly impressed with this group's justification for being atheists. There was a scroll found in Papua New Guinea that dates to around 300 BC that says there is no God, and we have faith that it is correct.

Anyways, this next meeting we'll be talking about the recent bestselling "Left Behind" series that have done so well, and why the books are not accurate representations of past, present and future. We need to get atheism back in our schools and stop atheists from being second class citizens!

Let me know,
Deuce

P.S. this e-mail may contain satire ;-)

Posted by deuce at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Stephen Colbert recently was the keynote speaker at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. I didn't see it but have been reading over the transcript online. Some great parts from his speech:

"I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit."

"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man [Bush] has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality'. And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

"Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side."

"Joe Wilson is here...of course he brought along his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Oh, my god! Oh, what have I said? [looks horrified] I am sorry, Mr. President, I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife Joe Wilson's wife."

"I stand by this man[ Bush]. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

The rest of the transcript is available here.

Posted by kindig at 07:15 PM | Permalink

There are a lot of parallels between evolutionary theory and free market theory. In the natural environment, different species compete for resources, and adapt and innovate to compete more effectively. If they can't adapt sufficiently, they die out. In the free market environment, companies are the equivalent of species. Different companies compete for resources, and adapt and innovate to compete more effectively. If they can't adapt sufficiently, they die out.

In biology, it is commonly emphasized that evolution is not a moral force. In fact, Charles Darwin himself, the very first person to see the ruthless process of non-random death that develops life, his true creator, rejected it's moral code. He labeled natural selection a, "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel work of nature." How ironic it is that the road to the graceful swallow and dolphin is strewn with countless carcasses. Natural selection produces the male chimp that rapes, the mother rabit that eats her young, the wasp that paralyzes the caterpillar so its larvae can slowly feed on live flesh, and the pathogens that have killed tens of millions of innocent children.

Yet despite Darwin's warnings, after his death many came to think that natural selection was inherently a good thing to be embraced. We should apply natural selection's lessons to our society, they said. Social Darwinism these ideas were called, and many great minds, including many scientists, were seduced by it. Even H.G. Wells, in his book The New Republic, lays out a "utopia" where natural selection reigns supreme: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?... the black?...the yellow man?... the Jew?... who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go... And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness... is death.... The men of the New Republic... will have an ideal that will make the killing worthwhile." Fuckin' eh. It always sucks to find out that a guy you had respect for was a douche bag.

The Nazis made Social Darwinism a bit unpopular to say the least. Any respectability Social Darwinism once had died in the ovens of Auschwitz.

Continue reading "The Market is Not a Moral Force" »

Posted by deuce at 02:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)