knowledge

Activist judges, money for oil, and a blatant disregard for reality

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

Funny how the right-wing complains about judges being “activist” whenever they overturn anything they like, such as gay marriage bans or laws that tip the scales heavily away from individuals and toward big businesses. When they declare Obama’s deep drilling moratorium on new leases deeper than 500 feet to be unfounded and lift it, however, they apparently cheer, wholly oblivious to their hypocrisy.

Oil companies should get back to the business of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a U.S. federal judge ruled, declaring President Barack Obama’s six-month ban “arbitrary and capricious.”

As crude oil continues to gush from BP’s catastrophic blowout, Judge Martin Feldman said Tuesday that the Obama administration had failed to provide an acceptable rationale for imposing a six-month moratorium on all deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

His ruling came even as BP said the industry needs to change its operating procedures to reduce the risk of another such accident.

[…]

That incident, which was seized upon by Republicans and conservative pundits in the U.S., “caused some apprehension” about the process by which the moratorium was enacted, the judge ruled.

He said the administration investigated the BP disaster and then concluded all deep water drilling was unsafe – reasoning he found deeply flawed.

“If some equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are? Are all airplanes a danger because one was? … That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed and rather overbearing,” the judge wrote. The moratorium also threatened to devastate the local economy around the Gulf, the judge noted.

Meanwhile, despite being in effect since the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the moratorium has not done a damn thing to stop 198 new leases in the Gulf, 10 of which being granted to British Petroleum.
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Activist judges, money for oil, and a blatant disregard for reality
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Pac-man Tech Support – Jeff Paul!?

Jason Thibeault, 9 Comments

People are not necessarily as computer-savvy as you or I. Before taking my present position, I spent about four years of my life doing over-the-phone tech support for various computer products, and it grinds at your soul after a while. This is a call from Google’s tech support over… believe it or not… the Google Pac-man logo.

I feel so bad for this guy. He’s obviously from pretty high up on the Google technology chain as it was a scheduled call-back (See below update!), so he must have been absolutely stumped by the description of the problem in the original call-back request. To have to deal with an end-user who didn’t understand her browser enough to know she could close the Google tab after she was done searching for something… well, that’s a level of understanding that puts computers on par with “magic box that words come out of”. She uses her computer as an appliance, for studying, not for the kind of usage scenarios you or I might expect.

Four years of my life spent doing pretty much exactly this type of call… I probably would have handled the call flow a bit differently after that amount of experience. This poor man obviously is not used to the level of computer savvy the “average user” actually has. Sometimes it’s hard to step back from the level of knowledge you have on a topic, and recognize that others don’t have that level of experience themselves.

Update:
Okay, so. I didn’t clue in to the name she threw out there that she was studying, but on showing a colleague at work this video, his first question was: a) where did it come from? and b) is it viral? I decided to Google the name “Jeff Paul” and was amused to discover he’s one of those internet scam artists, those ones that claim you can become a millionaire from your own home and give you an almost-sorta-kinda-foolproof way of doing it. There’s a tech support line in Utah set up to help people that have paid for a Jeff Paul course, as Cnet discussed. The guy I originally felt bad for, doesn’t work for Google as I alluded to above. That was second-hand information, from the person that showed me the video originally, and I should have done my research before I threw it up on the blog. My apologies.

Someone in the Jeff Paul team must have seen this call and recognized the viral value of putting it up on the net, marking it as a “Pac-man call”, hoping that some people might notice the Jeff Paul mention (several times!), Googling his name, and discovering a secret path to riches. For my part in directing people to this scam artist, my apologies.

Word to the wise. Anyone telling you the secrets of how to get rich quick, is actually getting rich quick themselves on your back.

Pac-man Tech Support – Jeff Paul!?

Geek Pride, Towel Day, Glorious 25th of May

Jason Thibeault6 Comments

Three geeky celebrations happen to fall on the same day totally coincidentally. May 25th was chosen as Towel Day, celebrating the life and works of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, two weeks after Adams’ death in 2001. Geek/Nerd Pride Day has been celebrated since 2006 on the anniversary of the premiere of Star Wars in theatres in 1977. Terry Pratchett fans can also celebrate today as the Glorious 25th of May, wearing lilacs and hard-boiling an egg in honor of an important date in Discworld’s history; when Pratchett announced that he had a rare form of Alzheimer’s in 2008, fans brought the celebration into real life to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s research.

I have a towel at work with me today. And I will be unabashedly geeky in both posting this and in explaining the provenance of today to anyone who asks about the towel. I have a few words to say about geekiness in general though. Specifically, while a perfect world would include tolerance for the kinds of specialized knowledge that generally gets you teased in grade school, the social awkwardness that often accompanies this specialized knowledge, unless you’re talking specifically about high-functioning Asperger syndrome, is not necessarily married to that specialized knowledge. Often social awkwardness is coupled with this specialized knowledge because exhibiting any kind of knowledge is grossly discouraged in grade school in an attempt by your peers to breed conformity.

Granted, having a thorough understanding of the interconnected Spider-Man chronologies and an encyclopaedic knowledge of his rogues’ gallery is of limited utility at best, but this drive to enforce conformity by my peers probably resulted in the specific neuroses I have today. If you’re from my distant past and you’re reading this, I am what I am today because you tried to make me like you, and I resisted.

Would there be fewer “nerds” and maladjusted social pariahs without this pressure for conformity? I think so. Certainly it wouldn’t eliminate such social ineptness altogether. But there would be less shame in this world over knowing every word to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or knowing every statistic of every team from the 1985 NHL season, or being able to crochet any three-dimensional object just by looking at it, or being a writer for Lost. They may not be USEFUL talents, but they are talents nonetheless.

Take your towel with you today. Do something nerdy. And explain proudly, not meekly, when someone asks you about it.

Geek Pride, Towel Day, Glorious 25th of May

Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3

Jason Thibeault, , , ,

2 – Know your deities

This is part 3 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts.

but everyone knows prayer works!

Everyone prays when your time comes or when you get into trouble, even atheists — or so the aphorists would have you believe. Belief in the power of prayer is seemingly omnipresent, with daily reinforcement of the concept from other people that believe likewise. You see the reports on the news of the one little boy that walked away from a horrific plane crash (who was saved by God — never mind that everyone else on the plane was *not*). You know the story of the hurricane that tore through a small town and left only the church standing. You’ve heard about the “light at the end of the tunnel” when a dying person’s neurons start misfiring and they gasp out their last coherent words immediately prior to oblivion. The media, populated in equal measure to the society at large with theists, use phrases like “miraculous” or “divine providence” or “act of God” in describing rare events.

In the presence of such widespread and self-reinforcing memes, it’s difficult to imagine how to shake the general populace’s belief that prayer does anything. The only way I can see, as with pretty much every other problem humankind faces, is through judicious use of science. Sound logic will, of course, only get you so far.
Continue reading “Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3” →

Why Prayer is Nonsense – part 3

Why prayer is nonsense – part 2

Jason Thibeault, , , , 3 Comments

1 – First, define prayer

This is part 2 in a series of posts on prayer. Please use the links at the top and bottom of each post to navigate through the parts.

know your deities

In the monotheistic religions that make up the bulk of religions in the Western world, the variety of qualities ascribed to deities are so diverse as to populate the complete spectrum from the deist’s “the entire universe is God” (replacing nature with deity), to “God created everything exactly as suggested by my holy book and all the accounts therein of his intervention in history are absolutely true”. As there are as many postulated gods as there are people who believe in gods, one cannot argue against so many deities without letting a few slip through the cracks. Therefore, instead of breaking things down by deity, it will be far more useful to break things down by the properties postulated for the specific gods people happen to believe in.

In concert, some of these properties are mutually exclusive. Unsurprisingly, those couplings also cause the most grief when it comes to figuring out whether praying to your particular deity is worthwhile. Many of the properties that are suggested by humans for their particular flavor of deity are impossible in the scope of the universe we understand today. Many are redundant and require you to believe some very narrow views of the universe to accept their possibility. Many outright refute the body of evidence we humans have collected so far. For the purpose of this series, I will by and large ignore these problems, taking the special pleading arguments necessary to resolve such issues for granted, with one caveat — I will absolutely use the fact of the problems to argue against prayer in the matrix planned for part 5: “So why pray?”.
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Why prayer is nonsense – part 2

This is a really big problem

Jason Thibeault, , 26 Comments

You can see the oil slick from space. What was once permanently sequestered underground was released in our ever-increasing lust for oil, and with a haste spurred on by that lust, we tapped more wells, wells that were more dangerous, more nearly inaccessible, and more seemingly remote from human civilization, to the point where we started tapping some wells with the deck stacked against us without any idea as to how to mitigate damage in the event of a catastrophe. A catastrophe that was bound to happen.

BP, arguably one of the most environmentally conscious oil companies (though that’s like saying “most tolerant televangelist”), has admitted to having no fucking clue how to plug the Deepwater Horizon tap now that the rig is sunk and the pipes are spewing oil like a firehose at a rate of 795,000 litres (about 5000 barrels) a day. This despite the accident happening on a day when several BP execs were on that very oil rig to celebrate their safety record, and their repeated protestations that offshore drilling is incredibly safe and efficient and nothing could ever go wrong. What’s worse, BP scientists have projected a worst-case scenario of ~9.5 million litres (60,000 barrels) a day if the pressure continues to shear at the comparative pinhole that exists presently. BP claims to have the capacity to handle a worst-case scenario of 162,000 barrels a day, but no action has yet been successfully taken despite the disaster happening 20 days ago and counting.

To compound the issue, Obama’s newfound love of “drill baby drill” appears completely unabated by the situation at Deepwater Horizon. Regulators are rubber-stamping new oil leases and waiving environmental impact studies at an alarming rate, despite the acknowledgement that this is on track to become a worse spill than the infamous Exxon Valdez. Granted, this is well down on the list of worst oil spills of all time, but knowing the damage the Valdez caused, due to human error and finger-pointing, it’s galling to see the current round of blame-game, the Shaggy Defense, between BP, Transocean and Halliburton:

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And frankly I’m getting sick of people dodging blame. It’s also sickening to see people honestly thinking that they can pray the oil away, because I see that as another way of dodging the blame.

We are all to blame, to a degree, for our complacency in maintaining an oil-based economy and energy policy. We are to blame if we give corporations cover to make profits without any repercussions when something goes wrong — as is the case if BP, Transocean and Halliburton all get off the hook for their part of the liability for the cleanup efforts. We are to blame if we elect into office people that deregulate and remove restrictions regarding protecting not only the environment but the sustainability of our present actions. And we are especially to blame if we do not shout loudly and with as much anger as we can muster about the vicious cycles of burning oil and drilling oil and spilling oil despite all the obvious long-term detrimental effects this will have for humanity.

This goes double for you idiots that are on your knees praying for relief from the oil disaster. Understand that there are people with as expansive of faiths as yours, who are praying for the acceleration of an apocalyptic final battle where everyone dies and some select few get to go to heaven. There’s something you can be doing instead — figure out the underlying reasons (hint: our dependence on oil) for our problems (hint: the environmental impact we have on our planet in pursuit of oil) and do whatever it takes to raise awareness and/or elect officials that give a shit about the problem (hint: people that recognize that the vast majority of scientists agree that the evidence shows we need to get the hell off of our addiction to fossil fuels ASAP).

And if you’re one of those people, you can run for office yourself. You know, in a last resort.

This is a really big problem

Pope Keeps Digging

Jason Thibeault

So the AP reports that the Pope delivered a speech heavy on misdirection and obfuscation. What else is there to do when you find yourself in a hole?

“I must say, we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word ‘repent’, which seemed too tough. But now under attack from the world, which has been telling us about our sins … we realize that it’s necessary to repent, in other words, recognize what is wrong in our lives,” Benedict said.

“Open ourselves to forgiveness … and let ourselves be transformed. The pain of repentance, which is a purification and transformation, is a grace because it is renewal and the work of divine mercy,” he said.
[…]
On Monday, the Vatican posted on its Web site what it claimed had been a long-standing church policy telling bishops that they should report abuse crimes to police, where civil laws require it.

But critics have said the guidelines were merely a deceptive attempt by Rome to rewrite history, designed to shield the Vatican from blame by shifting responsibility of dealing with abusive priests onto bishops.

The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer who has been the main expert witness for victims in hundreds of lawsuits, called the guidelines a “failed attempt at damage control through revision of history.”

He noted that senior Vatican officials, including the current Vatican No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, were quoted in 2002 as saying the church shouldn’t require bishops to report abusive priests to police because it would violate the trust the two shared.

“In practice, the policy has been to avoid contact with civil authorities and to cover up the crimes and the criminals,” Doyle wrote in an article this week. “The newly created canonical tradition of referral to civil authorities is the result of one thing: public outrage, the exposure from the media and the pressure for accountability in civil courts.”
[…]
[A] French court gave Pican, then bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux in northwestern France, a suspended prison sentence for concealing knowledge about the Rev. Rene Bissey. Bissey was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2000 for raping and sexually abusing 11 minors in the 1990s.

In the letter, Hoyos wrote: “I congratulate you for not having turned in a priest to the civil administration, and I am delighted to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, will have preferred prison rather than to turn in its son-priest.”

Sounds pretty damning, if you ask me. But you shouldn’t, because I’m obviously just on an anti-Catholic crusade.

You really need to read that whole article. I can’t quote any more liberally than I already have.

Pope Keeps Digging

Adam Deen vs Dan Barker – Is God a Delusion?

Jason Thibeault

The question and answer periods are always so awkward, so neither Jodi nor I really felt the need to watch them, but the debate itself was rather one-sided. Of course it always seems that way — theists always think their side handily won any such debate, while atheists likewise think the same thing. My reasoning for calling it one-sided is insofar as Barker actually adequately answered Deen’s claims (though not, as Deen seemed to think he should have, during the opening speech), while Deen did nothing of the sort, merely constructing several incorrect assumptions about Barker’s worldview.

I’ve noticed that quite often during debates — the theist side will make several claims about the atheist’s worldview in particular, even going so far as to outright refuse to acknowledge the atheist’s self-definition. I can’t recall a debate where an atheist tells a theist what the theist believes — only that their reason for believing what they claim to believe is wrong.

Adam Deen vs Dan Barker – Is God a Delusion?

Christian Video Games Part 2: Wisdom Tree’s roots

Jason Thibeault, , ,

When I left off yesterday, I’d given you an overview of Wisdom Tree’s more horrible offerings. But of course, I’m not done yet — not while they still exist. And they do still exist, you know. And their idea of taking existing video game concepts and grafting Bible quizzes on them is now practically a time-honored tradition in Christian video games today, so you can’t say they weren’t influential.

In case you missed it, Part One is right here.

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Christian Video Games Part 2: Wisdom Tree’s roots