New name, same old crap

OneNewsNow reports that the Alliance Defense Fund, whose defense of bigotry and discrimination has suffered serious setbacks in recent years, is hoping to win some new support by adopting a new name. And in the best conservative Christian tradition, they’ve decided to pick a name that completely misrepresents what it is that they actually do.

The new name is Alliance Defending Freedom — but president and CEO Alan Sears tells OneNewsNow the group’s purpose remains the same.

“Defending religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family. Only the name has changed,” says Sears.

“The change is to help more people easily understand the work that we do and why it matters…”

You know, that kind of reminds me of another C. S. Lewis quote.

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So will Christians quit using the Internet now?

This strikes me as mind-bogglingly welcome news:

Google is stepping up its activism on gay rights issues in nations with anti-homosexuality laws on the books, a company official announced Saturday as he kicked off Google’s new “Legalize Love” campaign.

The campaign will focus on countries like Singapore, where certain homosexual activities are illegal, and Poland, which has no legal recognition of same-sex couples.

Whether this is motivated by genuine humanitarianism or crass public relations, Google deserves major props for recognizing which side is the right side to be on, and for going beyond the passive approach of standing on the sidelines and nodding their heads when people talk about gay rights.

Now they just need to set up a PC recycling program for all the conservative bigots who will be throwing away their computers now that the Internet has come out.

Government considers calculated misinformation to fight insider leaks

Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”

via Wired.com. Your tax dollars being used to deceive you and shut down your access to information about government misconduct.

Texas scientists: It could have been us…

It seems I’m not the only one to notice this aspect of the Higgs boson story.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have unveiled the discovery of a tiny particle Wednesday that may help them understand the nature and even the origin of the universe. It’s a breakthrough Texas lost its chance to try for almost two decades ago, when Congress defunded the costly project…

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Higgs Boson

I heard a rumor that somebody was getting ready to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson, and now I see the discovery being hailed as a done deed on CNN, so I guess they really did it. This is so cool and so awesome! It’s a bit ironic that the discovery was announced on July 4th, the American independence day, by European scientists—if it hadn’t been for penny-pinching anti-science bureaucrats in Washington, that discovery might have been made by, or in conjunction with, an American research team. But America has lost its drive to be pre-eminent in cutting-edge science, preferring instead to come up with innovative ways to mingle science and superstition in public school curricula.

But I digress, and I don’t want my curmudgeonly rant to cast a pall over this tremendous scientific discovery. Like so many in the field of advanced physics, it seems this answer only serves to raise more questions. And that’s the way science ought to work: each new discovery opens the door to making further discoveries. Yes, we have more questions, but now we know what the right questions are, and can start to work on answering them.

Of course, there’s one truly momentous question that’s on everyone’s mind right now, and I’m sure it’s one you all can’t wait to get answered…

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Firefighting

Imagine you’re a homeowner in a heavily-wooded neighborhood, in a year when the rains have been few and far between. You’ve watched nervously as the local news covers area brush fires burning out of control, and you’ve tracked the burn on your online maps, and watched them get closer and closer. Then one afternoon, you see the smoke, off in the distance, and within an hour or so the flames themselves become visible. Where are the firefighters? you wonder.

Finally, they arrive, five engines and a score of men and women dressed in heavy slickers despite the oppressive heat. They pull up and rush from their vehicles to form a line between your home and the fire, and—just stand there. The fire gets closer, and still they stand, staring the flames down, but making no move to unfurl any hoses or uncap any hydrants. Now you can feel the heat of the approaching flames, and the firefighters slowly fall back. Inch by inch, foot by foot, the flames advance, and the firefighters retreat. At last, defeated, the flee to their engines and roar away, and you yourself have only seconds to escape, with just the clothes on your back and whatever you managed to throw in the car before the firefighters got there.

Down the road, you catch up with the useless fire crew and demand to know what the hell they were doing, and why they didn’t get out their hoses and fight the fire. And that’s when you find out: they were graduates of the Focus on the Family Fire Fighting Academy, and the only technique they were taught was, “Don’t play with matches.” So that’s what they were doing. They came to your home, and stood between you and the flames, and aggressively did not play with matches.

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Wiretap requests down 14%

Networkworld.com is reporting a 14% drop in state and federal wiretap requests compared to a year ago.

According to a report issued by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts a total of 2,732 wiretap applications were authorized in 2011 by federal and state courts, with 792 applications by federal authorities and 1,940 applications by 25 states that provide reports. The reduction in wiretaps resulted primarily from a drop in applications for intercepts in narcotics offenses, the report noted.

At the risk of being paranoid, I can help wonder if that’s because the authorities are relaxing a little, or if it’s because they are now less apt to make a request first.

Well, ok, maybe just a LITTLE warming

The problem with trying to deny a worsening problem is that it becomes increasingly difficult to deny. And then what do you do? At Exxon, they’re trying the “admit it, but downplay it” approach.

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown. In a speech Wednesday, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt…

Tillerson blamed a public that is “illiterate” in science and math, a “lazy” press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear” for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ok, so maybe anthropogenic global warming is real, but it’s nothing we can’t handle, right? And those climate scientists who are turning out to have been right all along? They were just doing it to manufacture fear. But at least the public is basically illiterate in science and math, so they’re easy to bamboozle.

Considering how things are turning out, though, you have to ask: bamboozled by whom?

Sexual panhandling

I haven’t actually been to any major atheist/skeptical/freethought conventions, but I’ve been to a few technical conferences, and I’ve always enjoyed the opportunity to travel to new parts of the country and do a little sightseeing on the side. One thing I’ve found, though, is that sometimes when you step outside of the hotel or convention center, the panhandlers are waiting for you on the sidewalk, trying to bum some cash off of you. And then again, sometimes they aren’t. It depends on the venue.

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A modest baseline

I’ve been staying out of the current debate over sexism/feminism because frankly it’s a bigger issue than I have time to address. It’s a big deal, though, so here’s at least a couple cents worth: I’d like to propose a modest baseline for inter-gender interactions, and I’d like to aim it particularly at guys.

The baseline is this: before interacting with a casual female acquaintance, I want you to imagine someone you find sexually unattractive. I think, for example, a lot of you might not be attracted to, say, the comic book guy from the Simpsons. Whatever attention you wish to pay to your casual female acquaintance, imagine yourself receiving the same kind of attention from the comic book guy, with exactly the same feelings and motivations. Would it bug you? Would it be unwelcome? If so, assume that you do not have a right to behave that way towards your female acquaintance. You may eventually earn the right, but don’t just assume you have it, or that you can quickly earn it with the right “techniques,” any more than the comic book guy could with you.

That’s a modest and inadequate baseline, but I hope it might have some use as an exercise in promoting a bit of understanding and sympathy. And above all restraint.