There are relatively few people in this world today who impress me enough for me to call them heroes. But they exist. Belatedly, imperfectly, incompletely, I would like to thank them for inspiring me and encouraging me to expect more and better things.
Here, in no particular order, are some of them. Please help me fill in the names I will inevitably overlook.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports a disturbing but sadly unsurprising development in the struggle to recover our civil liberties.
At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House “We the People” website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for “maintenance” following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign.
If you follow the link to the Wired article, you can read about the circumstances which led to the petition, which was basically asking the White House to intervene to get the TSA to comply with the law.
UPDATE: Commenter Eidolon tracked down a post from the petition’s author stating that the petition was not pulled early, but simply expired. He speculates that people were assuming that the signing period would extend through midnight, but instead it expired in the middle of the day, at roughly the same time as when he first posted it. That’s not unusual, given how computers keep track of time periods, and it’s understandable that this could create the misperception of a prematurely-terminated petition. He also notes that the petition was given an extra day to compensate for the outage.
Looking over the comments from yesterday’s post, it seems that some people understood my point about Dawkins’ Mormon quote, and others didn’t. It’s an important point, though, so I want to follow up and try to make it clear for everyone.
The problem I see is not that Dr. Dawkins is impugning the sanity of people who would seriously consider voting for Mitt Romney. That’s fine, that’s fair game. Romney is a candidate for the US presidency, and it’s perfectly reasonable to discuss his expected behavior as president if he were elected. The problem is that the quote, as originally phrased, does not address Mitt Romney’s qualifications, it addresses the qualifications of “a Mormon.” Not any specific Mormon, but just “a Mormon”—and thus, by implication, any Mormon.
That may seem like a quibble, but it isn’t. There’s a hugely significant difference between saying you’d be crazy to vote for Mitt Romney because he makes important decisions based on irrational beliefs, on the one hand, versus saying you’d be crazy to vote for “a Mormon,” on the other. One is a specific assessment of a specific individual based on observed patterns in his behavior, and the other is prejudice against an entire class of people, based on religious affiliation, regardless of individual qualifications for the position. The former is fair game; the latter is prejudice based on religious affiliation.
With the recent shootings at the movie theater and the Sikh temple, a lot of people are pointing fingers at unbelief, and saying that the reason we have so much violence today is because we’ve lost the faith that used to guide us, that sense of supernatural reward and punishment that helped us resist evil and do good.
You know, they might have something. I mean, there’s a pretty definite pattern here. Not just the two most recent gunmen, but any number of violent criminals before them, are men who have lost the simple faith they once had in Santa Claus, who “knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” I’m sure that if they had only held on to their original, childlike belief in an all-seeing Father Christmas, making a list and checking it twice, they’d have never done anything so terrible.
It just goes to prove that Santa actually exists, doesn’t it.
If you’ve got a gay friend who’s getting married, you’ll soon be able to buy them a congratulatory card at Target. That’s a good thing: the more businesses who realize that gays spend money too, the more completely gays will be integrated into our consumerist society (and more importantly into the pervasive marketing and product placement that do so much to define our culture). But as far as human rights go, Target’s support has been mixed at best.
Target has a checkered background when it comes to supporting gay rights. The store previously sold T-shirts with gay pride themes online only a month before these cards were stocked in mid-June. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports Target’s recent boost in enthusiasm for gay rights is seen as an attempt to make amends after donating $150,000 to Minnesotans for Marriage, a group that supported Tom Emmer, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who opposed gay marriage.
If this is progress, then that’s a good thing; if it’s just political fence-sitting, then meh. Lukewarm ambivalence is better than outright hostility I guess. On the other hand, this is definitely going to help with mainstreaming acceptance of gays as ordinary people, so I’m calling this one a win, with or without genuine support from the business. When you’ve got them by the wallet, their hearts and minds will follow.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.