Hitchens under torture

Christopher Hitchens’ views on war in the Middle East often infuriate me, even while I greatly enjoyed his views on religion. My respect for him goes up, though, because he has done something I wouldn’t: to determine whether it really was torture, he had himself waterboarded by the US military (and if you relish the thought of watching Hitchens actually being tortured, it was recorded on video).

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning–or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and–as you might expect–inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

The answer is clear.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

It is a dreadful act to perform on the subject, and it degrades those who do it. I’m ashamed to admit that I would like to see all of the proponents of torture in this awful war subjected to this treatment; it is by an act of conscience that we have to say it must not be allowed to happen to anyone.

(via Cycle Ninja)

Our Serious News Media: Newsweek

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Yikes. As everyone seems to have noticed, their cover story this week is Lincoln vs. Darwin, an absurd premise driven by the coincidence of their common birthday, which stoops to quoting their horoscope at us.

As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there is more to this birthday coincidence than the same astrological chart (as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached–hmmm, so far so good).

And of course, this being our brain-dead media, it can’t actually discuss them as independent people who made their own unique contributions to the world, it has to turn it into a horse race and ask, “Who was more important?” (I won’t give the answer away, but here’s a hint: which one was American?) It’s a glib and superficial bit of tripe.

The only good part is that it does define what a scientist is. This will be handy when people ask what I do for a living.

And Darwin, at least at the outset, was hardly even a scientist in the sense that we understand the term–a highly trained specialist whose professional vocabulary is so arcane that he or she can talk only to other scientists.

You can read more about this major media event at the Sandwalk and RichardDawkins.net. Sad to say, I don’t seem to share a birthday with any major historical figures, precluding any hypothetical rivalries. Although I was born on the same day as a major earthquake in the Aleutian Islands, if that means anything.

Unintended consequences

I rather like the growing bans on smoking in bars and restaurants — it makes them much more pleasant places for those of us who’d rather not inhale poisons from acrid, burning weeds involuntarily. But maybe an exception should be made from places where the burning and inhaling of plant matter is the whole intent of visiting, as is being discovered in the Netherlands.

Millions of people flock to Amsterdam’s “coffee shops” every year to legally buy cannabis and hashish over the counter and to smoke it without fear of arrest, as long as they are on the premises.

But the new law bans tobacco inside café and restaurants, meaning cannabis users are now forced to light up potent and heady pipes and joints loaded with pure marijuana.

So now visitors are getting toasted on extra-potent weed.

Hey, is this just a publicity stunt for the new “Harold and Kumar” movie?

Ice, Mud and Blood

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I’m very fond of Chris Turney‘s book, Bones, Rocks, and Stars. It’s a slender, simple description of the many tools scientists use to figure out how old something is, and when arguing with young earth creationists, it’s become the first thing I recommend to them. It’s short and easy to read, and focuses on explaining how dating methods work.

Turney has a new book out: Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). This is the one you’ll be able to hand to climate change denialists, and it’s a winner.

Its virtues are the same as his previous book, the careful documentation of exactly how we know what we know, and less dictation of the conclusions. This is useful, because as we all know, climate is a phenomenon that shows a lot of variability, exhibits patterns in its history, and also has large degrees of uncertainty, phenomena that denialists can seize upon to magnify that uncertainty into a basis for an unwarranted rejection of well-supported hypotheses. So while we can see distinct variations from simple linear uniformity of climate change like the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, that doesn’t change the fact that greenhouse gases profoundly influence earth’s temperature, and it’s clear that CO2 has risen to levels the planet hasn’t seen in at least 650,000 years. The past tells us what we can expect in the future, and it’s grounds for serious concern. Yes, Turner comes down firmly on the side of an anthropogenic cause for the current trend of global warming, and he explains exactly why, step by step.

Where Turner departs from the formula of his last book, though, is that this one, while still fairly short, is much denser and more technical. Anyone can read it — I managed, despite knowing next to nothing about climatology — but it’s not the kind of thing you’ll be able to do in an evening or two of light reading. There are a few places where the level of detail slowed me down to a steady slog rather than a fast flit, but face it, any book that tries to untangle ocean currents, monsoons, El Nino, and past current reversals is going to occasionally demand the same level of studious, focused attention you’d need to clean up a snarled fishing reel. This is a book that is describing some extraordinarily complicated stuff.

If you want just one book, not too thick or too technical, that will give you the intellectual tools to at least understand what the climate change experts are talking about, this is the one. I recommend bringing it to the beach and reading it there — you’ll appreciate the rising tide and the ocean beaches a little more, and perhaps regard them with a little more respectful dread.

The poll…I cannot resist

Oh, man…you know you’ve got colossal wackaloonery when you find a website titled “Remember Thy Creator” — but then you discover that they are sponsoring a YEC conference at the end of July, that they list luminaries like John Morris and Ken Ham, and that they’ve got a front page article demanding that people reject the idea that the earth is old because the Bible says so, and best of all, they’ve got an open online poll. “Do you think Creation should be taught, along with Evolution, in public schools?”

Go on, skew that sucker.

Astonishing pusillanimity

This has to be seen to believed. John Conyers asks John Yoo a simple question: “Is there anything the president could not order be done to a suspect?” He can’t give a straight answer. So Conyers reduces it to a simple hypothetical: “Could the president order a suspect to be buried alive?” He still can’t answer! It’s a yes or no question!

What can be done in the face of such a disgusting evasion of simple decency from the Bush administration? Not much, but laugh.

Gary Farber has invented a game, “Stump the Yoo”. Go ahead, think of some outrage you would propose as a hypothetical to John You, just to see him squirm.

Gary suggests, “Can the president order the arms of a suspect eaten by wolves while still attached?“

How about, “Can the president order a suspect to be impaled for his lunchtime entertainment?“

Or perhaps, “Can the president order a suspect to be repeatedly drowned to the point of suffocation?“

Your turn. Can you think of a question that would get John Yoo to say simply, “No, the president cannot order that”?

Obama and ‘faith-based’ initiatives

First, there was this awful news about Obama’s support of “faith-based programs”:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Gak. If that were true, he’d be at some risk of losing my vote, and would definitely be on the road to losing my campaign support. That was Fox News, though, so I held off until I heard more…although reporting that Obama supported an agenda favored by the religious right seemed unlikely from that source, unless they also announced he was only going to fund Islamic programs (Oops, did I just start another rumor?).

Next, there was some fast damage control: that early report was wrong, and here’s what Obama really said.

Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea — so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work.

That’s better. Until you think about it. He’s still proposing an expansion of Bush’s faith-based initiatives — he’s going to be handing out billions of dollars to religious organizations. It’s nice that he’s specifically saying there will be restrictions, that the money can’t be used in programs that discriminate, and it must be for secular purposes, but he’s still propping up a religious middleman between government aid and the people, and that’s a tool that will be used to proselytize indirectly, even if they don’t simply flout the rules. This is a bad idea.

I’m going to take the side of Americans United, which has put out a call for Obama to shut down the government’s pandering to religion with these faith-based charities.

Rather than try to correct the defects of the Bush “faith-based” initiative, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would do better to shut it down, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Obama today announced a proposal to expand faith-based funding during a speech in Zanesville, Ohio.

“I am disappointed,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “This initiative has been a failure on all counts, and it ought to be shut down, not expanded.”

However, Lynn said he was pleased to hear Obama express support for church-state separation and say that he would bar government-funded proselytism and religious discrimination in hiring when tax dollars are involved.

“It is imperative that public funds not pay for proselytizing or subsidize discrimination in hiring,” said Lynn. “Obama has promised that he will not support publicly funded proselytism or discrimination in hiring, and that’s an important commitment.”

The Bush administration has repeatedly insisted that religious charities can discriminate on religious grounds in hiring staff when running publicly funded programs.

Lynn said he is concerned that the Obama plan apparently would allow direct tax funding of houses of worship to run social service programs. That, said Lynn, raises serious issues of entanglement between religion and government.

Americans United has led opposition to the Bush faith-based initiative since it was unveiled in 2001.

The plan Obama proposes doesn’t even make sense. If religious groups have a history of altruistic support for the needy, good for them and let them continue as they have…but funneling government funds through organizations that supposedly already have “faith-based” mechanisms for raising money seems superfluous. That’s the only advantage these groups have, anyway — the ability to fleece the flock to fund their work. Being religious does not give any advantage in obtaining material outcomes.

End the faith-based initiatives. The government should only be supporting programs that work — at least, in my dreams of an efficient administration, anyway.

Theology is a deceitful strategy

Karl Giberson is interviewed about the subject of his new book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It looks interesting, in an aggravating sort of way, and it’s on my long list of books to read and use to put dents in my wall. The interview reminds me why I detest the rarefied apologetics of sympathetic theologians as much as I do the bleatings of the purblind literalists — neither one even notices the fundamental flaws in their core of belief.

Let me be nice first. Giberson does say a number of eminently sensible things — he’s a physicist by training, he has no brief for creationism at all, he might wish Intelligent Design were true but he sees it as a betrayal of the scientific enterprise. Don’t mistake him for your corner bible thumper! Here, for instance, is a good argument well spoken:

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