Put this video on full screen and sit back and savor the under-appreciated weirdness found in our oceans.
(If I had to guess, it looks like a deep sea jellyfish to me.)
I have to commend Sam Harris for featuring a guest post by security expert Bruce Schneier on profiling, especially since he backs up everything I’ve said so far. 1) Profiling people who “look Muslim” will have a high false positive rate, 2) “looking Muslim” is a hopelessly indefinable criterion, 3) terrorists will use profiling to avoid detection, and 4) it’s a strategy to alienate those who could be on our side.
I do recommend his blog, Schneier on Security, for your regular reading (also because he has Friday Squid Blogging — he’s a man of excellent taste).
I’m also going to recommend this paper that Brownian mentioned in the comments here: Strong profiling is not mathematically optimal for discovering rare malfeasors. Profiling doesn’t add up; the numbers don’t work.
Are we done now?
It was a fairly long fuse, I guess — it’s taken more than a month for the FtB April Fools’ joke to finally detonate at Greg Laden’s place.
Poor Bob.
We all know now that Sam Harris has Muslim friends.
I’m proud to say I have humanist friends.
It is true that fear, hatred, and hostility of some Western people toward Islam and Muslims help made Muslims all over the world more religious, more fundamentalists, and more terrorists. We who were born in Muslim family but became an atheists and fighting Muslim fundamentalists know very well how difficult this fight has become.
We know there is a conflict. But the conflict is not between the West and Islam. Or West and East, or Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism and Islam. The conflict is between secularism and fundamentalism, between rational logical minds and irrational blind faith, between innovation and tradition, between humanism and barbarism, between the future and the past, between the people who value freedom and the people who do not.
The transcript of Greta Christina's interview with Edwina Rogers is now available. I’ve heard that some other people here at FtB are going to get a shot at interviewing her, too — I was offered a chance, but deferred because…well, because she reminds me of this commercial.
It’s getting ugly. The SCA can’t very well put her in a sealed room and tell her not to do interviews anymore — communicating with people is her job — but I suspect the board that hired her is cringing every time she opens her mouth.
Maurice Sendak is dead. The books live on.
I read every one of his books to my kids. Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Pierre — they were all just a little subversive, all just a bit off-kilter, all just off enough to be appropriate to spark a little freethought. I think they reflected his personality.
I was born into a christian family. We weren’t fundamentalists, religion wasn’t the center of our lives. We did go to church every Sunday morning and I went to youth group every Wednesday night. Neither were overbearing and you were allowed to believe whatever you wanted, so long as it was still christianity, except, that, science always took a back seat. I loved biology in high school, But, when my teacher was forced to read that dreadful memo at the beginning of the evolution portion of the class, my parents started pushing me towards engineering. I didn’t quite understand why, but t liked math and legos were my thing for a while, so I followed their wishes well into college.
Kentucky just launched a tourism campaign to tout the wonderful landmarks in their state — and Governor Beshear includes Ken Ham’s creationist “museum” as one of them. He has just slapped the whole state with a gross insult.
Really, Governor Beshear? You’re so desperate for tourist attractions that you pad your list with a shameful institution dedicated to lies and miseducation? They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel; next on the list is a garbage dump, or a sewage treatment plant, or a polluted lake.
Of course Ken Ham is laughing happily. Not only did he get the state seal of approval on his madhouse, but the state has committed $2 million to road work to improve access, with $9 million more on the way.
Man, the University of Kentucky must be rolling in cash if the state has so much to spare that they can waste it on roadbuilding to an attraction that doesn’t exist.
There is a trial going on right now of 5 men who plotted the 9/11 attacks (now? What happened to the idea of a speedy trial?) The lawyer for Walid bin Attash has done something I have mixed feelings about. She’s wearing a hijab.
Attorney Cheryl Bormann, 52, who is from Chicago and is not Muslim, said she wore the modest garment that revealed only her face to show respect for the religious sensitivities of her client, Yemeni terror suspect Walid bin Attash.
These men must get fair representation in the court, and she’s going beyond the call of duty to work with her client…although letting them dictate how the lawyer dresses goes too far. If she were defending a sexist asshole like Tucker Max, would she let him make her do her appearances in a bikini? She’s there as a professional, not as a slave to the suspects.
But alright, let that one slide…let’s assume she’s doing what needs to be done to represent a slimebag. This, though, is not forgivable.
Bormann asked the court to order the other women present at the hearing to dress more modestly so as not to distract the defendants, who would be "committing a sin under their faith" by looking at them.
What an astonishing demand. According to the article, the chief prosecutor “deemed the request not worthy of a response.” Seems about right.
But now I’m wondering…Bormann has to know that this kind of behavior and request in the environment of that courtroom has to be highly prejudicial. Is she trying to subtly sabotage Walid bin Attash’s case? Because I don’t know much about him, and I’ve already decided that he’s an arrogant, contemptible jerk.
