What to expect when you hire a Goon Squad

One of the many disgraceful acts of brigandage our country committed in Iraq was the hiring of mercenary thugs through a company called Blackwater. Unwilling to risk the political fallout from openly discussing and recruiting the number of soldiers necessary to actually carry out their grand plans for invading another country, the previous administration instead threw buckets of money at Halliburton-KBR and outsourced the military to profit-seeking, murderous killers-for-hire who did more to harm than help the war effort. As we ought to have expected, the Blackwater unsavoriness is getting even uglier.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

These bastards fit right in with the Bush administration, didn’t they? These monsters need to be shut down now, and I hope the Obama administration has the steel to do it.

Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, “If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians.” Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.

“Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn’t exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated,” Kucinich said.

Is it really that hard to understand?

Once again, we’ve got an anti-atheist claiming that the opposition to the nomination of Francis Collins to head the NIH is built entirely on the fact that he is a Christian. It’s nuts. We spell it out clearly, over and over again, and these people seem incapable of comprehending a basic fact.

Every single one of us that has come forward to voice our unhappiness with the nomination has given an argument that is not based on the simple private fact that a nominee prays or goes to church. Such a position would be insane and impractical; we live in a country that is at least 80% Christian, and there is a bias to preferentially select nominees for public positions who are at least nominally religious. If we really felt that being a Christian meant you shouldn’t work in government, we’d be raging constantly at every public office in the country.

Do you see that happening? No. We aren’t interested in what public officials do in their free time. They can have whatever legal hobby they want, they can favor whatever private rituals they want, they can associate with any non-dangerous group on their weekends that they want, whether it’s going to church or gathering to watch football.

So what’s different about Collins? He doesn’t keep it to himself. He is openly and avidly evangelical, brags about adding religious messages to NHGRI announcements, and recently built a high-profile website that promotes evangelical Christianity. I don’t mind a Christian in charge of the NIH, but I do object to a missionary, especially one who has said some awfully stupid things about science, being put in control of such a large chunk of our country’s science budget.

I find it difficult to believe that the people who have been sowing this lie, that the “New Atheists” oppose Christians in office because they pray or go to church, are so stupid to believe something so patently untrue, or so carefully negated in our arguments. It seems to be pure malice: they are trying to discredit us with disinformation. I guess I have to get used to the fact that the other side likes to fight dirty.

Ken Miller on Collins

Sam Harris wrote an op-ed criticizing Francis Collins’ nomination to head the NIH titled “Science is in the details”. Now Ken Miller has written a short letter in reply, and I think he would have done well to have heeded that title.

Dr. Collins’s sin, despite credentials Mr. Harris calls “impeccable,” is that he is a Christian. Mr. Harris is not alone in holding this view. A leading science blogger, also attacking Dr. Collins, demonstrated his own commitment to reasoned dialogue by calling the scientist a “clown” and a “flaming idjit.” When reason has such defenders, Heaven help us.

No, that first sentence is completely false. The head of the NIH can be a Christian, a Jew, a Moslem, even an atheist, and it won’t disturb us in the slightest. Here’s a list of past directors of the NIH; can you identify their faith, their hobbies, their sexual orientation, their favorite kind of music? Do you care? The fact that Collins is a Christian is not a problem at all — we are not interested in narrowing the search pool for science administration to the extent that we exclude the majority of people in this country.

What is disturbing is that Collins is a fervent evangelical believer who inserts his superstition where it doesn’t belong, in the execution of his job. James Wyngaarden and Bernadine Healy and Harold Varmus did not do that. I cannot trust him not to Christianize his responsibilities — from reading his book, it is clear that he actually feels a moral obligation to add religious instruction to everything he does. That should bother everyone.

There should be no religious litmus test for the office, but that does not mean that there shouldn’t be constraints on how the office should be used — it should not be steered into becoming the National Institutes of Holiness.

Jerry Coyne also makes the point that the tolerance always goes only one way: if the nominee were aggressively atheist…oh, never mind. A person who was as vocal an atheist (or Muslim, or Scientologist, or Hindu) as Collins is a Christian would never even be considered for nomination. The kind of behavior exhibited by Collins on his BioLogos website, if done in service of any other belief than evangelical Christianity, would be a great big waving red flag to anyone vetting the nomination.

As for the rest of Miller’s complaint, it is true: I called Collins a “clown” and a “flaming idjit”. But that’s because I believe in telling the truth.

I did not say those things because Collins is a Christian, but because of the bad science and poor logic he uses in his talks. Those imprecations were inspired by an examination of what he did.

I will repeat what I wrote about the Collins nomination again.

The situation is this: the White House has picked for high office a well-known scientist with a good track record in management who wears clown shoes. Worse, this scientist likes to stroll about with his clown shoes going squeak-squeak-squeak, pointing them out to everyone, and bragging about how red and shiny and gosh-darned big his shoes are, and tut-tutting at the apparent lack of fine fashion sense exhibited by his peers who wear rather less flamboyant footwear.

I would rather Obama had appointed someone who wore practical shoes, and didn’t make much of a fuss about them, anyway. And excuse me, but I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.

I stand by that still. It’s what I think of the situation.

But notice that nowhere have I or Coyne or Moran or any of the people critical of this choice ever claimed that “Dr. Collins’s sin…is that he is a Christian.” That’s simply a disgraceful lie, one designed to imply false motives and generate an unjustified sympathy for Miller’s choice.

Amsterdam is a cesspool of corruption

If you believe Bill O’Reilly and Fox News, that is. They’ve been fond of claiming that that very liberal European nation’s experiment with tolerance and personal freedom is a complete failure, that the Netherlands is collapsing in anarchy. So an Amsterdam resident made a short clip documenting cultural armageddon.

That was beautiful, an extremely effective rebuttal. If the Netherlands is in decay, the comparison of the statistics between that country and the US must mean that Bill O’Reilly really despises America.

Now I want to move to Amsterdam.

Republicans have become certifiably insane

The other day, one of those routine, empty resolutions came up in congress: a Hawaiian representative brought up a nice fluffy little resolution recognizing the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood, which contained a collection of whereas’s listing notable features of the state. Bland stuff, nothing controversial, except maybe one line, if you’re a kook: one of the points of pride is that Hawaii has now contributed a native son to the White House.

Need a kook? Minnesota’s own Michele Bachmann stood up to shoulder the honor. She bravely blocked the vote. (The resolution has since been passed.)

I could accept the occasional wacko, even if they do come from my own state, but it goes deeper than that. A huge chunk of the Republican contingent at the capitol is either buying into this ‘birther’ nonsense, or is so afraid of losing the far right wing vote that they won’t speak out against it. This is a hilarious video of Mike Stark interviewing Republican representatives, asking them if they believe Obama was a natural born citizen who could legitimately serve as president…and most of them dodge the question.

These people are nuts.

Monday must be Pick On Francis Collins Day!

Sam Harris seems to have triggered some kind of reflex, because there is discussion going on all over the place.

Jerry Coyne has a long piece up that chews over that awful talk Collins gave at Berkeley. He has the full recording of the whole talk — it was titled “The Language of God: Intellectual Reflections of a Christian Geneticist”, and I’m pretty sure the fifth word slipped in there entirely by mistake — and it is a genuinely appalling load of rubbish. It’s two hours long, but I could only make it through the first half hour before having to give up. I thought I had a strong stomach from years of wading through the creationist literature, but I guess I have limits.

I ran away in exasperation at the point where he starts babbling about the fine-tuning argument, claiming that there are only two possible choices: either there is a multiverse with an infinite number of possibilities to explore, or the cosmic constants were chosen by his god. What about chance? There’s nothing impossible about the fact that our universe was the product of a chance event: after all, I am the product of a chance event, a randomized mixture of the genes of two people equally the product of chance. You can’t simply rule out the importance of chance events in the history of individuals or the universe, but Collins does. And what about necessity? It may be that a universe can only exist if it possesses an interlocked set of constants…that, in fact, all the parameters of the universe are co-contingent and co-dependent.

Anyway, I’ve read his book, but I hadn’t experienced the full force of his looniness until I’d seen that presentation. The man is a flaming idjit.

US New and World Report weighs in, too, and asks a couple of reasonable questions that I have to answer in the negative.

But isn’t it possible that Collins’s faith might be valuable for NIH beyond its PR power?

From spending some time with him, it appears that Collins’s scientific curiosity is at least partially motivated by a faith-based desire to understand what he believes is God’s universe. Isn’t that a net positive, given that it helped him lead the team that decoded the human genome?

And might not his faith lend guidance on inevitable questions he’ll face around scientific ethics? Don’t those ethics have to be rooted in some moral or religious system that transcends pure science?

Curiosity is a fine thing and I have to encourage any wellspring for it. However, the defining feature of Collins’ faith, and that part of it that makes it objectionable, is that he uses it to wall off parts of the human world from curiosity. The human genome project was a technological exercise, a sustained, disciplined effort to apply developing tools to a specific, narrow problem. It opens up new avenues for science, but in itself was not a demonstration of scientific competence. His administrative ability led the work to a conclusion, not his scientific skill set.

And what has he done with it afterwards? Declared the genome a divine artifact, decreed that certain domains, such as human behavior and morality, are exempt from scientific scrutiny, and proposed a succession of freakish Christian dogmas as substitutes for reasoned analysis. At this point, where the real science takes over, his faith only gets in the way.

And please, don’t ever equate faith with ethics. They have nothing to do with each other, except, perhaps, that faith is a commonly used escape clause to get away from the requirements of human morality. Science itself is a tool, as amoral as a hammer, and it certainly can be misused, but don’t go crawling to the priests for guidance. Let’s hear from philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and lawyers long, long before we consult with theologians—I can’t imagine a worse fate for scientific ethics than for it to fall under the sway of a dogmatic Christian.

Russell Blackford takes a pragmatic approach: we’re stuck with Collins, there isn’t much we can do to oppose his appointment, and we can’t even make the argument that he’s a crummy bureaucrat — he’ll do a competent job in the office. I agree completely. There really are no plans for the godless horde to march on Washington, there will be no effigies burnt, we aren’t going to even throw rotten tomatoes at the NIH building. We will sigh and go on.

However, we will continue to make quiet complaint, and we will be scrutinizing his actions carefully.

The situation is this: the White House has picked for high office a well-known scientist with a good track record in management who wears clown shoes. Worse, this scientist likes to stroll about with his clown shoes going squeak-squeak-squeak, pointing them out to everyone, and bragging about how red and shiny and gosh-darned big his shoes are, and tut-tutting at the apparent lack of fine fashion sense exhibited by his peers who wear rather less flamboyant footwear.

I would rather Obama had appointed someone who wore practical shoes, and didn’t make much of a fuss about them, anyway. And excuse me, but I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.

So predictable…

When I read this opening to an article about a Republican politician, I knew instantly exactly where it was going.

Meet Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley. He’s a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is “a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school.” (Check out the religious imagery on the site — the sun poking through clouds, as if manifesting God’s presence — which of course shows Stanley’s deeply pious nature.)

Can you? Take a guess, then look below the fold.

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