Ted Kennedy has died

Sad news: another Kennedy has gone. Despite his reckless personal life, I liked the policies he stood for, and he was an excellent senator — may we have many more Massachusetts liberals to take his place.

I have to add that there is one thing I find really repellent about that NY Times obituary. It’s the end, where Edward is compared to his brothers, John and Robert.

“He was the survivor,” Mr. Ornstein continued. “He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he will end up by far being the most significant.”

John and Robert Kennedy did not ‘burn brightly and fade away’. They were brutally murdered in their prime.

Watch Maine

Maine recently legalized same-sex marriage —hooray and all that, but we don’t get to be complacent about it now. There is a proposition on the ballot for November, Proposition 1, that would revoke marriage equality, and as you might expect, conservative forces are gearing up to promote this bill. Greta Christina has some suggestions for how you can help defeat this hate bill…and explains why you should.

Tulsa, Oklahoma must be paradise

That’s what I must conclude from Anna Falling’s priorities. She’s running for the office of mayor, and her #1 most important issue, the one she’s made the centerpiece of her campaign, is to get creationist displays installed in the Tulsa Zoo.

For Anna Falling, the road to city hall runs through the Tulsa Zoo.  She’s made her Christianity central to her platform and now the exhibit depicting the Christian story of Creationism is her first campaign promise.

“Today we are announcing that God will be glorified in this city.  He shall not be shunned. Upon our election, we hereby commit to honoring Him in all ways that He has been dishonored,” said Anna Falling.

This was news several years ago when the zoo board rejected a proposal to add sectarian Christian messages to their exhibits. The rejection must have rankled, since Falling now thinks this is the Most Important Issue for Tulsa.

Besides being ridiculous, though, it does make me marvel. The economy must be booming in Oklahoma; the mayor doesn’t have to concern herself with recruiting and maintaining new businesses. There must not be any crime. Race issues have disappeared. Education…oh, never mind, creationists don’t worry about good education, anyway. City services must be flawless.

I hope you Tulsans aren’t so lulled by the easy livin’ in Oklahoma that you don’t bother to participate in the political process any more. Get out of your easy chair on election day, strap on your jetpack or get in your flying car, zoom past the gumdrop mountain and the drinking fountains that dispense free beer, and vote!

Oh, wait. The Tulsa World reports that she’s making creationism in the zoos her top priority “among city issues that also include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.” How can this be?

Maybe bumpy streets aren’t that big a deal when you get to work on angel’s wings.

Our health care opponents are shamelessly stupid

Right now, the US is in a political struggle to get better national health care. One of the chief tactics of the opposition is, in addition to simply lying and pretending it would be horrible for poor children to get medical treatment, is to tell us horror stories about all those wicked socialist countries and their miserable health care, without the wondrous benefits of raging capitalism. Investor’s Business Daily, for instance, ran this interesting example of how bad the British health services are (it has since been corrected, with some acute embarrassment, I hope):

“The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary,” read a recent editorial from the paper. “The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script…

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

I guess they thought Stephen Hawking was an American. Maybe it was the accent.

For the record, though, Stephen Hawking: British. Not dead.

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.