Saddam Hussein has been killed.
He was a venal little monster, but I don’t see that we’ve gained anything by stooping to the level of a third-world thug, and the unseemly haste with which an irreversible act was committed makes it even more sordid and sleazy.
He said that celebrations broke out after Hussein was dead, and that there was “dancing around the body.”
Barbarians.
At this point, it’s safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due consideration in product placement.
Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.
The book is clearly in violation of the standards the Park Service sets for itself; this excellent letter from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility cites the explicit directive from the director of the agency that lays out the criteria.
Historical and Scientific Research. Superintendents, historians, scientists,
and interpretive staff are responsible for ensuring that park interpretive and
educational programs and media are accurate and reflect current
scholarship…Questions often arise round the presentation of geological,
biological, and evolutionary processes. The interpretive and educational treatment
used to explain the natural processes and history of the Earth must be based on
the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have
stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism.
This is a no-brainer. The book should not have been approved in the first place. It should be removed from their catalog immediately. The Park Service should approve and implement training for their staff (which should hardly be necessary; they shouldn’t hire idiots in the first place) to make sure that they are presenting accurate geological information to the public.
“No comment” is not good enough. This disgraceful controversy has been stewing long enough that the continued inaction of the Park Service administration constitutes an implied endorsement of anti-scientific nonsense.
This country is thoroughly screwed up. Compare these two stories.
A man was found guilty of a $2 robbery, released on parole, then sentenced to life in prison after he tested positive for marijuana. It was in Texas, and the sentence has been commuted (after he’d served 16 years for smoking pot), but still, that’s insane.
ExxonMobil was fined $5 billion for their negligence in the Exxon Valdez tanker accident, which they haven’t paid and probably plan on never paying. They just got a friendly judge to cut the penalty in half.
Both sentences occurred at about the same time. Tyrone Brown got to sit in jail for half his life for a petty crime. Lee Raymond got to grow fat and obscenely rich after poisoning the environment, and his company lawyers get to play games with the law.
That’s America.
Thanks to Hilzoy, I’ve learned that our dearly beloved president has enunciated an important principle.
Bush said that despite declarations of piety from Muslim radicals now fighting the United States, he doubted that they believed in God.
“‘Terrorists’ can’t be God-believing people,'” Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, quoted Bush as saying.
Before you run off and dismiss this as the ravings of an incompetent, deluded boob, think it through. It means that if someone does something wicked, we get to declare that they must not really believe in God — true faith only belongs to saints. All those angry people in the Middle East? Atheists. People who push buttons to launch cruise missiles? Atheists. People who order people to launch cruise missiles? Atheists. People who set policies that drag us into wars that require people to order other people to kill people? Atheists. Personally, I think people who extort the elderly into mailing them substantial portions of their social security checks are also atheists. People who are wicked enough to try and teach creationism must also be atheists. Only an atheist can do bad things.
Since saints are a negligible minority, it’s now safe to say that America is an atheist country.
Now comes the hard part, though. We have to get all those atheists in America to stop lying and calling themselves Christian, and we have to get all those atheists in the Middle East to stop lying and calling themselves Moslems. I’m not sure how we’re going to get them to confess.
Torture, maybe?
Despite the fact that the scientific evidence supports their innocence, the kangaroo court in Libya has found the six medical workers guilty of intentionally infecting children with AIDS. The mob, at least, is happy.
“For the second time, justice has spoken out with a ruling against those criminals and the punishment they deserve, because they violated their obligations and sold their consciences to the devil,” Abdullah Maghrebi, the father of one infected child, told the BBC.
I can sympathize with a father with a sick child, but in this case, may he continue to live in his devil-haunted world, and may no modern medical care ever come again to his entire pariah nation. No medicine, no vaccinations, no surgeons—leeches and lancets and the usual contrivances of the pre-eighteenth century world should be all they get. That is my curse on Libya. The sad thing is that many of these deluded fools would consider it a blessing.
How can they have a respectable show trial if the defendant keeps defending himself so well? This is a classic and irrefutable response.
Our country, with the approval and encouragement of George W. Bush, has been carrying out a program of religious indoctrination and the unconstitutional endorsement of evangelical Christianity. Federal money has been funneled into “faith-based” programs that make religious dogmatists prosper, and have no other actual, real-world value. The clearest examples are the prisons, where con artists like Chuck Colson have been engaged in a kind of ministry that is actually religious extortion and bribery.
The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.
But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress.
The article documents many instance of this kind of behavior line up at the trough and get cash—large amounts of cash—to proselytize to captive audiences. It’s genuinely despicable. This is exactly why the government should not be involved in favoring one religion over another—these gasbags cannot be trusted to put the interests of their target audience above their need to preach dogma.
For another example of the sleazy behavior of evangelicals, I give to you Kent Hovind. Hovind is a dishonest creationist who was caught committing tax evasion. Not only was he skimming to enrich himself, but by playing games with their salaries and paying them under the table, he was screwing over his employees, which seems to be a most Christian thing to do. He’s been convicted and thrown in jail, and he has been sporadically posting blog entries from prison. These are appalling stories of a con man who can’t stop bilking his fellow inmates.
have also been teaching math and science to some of the others. It is great to see convicted drug dealers get excited when they learn fourth grade level math for the first time. I have spent quite a bit of time with one 29-year-old man who cannot read at all. I have been teaching him phonics and we are reading Genesis 1, 2, 3 and John 1, 2, and 3. His face lights up when he sees that he can do it. I offer commissary items like soup or coffee to men who memorize Bible verses. There is no way to describe the joy that they show when they get it right. Many have never memorized scriptures in their life, and maybe that is why they are in jail. Scripture helps us to “cleanse our ways” Psalm 119:9-11.
Hovind is not a good teacher. I’ve heard his lectures; he’s a fraud and a liar who babbles at a frantic pace, who has been peddling anti-scientific crap for decades, and now he claims to be teaching science to his fellow inmates. This is an injustice. We’re locking up these poor fellows as punishment, isn’t it a bit much to also allow a bunco artist like Hovind to fill their heads with lies and actively contribute to their ignorance?
Also note the outright bribery I highlighted in the quote—the man has no shame at all.
In fact, he is so shameless I expect that he’ll soon be applying for federal aid in his propaganda efforts…and given the record of this Republican administration, he’ll probably get it. After all, a belief in Jesus seems to be sufficient qualification for any clown to be a teacher (or a president!), overcoming any amount of stupidity.
(crossposted to The American Street)
I’m going to rudely hijack one political issue to make a point about another. I think you’ll quickly figure out what it is.
NARAL has been undermining their own relevance by failing to support pro-choice positions in a misguided attempt to court moderates—basically, as Ezra Klein points out, they’re failing to recognize their role in the political ecosphere. They’re an advocacy group for a specific range of policies, not a politician who has to balance constituencies—they are supposed to be spokespeople for one particular constituency.
…one thing groups like NARAL have a tendency to do is accept vaguely acceptable-sounding or politically popular bills in an effort to remain in the center, believing their group’s moderate credentials — see also their early endorsement of Lincoln Chafee — somehow important. The alternative strategy — practiced by the NRA, among others — would be to wage all-out war on even these minor encroachments, thus fighting to shift the center left.
This strategy of trying to join the center rather than move it is a damaging one. If NARAL were totally dogmatic and absolutist, that would make life much easier on Democrats who could occasionally show their “centrism” by voting against NARAL-opposed legislation that actually doesn’t much matter. Instead, however, to demonstrate independence on choice, Democrats end up supporting much more onerous and repulsive legislation, because just aping NARAL’s priorities line doesn’t win them any points in the media. Elected politicians, after all, often have to remain “in the center.” Independent interest groups, on the other hand, can spend their time trying to redefine what “the center” is. NARAL — and others on the left — should do more to exploit that freedom.
Digby also reiterates this very important point.
I do not think NARAL understands its function anymore. It is not a politician from a conservative district who won with only a few percentage points and needs to pander. It is not a political party that needs to gloss over differences to come to consensus. It is an advocacy organization. Its job is to hold the line and then move the debate their way.
If this is true for NARAL, how much more appropriate is it for the independent voices we look for on blogs? The job of the blogger is not to triangulate and strain to express some hypothetical view of some nebulous ‘moderate’—it’s to state his or her opinion, unmellowed by that fawning desire to appeal to a majority. Our readers are presumably sampling multiple online sources, and what we have to expect is that they will make up their own minds on the basis of those many inputs, and the real arrogance is to pretend that we can read those minds and aspire to represent a majority. We can’t and we don’t. We are nothing but the enabled and accessible voices for nations of one.
I am strongly pro-choice, so much so that my views probably make many other pro-choice people uncomfortable…and that should be OK. I am not trying to stand for a consensus, I am staking out my position.
This is also true for my views on other aspects of the political argument, on science and evolution, and on religion vs. atheism. I simply do not understand why apologists for religion, for instance, think they need to carp at me and tell me to be less radical, to moderate my stance and to quit alienating those hypothetical fence-sitters that they are trying to woo. That’s not my job. My goal is to shift the debate towards my position (without expecting that everyone will adopt my specific views), and I can’t accomplish that by letting the rope go slack and drifting towards someone else’s position.
So, loud and proud, baby. Fight for your ideas, not those that someone else tells you are examples of what the majority wants to hear. Majorities are made of individuals, and the only way we’ll ever get an honest consensus is if everyone is singing out frankly for their own beliefs.
Go read Effect Measure on the recent events in the case of the Tripoli Six. This is the story of a team of health care workers who were blamed for an outbreak of HIV among young patients at a Libyan hospital—they’ve been tried in a kangaroo court and face very unpleasant prospects.
Now, in a powerful reply to the Libyan accusations, Nature has published the results of a detailed analysis of the viruses afflicting the children, and the story is clear: the cause of the outbreak was the poor hygiene present at the hospital before the six workers arrived. Here are the major conclusions of the paper:
In 1998, outbreaks of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection were reported in children attending Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. Here we use molecular phylogenetic techniques to analyse new virus sequences from these outbreaks. We find that the HIV-1 and HCV strains were already circulating and prevalent in this hospital and its environs before the arrival in March 1998 of the foreign medical staff (five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor) who stand accused of transmitting the HIV strain to the children.
The strains present were also traceable to North Africa and at least one was prevalent in Egypt. They also found that the timing was off: the outbreak had begun before the workers had arrived.
We found that, irrespective of which model was used, the estimated date of the most common recent ancestor for each cluster pre-dated March 1998, sometimes by many years. In most analyses, the probability that the clusters from the Al-Fateh Hospital originated after that time was almost zero. For the three HCV clusters, the percentage of lineages already present before March 1998 was about 70%; the equivalent percentage for the HIV-1 cluster was estimated at about 40%.
Apparently, the scientific evidence which would have exonerated the accused was not allowed in the court. The Gaddafi government continues to live up to its reputation.
I like ’em. There are a few you absolutely must read today.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden on why she blogs.
Zuska on why she isn’t polite.
Digby on our government’s unforgivable inhumanity.
