Glass houses and stones

I was wondering how long it would be before some country that is lectured on human rights by the US government would turn around and hurl its own abuses back at it. It would have to be a country that was independent enough of US influence. Well, it looks like China has taken the lead, in response to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of human rights in China.

According to Reuter’s “The United States is beset by violence, racism and torture and has no authority to condemn other governments’ human rights problems, China said on Sunday, countering U.S. criticism of Beijing’s crackdown.” China also said that the US’s advocacy of free information flow was contradicted by its efforts to shut down WikiLeaks.

Now that China has said it, how long before other countries justify their own abuses in a similar fashion? When one country denies human rights to people, it starts a downward spiral in which other countries justify their own abuses by saying “Why pick on us when they do it?”

Pressure builds on Obama over treatment of Bradley Manning

A long list of law academics, some of whom have been considered supporters of president Obama, have signed a letter strongly protesting the cruel treatment of Bradley Manning.

The existence of this letter was reported in the London Guardian:

The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago.

He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that “is not only shameful but unconstitutional” as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia.
…
The intervention of Tribe and hundreds of other legal scholars is a huge embarrassment to Obama, who was a professor of constitutional law in Chicago. Obama made respect for the rule of law a cornerstone of his administration, promising when he first entered the White House in 2009 to end the excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

I hope US news outlets pick up on this and publicize it widely.

How civilians get killed

We frequently get reports of how civilians, including women and children, get killed in air strikes by drones and other military aircraft. But why does this keep happening, when the technology is now supposed to be so advanced that people can be identified at long range? Surely you should be able to at least be able to make out children to alert you that you are not engaging fighters?

This article, based on military documents and transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, describes in detail how one such tragedy came about. It shows the power of confirmation bias, how when you are determinedly looking for something, you interpret events as supporting your beliefs even if they do not.

Evangelicals and fundamentalists

In the American Christian religious landscape one finds Catholics, mainline Protestant religious denominations, and the rest that one can describe as evangelicals and fundamentalists. While the Catholics form a distinct group, there is a great deal of overlap between the other three categories and it is not often easy to see what distinguishes them. In particular, people tend to use the words fundamentalists and evangelicals interchangeably.

John Green of the University of Akron describes four cardinal beliefs of evangelicals that distinguishes them from mainline Protestants:

One belief is that the Bible is inerrant. It was without error in all of its claims about the nature of the world and the nature of God. A second belief is that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ. A third belief, and one that is most well known, is the idea that individuals must accept salvation for themselves. They must become converted. Sometimes that’s referred to as a born-again experience, sometimes a little different language. Then the fourth cardinal belief of evangelicals is the need to proselytize, or in their case, to spread the evangel, to evangelize.

Now different members of the evangelical community have slightly different takes on those four cardinal beliefs. But what distinguishes the evangelicals from other Protestants and other Christians is these four central beliefs that set them apart.

[Read more…]

Searching for the mind of the Lord

Via Pharyngula I learned about an internal fight amongst the so-called Young Earth Christians that resulted in Ken Ham (The head of Answers in Genesis and the person behind the creationist museum in Kentucky) being disinvited from a conference on home schooling. What struck me was how the other creationists decided that Ham should be kicked out. In their letter to him, they said, “The Board believes this to be the Lord’s will for our convention and searched the Scriptures for the mind of the Lord and the leadership of the Holy Spirit before arriving at this decision.” (My italics)

I became curious about how they did this. What exactly were they looking for? Where in the Bible would you find something about your god’s policy on home schooling conventions? What keywords would you use? Or do you randomly pick verses from the Bible, like a lottery, and then try to divine its meaning, like you would the entrails of a chicken in former times?

I suspect that although such Christians routinely use the language of ‘searching for the mind of god’, they arrive at their policy decisions based on more mundane considerations just the way other people do and throw in god as an afterthought to give them added weight.

Prostate cancer tests

Older men like me are routinely given a PSA test for prostate cancer as part of our check-ups. My numbers fluctuated from year to year. Some years my number would rise slightly and my physician would alert me to it, but the next year it would drop. I never did anything about it since I was not convinced that the tests were conclusive enough. Now a new study seems to indicate that my skepticism was justified, since the PSA seems to have high levels of false negatives and even higher levels of false positives.

This latest study was carried out in Norrkoping in Sweden. It followed 9,026 men who were in their 50s or 60s in 1987.

Nearly 1,500 men were randomly chosen to be screened every three years between 1987 and 1996. The first two tests were performed by digital rectal examination and then by prostate specific antigen testing.

The report concludes: “After 20 years of follow-up, the rate of death from prostate cancer did not differ significantly between men in the screening group and those in the control group.”

The favoured method of screening is the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test.

However, around 15% of men with normal PSA levels will have prostate cancer and two-thirds of men with high levels of PSA do not in fact have prostate cancer.

One study has suggested that to prevent one death from prostate cancer you would have to screen 1,410 men and treat 48 of them. (My italics)

Title song from Singham

Apparently a new film has been released in India with the title character sharing my last name. The way my last name is spelled in Tamil leads to a slight ambiguity in transliterating to English, with those favoring a hard g sound writing it as Singam and pronouncing it ‘Sing gum’ with heavy stress on both syllables while those favoring a soft g (as my family does) writing it as Singham, to rhyme with Bingham.

The Singham/Singam in the film seems to a tough but honest cop in the Dirty Harry mold, as you can see from this music video created around the title song.

Silly royal etiquette

I have never understood the fascination that people have with the British royal family, a truly useless and parasitic group if there ever was one. And it is not only Americans who seem to be so obsessed. I was in Sri Lanka when Charles and Diana got married and the English-speaking community there seemed to talk about nothing else.

We are now seeing this replayed with the upcoming wedding of their son. What amuses me is that people are so concerned about the minutiae of ‘royal etiquette’ as if causing offense to the royal family by breaking some rule that does not apply to anyone else was one of the worst things one could do. In a previous post titled God save us from the Queen I said that it is absurd for the queen to expect any more respect than we would give any elderly woman.

Stephen Colbert deservedly pokes fun at all this.

Marjoe

Some time ago I wrote a review of the documentary Marjoe of a Pentecostal child evangelist/faith healer in which Marjoe Gortner (an unbeliever and now an adult) gives an insider’s account of how the racket works.

You can now see the entire film online. It is quite fascinating