The lies of war

It seems like every time the US wants to attack another country, we hear stories of appalling atrocities committed or about to be committed by that country that requires that “WE MUST ACT NOW! THERE IS IMMINENT DANGER OF SOME VAGUE CATASTROPHE! NO TIME TO WEIGH THE OPTIONS! NO TIME TO CONSULT CONGRESS! NO TIME TO SEEK PEACEFUL RESOLUTIONS! WE MUST START BOMBING IMMEDIATELY TO AVOID DISASTER! AND DON’T FORGET HITLER!”

And once the war is well under way, we are told, “Oops, sorry, things were not so bad after all but nobody could have known that then. We cannot change course now because it would only show weakness. So the war must go on”

Patrick Cockburn tells us that the Libyan war is no exception to this pattern.

Camp Wingnut

Say you are a Tea Party true believer. Where could you send your child to summer camp so that that they are not in danger of being brainwashed by camp counselors all of whom are well known as seeking to advance the Commie-gay-atheist agenda? You create your own camp, of course, based on those run by Christian groups like the one shown in the film Jesus Camp.

So what delights await the lucky children sent to such camps?

One example at Liberty: Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the “banker” will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value.
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Still another example: Children will blow bubbles from a single container of soapy solution, and then pop each other’s bubbles with squirt guns in an arrangement that mimics socialism. They are to count how many bubbles they pop. Then they will work with individual bottles of solution and pop their own bubbles.

“What they will find out is that you can do a lot more with individual freedom,” [Jeff] Lukens said.

They certainly will, Jeff Lukens!

But I think that this does not go nearly far enough and the camp could be made even better. So here are a few of my suggestions for improvement.

  • Children should be told that if they get into trouble while swimming, not to expect other children to save them since each person must succeed or fail on their own and being rescued by others merely encourages dependence on the nanny state.
  • If a child gets a gift of food treats from his family, he should not share it with others but eat it on his own, all the while lecturing the others that he deserves it due to all the hard work he put in to be the child of rich parents.
  • No team sports or group activities will be allowed whatsoever. Each child must only do individual activities to inculcate the lesson that we all succeed and fail on our own.
  • Around the campfire at night, each child will read aloud a chapter of Atlas Shrugged with the naughty bits redacted.

I offer these suggestions gratis purely to advance the cause of wingnuttia. No need to thank me, Jeff Lukens.

Heart with no heartbeat

NPR had an interesting story on a new type of artificial heart. Older models had tried to replicate the human heart with its pumping mechanism but have been unable to create models that work without problems for a long time.

This new heart is radically different in that it foregoes the pumping action and has motors that continuously drive blood through the body. This makes for a much simpler design with less chance of breakdown. It seems as if the pumping action is not essential for the working of the body, though it is still early days and we do not have long-term data on the effects.

If the results hold up and a heart that beats is not really necessary, it means that the beating heart is a product of evolution that is functional but not optimal. This would illustrate once again that the processes of evolution do not necessarily produce the best design but merely a design that works. This will not be the first time that thinking that nature’s design is the best and trying to copy it has sent us in the wrong direction. Early experiments with flight tried to emulate the flapping wing action of birds with little luck.

What is kind of weird is that with this new artificial heart, there will be no heartbeat, no pulse, and the EKG signal will be a flat line. So the most common markers we currently use to see if someone is dead or alive would indicate that the person is dead.

Hypocrisy about cyberwar

One of the crucial steps by which the US entered a state of permanent warfare was when acts of ‘terror’ (however one defines that politically malleable word) shifted from being criminal acts that could and should be treated as lying within the province of law enforcement agencies, to political acts that required a military response such as bombing and invading countries or extra-judicial ones such as setting up kangaroo courts where the normal processes did not apply but convictions could be easily obtained or even where people could be held without trial indefinitely.
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The facts about Social Security

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), exposes all the myths and lies about Social Security being in crisis and requiring a radical overhaul.

Fortunately, the program is fundamentally solid. While you can sound really smart in Washington by saying that Social Security is going bankrupt, the facts say the opposite. According to the Social Security trustees’ report, if we did absolutely nothing the program could pay every penny of scheduled benefits through the year 2036.

Even if we never did anything, Social Security could always pay near 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
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Social Security is a great program that does exactly what it was supposed to do. It provides a core retirement income as well as insurance against disability and support for survivors. It has extremely low administrative costs and little fraud. The only problem is the politicians who say they want to save it.

End of The World

The News of the World, one of England’s largest circulation newspapers, will close down after this Sunday’s edition, ending a 168-year run. It is the first major casualty of the phone-hacking scandal involving the Rupert Murdoch empire.

It is reported that Andy Coulson, a former editor of the paper who was British prime minister David Cameron’s director of communications until January when he resigned over early hacking allegations, will be arrested tomorrow and that other arrests are expected.

News Corp scandal

There is a huge scandal blowing up in the UK involving News Corp, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post in the US and several of the biggest newspapers in Britain, including the Sun and News of the World. The Guardian has been providing exhaustive coverage of this story in the UK but it has not caught fire here. In the June issue of Vanity Fair, Sarah Ellison provides some background to the whole sordid affair.

Murdoch’s media outlets have been implicated in the widespread hacking of the phones of people. It started with the phones of celebrities and they used the information thus gained to essentially blackmail them, not for money but in exchange for the kinds of exclusive celebrity gossip stories that are the trademark of their tabloids. But they also hacked into the voicemails of politicians, crimes victims’ families, families of dead soldiers, and the victims of terror attacks and it is these revelations that have really sparked outrage. Furthermore, these sleazy people had a close symbiotic relationship with the highest levels of people in the government and the police, whereby they provided favorable coverage in exchange for protection for their illegal activities.
What pushed the story over the edge was that they had hacked into the voicemails on the cell phone of a 13-year old girl Milly Dowler who went missing in 2002 and was found murdered about six months later. But when her mailbox filled up, mostly with friends and family pleading with her to contact them, the snoopers deleted some messages to allow new messages, cruelly raising the hopes of the family and police that the girl was alive and monitoring her voice mail.

Readers of this blog know that I do not hold the traditional media in high esteem but even by those low standards, Murdoch’s operations represent the absolute dregs. Unprincipled, sleazy, and corrupt are the words that jump to mind when Murdoch’s name is associated with anything. So far there have been no allegations that Murdoch’s American operations have engaged in similar actions but given the close ties between the UK and US operations I would not be in the least surprised if it had happened.

The logic of science-2: Determining what is true

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

An important question in any area of knowledge is being able to identify what is true and what is false. The search for what is true and the ability to know when we have discovered truth is, after all, the Holy Grail of epistemology, because we believe that those things that are true are of lasting value while false statements are ephemeral, usually a waste of time and at worst harmful and dangerous.

Aristotle tried to make a clear distinction between those things that we feel we know for certain and are thus unchanging, and those things that are subject to change. The two categories were variously distinguished as knowledge versus opinion, reality versus appearance, or truth versus error. Aristotle made the crucial identification that true knowledge consisted of scientific knowledge, and his close association of scientific knowledge with truth has persisted through the ages. It also made the ability to distinguish between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge, now known as the demarcation problem, into an important question since this presumably also demarcates truth from error. (This brief summary of this history is taken from the essay The Demise of the Demarcation Problem by Larry Laudan which should be referred to for a fuller treatment.)
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Casey Anthony and Anthony Sowell

Sometimes I am so clueless about current events that it amazes me. What triggered that thought is that I had been almost completely oblivious to the goings on in the murder trial of Casey Anthony. It was only yesterday when she was acquitted of her daughter’s murder that I became aware that this case had apparently been gripping the cable news world over many years and that people around the nation had been so obsessed by it that some actually flew to Florida from all over the country and lined up early outside the courthouse in order to get a seat at the trial.

Apparently the cable news world and chattering classes had decided Anthony was guilty and the acquittal seems to have caused some kind of national freak-out. Why are people so quick to dismiss the jury’s verdict? After all, they are the ones who followed the trial most closely.

I had not been totally unaware of the trial. I check Google News headlines regularly and had seen mention of the name Casey Anthony accompanied by a photo of her and knew that she was on trial for something but did not see any reason follow it up.

While the death of a two-year old child is undoubtedly tragic and sad, there are many such murder cases and it baffles me why some become the focus of so much attention. Is it due to the fact that the media pays more attention if there is a young, white, reasonably attractive (as far as one can tell from the thumbnail photos), middle class woman at the center of events?

Right now there is a trial going on in Cleveland of Anthony Sowell, a man accused of the serial rape and murder of eleven women and burying their bodies in various parts of his home. It is a macabre and truly sensational case that is a big story locally. But as far as I can tell, it is not receiving much attention nationally. I would not be surprised if even many Clevelanders were following the Casey Anthony story more closely than the Sowell case. Is it because the people involved are all black and the victims were mostly drug addicts, prostitutes, runaways, homeless, or otherwise social outcasts?

My article in The New Humanist is now online

You can read it here.

The article is titled No Doubt and suggests a short and simple new definition of the term atheist that more accurately and unambiguously captures what that label represents to those who choose to adopt it. This new definition leaves little room for agnosticism.

I’d be curious to hear from the readers of this blog what they think of my suggestion. If you think it is an improvement, maybe you could spread the word to the other atheist forums and groups that you patronize.