(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

As readers may have noticed I have been quite harsh, more so than is my custom, with Ray Comfort and his evangelistic efforts, derisively referring to him as Banana Man and ridiculing his pathetic attempts at combating the theory of evolution. Why? Because I think that the kind of message that he preaches (which is very similar to the ones I used to hear as a young man in evangelical churches and in organizations like Youth for Christ and Campus Crusade for Christ) is positively evil.

Note that I am not saying that Comfort himself is evil. For all I know, he may be a perfectly charming man, kind to animals and children. But his message to people is evil though he, like all such evangelists, prattles endlessly about how they are spreading the ‘good news’ of Jesus to people.

What I find despicable is that Banana Man and other evangelists try desperately to make their listeners miserable by creating in them a sense of self-loathing (“The Law of God shows us that the best of us is nothing but a wicked criminal”, on page 47 of his introduction to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) and an inordinate fear of death, so that he can then bribe them to accept Jesus in order to assuage the terror that he himself has helped create. He provides direct support for Sigmund Freud’s suspicion that fear of death is the basis of religion.

Look at the things Banana Man and almost all evangelists of his stripe say to frighten people about death.

We will be without excuse when we stand before God because he gave us our conscience to know right from wrong…On Judgment Day, when God judges you, will you be found innocent or guilty of breaking this Law? Think before you answer. Will you go to heaven or hell? (p. 43)
…
All of humanity stands on the edge of eternity. We are all going to die. We will all have to pass through the door of death. It could happen to us in twenty years, or in six months … or today. For most of humanity, death is a huge and terrifying plummet into the unknown. (p. 41)

They are flat out wrong. What happens after we die is not unknown and should not be terrifying. Death and what happens after death is really quite simple and easy to understand. If you accept evolution, then you should know that all living things are related to each other. We are all part of one tree of life. We can be as certain about what happens after our own death as we can be about anything, because our death is no different from that of a banana or bee or a fish dying, and we know what happens in those cases.

Overwhelming evidence points to the fact that when we or any other living thing dies, all that happens is that our biological functions cease and we become just an inanimate mass of atoms. That’s it. There is no credible, objective evidence whatsoever that death is anything else but that. Life after death, heaven and hell, are all just figments of the imagination. Just as when a bird dies, we don’t think that a bird god judges whether it goes to a bird heaven or a bird hell, so it is for us. There is absolutely no reason that our particular branch of the evolutionary tree should have a different fate after death than any other branch.

There is nothing hugely mysterious or terrifying about death. The only emotion that makes sense as one gets older and approaches one’s own death is regret. Regret at not having left the planet in better shape, fought more vigorously for justice, helped others more, learned more things, read more books, seen more films, done more things, seen more places, enjoyed more the company of one’s family and friends, and so on. Regret at not being able to continue enjoying life is the only reasonable reaction to the thought of one’s impending death. But balancing that should be the deep sense of satisfaction that one has experienced the joy of life.

But people like Comfort, instead of allowing people to come to terms with death and relinquishing life peacefully when the time comes, instead try to terrify them for their own selfish purposes. People like him prey on the gullible and weak-minded, those who are not able to see that they are being manipulated. They exploit the reasonable fear people have that the process of dying might be painful, perhaps due to a protracted illness, to imply that people should fear death itself. The ‘comfort’ these evangelists offer believers is that if they believe in Jesus they can avoid hell. (“So you no longer need to be tormented by the fear of death”, p. 49.)

I would be less harsh on them if the ‘salvation’ they offer from fear of death was a one time thing. But the solution that these evangelists offer is not like a vaccine that inoculates for life, that enables people to overcome their fear of death, get on with their lives anew, and live the rest of their lives joyously. Such an outcome would not serve the evangelists’ purpose. They want you to repeatedly seek salvation over and over again and, more importantly, keep sending money to them.

So what they offer instead is a short-term satisfaction that disappears after a day or two. The ‘comfort’ they offer is more like a shot of heroin given to a drug addict, that makes you feel good for the moment, but then the effects wear off, you suffer withdrawal pains, feel miserable, and need to go back for another fix. They seek to create not emotionally healthy people but emotionally stunted drug addicts for Jesus.

I have been to evangelical meetings and know the routine. (The documentary Marjoe gives a revealing look behind the scenes at how they operate.) Week after week the gullible, under relentless condemnation of their sinfulness by the preacher, weepily confess once again what loathsome people they are, how they have strayed and sinned once again, how undeserving they are of god’s love, and then once again ‘give their lives to Jesus’ in order to get their Jesus fix. And they will return the next week to say the same thing.

The message that Comfort and his ilk preach is one that increases misery and self-loathing. It is death-obsessed and life denying.

In reality, life is a precious gift that we must enjoy while we can for as long as we can, and we should seek to have as many others enjoy it as well by seeking justice, being nice to people, and enabling them to enjoy life more too. Then when the time comes for us to die, we should do so gracefully and in peace, grateful for the fact that we have lived.

The atheist Robert Ingersoll said it best: “My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

How joyful and life affirming that creed is! In a few short words, it tells us how to live in a way that makes life better for everyone.

POST SCRIPT: The failures of logic and evidence in support of god

An excellent expose of the fallacious arguments put forward by religious believers. Well worth watching.

(Thanks to onegoodmove.)

In the previous two posts that dealt with what accommodationists believe (here and here), I examined Robert Wright’s attempt to resurrect a theology that will likely only appeal to that minuscule group of intellectuals who want to preserve their scientific credibility (which belief in an interventionist deity absolutely destroys) while at the same time satisfy their inexplicable need to think that there is some powerful supernatural entity out there, even if that entity does absolutely nothing. Biologist Jerry Coyne, in response to a similar attempt at accommodationism by philosopher H. E. Baber, has accurately dubbed this entity a ‘slacker God’, akin to someone who has immense talent and abilities and resources, yet chooses to live the life of a bum.

So we should really think of ‘accommodationists’ as ‘worshippers in The Church of the Slacker God.’

But this raises the question of why intellectuals like Wright and Baber so desperately want to belong to such a church, which frankly does not seem to offer much to its parishioners. After all, it rules out answers to prayers, miracles, heaven, and all the other goodies that entice believers to join the more mainstream churches, even though those goodies never actually materialize. How much mileage can you get out of the mere contemplation of ‘ultimate beauty, power, and glory’, as Baber suggests. Is it likely that Catholics would have shelled out the billions of dollars that enables the Pope to live in luxury if the Catholic Church had merely promised in return little more than a Zen-like experience?

Why do religious intellectuals like Baber and Wright feel the need to find reasons to believe in the existence of such a slacker god? Cynics have suggested that the lucrative Templeton prize that is given to those who try to reconcile science and religion is a powerful incentive to gloss over the unbridgeable chasm that separates the two worldsviews. At least that is what Jesus and Mo think.

But obviously only a very, very few are in the running for such a prize. While the total membership in the Church of the Slacker God cannot be that large (after all, how many religious people would find such a noninterventionist god appealing?) it is not vanishingly small either. But since the members are usually high-level intellectuals with access to a mass media sympathetic to their point of view, they can command a high public profile out of proportion to their numbers.

But the Church of the Slacker God, like all churches, has to deal with heretics. In this case the heretics are those who think that their god is not quite the slacker that people like Wright and Baber envisage. Some heretics like biologist Kenneth Miller, author of the book Finding Darwin’s God, try to find ways for the Slacker God to intervene in the world without being detected. The favorite vehicle for this is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Such heretics share the strange belief that god needs and wants to act in the world and yet does not want to be detected doing so, and thus has to go to extraordinary lengths to hide his actions by creating laws that enable him to surreptitiously intervene.

Why does god go to all that trouble, you ask? Pose that question to believers and you will receive the favorite cop-out answer given whenever believers are posed the question of why their god behaves in such weird ways: God acts this way for reasons that our puny human minds cannot comprehend at least at this stage in time and so the reasons must remain mysterious until he thinks we are ready to receive this knowledge. There is no real answer that can be given to this except to point out that they seem to have extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the reasons for god’s behavior even while they claim that god wants us to remain ignorant.

But there are even greater heretics like mathematician John Lennox, physicist John Polkinghorne, biologist Francis Collins, and author C. S. Lewis, all of whom start out by claiming fidelity to the doctrines of The Church of the Slacker God, but then abruptly switch and say they believe, among other things, that god resurrected Jesus from the dead, thus destroying his slacker cred.

What is interesting is that all the Western followers of the Slacker God seem to get their beliefs about god ultimately from the Bible, a book that unquestionably was written by people a long time ago who had their own agenda and were not at all followers of the Slacker God. What these intellectuals have done, following theologian Rudolf Bultmann, is de-mythologize the Bible, steadily stripping away every magical element that makes their god a god. But once that process is complete, instead of conceding that there is nothing left, they give the remaining emptiness the name of god and claim existence for it, a classic reification error.

William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in the famous ‘Monkey Trial’ of 1925, was much more tough-minded than modern day accommodationists. He knew where this process of demythologizing would end and he was having none of it.

If a man accepts Darwinism, or evolution applied to man, and is consistent, he rejects the miracle and the supernatural as impossible…If he is consistent, he will go through the Old Testament step by step and cut out all the miracles and all the supernatural. He will then take up the New Testament and cut out all the supernatural – the virgin birth of Christ, His miracles and His resurrection, leaving the Bible a story book without binding authority upon the conscience of man. (God and Evolution, New York Times, February 26, 1922, p. 84, emphasis added)

His conclusion? “Evolution naturally leads to agnosticism and, if continued, finally to atheism.”

It is fashionable now to reject Bryan as a fundamentalist anti-science zealot, even a stupid buffoon. But Bryan was smart enough to realize that once one accepted the theory of evolution, one ought to follow its implications through to their logical end. Since he did not like the atheistic conclusion he arrived at, his solution was to reject the premise, which was the theory of evolution itself.

By contrast, the members of The Church of the Slacker God, and even its heretics, say they embrace the theory of evolution by natural selection and all that that follows from it, but shrink from accepting the ultimate conclusion they arrive at that god is superfluous and thus can be rejected with no loss. Seeing no other way out of this impasse, they tack on an ad hoc ending, simply asserting that they believe in god anyway. They lack the logical consistency of Bryan.

But why bother to do all this? Why is it that even the Slacker God is so appealing to people like Wright and Baber? Perhaps they think that even though this entity has never done anything apart from creating the universe and its laws right at the beginning, it has the potential to do something, and they find that thought somehow comforting.

Weird.

POST SCRIPT: Who are you calling a slacker?

In this Mr. Deity clip that I have shown earlier, God and Jesus explain to their assistant Larry the real reason they stopped intervening in the world.

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

As I said in a previous post, practicing torture leads to the problem that you cannot then allow people to talk about the treatment they received.

It appears that the Obama administration is now circulating a new proposal to solve that pesky problem by executing people without even a trial, based purely on their guilty pleas, even though those might have been obtained under torture. According to Saturday’s New York Times:

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques.
…
The proposal would ease what has come to be recognized as the government’s difficult task of prosecuting men who have confessed to terrorism but whose cases present challenges. Much of the evidence against the men accused in the Sept. 11 case, as well as against other detainees, is believed to have come from confessions they gave during intense interrogations at secret C.I.A. prisons. In any proceeding, the reliability of those statements would be challenged, making trials difficult and drawing new political pressure over detainee treatment.

Note the use of the euphemisms ‘brutal interrogation techniques’ and ‘intense interrogations’ which the media uses instead of the word ‘torture’ when it is talking about US actions. It only uses the word torture when those practices are done by other countries.

Imagine what would have been the reaction if Roxana Saberi or Euna Lee or Laura Ling were to be executed without an open trial. But the Times, ever sympathetic to the needs of the political establishment, simply refers to this appalling proposal as a possible way to ‘ease’ the ‘government’s difficult task’.

The article quotes David Glazier, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has written about the commission system, as saying: “This unfortunately strikes me as an effort to get rid of the problem in the easiest way possible, which is to have those people plead guilty and presumably be executed. But I think it’s going to lack international credibility.”

So this is where the torture policies have driven us. We throw people into prisons, keep them without charges or trial for years on end, we torture them, and then based on their confessions, we execute them without giving them a chance to give their version of the story.

The original drafters of the US constitution were trying to create a document that they hoped would be a model to other nations of how the rights of government and people would be balanced by providing checks and balances. Their document was flawed (particularly in the way it allowed slavery to continue) but I think it is fair to say that the drafters would be appalled at the level of impunity with which the current government acts in violating the basic human rights of people. We seem to have restored the unilateral and unchecked power of kings, the very thing they sought to oppose.

POST SCRIPT: The case of Lakhdar Boumidienne

Lakhdar Boumedienne is an Algerian and Bosnian citizen who was doing humanitarian work for the Red Crescent Society when he was abducted in Bonia by the US, shipped to Guantanamo, and tortured there for nearly eight years. When the US Supreme Court, in a landmark 5-4 decision, said that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 under which he was being held was unconstitutional because it denied the right of habeas corpus, he was finally given a trial and the district court judge ruled in November 2008 that there was no credible evidence to keep holding him and ordered his release.

He now lives in France with his family. (See Glenn Greenwald for the full story.) You can see an interview with him that Jake Tapper of ABC News conducted.

A much more detailed account of the interview can be read here. In it we are told that in addition to the harsh treatment he received, the letters from his family were never given to him. There is a particularly poignant passage:

Last month, in a tearful ceremony at an airport outside Paris, Boumediene was reunited with his family. His daughters, who were toddlers when he was detained, are 13 and 9 years old.

“I cried, just cried. Because I don’t know my daughters,” he said. “The younger, when I moved from Bosnia to Gitmo, she had 18 months, only 18 months. Now 9 years. Now she’s big. Between 18 months, baby and 9 years, she walking, she’s talking, she play, she’s joking. It’s a big difference.”

It is important to realize that Boumedienne was eventually released only because he was brought to trial and allowed to make his case. Obama’s new proposals of “preventive detention” seeks the authority to keep people like Boumedienne in prison and tortured indefinitely and even executed without trial.

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

It is not just Geithner who is a slave to Wall Street interests. Key economic advisor in the Obama administration Lawrence Summers, although he comes from academia, is also enmeshed in that world. In just 2008 alone, Summers received $5.2 million from the hedge fund firm D. E. Shaw. Mind you, he was still a full-time professor at Harvard at that time, so this was for just part-time work. (Jonathan Schwarz breaks down the links to all his financial dealings.)

Summers also received $135,000 as a speaking fee for two speeches given at Goldman Sachs, the company that has been, and continues to be, a huge beneficiary of the bailout. (Recall that the previous Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and before that Robert Rubin also used to head that same firm). At that time, Summers was already heavily involved in the Democratic campaign and it was clear that he would be a major player in either the Obama or Clinton administration. So Goldman Sach was likely buying “insurance” or, as Glenn Greenwald says, paying an “advanced bribe”, making sure that a friendly face would be in a major decision making position in the new Democratic administration, since they could not pay him once he joined the administration.

Here’s another examination by David Sirota of the close-knit and like-minded people from both parties who control economic policy.

At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council. As Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Tim Geithner (now Obama’s Treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama’s chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary-designate Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a “cash for trash” scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry’s bad loans. It’s another ploy “to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms,” says economist Dean Baker—and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a “rival” voice inside the White House.

This financial oligarchy makes sure that those who are not with the program of letting the big financial firms have unfettered control over the economy get shut out of power. The story of Brooksley Born, former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is illustrative. She describes how her efforts in the 1990s to bring the wild derivative markets that caused the current crisis under regulation was vigorously opposed and defeated by a coalition of Alan Greenspan (then head of the Federal Reserve), then Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration Robert Rubin (who used to head Goldman Sachs), and Lawrence Summers. Her story shows the bi-partisan nature of the protection given to Wall Street’s interests.

As chairperson of the CFTC, Born advocated reining in the huge and growing market for financial derivatives. Derivatives get their name because the value is derived from fluctuations in, for example, interest rates or foreign exchange. They started out as ways for big corporations and banks to manage their risk across a range of investments. One type of derivative—known as a credit-default swap—has been a key contributor to the economy’s recent unraveling.
…
Back in the 1990s, however, Born’s proposal stirred an almost visceral response from other regulators in the Clinton administration, as well as members of Congress and lobbyists. The economy was sailing along, and the growth of derivatives was considered a sign of American innovation and a symbol of the virtues of deregulation. The instruments were also a growing cash cow for the Wall Street firms that peddled them to eager takers.

Ultimately, Greenspan and the other regulators foiled Born’s efforts, and Congress took the extraordinary step of enacting legislation that prohibited her agency from taking any action. Born left government and returned to her private law practice in Washington. (my italics)
…
Speaking out for the first time, Born says she takes no pleasure from the turn of events. She says she was just doing her job based on the evidence in front of her. Looking back, she laments what she says was the outsized influence of Wall Street lobbyists on the process, and the refusal of her fellow regulators, especially Greenspan, to discuss even modest reforms. “Recognizing the dangers . . . was not rocket science, but it was contrary to the conventional wisdom and certainly contrary to the economic interests of Wall Street at the moment,” she says.

All this occurred during Bill Clinton’s administration during which Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for most of the time. So the concept of ‘divided government’ applies only as long as Wall Street interests are not involved. We see that all these people from across the political spectrum, so-called conservatives and so-called liberals, Democrats and Republicans, united to give Wall Street a free hand by removing restrictions from the financial institutions and thus sowed the seeds of the current crisis, showing how the financial oligarchy maintains continuity even though political parties come and go.

Alan Greenspan was such a die-hard Ayn Rand devotee that he even told Bonds that he did not think there should be any laws against fraud because the market would take care of things. We saw how well that turned out. The problem is that in an oligarchic system as currently exists, market forces only apply to powerless people. When the markets turn against the big financial interests, they have the power and influence to get the government to use taxpayer money to bail them out. Oligarchies never lose unless there is a popular revolt.

POST SCRIPT: The need for strong oversight

Jon Stewart has an excellent two-part interview with Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), who has been charged with overseeing the current bailout.

Part 1 explains what is going on now and part 2 explains clearly how we got into this mess and what we need to do in the future.

Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M – Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 1
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Part 2:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M – Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

My concern is that because Warren seems to be honest and smart, she may be seen as a thorn in the side of the oligarchy which will try to make her serve as the usual window dressing to make it look as if there is accountability when in reality there is none. It seems clear that she is already being slowly frozen out of the information loop by the Obama administration. I wonder how long it will be before she quits in frustration, like Brooksley Born.

For some reason that I cannot figure, the last half-dozen or so comments disappeared, including some of my own. My apologies.

The second annual Ask an Atheist forum on February 5 was quite well attended. There were four of us on the panel answering questions. One question dealt with how it came to be that each of us did not believe in god’s existence, and the answers were pretty much the same, that although we had all been brought in religious families, we each realized at some point that it was silly to believe in something which violated all the laws of science and for which there was no evidence.

During my answer, I said that I was somewhat embarrassed that I had arrived at this realization so late in life (in my thirties) while my fellow panelists, two of whom were students, had figured this out while still in their teens. It still amazes me that I did not come to my realization sooner. After all, I had atheist friends in my teens and we argued about god and religion. But their arguments did not convince me then and that makes me wonder how I could have been so oblivious for so long.

I think I have discovered the answer. My atheism was caused by Mac computers.

I began disbelieving in the mid-1980s, around the same time that the Apple Macintosh computers were introduced. I remember the sense of excitement about using the first Macs when they came out in 1984 when Drexel University installed a lab of them and I had so much fun with them. I immediately realized that these were the computers I wanted to use, even though I did not get my own until 1989.

My realization that Macs were the true causes of my conversion to atheism was triggered by this page of the website of an outfit called Objective Ministries that clearly lays out the case of how Apple is the agent of Satan. Little did I know that I was being seduced by the revolutionary new ‘point and click’ operating system into giving up my god-fearing ways, whereas my young fellow panelists had grown up in the age of Macs and thus were indoctrinated much earlier in their lives.

So it is clear that the Macintosh line of computers is deliberately turning people to atheism. This raises an interesting question. If Macs are the tools of the Devil, is Steve Jobs the anti-Christ? Does that make Bill Gates the second coming of Jesus? The incomprehensibility of the old DOS operating system does remind one of religious doctrine. Is Armageddon already here, except that the fight is over market share for personal computers?

Actually, the Objective Ministries website linking Macs to the Devil is a parody but is so well done that initially I was fooled and thought it was real, yet another product of the paranoia of religious people seeing dark plots against religion in all kinds of unlikely places. Another page on this same site that also initially fooled me says that Objective Ministries is seeking to launch an expedition to find living pterosaurs in order to disprove the theory of evolution which says that humans and dinosaurs did not live contemporaneously. It was only when I started researching into who “Dr. Richard Paley” was and the “Fellowship University” where he supposedly taught something called “theobiology” that I discovered the truth.

That I was almost completely taken in by these hoaxes is because religious websites are often so weird and illogical in their message that it is hard to distinguish the real thing from a clever parody. The websites of the religious are so irrational as to make ripe targets for parodists and some are having a lot of fun doing so.

Not all seeming parodies are really so. The website of the Westboro Baptist Church is so over-the-top in its anti-gay bile that it seems like a parody. But the numbers of real people it gets out for its demonstrations seem to suggest that it is either real or has a huge numbers of performance artists working for it for a long time, which seems unlikely. Similarly the counting down to Armageddon of the Rapture Ready site is not known as a parody but its premise is so absurd that it would not surprise me if it was.
Conservapedia is not a parody (as far as I know) but its Wikipedia-modeled open editing platform has led to suspicions that many of the entries are by parodists actually mocking religion, while seeming to be earnest supporters of its 6,000 year old world view.

Although the cover of Objective Ministries has not been completely blown yet, there are some well-known parodies of religious websites that are fun even though, and perhaps because, you know they are parodies. Jesus’ General, Landover Baptist Church, Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are some examples.

But coming back to the issue of the link between atheism and computer preference, Objective Ministries may be on to something, when it asserts in jest that there is a correlation, even a weak one, between using a Mac and religious disbelief. One interesting study might be to see if Mac users are more likely to be unbelievers than Windows or Linux users. Maybe the Pew Research Center should add this question when it conducts its next survey of the religious beliefs of people.

POST SCRIPT: Cookie Monster does not quite get the library concept

In response to the Israeli attack on Gaza, the US and UK governments and the mainstream media in those countries have been as usual almost unanimous in their support for the Israeli actions and in condemning the Palestinians.

Paul Craig Roberts comments on the underlying reasons why Gaza is being strangled and the hypocritical reactions of especially the US and UK governments.

Israel’s excuse for its violence is that from time to time the Palestinian resistance organization, Hamas, fires off rockets into Israel to protest the ghetto life that Israel imposes on Gazans. The rockets are ineffectual for the most part and seldom claim Israeli casualties. However, the real purpose for the Israeli attack is to destroy Hamas.

In 2006 the US insisted that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hold free elections. When free elections were held, Hamas won. This was unacceptable to the Americans and Israelis. In the West Bank, the Americans and Israelis imposed a puppet government, but Hamas held on in Gaza. After unheeded warnings to the Gazans to rid themselves of Hamas and accept a puppet government, Israel has decided to destroy the freely elected government with violence.
…
For the US and UK governments, Israel can do no wrong. Israel doesn’t have to stop withholding food, medicine, water, and energy, but Hamas must stop protesting by firing off rockets. In violation of international law, Israel can drive West Bank Palestinians off their lands and out of their villages and give the stolen properties to “settlers.” Israel can delay Palestinians in need of emergency medical care at checkpoints until their lives ebb away. Israeli snipers can get their jollies murdering Palestinian children.

The Great Moral Anglo-Americans couldn’t care less.

[Read more…]

The more accurate parallel for what is happening in South Ossetia is not Iraq but Kosovo.

But mention of Kosovo is largely absent from the current discussions because the parallel between what happened there and what is happening in South Ossetia undercuts the basis for the west’s anger at Russia. So Kosovo must be made to disappear. As Aldous Huxley said, “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.” Justin Raimondo, in an essay that traces the origins and resurgence of Russophobia says that “Official censorship simply isn’t necessary in the West, because everyone knows what to say – and, more importantly, what not to say.
[Read more…]

In addition to watching 2001: A Space Odyssey recently, I also indulged in a personal mini-Arthur C. Clarke festival, re-reading his novels Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama, and reading for the first time his short story The Sentinel that contains as its central idea a key plot element that reappeared in 2001.

One of the interesting things about Clarke’s books is how for him, it is the science that is the most interesting element. That, and his vision of what future society will be like, are what moves his stories along. He tends to eschew traditional storytelling devices such as love, intrigue, violence, and all the other strong emotional factors. His stories focus less on fleshing out the characters and more on how normal human beings might react when they encounter an astounding new piece of information, such as making contact with intelligent life from elsewhere in space.
[Read more…]