An Alito Filibuster?

So, it looks like John Kerry might be leading the charge to filibuster Alito. Good for him. Alito is a creep. The whole "unitary executive" spiel freaks me out, but there's more to it than that.

A few months ago, I wrote that the discussion of Harriet Miers was bothering me because the main argument in favor of her was "She MIGHT succeed despite her complete lack of credentials." No, that's not the point. We shouldn't have to guess whether a nominee will make a good Supreme Court candidate or not. The point of having hearings is so that Congress can ask questions and the nominee can answer them.

I watched some of the Alito hearings and they pissed me off. I am sick of this stupid game that all the Bush nominees have played -- a game called "Guess how to make me talk." Whenever Congress asks a direct question like "How would you be likely to rule on this issue?" we get one of these canned responses:

1. "I can't answer that because it might reveal what I think before I actually rule on it."
2. "That's already been ruled on, so it's been settled and I can't answer it."
3. "You can't read what I said I think as an indication of what I actually think."
   

You know how it goes...

Senator: "Judge Alito, you once wrote that you personally feel that abortion is the world's greatest evil and should be destroyed with extreme prejudice the moment we have the chance to do God's bidding."
Alito: "Well, first of all, I was only writing what my former bosses told me to write. And second of all, even if I ever did feel that way, it was a long time ago."
Senator: "Okay. How do you feel about it now?"
Alito: "Stare decisis. My opinion isn't relevant."

Can you imagine any other job interview where a candidate gets to act like this?

Interviewer: "How would you handle this hypothetical situation if we hired you for this position?"
Candidate: "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that question because it might have some relevance to how I would do this job."

For all the interviewer knows, this person MIGHT be supremely competent at handling the job. But there's no point in waiting to find out, because the candidate is an asshole, and the interviewer is completely justified in showing him the door.

And that's what I wish Congress would do. And keep doing it. And send a message to the president: "I'm sorry, but this idiot will not talk to us. If you're serious about getting a nominee approved, please send us someone who will answer the questions."

Alito should damn well SAY: "No, I changed my mind about this unitary executive stuff. I don't believe it, and if the president overstepped his boundaries, I would rule against him." And if he won't say it, after being pointedly asked, then there's no reason not to assume the worst.

If Bush and Co. want an anti-abortion candidate badly enough, can't they at least be honest about it? Let them send a guy who will say "I disapprove of Roe v Wade and I mean to do all I can to undermine it, if not overturn it." If they want somebody who will assign the absolute power of a monarch to the president, let them send a guy who will say that.

He'll lose, of course. But he deserves to lose if he can't get 60 votes. As I said about Miers, the vast majority of people have NO business being on the highest court in the land, and the nominee gets the burden of proof on whether he is one of those uniquely qualified individuals.

Unlike Harriet Miers, Judge Alito is not a clueless groupie. He knows the law. But that's not enough. I want the guy who will serve on the Supreme Court for most of the rest of my life to have at least two qualifications. I want him to be competent, AND not evil. One or the other doesn't cut it.

I don't think that's a high bar to set. Nor do I think it's unreasonable to expect the candidate to openly and honestly demonstrate that he meets those expectations.

Classes start tomorrow

In case anyone is interested, I'm beginning classes towards my Master's degree tomorrow at the university of Texas. Check out my program at the Center for Lifelong Engineering.

My classes will meet once a month, all day Friday and Saturday. On both days, my schedule will be:

8am - 12pm
Data Mining EE 380L
Basic concepts of data mining, in parallel with a practical track involving hands-on experience with industrial strength software and a term project will be covered.
Instructor: Joydeep Ghosh

1pm - 5pm
Verification and Validation EE 382C.3
This course covers various traditional and state-of-the-art techniques for software validation, a process that includes reasoning about (the correctness of) programs and testing programs. The course content will include both techniques for dynamic analysis, such as glass-box and black-box testing, equivalence partitioning, test strategy and automation, regression testing and debugging, and techniques for static analysis, such as symbolic execution, and also techniques for software model checking including those that employ artificial intelligence based heuristics.
Instructor: Sarfraz Khurshid

Review of "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe

Ten years after the publication of Darwin's Black Box, I finally took it upon myself to read the thing. I felt that I was pretty familiar with author Michael J. Behe already, having followed the intelligent design movement for years, read his arguments online, read detailed criticism on other sites, and listened to his testimony in front of the Texas State Board of Education in 2003.

Still, I'd never picked up his book until now. There's this Old Earth Creationist / Intelligent Designist on the message board I frequent, and he's always taunted me as being closed minded for not reading Behe. So I read the book, not so much because I thought I would actually get any new information, but because I wanted to stop having that be a part of our arguments.

Here were my preconceptions about the book. As I understood it, Behe is probably the smartest person in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. He is a real, actual biochemist. He has published peer-reviewed scientific papers, although not on the subject of ID. He knows science and scientific language. He also, not coincidentally, differs hugely from self-professed creationists in the sense that he accepts evolution almost in its entirety. He believes, or at least doesn't contradict, that macro-evolution occurs and that the earth is billions of years old.

Although Behe thinks that evolution is reasonable, he disagrees with mainstream biologists in the sense that he denies that evolutionary processes alone -- random mutation combined with natural selection -- are enough to account for all the diversity of life on earth. He believes that certain biochemical systems exhibit what he refers to as "irreducible complexity". Irreducibly complex things cannot have evolved, proposes Behe, and that leaves the alternative that they were "designed". Behe picks several systems as examples of irreducible complexity, which should be well-known by most who have followed the ID political movement: blood clotting, the cilium, etc.

All this is what I knew before reading the book. Early reading bore me out in these impressions. In Behe's own words:

"For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world." (pg 5)

So as far as Behe's concerned, it's fine to think that everything is descended from a common ancestor; so humans do indeed share genes with chimpanzees, with apes, with all mammals, with all vertebrates, and so on.

Furthermore, evolution operates just fine on the macroscopic level, for most things. Here is Behe on the evolution of the famous Darwinian bugaboo, the eye:

"Somehow, for evolution to be believable, Darwin had to convince the public that complex organs could be formed in a step-by-step process.

He succeeded brilliantly. Cleverly, Darwin didn't try to discover a real pathway that evolution might have used to make the eye. Rather, he pointed to modern animals with different kinds of eyes (ranging from the simple to the complex) and suggested that the evolution of the human eye might have involved similar organs as intermediates.

[Behe then recaps Darwin's example.]

Using reasoning like this, Darwin convinced many of his readers that an evolutionary pathway leads from the simplest light-sensitive spot to the sophisticated camera-eye of man. But the question of how vision began remained unanswered." (pg 16)

After this, Behe gives a fairly technical biochemical explanation of vision in terms of photons and proteins and such. His point as I understand it is this: on a macroscopic scale, sure, evolution can account for the construction of complex machinery from chemical parts. But the existence of the chemical parts themselves are a mystery beyond the reach of blind natural processes.

This is what the "black box" means in the title. The cell is treated as a black box by evolutionists. In math and computer programming lingo, a "black box" is a routine that does a certain job reliably. You stick something in, and you get something out. You don't necessarily know HOW the routine does its job, because it's hidden inside the box. But as long as it gives you the right results, you don't care.

So Behe means that the cell might as well be magic as far as macrobiologists are concerned. And that's what he builds his case on. As a biochemist, Behe says he's uniquely qualified to see that, in a nutshell, the cell IS magic. You look inside the cell, you see all this intricate machinery that couldn't have evolved, so you marvel at the brilliance and foresight of an "intelligent designer" who must have planned the thing.

Before looking at his arguments, I'd like to take a moment to address the style of the book. It's a little bewildering. Much of the book is written in a highly patronizing simplistic manner. Behe illustrates his points with analogies to Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, Foghorn Leghorn predicaments, Rube Goldberg machines, and hugely tedious detailed descriptions of everyday activities. Don't get me wrong, often a book on a complicated subject can benefit from the occasional light-hearted cartoon or cutesy analogy. But Behe doesn't just throw out the cutesy analogy and move on; he spends page upon page explaining his analogies in insulting baby talk. For example, in chapter 3, he writes about the process of swimming:

"Suppose, on a summer day, you find yourself taking a trip to the neighborhood pool for a bit of exercise. After slathering on the sunblock, you lie on a towel reading the latest issue of Nucleic Acids Research and wait for the adult swim period to begin. When at long last the whistle blows and the overly energetic younger crowd clears the water, you gingerly dip your toes in. Slowly, painfully, you lower the rest of your body into the surprisingly cold water. Because it would not be dignified, you will not do any cannonballs or fancy dives from the diving board, nor play water volleyball with the younger adults. Rather, you will swim laps.

Pushing off from the side, you bring your right arm up over your head and plunge it into the water, completing one stroke. During the stroke, nerve impulses travel from your brain to your arm muscles, stimulating them to contract in a specific order..." (pgs 57-58)

Behe goes on for three pages like this. And then when he finishes this drivel, he takes another two pages to explain that what he meant to say was, "You may think that the act of swimming is simple, but it's not."

But interspersed with these obnoxiously simplistic passages, there are plenty of passages stuffed full of dense, unreadable technical language like this:

"Conversion of plasminogen to plasmin is catalyzed by a protein called t-PA. There are also other proteins that control clot dissolution, including α₂-antiplasmin, which binds to plasmin, preventing it from destroying fibrin clots." (pg 88)

Or this:

"Enzyme I requires an ATP energy pellet to transform ribose-5-phosphate (the foundation) into Intermediate II. The enzyme has an area on its surface that can bind either ADP or GDP when there is an excess of those chemicals in the cell. The binding of ADP or GDP requires a valve, decreasing the activity of the enzyme and slowing the synthesis of AMP." (pgs 157-158)

Now, I'm not scientifically illiterate. It's just that biochemistry happens to be way outside my field. If you're going to go with a level of description that requires the use of Greek letters, then count on losing a significant chunk of your audience.

This leads me to wonder: who is Behe's intended audience? If this were a biochemical treatise meant for biochemists, then he could have submitted it to a scientific journal, but he didn't. I've never heard the book promoted anywhere except on daytime Christian talk shows and in right wing columns. No offense intended to those forms of media, but most of their audience is probably not going to have any more luck deciphering "ADP" and "GDP" and "alpha-sub-2" than I did. And anyway, if he were going after very scientifically literate readers, then he would have done well to scrap the lengthy explanations of Calvin and Hobbes, as biochemists who know the material would certainly find them as pointless as I do.

But if the readers don't already get biochemistry, then he clearly does not expect them to follow the scientific lingo. In fact, it looks to me like he actually wants most readers to skip over the technical stuff. Whenever he slips into technical mode, he sets off the entire section with little boxes at both ends. The first time he uses this technique, he makes the following comment:

"The following five paragraphs give a biochemical sketch of the eye's operation. (Note: These technical paragraphs are set off by [] at the beginning and end.) Don't be put off by the strange names of the components. They're just labels, no more esoteric than carburetor or differential are to someone reading a car manual for the first time. Readers with an appetite for detail can find more information in many biochemistry textbooks; others may wish to tread lightly, and/or refer to Figures 1-2 and 1-3 for the gist." (pg 18)

Also, at various points in the book he writes things like "I assume I've lost most readers in the labyrinth by now..." (pg 149) And at one point he actually ridicules those who attempt to give understandable explanations to a lay audience.

"I apologize in advance for the complexity of the material, but it is inherent in the point I wish to make. Richard Dawkins can simplify to his heart's content, because he wants to convince his readers that Darwinian evolution is 'a breeze.' In order to understand the barriers to evolution, however, we have to bite the bullet of complexity." (pg 48)

Balderdash. I've read a fair portion of what Dawkins has written, and at no point do I remember him saying that evolution is "a breeze". I have no doubt that Dawkins has written some equally dense papers for his colleagues. My subject is computer programming, which is very far off from the work that Behe does. If I were going to write a book on programming, I could easily lose casual readers with detailed explanations of recursive search algorithms, segmented CSB+-trees, and context-free grammars. I could even, if I chose, use Greek letters. But if I were trying to reach an audience of interested novices, I probably wouldn't do that.

What I'm saying is that there's a simple way to explain a subject and a complex way to explain the same. Behe intentionally chose to go the incomprehensible route. If he did it for the reason I think he did -- to prove that biochemistry is a hard subject that requires a lot of specialized schooling to follow -- then he was wasting his time. I already believe that biochemistry is hard. If I thought it was easy then I might have become a biochemist. Instead of filling up pages of diagrams that most people would only glance at, he could have devoted some of that page space to fleshing out his arguments better.

But I suspect that there is something else going on here. I think Behe really does NOT expect most people to read the parts in boxes, but merely to be impressed by the big words and fancy abbreviations. The average reader would just look at the technical parts and say "Gee whiz, you're smart, Dr. Behe!" Most of the main thrust of his arguments are by analogy, and the GeeWhiz passages are just meant to convey the impression that the analogies are valid because they were made by someone smart.

Back to the substance of the book. To make the case that "black boxes" (cells) require a designer, he fleshes out his notion of "Irreducible Complexity", with one example in each of chapters 3-6. Since I'm not a biochemist or anything close to one, I'm just not very qualified to speak about whether Behe is right that the evolution of these systems is really as big a mystery as he says they are. Luckily, people who are qualified have long since stepped up to the plate to write at length about Behe's examples, so I'll defer to their explanations.

Chapter 3: The cilium
Chapter 4: Blood clotting
Chapter 5: Vesicular transport (search the page for "vesicular")
Chapter 6: The immune system

Each link gives a biologist's response to the stated claim. Note that the link for chapter 5 is actually a pretty lengthy deconstruction of the whole book.

Since the "irreducibly complex" (IC) nature of these particular systems has already been addressed very capably on other sites, I want to address Behe's overall concept of IC as the test for design. In its simplest form, the argument runs like this: Consider a system X that has dependent parts A and B. If you remove part A, then X will cease to function. If you remove part B, then X will also cease to function. Since either A or B must have evolved first, it stands to reason that at some point, X must have existed without one or the other. The resulting system would be useless. Therefore, it cannot have evolved in steps. It must be designed.

To really emphasize how silly the argument is, let's suppose that "X" = "The human body", "A" = "head", and "B" = "torso". Logically, the IC argument means "If the human body evolved, then at some point in history it must have been either a blundering torso with no head, or a disembodied head with no torso. How preposterous! Neither of those could survive! Since there cannot be a head with no torso or a torso with no head, God must have planned the head AND the torso to work together from the beginning!"

In this form, it should be pretty obvious where the fallacy is. The head and body coevolved. At an early enough point, you don't find a body with no head; you find a body that performs the functions of the head with no clear separation between them. Earlier than that, you reach organisms that just don't do head-like things like seeing, hearing, or thinking, yet they survive just fine.

So it's not enough to say "You can't remove parts A or B." To prove the case of irreducible complexity, you also have to prove that there is no simpler form of A or B that does the same job, only a bit worse. And beyond that, there's the scaffolding issue, i.e., some body types had features that supported the adaptation of other features, but then went away.

Obviously no one would bother denying that there are a great many complex systems that exist in living organisms. That is exactly why the theory of evolution exists: because it explains the very complexity we observe, better and more thoroughly than any other concept proposed. Does evolution also explain complex chemical compounds such as those that make up the cell? Almost certainly, according to the theory of auto-catalytic cycles proposed by Stuart Kauffman and others. According to this principle, a large enough variety of chemicals may be almost guaranteed to produce complex systems that continue to create more copies of themselves. It also shouldn't be overlooked that prokaryotic (simple) cells had about a 2.8 billion year headstart on evolution before the first eukaryotic (complex) cells arrived on earth. That's more than twice as long as the rest of all evolutionary history.


There was one analogy in the book that particularly didn't sit right with me. Behe tries to explain that even though one complex system may appear to be a "descendant" of another system, there is no logical path to get from one to the other. For example, you could say that motorcycles are just juiced up bicycles. But there are no small, incremental changes that could be made to bicycles that would turn them into motorcycles.

Well, Behe is absolutely right to say this. Motorcycles didn't evolve from bicycles. For one thing, a motorcycle has a gasoline powered motor. The gas powered motor wasn't specifically made for motorcycles; it was invented separately and has been applied to all kinds of other inventions that share no intellectual ancestry with the motorcycle. Another example that Behe didn't mention would be the computer chip. Today, you find ridiculously powerful computer chips in appliances like thermostats and alarm clocks. The power of those chips is largely wasted in such appliances, but they are used there anyway because they can be cheaply mass-produced, now that the development has already been done for computers.

That's one way that motorcycles and alarm clocks are different from living organisms. Designers transfer parts from one invention to another easily, but that just doesn't happen in nature, as far as we've observed. Far from being a problem with evolution, this is one of the ways that evolution has been confirmed. The theory predicts that no such borrowing of spare parts will occur. Different animals can receive the same feature from a common ancestor, or they can separately evolve apparently similar body parts. But they cannot transfer precise information across the family tree if the common ancestor didn't have that information. If an animal had a feature that was clearly co-opted from an unrelated species -- such as, if an ostrich suddenly gained a perfect copy of human hands with opposable thumbs -- that would tend to discredit evolution. But we don't see that sort of thing happen. This is one of the ways that evolution is falsifiable, which is one of the reasons why it's a legitimate science.

So finally we get to the idea of Intelligent Design, in a chapter which is surely the precursor to a lot of the pro-ID arguments that we've heard in the last ten years. In one of the most famous passages in the book, Behe says:

"Imagine a room in which a body lies crushed, flat as a pancake. A dozen detectives crawl around, examining the floor with magnifying glasses for any clue to the identity of the perpetrator. In the middle of the room next to the body stands a large, gray elephant. The detectives carefully avoid bumping into the pachyderm's legs as they crawl, and never even glance at it. Over time the detectives get frustrated with their lack of progress but resolutely press on, looking even more closely at the floor. You see, textbooks say detectives must 'get their man,' so they never consider elephants.

There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life. The elephant is labeled 'intelligent design.'" (pgs 192-193)

That is all well and good, except that it is a patently bogus bit of sleight-of-hand. At no point in Behe's book does he ever actually produce any elephants. Instead, he just insists "Now that I've ruled out the mainstream scientific explanation, the only alternative is elephants."

Worse, Behe never offers any reason to suspect that his elephant (the "intelligent designer") actually exists. A more appropriate analogy would be if the detectives were swarming around a 23rd story apartment in New York, with a mysterious murder but no visible signs of an elephant whatsoever. While the detectives are trying to do their job, Behe is saying "See, I told you that theory would hit a dead end. It must be elephants that did it!" And "THAT clue didn't pan out either, did it? Why don't you just admit that it's elephants?" When the detectives point out that no witnesses have seen an elephant, and that there is no clear way that an elephant could have gotten up the stairwell or elevator in the first place, he accuses them of anti-elephant bias.

In this situation, the burden of proof is clearly on Behe to give a reason why elephants should be even considered as a hypothesis. It's not that the detectives have ruled out elephants entirely; it's just that until there is compelling evidence to suggest that an elephant was there, "getting their man" is a much simpler approach to the crime.

In order to make a case for a designer, Behe has to do more than reject natural selection as an explanation; he has to actually provide a reason to think that a designer was available at the scene. In one passage, Behe writes about genetic engineering, saying,

"The fact that biochemical systems can be designed by intelligent agents for their own purposes is conceded by all scientists, even Richard Dawkins... Since Dawkins agrees that biochemical systems can be designed, and that people who did not see or hear about the designing can nonetheless detect it, then the question of whether a given biochemical system was designed boils down simply to adducing evidence to support design." (pg 203)

That is hardly a "concession" at all. I can't imagine anybody disagreeing that intelligent beings like us CAN use our intelligence and our current state of technology to alter a gene, or that this ability will be further enhanced in the future.

It is, however, a complete red herring. From "some genes can be designed" Behe makes the logical leap to "all genes were designed." This is like saying that because some vegetables are grown by farmers, it logically follows that ALL vegetables are grown by farmers, and none of them grown in the wild.

What is missing from Behe's argument is the fact that people can design genes, but only if there are any people around to do it. A hundred years ago, the capability to "intelligently design" genes did not exist, at least among humans. And obviously people could not have designed the genes of the first life. So the burden of proof is on Behe to show that there existed any "designer" back then who was capable of genetic engineering. He asserts that there was, but he's begging the question. Since Behe refuses to speculate on the identity of this designer, we're back to square one. Either present evidence that such a universal gene-tinkerer exists, or just acknowledge the fact that natural explanations are all we have to go on at this time.

Although Behe taunted scientists for letting the cell remain a "black box", Behe's solution to the matter is to propose that a particular kind of pre-human intelligence exists -- certainly not a trivial claim in any way. This intelligence is older than the oldest multi-celled life on earth, and is capable of performing genetic engineering on a scale far beyond any human ingenuity so far. How does this designer work? Where did it come from? How do we explain the inherent complexity involved in the designer's existence? We don't know, and it's not our business to ask questions about it. So to get rid of these tiny black boxes, Behe just creates the biggest black box of all out of nothing.

Classic Daily Show shot

I ripped this picture off the Comedy Central web site.

I have nothing in particular to say about it, just saving it for posterity.

Clarification for those who don't watch the Daily Show:

The picture is of Jon Stewart doing his usual very bad -- yet oddly hilarious -- impression of Bush.

Draft of a press release for ACA

On December 20, 2005, judge John E. Jones III issued a 139 page ruling on the case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, stating that a rule requiring teachers to present Intelligent Design (ID) as a scientific alternative to evolution is unconstitutional. In Judge Jones' own words:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.

We in the Atheist Community of Austin applaud this ruling. We have been saying for many years that Intelligent Design is not science, but merely biblical creationism dressed up with the trappings of science.

Since the introduction of the Wedge Strategy in 1990's, it has been embarassingly clear that Intelligent Design is a front for a group of individuals whose ultimate goal is to undermine scientific knowledge and shoehorn religion into public schools. They have done no original research, produced no scientific results, and accomplished little more than a massive and relentless public relations campaign for their ideas. Their strategy has been to repeatedly infiltrate school districts in individual towns across the country, instituting changes in local education standards, in the hopes that ID might eventually receive a facade of credibility if they win enough political battles.

Our home city of Austin received a taste of this campaign in 2003, when the neo-creationist road show came to Texas to demand that misleading statements about evolution be added to the state's textbooks. In that instance, as in this one, they were resoundingly defeated.

Unless Judge Jones' ruling is appealed, it will only directly affect Pennsylvania school districts. However, because the ruling is so thorough, it will likely serve as a legal template for any future decisions on the topic of ID in schools. Judge Jones minced no words regarding the scientific uselessness of Intelligent Design, also stating:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

The issue of creationism affects education throughout the country. It is not a matter of atheists against Christians. It is a matter of good science, backed by decades of evidence, against a nonscientific political crusade. It is about religion masquerading as science, trying to sidestep the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state that exists in this country. This week, a major blow was struck against this agenda.

Note: If you receive this blog via the RSS feed, please check the original source page for revised versions that will follow.

Mockery

This post I wrote was deemed (by ongoing vote) the number one best post on the Motley Fool message board system for about four hours yesterday.

The discussion was about a college professor who had ridiculed creationism in private email. Another poster wrote, "Mocking someone else's beliefs is just plain ugly".

I replied:

That is a load of bunk and I will now mock you for having this belief.

(Waggling my finger) Mock, mock, mock.

All beliefs are created equal, but some become harder and harder to maintain with a straight face over time. Anyone in the 21st century who believes, for instance, that the earth is flat, deserves all the ridicule they can be subjected to for this belief. I mock them now.

Mock, mock, mock.

Fundamentalist Muslims believe that women are the property of their husbands and fathers, that they should not be out in public without male escorts and veils, and that they must never speak their mind or contradict their men. For holding those beliefs, I mock fundamentalist Muslims.

Mock, mock, mock.

As recently as 50 years ago, a large number of people in certain areas of this very country believed that blacks were inferior human beings, and that they should not be allowed to sit at the same tables as white people or share the same drinking fountains, and if they tried to marry white women, they deserved to be lynched. Those people were jackasses, and I mock them.

Mock, mock, mock.

You can sit around and come up with rational arguments to use against cretins who believe the holocaust never happened. And you SHOULD be familiar with those arguments, if you want to be solid in the real facts. But at a certain point, you don't legitimize holocaust deniers by giving them equal time in history classes and giving students the opportunity to decide for themselves. You tell them what the best evidence of history points to, and you rightly say that holocaust deniers are morons who have no leg to stand on.

Mock, mock, mock.

Don't get me wrong, I hold that everyone's right to BELIEVE their own ridiculous ideas is sacred, or as close to "sacred" as an atheist can muster. But to tell me that I have no right to POINT OUT that their beliefs really are ridiculous is outrageous. Many ideas are not just stupid, they are downright harmful to a society and the innocent people who live there. And since I do not believe in censorship, the best way to effectively combat these beliefs is to mercilessly mock bad, outmoded, and wrongheaded ideas every chance I get.

Mock, mock, mock.

It is not only GOOD to mock obviously bad ideas for being bad. I argue that it is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT to shoot them down whenever possible. Otherwise, ideas that are completely unreasonable start to sound reasonable to an uneducated populace who never learned how to tell the difference between fact and opinion. And the folks who cynically take advantage of other people's bad education to hoodwink them into believing things, so they can steal their money and commandeer their lives, are the lowest scum of the earth. They should be exposed. And then mocked.

Mock, mock, mock.

Republicans against creationism

Two recent articles by conservatives criticize Intelligent Design, one by George Will and one by Charles Krauthammer.

In a nutshell, Will and Krauthammer are extending a plea to the religious zealot wing of the Republican party: "Hey guys, could you please shut up about the intelligent design thing? You're hurting us and making us look dumb."

My opinion? It's not so much a problem with a small fringe group as it is with the way that the Republican party has intentionally chosen to structure themselves. You have the economic nerd wing of the Republican party, such as Will and Krauthammer, as well as probably guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney. Smart guys with a political philosophy that can be summed up as "screw the poor."

Then you have the religious zealots, who are intent on demolishing the rift between church and state -- many of whom ARE poor.

The economic nerds are the guys who aspire to power, and are smart enough to get it. But to do that, they need to get a majority of voters on their side, and they fill out their base by pandering to the zealot wing. These are people who probably wouldn't vote Republican if it weren't for the lip service they received to their agenda (i.e., overturn Roe v Wade, stop them uppity queers, and teach kids their religion in disguise as ID). I'm not saying they would vote for Democrats if these things were not on the table, but in all probability many of them simply wouldn't vote.

So those like Will and Krauthammer have a real problem. Their financial ideas (like supply-side economics, which is essentially the economist's version of creationism) have gained some measure of perceived respectability, but they simply aren't popular enough to win elections on their own without the support of the religious right. But then the religious right goes around making themselves highly visible and making the nerd wing look ridiculous.

Part of me wants to cheer for the Republicans who are now telling creationists to go jump in a lake. Then there's another part of me that says that their image problems are of their own making, so let's grab some popcorn and enjoy the fallout.

Please, Bill, put me on your enemies list!

To: Bill O'Reilly [oreilly@foxnews.com]

Dear Bill O'Reilly,

Please put me on your enemies list.

I am an atheist and I want to STEAL CHRISTMAS! Bwahahahahahahaaaaa!

Sincerely,
Russell Glasser
http://kazimskorner.blogspot.com

I'm a grad student

Well, almost.

Russell –

The Software Engineering (SW) program admissions committee has reviewed your application and is recommending your admission to the Graduate School. The next phase will be for the graduate school to review your file and finalize the admission decision. This should only take a couple of weeks if not less before you receive a letter in the mail from the graduate school with their final decision.

[snip]

Congratulations again – we are looking forward to working with you over the next two years. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

Thanks,
Nicole *****
Graduate Program Coordinator
UT Austin - Center for Lifelong Engineering Education

Update: I got the official acceptance letter and accompanying bill (yikes!) a few days later. I start in mid-January.

The Truth (With Jokes)

I bought Al Franken's new book, The Truth (With Jokes) today at Barnes & Noble before lunch. Wouldn't even wait a few days to get it shipped from Amazon. I believe it came out yesterday. I'm such a fanboy.

I haven't been reading nonfiction for the last several months. I was enjoying it for a while, but then it started to depress me. The last nonfiction I was reading was Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is REALLY depressing. I think I quit reading shortly after learning that the residents of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico turned to digging up corpses and eating them when farming could no longer sustain them.

That book now graces my bathroom, where I can take it in small doses of two or three pages at a time. In its place, I've been dividing my time between Shadow of the Hegemon by Card, and the long slog that is the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King. (I kept hearing that this is something you're supposed to read. So far, at 3/4 through the first book, I'm not sure if I'm impressed enough to get the next one.)

Anyway, these will take a back seat as I'm already a couple of chapter's into "The Truth" since lunch. I didn't much enjoy reading a recap of election day, but he did manage to make it both dramatic and funny. He even laid out bits of the script they had planned for the next morning, based on the arrogant assumption that Kerry would definitely win by a lot.

An excerpt from that chapter:

A clap of thunder rumbled in the distance. Ah, I thought. A good omen. Mother Earth was about to be replenished, just like our drought stricken political culture.

My phone rang. Felt. Mark Felt.

(Footnote: "Mark Felt" is the alias I'm using in order to protect the identity of my real source, Judith Miller.)

Later in the book there's an entire chapter devoted to Terri Schiavo. That should be interesting.

The war against objectivity

"Some people today would say that there is no true reality, only perceptions and opinions.

...Today we often hear phrases like 'that may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.' To those that hold that there is no absolute truth, truth is seen as nothing more than a personal preference or a perception and therefore cannot extend beyond a person’s boundaries."

Thus sayeth Josh McDowell - Christian apologist, youth minister, and author of popular religious books such as "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" and "More Than a Carpenter". As a masochistic listener to Christian radio, I've heard him and many like-minded Christians repeat this charge many times over the years, generally following it up immediately with an assertion that this is bad news for religion and undermines faith.

What surprises me is how much I agree with the underlying principle. There ARE a lot of people who seem to think that truth is nothing more than opinion, and it is a serious problem for everyone who likes to deal with logical debate. Where I disagree with Josh is that I don't think the cause is atheism. On the contrary, subjective reality is fundamentally a faith based proposition.

The dictionary definition of "faith" in the religious sense is "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." The Bible declares that "faith is he substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Mark Twain, through the mouth of Pudd'nhead Wilson, said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." Any way you slice it, having faith means coming to a conclusion first, and then filtering the facts to match your expectations.

I argue on message boards a lot, and I notice a trend among certain types of people. Often I go to considerable trouble to research an argument, make sure there are no holes in my reasoning, and prove beyond all reasonable doubt that I am making a solid case. Yet hours of work are tossed aside with a single dismissive comment, such as, "Well, that's some pretty good research, but I still believe what I believe. You're welcome to your opinion, though."

Or, "You can't trust polls / mainstream news sites / that website, they're biased!"

That's depressing because there's no real response to it without getting into a whole metaphysical argument about what constitutes evidence, and whether there really is a difference between fact and opinion. I expect to have to deal with mistakes on my part. I expect to be taken to task for my own misinterpretation of the facts. At the very least I want some kind of canned response to refute my points. But instead, I get "thanks for sharing, that's just your opinion." Or as one of Josh McDowell's students might say, "That may be true for you, but it's not true for me."

Except these aren't liberals I argue with (most of the time). They're Christian conservatives. Hence, they've made up their mind, and even acknowledging any serious flaw in their argument would be tantamount to heresy or treason, depending on the subject.

I think this is an absolutely poisonous attitude that goes beyond some bandwidth wasted on a message board or blog; it's something that infests our national debate. One way that it manifests itself is in the way they attempt to undermine the perceived accuracy of any and all forms of media.

Sometimes even a relatively straightforward link to a reference site, such as Wikipedia will lead into a whole can of worms about how everything Wikipedia says is automatically wrong because it's "open source". Now, I think that every skeptical person should be at least aware of what Wikipedia is, and not take everything they say as gospel. It's important to be aware of the review process, and make sure to check out their secondary sources, and use your own critical judgment to recognize the difference between fact and opinion. But those are general concerns that everyone should have about every source: some are less reliable than others, do your homework.

That's not how this kind of person argues, though. They don't argue with the contents of a particular article, or explain why they find a particular claim to be likely untrue. They just dismiss the source outright, and refuse to read any further.

Now hang on just a second. I realize, of course, that NOTHING written by human beings is ever going to be 100% objective. That's a basic principle of scientific thought. But if everything in Wikipedia can be dismissed because there are multiple authors... and everything we read in newspapers can be dismissed because it's "liberal"... and (according to creationists) everything coming out of the "scientific establishment" can be dismissed because it's advancing the agenda of the scientists... what are we supposed to do?

Is it seriously the position of these people that there is NO WAY to know anything at all with even a tiny bit of confidence? Is it then absolutely impossible to arrive at something that we can refer to as "The Truth"? Is it a waste of time to even try?

This attitude comes pretty darn close to solipsism. Solipsism is defined as "The view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing really existent." I might call it weak solipsism, because they don't necessarily believe that the self is "the only thing really existent." But if you took their arguments seriously, it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that they think there is no truth or reality that extends beyond themselves.

Is that what they really believe? Well, probably not. I think that they believe in objective truth, or at least they believe that they believe it. What they really want is to overthrow research and investigation as a legitimate way of arriving at the truth. What does that leave? The answer can be summed up in a word: FAITH.

Faith in an ancient holy book. Faith in the administration. Faith in the fundamental and unshakable goodness of everyone whom they, personally, hold to be good and right. That is truth to them. Facts are fickle; they have this nasty habit of not supporting your most cherished opinions. But faith can never be undermined unless you want it to.

But, yikes! If there was EVER a method of knowledge that could be called subjective, it's faith. To judge the reality of the universe based on what you have decided is true, regardless of any sort of study or skepticism? Not only does that make no sense, but I would say that the odds are astronomically stacked against any pre-conceived belief system just happening to be the one that is in tune with reality.

What it does do is entrench power. If I can't hope to decide for myself what is real, then my only choice is to go down to my friendly neighborhood priest and ask him what to think. Then he'll be happy to open up his holy book, point to chapter and verse, and tell me that this sentence here is absolutely true and the answer to all your moral dilemmas. I can also go to the rabbi or mullah next door, and get a totally different answer that is also absolutely true. Ultimately, though, the sect with the most power will amplify itself and crush out the other absolute truths, until it's the only one left.

Unless we recognize the fact that there is such a thing as reality, which is not changed by our little beliefs. Unless we recognize that it is our job to FIGURE OUT and INTERPRET the available evidence, so that our beliefs might become more in tune with what's really out there beyond ourselves -- not rewrite the facts so that they better fit into what we believe.

Look, I know that all information-gathering organizations make mistakes, and many times even lie. The New York Times had their Jayson Blair incident. Dan Rather should have checked his sources better. But the solution to that is not to say "From now on, I shall never again believe anything that the New York Times or any other news source say, about ANYTHING AT ALL, just because they have printed it and they have been wrong." The solution is to treat each story with an appropriate level skepticism, try to cross-check and cross-reference their information, get as close to you can to the original sources, and accept that everything you know is tentative to a greater or lesser degree. But when all's said and done, you have to recognize that basing your beliefs on the evidence you can get is a better way of knowing things than basing your beliefs on your beliefs themselves.

In my opinion, the whole problem with our national discourse right now is how much people are buying into the idea that there are no facts that can be learned through observation; there are only opinions, and YOUR opinion is the one that matters. It cuts to the heart of the problem with batshit crazy fundamentalist types. It is on display every time we see another press conference in front of a pre-screened audience. It explains how people can hear about Terri Schiavo being brain dead and blind, and then immediately start off another quest to indict Michael instead of saying "Oh my God, we were wrong about her condition!!!" And it's why people hear reports of people being tortured by Americans, and they simultaneously say "That's not true" and "They deserve it!"

Qualifications? Why?

I was watching Washington Journal on C-Span this morning as a series of "experts" breezed through to offer their opinions on the nomination of Harriet Miers.

I find myself growing more and more irritated with the people who are acting as apologists for Miers. Over and over again, I keep hearing this argument: "Well, so-and-so was never a judge before his appointment to the Supreme Court, and he was a great justice." Or "Nobody could have expected this historical guy to amount to anything, based on his qualifications. But look how important he turned out to be."

Great. That's all fine as far as it goes, in the sense that it proves that there exist at least N people who did better than their record would indicate.

But it's a stupid, fatuous argument when it is applied to any particular case. What ticks me off is that this isn't an argument for why MIERS is a particularly good pick to be on the Supreme Court. It's as if all the experts are saying "Well, there's no particular reason I can think of why she should be approved, but in a cosmic sense, why shouldn't ANYONE be on the Supreme Court? Why put up any barriers?"

It's rather like Intelligent Design advocates who say "What do you care if we publish our results in scientific journals or not? Scientific journals are overrated, and they're biased against our work anyway."

Or it's like the crackpot inventor who tries to convince the world that his perpetual motion machine, or his eternal life rings, have merit. He says "Well they all laugh at me. But they laughed at Edison too!" Fine. So you have that in common with Edison. But what you still don't have is evidence that your whatchamacallit is of any use at all. Or as Carl Sagan put it: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

And applying this to Supreme Court Justices: the fact that some brilliant legal minds had no credentials does not imply that all people without credentials have brilliant legal minds. Some people are just flat-out bad picks.

It's not about whether I personally think that Harriet Miers is a good pick or not. It's about the way all the people who defend her have nothing better to say than "You can't really tell anything at all about whether anyone is good, so you might as well just approve her and find out."

This sort of linguistic trick is nothing more than a kind of solipsism (I'll explain what I mean by that in more detail in a later post). It's not an argument, it's a concession. It's "I have no way to support what I say, but really we have no way of knowing anything at all. So you might as well admit that I'm right. I don't need a better reason."

You should always beware the kind of people who argue from solipsism. They may or may not know that they're wrong, but this argument stems from frustration that they can't figure out a better way to make their case.

In my opinion, Supreme Court nominees are not "innocent until proven guilty". There are far, far more people who *should not* be on the USSC than people who *should*. The burden of proof ought to be on Miers and her supporters to prove that she is one of the rare individuals who does have any business being on the highest court in the land.

But I can guarantee she won't meet that burden of proof. Just like John Roberts, we'll hear a lot of "I can't comment on this" and "That's not my problem". We'll get no substantial arguments at all. And she'll be waved through.

Argumentam ad nauseam

My sister observed that a lot of our conversations on the show go like this conversation we had yesterday.

This can work with any proposition P, so feel free to fill in anything you like for P, such as "The Bible is absolutely true" or "Pascal's Wager is legitimate" or "Green skittles have magical powers over your libido."

Theist: "I assert that P!"
Atheist: "Yes, but I don't believe P, because (off the cuff philosophical explanation of why P is invalid)."
Theist: "Yes, I see what you're saying, but I have to remind you: P!"
Atheist: "Okay, but I still don't agree with P. Let me explain my objection another way. (Another explanation from a different angle.)"
Theist: "Hmmm, that's an interesting point. Now I have a good point for you: P!"
Atheist: "Maybe you're not quite seeing my point. Let me give you an analogy. (There follows an extremely dumbed down and easily grasped analogy involving, for instance, the flying spaghetti monster.)"
Theist: "Well that is fun to speculate on, but it still doesn't address the basic point, which is: P!"
(Repeat 1-7 more times)
Atheist: "Thanks for calling."

Google Earth

Okay, this is the coolest thing I have seen on my computer in a very long time.

http://earth.google.com

Go there, download it, run it. You'll be glad you did. Fast internet connection recommended; decent 3D capabilities on your computer required.

Once you've figured out how it works, here are some other cool things you can do with Google Earth:

1. Turn on the "Borders" checkbox to see state lines when you look at the image map. Also turn on "Roads".
   
2. In the "Layers" panel (lower left part of the interface), check the box that says "3D buildings" and then zoom in on New York or San Francisco.
3. Also in Layers, check the box that says "Keyhole Community BBS". When you zoom in anywhere, you can see little "info" marks that tell you interesting (or not so interesting) facts about the places you're looking at.
4. When you click on an info button, you can also click "more" to open a message board post giving more detail.
5. You can also use this message board to find more interesting locations. For instance, I wanted to find Machu Picchu, but typing "Machu Picchu" in the "Fly To" bar did not work. Instead, I search for Machu Picchu on the keyhole message board. I find a post that's useful, and it has a link on top that says "Open this placemark." Click there, and you jump to the right spot on the map.
6. The altitude is represented in 3D on the map. You can see this if you click on "Colorado River View" (of the grand canyon) or "Mount Saint Helens". Once you are close, you can tilt and rotate around your landmark using the interface on the bottom. I used this feature to look up the cliffs in La Jolla where I used to climb down to get to the beach.
7. If you are near the area where you want to find something, you don't have to retype the city and state. You can type an address or a business name. While looking at San Diego, I typed "Cheese Shop" to find a little sandwich spot where I used to eat lunch almost every workday.
8. Take a virtual trip across the US! Click "Directions" on the upper left. Type a starting destination and an ending destination. Then once the path is found, you can double-click on each waypoint. Your point of view will zoom to the location where you clicked, and you will be facing in the direction of the next leg of your journey. You can jump from spot to spot until you reach the end.

Cindy Sheehan

I live about an hour and a half from Crawford, TX. I heard about Cindy Sheehan and wanted to go down there on Saturday, but I couldn't make it because I was busy with the broadcast of my internet audio show, The Non-Prophets. I told my sister Keryn about it instead, and she went with her boyfriend and two other friends.

According to Keryn, there were about 200-300 people there supporting Cindy Sheehan, and about six counter-protestors on the other side of the road holding up pro-Bush signs. They met and hugged Cindy, and they also met Barry Crimmins who had been sent from The Randi Rhodes Show. They tell me that there was a huge pile of donated food and water, and everyone was free to go over there and take whatever they wanted. It was almost like a party.

The funniest part of their story was about the counter-protestors. They were organized by a local right wing radio station, but there were only a small handful of them. They held up signs saying things like "Don't the Iraqi people deserve their freedom?" It was a typical scorching hot day in Crawford. The people on the Cindy side of the road were jockeying for what little shade there was. The counter-protestors had no shade anywhere, and they hadn't brought any water either.

My sister's friend went across the street to them with bottles of water and said, "Here, would you like some of this?" They turned it down, saying, "The guys in Iraq aren't getting water."

It's official: I have no life

This is stupid and of no interest to anybody. But as of last night, after nine months of playing, I have a level 60 character in World of Warcraft.

To fill in those who are not gigantic gaming nerds, World of Warcraft is a multiplayer online roleplaying game, and level 60 is the highest level you can achieve. It sort of means that you won the game, although not really, because you can still keep joining up with other level 60 players to engage in high level content, fight other players, and get more gold and stuff in the game that will never, ever improve your real life. In short, it is the pinnacle of loser-dom. :)

Some of my friends and guildmates from The Motley Fool message boards were on hand to help me break the level 60 barrier. You can see screenshots of the big event by going to the Warcraft Fools album.

The Island: A "pro-life" action flick [movie, *** out of 5]

Ginny and I saw "The Island" last night. It was part futuristic dystopian sci-fi, part mindless computer generated action flick, and part ham handed political diatribe against abortion and/or stem cell research. If this seems like a weird combination to you, it did to us too. I'll get to the pro-life part later, but it will involve spoilers so I'll give a clear warning when they come.

The story centers around two characters played by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

Garth: "She's a babe."
Wayne: "She's a robo-babe. In Latin she would be called 'babia majora'."
Garth: "If she were a president she would be Baberaham Lincoln."

Anyway, Scarlett and Ewan play two cute little model citizens in a closed and tightly monitored society reminiscent of the one in Brave New World. Each day they are told by a smiling pretty face and by instant messages how lucky they are to be protected in their little bubble, away from the deadly poison that the earth's atmosphere has become. And if they win the lottery, which EVERYONE does eventually ("Your day will come!" chirp the cheerful ads) they'll be transported to The Island, the one outdoor area on earth that is somehow free of contamination, and they can frolic and cavort outside forever.

So I'm sure it will be no big shock to anybody who's picked up this sort of story in their lives, that the whole thing is based on a lie. I won't give away what the lie is just yet. I will say that I saw exactly what was happening a very long time before the reveal happened, partly based on a review I accidentally read which revealed the theme in the first couple of paragraphs, though not the particulars.

The special effects are kind of cool, the vision of a near-future LA (2019) was nicely rendered. The action sequences were fairly exciting until they got very, very, very stupid. I'll just give three examples from one chase scene that should tell you all you need to know.

Our Heroes are speeding away on some sort of motorcycle/hovercraft device. They fly through a skyscraper. The glass of the windows on the side of the building shatters completely as they pass through it. They emerge with maybe a minor scratch or two, even though they are not even in an enclosed vehicle.

On reaching the other side, they shoot out of the building and lose control of the vehicle. They both fall off, but luckily they happen to land on the corporate logo in the shape of a giant letter "R". A wide shot reveals that this logo takes up a teeny, tiny amount of the overall area on the side of the building.

In order to pull off this landing, I guess they should feel lucky that (1) they happened to be on THAT side of the building instead of one of the other three, and (2) they came out precisely in the center, rather than off to one side or the other, and (3) they were RIGHT ABOVE IT, so the short drop didn't kill them anyway, and (4) they didn't overshoot the very narrow logo and fly right over it, and (5) it wasn't the letter "A".

So after they land on this letter, the bad guys manage to detach it from the building and man, woman and letter plummet from a height of 40 stories or so. Do they snag a rope on the way down? Does a plane catch them? No. They fall all the way... and then they land in some netting. Not a fine mesh net, mind you, but a sort of tangle of rope. Even with the net there, I would think the impact would have killed them anyway if not actually sliced them to ribbons.

I'll get to the spoilers in a minute, but first I want to mention that Steve Buscemi is one of those people who can unfailingly appear in a bad movie and make it temporarily good by virtue of his presence. I love Steve Buscemi.

Warning: spoilers coming soon, but not quite yet.

The movie did contain an extremely blunt and badly mishandled pro-life argument. I wasn't the only one who thought this. Ginny and I came out of the movie and both started asking each other "Was it just me, or...?"

It doesn't deal specifically with abortion or stem cell research, but it hits you over the head with the message hard enough that you'd have to be pretty clueless not to catch it. Apparently a lot of reviewers are pretty clueless, because in skimming reviews, almost nobody mentions it, even at liberal sites like Salon and Slate. Exceptions: the New York Times reviewer saw an anti-abortion message, and the Onion AV Club saw anti-stem cell. They're both right.

Warning: Spoilers! Stop reading now unless you have already seen The Island or never plan to.














There is no island, and the earth is not ruined. These people are all clones, living in a bunker and surrounded by a holographic projection. Those who win the lottery are taken away to an operating room where they are killed and then harvested for organs, which are then given to the rich and powerful people from whom they were cloned. (The clones are around 2-5 years old but they are born as adults. Stupid adults.)

The bad guy is the company CEO, who says "Originally we planned to keep them in a persistent vegetative state" (SCHIAVO ALERT! WHOOP! WHOOP! Did you miss the subtle reference?) "but the organs don't survive that way, so we have to let them grow up and walk around."

They lie to the clients and investors, letting them believe that the clones aren't conscious.

In case you're still not getting the message, the villain makes some villainous speeches just to make sure you understand that he's with the pro-choice and pro-research establishment. "Come on!" he says. "We created them, we can destroy them! These clones don't have SOULS!" And, "In a few years we'll be able to cure leukemia with this project." Yeah, what are you, some kind of anti-medical nut?

So the doctor is this ghoulish SOB who only cares about the fame and money, and he feels free to research on clones and kill them, while telling himself that they're not really human. Doesn't this sound just like a pro-choice person?

Well uh, no. It sounds like a pro-life caricature of a pro-choice person.

I don't care if they have "souls" or not. The clones have active brains. They have personalities. They can communicate. Their nervous systems can feel pain. All of which, duh, is EXACTLY what most pro-choice people would agree is what separates a person from a fetus. Or a blastocyst. Or someone in PVS.

So, the doctor, who I guess is meant to be a stand-in for a guy who makes pro-choice arguments, is quite frankly a lunatic. I'm one of the most pro-choice people around, and I think he's a lunatic. And it's okay if you want me to believe that a lunatic is the head of his own company. Happens all the time. However, it is completely impossible for me to swallow the idea that with all the people who also know the secret -- doctors, scientists, technicians, and so on -- not one of them is really bothered by what they do all that much, and none of them feel like they should blab this to the press.

So obviously nobody feels like this what they're doing is really all that bad, and yet everybody agrees that it would be a complete PR disaster if the rest of the world found out, and they would be shut down. So if people are smart enough to see that this is a bad idea, why don't any of the grunts agree?

And then there's a scene where Ewan McGregor meets his sponsor, his other self, who is a filthy rich inventor. I will call the original EM and the clone EM2. At first EM and EM2 get along famously -- turns out that EM2 not only has EM's DNA, but also acquired some of his memory. (Horrible, horrible science. But we'll let it slide.) Then EM remembers he has only a year or two to live. So he decides he will turn EM2 over to the guys who are pursuing him, or even kill EM2 himself so he can get at all those yummy organs.

All this makes perfect sense in the fundamentalist worldview, where people are basically rotten and will do anything to survive. [fundie]Heck, women will even murder their own poor little babies so they don't have a little bit of inconvenience![/fundie]

Except that people don't act like that. Really. They don't. I don't know a single person who would act like that. Oh sure, we're willing to drop bombs on people half a country away, but we don't have to look them in the face and have a conversation first. Even our soldiers don't do THAT.

Excuse me, but did they bother to ask me? I'm pro-choice. Even if I have only two years to live, I don't kill the guy who's sipping chardonnay in my living room so I can get his organs. Clones or no clones. If the people in this world are willing to do that kind of thing without being troubled by the ethical issues, then why bother cloning anyone at all? Why not just grab people off the street and say "Congratulations, you won the lottery! Step into this helicopter, please..."

In the end, the anti-choice message is so blatant that it's hard to miss, but so badly handled that it's hard for me to imagine anyone seeing themselves in it.

Liars, truth tellers, and bias

My wife and I both argue politics on different message boards, and we both agree that there is a tendency for people to listen only to the sources they like and discount the sources they don't like. For instance, people who insist that "mainstream media" is automatically lying because of their "liberal bias", will in the next breath go on to confidently quote blatantly right wing sources such as Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, etc.

Now, admittedly, Ginny and I get a lot of news from left wing sources. And I'm not talking about Time, the New York Times, CNN, etc... the places that conservatives pretend are liberal when they aren't. I'm talking about Air America Radio, Daily Kos, Media Matters, and so on. Sources that are really liberal, and don't fear to say so.

Ginny asks me sometimes, "Do you think we do the same thing, but reversed? Do we just listen to those sources and form our opinions based on that, while ignoring the other side?"

My answer is no. Sure I listen to my favorite liberals, and I occasionally catch myself repeating what they say without checking it out first. But most of the time, if I want a new "fact" to enter my mental library, I go and check it out with as unbiased a source as I can find. If it's about something Bush said, I look at the White House page. If it's about world news, I try to corroborate it with several unrelated sources. If it's about science, I look for peer-reviewed material, or at least direct references to peer-reviewed material. And whether the answer is what I want it to be or not, I accept the results of my best research efforts.

Al Franken likes to tell an anecdote about himself and Rush Limbaugh. He repeats it a lot, so if you listen to his show then you've almost certainly heard it. In case you haven't, I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I repeat it one more time. From an interview:

A few months ago, Rush was talking about the minimum wage. Conservatives like to portray it that no one has to raise a family on the minimum wage, the only people who get the minimum wage are teenagers who want to buy an i-Pod. So Rush says, "75 percent of all Americans on the minimum wage, my friends, are teenagers on their first job." And one of the researchers brings this to me, with a smile, and I say, "Well, can you look it up?" And they look it up, the researcher goes to something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 60.1 percent of Americans on minimum wage are twenty and above. 39.9 percent, then, are either teenagers or below twelve (laughs). I had several jobs as a teenager, so you figure, what, 13 percent might be teenagers in their first job. Not 75 percent. So where did Rush get his statistic? Well, he got it directly from his butt. It went out his butt, into his mouth, out the microphone, into the air, into the brains of dittoheads. And they believe this stuff.

So we get our labor statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He gets his from the Bureau of Rush's Butt. And that's the difference. We don't do that. That's one of the main differences.

That is a big difference in my book. It's not that I think Al Franken does flawless research; he's wrong sometimes. But the point is that he actually CARES whether his information is correct or not, he is willing to go to a credible source and not just use rhetoric. That very attitude sets him miles apart from Limbaugh.

Even so, I'm not sure that it is correct to say that Limbaugh is "lying" when he says something like "75 percent of all Americans on the minimum wage are teenagers on their first job." That is because in order to really be lying, you have to actually know whether what you're saying is true or not. If you don't know, then you're just mistaken.

I heard an anecdote -- almost certainly not true -- about an asylum inmate who was hooked up to a lie detector. He was then asked, "Are you Napoleon?" The inmate answered "No." The machine indicated that he was lying.

You can be right and still be lying, if you don't think that you are right. And you can be wrong without lying.

In that spirit, I don't know for sure that Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Hannity ever lie. I think it is far more likely that they just don't care whether they say things that are true or not. There is a difference. They care whether they say things that agree with the construct they've made of the world, but they don't see a difference between lies and non-lies. That's why they tell you that the media is biased, that polls don't matter, that scientists all have a nefarious agenda, etc, etc. They want to rule out the possibility that anything could contradict them and still be accurate.

How American Are You?

I'm not very American, at least not according to the author of this quiz.

But then, the quiz ought to be called "How Conservative Are You?" Note that answering that your favorite president is Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter will both net you less points than Ronald Reagan, and answering that you like American music and movies actually hurts your American-ness. Where's the answer to the sports question for people who don't watch sports? And what is the guy's deal with cheese? Are sheets of yellow plastic the only other type of cheese besides brie and bleu? I think maybe they make some other kinds of cheese in Wisconsin, and they're Americans there.

The author, whether in jest or not, is buying into the myth that people who are religious, outdoorsy, macho, simple, and humble are true Americans; while people who are educated, cultured, complex, godless, and progressive are not.

Whether or not it's a joke, the myth is bullshit. I am an American. I like rock music and big summer action blockbusters. I like to read long non-fiction books and play video games in "hard" mode and solve puzzles on the internet. I like not having an official religion, or an official category of religions. I like it that minorities can vote and women can work, even though I am neither. I like speaking out against my government when they deserve it.

If "true Americans" can't accept that those things are part of what America is all about, then they should leave my country.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [movie, ****]

Warning: this review contains spoilers about the new movie, which you will not know from reading the book.

I'm not one of those people who worships the original movie. I liked it a lot; for years I would watch everything with Gene Wilder because I loved seeing Willy Wonka. That movie was the first opportunity I had to learn about special effects. I knew all the kids were actors, but I was convinced that Augustus really did go up from the pipe into the fudge room, and Violet really turned blew and blew up, etc. I asked my mom how they could do all those terrible things to the children, and she tried to come up with a plausible technical explanation for each one. That was cool, but I have no idea how I would begin explaining the new computer generated effects to my kid.

The Gene Wilder movie was good but not great. I found the music catchy but annoying. After I read the book, I was disappointed at many of the deviations, particularly the mundane nature of the Great Glass Elevator. But also, although Gene Wilder was adorable, he didn't quite capture the spirit of the character for me. He was just too darn tranquil most of the time. Violet is chewing gum, and book Wonka will scream "Stop! Spit it out!" while wringing his hands, but movie Wonka is practically yawning while muttering the same lines in a bored manner. Dahl's Wonka was easily excitable; Gene Wilder was relaxed and seemed really in control.

To Johnny Depp's credit, he captured the manic personality of Wonka much better, but he also added something totally different that I never would have expected. Clearly what Depp and Burton were thinking was, "Here's a guy who has spent 20 years secluded in a factory, with nobody to talk to except these freaky little guys. Genius or not, he's bound to be a little bit socially awkward. Actually Johnny Depp plays him as a tremendous nerd, who reads lines off of cue cards when he's lost for words, and can't even remember the names of the children. Throughout the movie he's always gesturing ineffectually at the kids saying "Uh, little girl, little girl..."

Now that doesn't fit with the image of Wonka that I had either. But it is a very interesting take that actually makes sense... AND he manages to combine it with that frantic energy that Gene Wilder didn't have.

As I've read, both movies sharply deviate from the book for the same key reason: The book has no moral center for Charlie. Basically he's not as atrocious as the other four, so he wins by default. Also he is assumed loveable because he's poor. In the Gene Wilder movie, they threw in a subplot with Slugworth tempting all the kids to spy for him, and Charlie refuses, proving his goodness. In the Johnny Depp version, Wonka tells Charlie he can only inherit the factory if he leaves his family. Charlie refuses, proving his goodness.

In order to get to that point, the movie throws in an extra-Dahlian subplot about Wonka's childhood with his father. It's okay. It is logically consistent with the Burton/Depp version of Wonka. I'm not sure it's necessary, and the flashbacks feel kind of crammed in there.

The real problem I had was that when Wonka demands that Charlie leaves his family... well... I just didn't buy it. In the book, the three of them crash through the ceiling of Charlie's house Wonka says "Come on, let's go! Wheel the bed in the elevator and let's head for the factory!" This new version makes Wonka more of a jerk, and I just didn't want him to be. It also forces a resolution with the "Wonka's dad" subplot, which I didn't think was all that important.

The real problem with the ending is that it doesn't jibe with the sequel. I've done some thinking about "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator," and I concluded that it just wouldn't make a very good movie. But let me fantasize, okay? Let's pretend that we can look forward to a Tim Burton version of Elevator, how does the ending of his movie jibe with the beginning of the next book? It really doesn't quite. In the beginning of the first book, Wonka has an element of surprise on his side. The other three grandparents are like "Who IS this nut job?" That doesn't really work if Wonka has already spent several days eating dinner and making nice with the family and learning what families are all about.

FYI, here's the second book in a nutshell: Wonka takes the family up in space with his elevator, where they are chased by shape-changing aliens and shot at by the president. The grandparents (except grandpa Joe) bicker constantly. Once they are back down to earth, Wonka tells them about his invention which makes people younger. They overdose on the substance, two of them turn into babies and the third takes so much that she disappears completely. Charlie and Wonka then take a terrifying trip down to "Minus-land", deep below the factory, to save her from negative age and horrible negative monsters.

Again, I can't see that plot making a good movie, but damn, wouldn't Tim Burton make it look cool?

Which reminds me to comment on the visual aspects. Very nice. Charlie's house was a brilliant design, loved it. Chocolate river and waterfall, miles beyond the original movie. Elevator, better than I imagined it. Special effects on the kids? Well, weird, and even more disturbing than the Wilder version. Actually less convincing in some ways, because they just LOOK so computerized. I'm mainly thinking of Violet here, although they show a parting shot of Mike Teavee after he was stretched, and that also looks silly.

Overall, I have to say that this was well worth seeing. It's just a bit better than the first movie, unless you consider the first movie perfect, in which case -- well, you're wrong -- but okay, you won't like the new movie more.