Not The Best Place For His Crack

The Associated Press is reporting that a man was saved from an alligator attack. While rare this wouldn’t really be interesting. What makes the story blog-worthy is the fact that the attack happened in the middle of the night and the man was both naked and on crack.

Sheriff’s deputies pulled a naked man from the jaws of a nearly 12-foot long alligator that almost completely severed the man’s arm, the sheriff’s office said.

Four deputies waded through thick mud about 20 feet into Lake Parker to find Adrian Apgar, 45, around 4 a.m. Wednesday morning, the sheriff’s office said. They were responding to multiple reports about a man screaming for help.
[…]
It was not clear why Apgar was in the water at such an early hour. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Apgar told deputies he had been smoking crack.

The moral of the story, alligators are attracted to cracks on cranks on crack.

Putting The ‘J’ Back In Christmas!

Julia Sweeney, outspoken atheist and comedian perhaps best known for her roles on Saturday Night Live, has an excellent post up about Christmas. After quoting a full page ad in the New York Times about returning Jesus and the religous meaning to public schools, she writes this. (Note: Ms Sweeney doesn’t like it when people quote her blog but that’s tough cookies. If she writes good stuff, grammatically correct or not, I’m going to quote it.)

Okay. Here’s what I say: I agree with [William A.] Donohue[, President of the Catholic League] (!!!). Well, I agree that it’s silly to take Jesus out of Christmas. I mean, we call it “Christ” mas, fer chrissake.

When I discussed this ad with my friend Jim Emerson (who sent it to me to begin with) he said, “Yeah, but you could also argue that the Christians took a perfectly good pagan holiday and made it about Jesus!” Which is also true.

But it kills me that Mulan [her daughter] can’t sing any religious songs at school for Christmas. Everything is all about Santa (as if that is less religious than Jesus!) and holiday-time. Which I really hate. I love the story of Jesus’ birth. A baby born in a barn, after a long trip? Born in the humblest circumstances and yet became a leader and revered? This is a great story. It’s a myth, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great story. That means that if I want her to hear the Jesus birth story I have to take her to a church. Which sucks. I mean, this is the myth of our culture! Why do we have to pretend it is not?

I say brava, brava, bravissimo!

Really. I agree fully with her reasoning and her motivations. She takes an extremely pragmatic approach to Christmas and belief. This is what gets me about another extremely outspoken atheist, Richard Dawkins. He is an extremely intelligent man but he misses the point on this that Julia nails. It’s about myths and stories. They have a place in society and public schools.

This topic ties in well with my weekend Intertube viewing. I am hoping to find some time this weekend to watch to the rest of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference.

Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked “Is God Dead?” the answer appears to be a resounding “No!” According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, “God is Winning”. Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements – some violent in the extreme – are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?

This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006.

The speakers included  Steven Weinberg, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Shermer and, of course, Richard Dawkins. The videos can be downloaded in full and cover the entire two and a half days of the conference. I’ll try to post a more complete wrap up next week because I’m only on the second day (and loving every most many minutes of it).

Unfortunately some of the speakers stake out positions I can’t accept.

Dawkins’ most outrageous claim is to say that calling a child a Catholic, an Muslim or a Hindu is a form of child abuse. Sorry, but WTF! I understand where he is going with this. But to call the association of small children with a specific religion child abuse is to demean child abuse. I’m sure Dawkins feels differently, but to me constant physical and mental torture are child abuse. Letting a child starve to death locked in a room where the only window is covered in paint (it happened in Hamburg last year) is child abuse. Screaming and yelling at a child for no other purpose than pure evil and ignorance is child abuse. Using the words Muslim, Hindi and Sikh in a newspaper picture caption is not child abuse.

A second person who I can’t warm up to is Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. I haven’t read his book yet (it’s on back order) but he takes an ‘in your face’ approach to religion. He seems to accept only two possibilities, atheism or fundamentalism. I don’t accept that. But more next week (I hope).

Finally there is Stuart Hameroff, who is just bat-shit mad. I mean seriously. They should simply find him a keeper and medicate him; tenured or not.

The speakers I have enjoyed immensely? Glad you wondered. Up until now, my favourite lectures were from VS Ramachandran taking about the bio-chemical reactions in the brain associated with religious feelings; Susan Neiman, who is currently writing Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists discussing morality without recourse to religious justification; and finally, Patricia Churchland, who’s discussion of prairie voles I thoroughly enjoyed.

Further heros include Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and all-round level headed guy, and, of course, Michal Shermer, who gave a good but not spectacular talk.

But back to Julia Sweeney. She takes the same course I would. Churches, stories, myths and beliefs aren’t inherently bad. They are part of the culture and part of the make up of the people living in that society. They are important; too important to sweep under the carpet; too important to leave in the hands of fundamentalists. That’s why we need people like Julia Sweeney, Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss. People who think but also feel and understand. That’s what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins don’t do. Or at least they don’t show it.

So yeah. Let’s put the Julia and the Jesus back in Christmas.

Two Years Left And NOW They Get It

After several years of managing to absolutely mangle any attempts at foreign policy with North Korea, the American government is taking an new tact. Deny the North Korean elite those trappings of power they have, I am sure, so appropriately earned. The Washington Post, in one of the snarkier articles they have written lately, reports this morning that the US and other countries, in addition to banning the export of weapons and nuclear technology to the maladjusted Southeast Asian nation, will limit the delivery of many luxury items.

The U.S. list of more than 60 items reads like a letter to Santa from the dictator who has everything. Yachts, water scooters, race cars, motorcycles, even station wagons and Segways won’t be crossing the border this season. There shall be no more DVD players and televisions larger than 29 inches for the man whose film library of 20,000 titles betrays a yen for Bond and Rambo.

Kim’s former chef has written that the man known as “Dear Leader” fancies sushi, Iranian caviar and shark-fin soup. He is said to have every grain of rice inspected for perfection. But he won’t be served any of it on American china, which is on the list. After dinner, he often enjoys a glass of fine cognac — so the United States put lead crystal and liquor on the list, too.

The U.N. resolution also freezes North Korean accounts in foreign banks that could be used to fund the weapons program. And it prohibits international travel by officials involved in the nuclear-weapons program and their families. That is ostensibly more bad news for Kim Jong Il’s then-29-year-old son Kim Jong Nam, detained several years ago in Japan while reportedly trying to travel to Tokyo Disneyland on a forged Dominican passport.

So, instead of sending troops and tanks, we limit the delivery of tobacco and Topless Teens 27. Gee. What a good idea. I wonder who thought of that? It was obviously the fearless leader, Kim Il-Jong George W. Bush.

Forget the Baker commission, forget the failures in Iraq, forget the Medicare mistakes, this administration has a course. We’ll be getting Kim back in bikini form in no time. He was looking just a bit pudgy. I just can’t wait; be still my beating heart.

What comes next; no technical cooperation to improve safety at the IR-40 heavy water reactor under construction near Arak fruit cake for Ahmadinejad?

Outlawed – An Important Message

Here is the link to the full length (27 minutes) video of Outlawed, produced in association with 14 different organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International and (in a strange combination) the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. To quote the press release from the Human Rights educational organisation Breakthrough.tv

Breakthrough is very excited to partner with Witness on the film, Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture, and Disappearances in the “War on Terror.” This film is a subset of our ongoing “Value Families” campaign on detentions and deportations.

Extraordinary Rendition is a United States government sponsored program, in which numerous persons have been illegally detained and secretly flown to third countries, where they have suffered additional human rights abuses including torture and enforced disappearance. The families and communities are deprived of any information about the missing persons. No one knows the exact number of persons affected, due to the secrecy under which the operations are being handled. In carrying out extraordinary renditions, the US government and participating European governments are in violation of their international human rights obligations.

“Outlawed” tells the stories of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government and various other governments worldwide. It features pertinent commentary from Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.S. President George W. Bush, Michael Scheuer, the chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, and Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State.

I encourage you to take the time to watch the film. Take the time to understand that behind the phrases spin doctored talking-points ‘extraordinary rendition’, ‘secret detention’ and ‘enemy combatants,’ there are real faces, real lives, real existences. This film illustrates those issues in an extremely powerful but ultimately almost unemotional manner.

Here are a couple of excerpts I found particularly interesting.

Condoleezza Rice

The United States has not transferred anyone and will not transfer anyone to a country where we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured.

Khaled El-Masri , quoting from his ‘Pakistani’ guard. A man al-Masari says had a Lebanese accent.

You are in a county without laws. Do you know what that means? We can imprison you for 20 years…or bury you; nobody would know.

George W. Bush

We do not condone torture, I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.

Bill Clinton

I did not have sexual relations with that woman! [Oops! Sorry, wrong film.]

Condoleezza Rice

International law allows a state to detain enemy combatants for the duration of the hostilities. The US does not seek to hold anyone for a period that beyond what is necessary to evaluate the intelligence or other evidence against them, prevent further acts of terrorism or hold them for legal proceedings.

Khaled El-Masri

I will continue to fight for this case until we succeed or until I die. For morality, for principles for values, This cannot continue.

Khaled El-Masri’s lawsuit against former CIA director George Tenet and others was dismissed in May 2006 because the government claimed the trial could reveal information which would threaten national security. El-Masri’s attorneys have appealed this decision. From yesterday’s Washington Post,

ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner told the court in Richmond Tuesday that el-Masri was “the public face of a publicly acknowledged program.” Since the basics of the rendition program already are common knowledge, he argued, the lawsuit could be considered without exposing state secrets.

Greg Katsis, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice, argued that the government properly invoked its state secrets privilege to protect information outlined in a classified affidavit that Judge T.S. Ellis III read before dismissing the lawsuit

El-Masri’s allegations also are the subject of a German parliamentary investigation that is trying to clarify when German government officials became aware of el-Masri’s case and whether German security services participated in interrogations in Afghanistan.

The appeals court usually takes several weeks to issue its ruling.