text:
Huge UI improvements
- Dock Updated with new Launcher App and some new icons.
- The Launcher itself. (Hit windows key to start too). - https://github.com/weaknetlabs/wt7-launcher.
- Installer that works - https://github.com/weaknetlabs/debian-custom-iso-scripts.
- Tools, tools, tools, and general apps (The reason for the absurd size of the ISO).
- Unsolved Mysteries - title track from my own CD - Unsolved Mysteries.
- Wine - Run exe files, OllyDbg.exe installed.
- Weather desktop app - https://github.com/weaknetlabs/wt7-weather.
- The clock font and color was changed to a more mature-looking theme.
- LOTS of art - wallpapers, icons, splash screens, themes, fonts, etc.
LauncherThe launcher is a simple search and find application that should handle all found files appropriately. I coded it in a way that should either open files or open their location. Keep testing and let me know if you find any bugs or think of any way I can improve it!
To start the launcher, simply hit the Windows key on your keyboard (SuperKey LEFT, or RIGHT), or hit the new Launcher icon in the dock with the orange dots!
Installation / ISO ToolsThe installation / ISO Utilities that I made were from the old code-base of Tony's Remastersys. I had to make a bunch of heavy changes due to the changes that were made in the newer kernel/Debian LINUX system, so after a while of editing his code, I just decided to code my own. The ISO creation process using XORRISO, and the installer simply sets up the system disks, copies the files with RSYNC, installs GRUB2 and then installs the latest Linux kernel from the repository.
USB Vs. VMWareAgain, if you look at the way I make the ISO, using my own custom tools, I make it as a "hybrid" ISO which should be bootable and work fine from a USB drive. Try using Disk Damager to put the ISO onto the USB drive. I do, however have the VMWare tools daemon and drivers installed into the ISO for anyone looking to use use it along side of their current OS. VMWare player is FREE to use from VMWare.
DownloadThese links bypass CloudFlare and go directly to my host, so there should not be any issues across the sea or via proxy. Download ISO (2.0GB)
Download MD5 (33k)


text:
Getting Your Medical Tests Online: Pros and Cons
New federal rules allow patients direct access to lab results, but they don't always understand them or what to do about them. WSJ's Laura Landro discusses with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... what you like to access and manage your own medical test results but need a little help interpreted memo as more patients directly accessed than lab test results ... health care providers are offering more help understanding the means of medical data with and ... if you tell us more is doubly SJ medical reporter Laura Landro I think the much for being with us to do the ... so the list of tax that patients can now access without a doctor's approval ... has recently gotten longer is that right tells why that is ... well basically you can access all of your lab tests now according to a federal law that mandates and existing privacy and lab that regulation rules ... and it means that blood test your analysis pap smears ... anything because in a little box outside the doctor's office which you go soft glad ... that use to be the doctor had to tell you about it now you can see yourself could inflation fell to a lot of patience and also many doctors you spoke with said they have no problem ... with their patients accessing this information but they ... one and that it needs to be read in context cracked right well study showed that even though patience really appreciate seeing guarantee that they feel a sense of ... common control unhappiness in relief and in fact Kaiser Permanente uses those exact words unsteady ... but at the same time they feel better or less confusing less likely to make a lot of alarm phone calls ... if in fact the doctor has talked them first about what to expect from the results ... what the results might mean in the context of their health after the lady tells about the new website the quest ... diagnostics ... is now offering to patients how does it work well quest Ishino was one of the big lad companies out there that does a lot of services and if you've had a lab test request ... basically you can go to the website that password protected or you can download onto your smartphone or a mobile app which you get your results pretty much break and I think its two to three days it's you know forty eight to seventy two hours ... they decided to do it that way even though the wind the rule is thirty days within thirty days you have to get at the Guinea get ... the doctor a little time to look at first ... and basically those results will now be available to you through these websites are apps ... informatics very easy to understand shows you what the normal range is a good use a little links to additional information ... and DIS has ... a really consumer friendly vibe to it so it does the information into some kind of content out there who give it to call now is just like raw numbers like yours reference is normal Here's where you are ... his weakness but your doctor about and allows you to share data from each with positions in with family ... and you know people who might be interested in helping him so if the more evidence that as patients get more control over their medical information that it's ... helping to correct some errors ... well in fact there are some studies that show that patients often don't even hear about the test results ... that I think in one study something like one of fourteen lab test results ... aided in communicating to the patient or they forgot to document that they communicated and the patient ... to you as a patient have a big stake in making sure that when those lab results command ... you look at them to make sure your doctors seen them to it there's no guarantee that that's happened first it's Deathly were checking out thank you so much while and after that thank you

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Your customers are overpowered by data. At no other time in history have people had as much information thrown at them as they do right now. 90% of the data that currently exists was made in the last two years. Around 571 new sites are created each minute. Furthermore, the normal searcher remains on a website page for less than three seconds, just long enough to look at 1/4 of the content on the page. Read More
The term "Mobile First" was first used following the iPhone launch in 2008. As we have become an ever-increasing mobile first society, the term is not just a vision of the future, but a reality.
Since 2012, PC purchases have been declining — selling 269.7 million in 2016; however, smartphone purchases are rising. In 2016, smartphones sold 1.5 billion; up five percent from the previous year. Read More
Did you know that 40% of web users will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load? You've probably done this yourself. In a culture where we need everything now, on our phones, within a few seconds, it is becoming mandatory for sites to be mobile responsive if they want to stay afloat in the digital ocean. Luckily for you, Turn The Page is always on the cutting edge and we proudly offer beautiful mobile-first website design.
Let's take a quick look at what a mobile-first site can do for you and how we set them up. Read More
You might think that mixing up your marketing strategies would be best at the beginning of the new year but, actually, since it's just after the holidays and still dreary winter, it's not the greatest. Spring is all about renewal and breaking out of all the snow and ice for the warm weather. Plus, there are those refreshing spring rains to clean off those ugly soggy leaves and salted streets. You can practically feel the buzz of summer in the air by April. So, this excitement is the perfect time to reattain your old customers' attention again, as well as pull in new ones. Read More
When it comes to website design, the way you lay out the elements on a page makes a big difference for user experience. Two of the most popular styles of layouts are full-width and boxed design. Each web design style has its own list of advantages and disadvantages, as highlighted below.
In order to figure out which type of design is right for your website, you have to weigh the pros and cons of each website design and understand how each would fit the purpose of your website.
If you ask me, the most important tool in any online marketer's possession is simple: analytics, all the way.
Some might be surprised to hear this from a content marketer — I'm supposed to love words, not data! I'm a creative! But ultimately, there's nothing more rewarding for myself or my clients than to see figures that support the content I'm producing — results that can confirm why our blogging or social media efforts are paying off when typical KPIs like ROI don't suffice. To this end, Google Analytics has become a good friend of mine.
While typically used by the more data-driven divisions of our agency — our pay-per-click team or SEO strategists — Analytics is also a handy tool for us creatives, providing clarity on the effectiveness of decisions made in the name of User Experience (UX).[bctt tweet="See how Google Analytics data can help you improve your website's UX!"]
Check out a few ways that Google Analytics can help web designers and developers optimize a website's UX, beyond the standard bounce rate and page load times.
WordPress is a fantastic user-friendly online content management system (CMS). We love it because it allows users change things and update their websites with relative ease. Here's a more in-depth look at how WordPress makes the average user feel like a web development genius, and also how it doesn't.
With Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, Cyber Monday (or for some businesses, Cyber Week) is the next official commercial celebration on the calendar.
Last year, Cyber Monday sales increased by 8.5% with the total number of transactions up and more purchases on average per transaction. Since 2009, the day has seen a steady sales growth:
While many retailers feature online and store-centric deals on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, on Cyber Monday, the focus is all online, all the time. This removes some stress from from brick and mortar storefronts, but puts a lot of pressure on web developers, servers, ecommerce sites, and more.
We're highlighting a few of the must-have components any successful Cyber Monday retailer must have when it comes to website functionality and usability.
If you've ever had the pleasure of meeting with one of our brilliant Website Design & Development (Web Dev) team members, you may have left the conversation more confused than when you began it. Web Dev jargon is like a whole different language, even to those that deal with websites in different capacities, such as writing or promoting them. So as a small business owner, chances are you're a total novice. We're here to give you the run-down on some of the most common terms you may hear our team members throw around.
Your Quick & Dirty Web Dev Dictionary
Back-end: This is where all of the magic happens. The back-end of the site is where we control everything that appears to visitors to your site, from graphics to content to custom features. You'll often hear the phrase "log in to the back-end of the site" because you must have certain credentials to see what's on the back-end (makes sense, right?).
Responsive: In layman's terms, a responsive web design is one that is easily viewed on all devices – desktops, laptops, phones and tablets. It minimizes the need to zoom in and pan across the page to read the website.
Iframe: The inline frame allows a web page to be shown within another web page. A common use is to embed YouTube videos or maps
Favicon: The favicon is the tiny image next to the web address or title of the page you're visiting. See that little blue and white arrow on this page? That's ours.
CSS: Short for "cascading style sheets," simply put, the CSS is how our Web Dev team defines the look of your website from the back end.
Landing page: While technically a landing page is where users "land" on your website, and could be the same as the homepage, a landing page is typically a standalone page. It's useful for telling visitors exactly where they want you to go, as you leave them no option but to click through. They are sometimes used as placeholders when a site is under construction.
Below the fold: This is anything you need to scroll down for. "Above the fold," then, is what appears on your website when you first load the page. Traditionally, we include a logo, menu, phone number and sometimes a call to action above the fold.
Navigation: Often shortened to "nav," our Web Dev team will talk about the "main nav" of your site. The main nav is simply the main menu that traditionally sits at the top or side of the page.
Plug-in: A plug-in lets Web Dev customize pages without changing the software application. Also called an add-on, it is precisely that. Some of the most common plug-ins are Adobe Flash Player and Apple's QuickTime.
CMS: An acronym for "content management system," the CMS is what our writers use to put your new or updated content into your website. It is, for the most part, free of design elements, meaning it's easy for clients to refresh their web content, as well.
Want to Learn More?
Think you're ready to take on Web Dev? Call the online marketing experts at Turn The Page today at (816) 527-8371 or (844) 889-5001. And if there are any other terms you'd like us to cover, be sure to leave a comment!
At Turn the Page Online Marketing, we have a crack team of website developers who are keep abreast of the latest trends in website design in order to give our clients a site that is sleek, functional, and above all, tasteful.
Not everyone has access to a team of edgy website wizards like we do–and their websites can suffer for it.


text:
Discovery Communications Posts Ratings Gains Among All Networks in Q109
March 31, 2009
(New York, N.Y.) Discovery Communications' portfolio of seven Nielsen rated networks continued to outpace broadcast and all other non-Discovery ad-supported cable networks in key demos in 1Q09 vs. 1Q08, increasing 6% in primetime among P2+ delivery versus 1% among cable and flat among broadcast. In P18-49, Discovery Communications is up 5%, while cable is down -1% and broadcast down -2%.
Discovery Communications' fully distributed and emerging networks experienced significant quarter-over-quarter growth in key demos, consecutive monthly wins and best-ever claims.
* All data below based on Primetime delivery, 1Q09 vs. 1Q08.
P2+ +5% (1.226k vs.1.167k)
P25-54 +8% (617k vs. 572k)
M25-54 +8% (399k vs.370k)
W25-54 +8% (219k vs. 202k)
P18-49 +7% (637k vs. 598k)
M18-49 +6% (416k vs. 392k)
March marked Discovery Channel's 6th consecutive month of year-over-year gains among P2+ and Persons, Men and Women 25-54.
Discovery Channel remains a Top 10 ad-supported cable network every night of the week among Men 25-54 and 18-49.
Network experienced its best 1Q among:
P18-34 on Mondays since 1Q05
P2+, Persons and Men 25-54 and 18-49 on Thursdays since 1Q01
M18-49 and Persons and Men 18-34 on Saturdays on record
M25-54, P18-49, W18-34 on Saturdays since 1Q00
P25-54 on Saturdays since 1Q01
"Destroyed in Seconds" and "Man vs. Wild" had their best quarters ever among Men 18-49 and 18-34
New series, "American Loggers" (Fridays 10 p.m.) experienced double-digits increases vs. its 1Q08 timeslot in P2+, P/M/W 25-54, P/M/W 18-49, and in March, the series was #2 in its timeslot among M25-54 behind only SyFy's "Battlestar Galactica."
HH +5% (760k vs. 721k)
P2+ +3% (970k vs. 938k)
W18-49 +4% (341k vs. 329k)
W18-34 +8% (185k vs. 172k)
March marked TLC's 6th consecutive month of year-over-year prime delivery growth among P2+ and HH, and 7 consecutive months of year-over-year gains among W18-34
TLC is a Top 10 ad-supported cable network among Women 25-54, 18-49 and 18-34
Season finale of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" (March 23, 9-10 p.m. ET/PT) was the highest rated Jon and Kate Plus 8 episode ever among P2+, P25-54, W25-54, P18-49 and W18-49, delivering 1.837k W18-49 and 1.096k W18-34, beating NBC's "Heroes" and CW's "One Tree Hill" in W18-49 (3% and 70%, respectively), topping NBC, CW, CBS's "Two and a Half Men"/"Rules of Engagement" and FOX's 24 in W18-34 (32%, 41%, 16% and 23%, respectively)
TLC's newest family, "Table For 12" (March 23, 10-11 p.m.) debuted higher than any other new series premiere in the past year among P2+ (1.607k), P25-54 (782k), W25-54 (608k), P18-49 (1008k), W18-49 (817k) and W18-34 (493k).
P2+ +7% (589k vs. 551k)
P25-54 +12% (245k vs. 218k)
W25-54 +3% (121k vs. 121k)
M25-54 +23% (121k vs. 98k)
P18-49 +15% (236k vs. 205k)
P18-34 +12% (101k vs. 86k)
March marked Animal Planet's 11th consecutive month of year-over-year growth among M18-34 and 6th consecutive month among P25-54, M25-54, P18-49 and M18-49.
Animal Planet experienced its best quarter among P 25-54 and 18-49 since 3Q06
"Yellowstone: Battle For Life" was the network's best performing Natural History program among P2+ (1.1M) since March 04 (excludes any Steve Irwin related programs that aired after his passing in Sept. 06).
P2+ +22% (230k vs. 188k)
P25-54 +34% (115k vs. 86k)
M25-54 +22% (50k vs. 41k)
W25-54 +44% (65k vs. 45k)
P18-49 +26% (92k vs. 73k)
W18-49 +36% (53k vs. 39k)
1Q09 marked ID's 5th consecutive quarter of growth among W25-54 and W18-49 (since its launch in 1Q08)
March marked ID's 14th consecutive month of year-over-year gains among W25-54, P18-49, HH and P2+ (since its launch in late Jan 08)
ID continues to be the fastest growing cable network among HH, P2+, W25-54 and W18-49 (excluding news and kids networks).*
P2+ +10% (76k vs. 69k)
P25-54 +11% (98k vs. 88k)
M25-54 +7% (65k vs. 61k)
P18-49 +14% (87k vs. 76k)
M18-49 +16% (59 vs. 51k)
1Q09 was Science Channel's best quarter ever among HH, P2+, P25-54, M25-54 and P18-49
March marked Science Channel's 7th consecutive month of year-over-year growth among P2+ and HH.
1Q09 marked Military Channel's 11th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in P2+ and P25-54 and 3rd consecutive quarter among HH
1Q09 was also Military Channel's best quarter ever among HH, P2+, P25-54, M25-54 and M18-49.
Discovery Health continues to stay healthy among key women demos, posting increases among Persons and Women 18-34
About Discovery Communications
Discovery Communications (Nasdaq: DISCA, DISCB, DISCK) is the world's number one nonfiction media company reaching more than 1.5 billion cumulative subscribers in 170 countries. Discovery empowers people to explore their world and satisfy their curiosity through 100-plus worldwide networks, led by Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Science Channel, Planet Green, Investigation Discovery and HD Theater, as well as leading consumer and educational products and services, and a diversified portfolio of digital media services including HowStuffWorks.com. For more information, please visit www.discoverycommunications.com.


text:
Free click & collect from our warehouse in Sumner | Shipping from $9.95 Australia wide
Box & Barrel Homewares is an Australian owned homewares retailer, offering quality, range, innovation and product knowledge in everything cookware; dinnerware; glassware; white ware and all other serving products to make our customer's experience a joy.
Join our mailing list for updates & 10% off your first order!
© 2020 Box & Barrel • Powered by Shopify
Join our newsletter and get 10% off your first order!
*By completing this form you're signing up to receive our emails and can unsubscribe at any time.


text:
Our Fiscal Cliff
Our big plans for 2013 and how you can help.
Issue No. 9 | Winter 2013
Print issue OUT OF STOCK
Our big plans for 2013 and how you can help.
How Chicago teachers took on neoliberal education reform.
Why the politics of national security means that we're all living in failed Hobbesian states.
There's a reason designers describe their field in abstract terms.
Debtors of the world, unite?
Why socialist realism loses out to avant-garde aesthetics.
How an uncompromising spirit lead the CTU to victory.
How state repression sets off radiating outrage towards police, prosecutors, and the social order they produce.
The political economy of Marissa Mayer.
Not quite feudalism, student debt is a peculiarly capitalist form of social control.
On the rise and fall of the Baffler.
Life after emergency.
Profit is the motor of capitalism. What would it be under socialism?
The problem for reality TV is that real life is too dull to make compelling TV, but compelling TV is obviously contrived.
Inside the real war on public education.
Print issue OUT OF STOCK


text:
Lets say I'm going to do a long drop (i.e, 100+ feet). Do you all just throw the rope over the ledge after anchoring, or do you leave the majority of the rope coiled up and spool it out during your rappel?
I always assumed most folks tossed the rope over the edge, until I saw a rappel video of somebody in Ellison's that appeared to show him spooling it out during his descent.


text:
Having won the championship earlier in the Autumn, Cuculainns (Kanturk) travel to Milford on Saturday 25th October to face Ballygiblin in the Rebel Og North U18'A'HL final which has a 4pm start. Cuculainns gained some consolation for their county championship final defeat when they took the spoils against Glanworth in the North Region semi final on Sunday 19th October on a 4-12 to 1-03 score line and thus qualify for the league final.
News >


text:
Now that one made me spill coffee on my shirt!Mine is kinder and gentler and more demure.
How little they know....
But thanks, heidi...retiring, shy and demure as you are, we love you.
A discussion community revolving around Eckhart Tolle but not limited to him
Now that one made me spill coffee on my shirt!Mine is kinder and gentler and more demure.
That ^ is the joy of our individuality sharing our oneness.rachMiel wrote: Problem is I forget it 99% of my waking life.
snowheight wrote:(... dare I? ...) ... ahem ... who is it that forgets? ...
rachMiel wrote: Ummmm ... the organ that resides in my skull and thinks it's "me?"
Enigma shared with absolute clarity and love..... (spaced wider for my slower processing)
Actually, the organ isn't doing the thinking. What you actually are, is.
Thinking originates the same place as everything else, including the brain; in consciousness.
The idea that the organ is what thinks is what leads to the idea that the thinker is in the body.
In fact, the body is in the thinker.
Who said retiring?But thanks, heidi...retiring, shy and demure as you are, we love you.
I have finally put down the knife.
nice Nat'! thanks for sharing!Natalie wrote: Many personal and emotional transformations followed this initial experience, none as intense. I lost interest in politics, sports teams, and things of that nature. I am no longer the dutiful Army wife I once was, and can no longer 'stomach' 99% of the TV programming I once found entertaining. A new 'self confidence' has taken over me and I swear I've even gained a few IQ points or a lot . These days I catch myself expressing ideas and views that I just know are not coming from 'me'. I feel as if I can tap into a source of knowledge and power not available to me before. I sometimes attribute this to the fact that my mind is a lot less cluttered after my initial shift and I now take longer before speaking because nothing is pressing me to express myself. I find it intensely pleasurable to live under my own skin.
Or making fun of the human nature to do such things on a website dedicated to to the serious business of awakening, oh my!I think the question is only dangerous in that it can lead to comparing, judging, and quantifying something that is way too nebulous for that.
This first step ... that recognition of what is happening ... I know for me this often does not "happen in time to prevent reaction out of fear" ... but also recognize that there was a time in your life when that recognition was not there at all, or even if it was, the recognition occurred outside of a framework for discerning exactly what was going on.ashley72 wrote:Natalie's story did resonate with me. Thanks for sharing.
I can have moments when I can find space around my thoughts, when they seem distant. I notice they don't have a hold and I feel calm. I see clearly. In other moments, particular around some people, they have a terrible grip, and suffering is there to remind me of the strangle-hold, I try and awaken from this state, fear won't let go. I can no longer find space to move, I feels it's powerful grip. I see the connection between the pull of fear, and staying awake and conscious. I try and listen to the conversation, and accept the feelings arising, let them go and listen to the conversation. The grip is still holding, but the grip is loosening. A moment later, the grip of fear has gone. Here It comes again, it's like a cycle. Those I-thoughts are coming and going. But hard to see and let go of. It's like when I stop looking for them, the fear goes, but when I look for them again the fear arises. When I look for the fear, I invited fear. Maybe if I stop inviting fear by not looking for it... It might go?
The advice from Mooji which woke her up is powerful as the mind does seem to do this dance with us ... it reacts to the experience of awakening by both jading itself to it and by pining for it and trying to re-capture it with what caused it before ... only by recognizing that and letting go of that past Joy can we claim it again.Ralph wrote:The question is "Are You Enlightened ?"
Well, would you like to see a person get enlightened ? ...if yes, then please watch this clip.
... the mind will not find this funny.


text:
Group Outings and Events Made Easy
Perfect for
- Customer Appreciation
- Employee Team Building
- Business Networking
- Charitable Fundraising Events
- or Just Plain Fun!
From 16 to 144 players!
View Group Outings Information
Choose one of these great packages and customize to exactly fit your group:
Crossings Classic Package
Crossings Plus Package
Call Now - 541-347-3232
"If you are looking for a great course to host your golf tournament or group event, this is it! This gem has it all, from smooth, wide fairways to challenging greens, from forced-carry par threes to expansive par fives and the condition of this course is second to none!"
"We have hosted five annual fund-raisers at Bandon Crossings and have found the staff to be a very caring and dedicated support team interested in creating the best tournament experience possible. Their help in setting up our putting contests, post-tournament events, as well as their generous tournament pricing structure are just a few of the things that will keep us coming back.
"Thanks, Bandon Crossing for your excellent tournament venue...You guys are great!"


text:
The pen is mightier than the sword, they say. The Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali certainly hoped it might be, and once drew a sword with a pen nib at its point. More characteristic of his peculiar genius for symbolism is the drawing used on the cover of this book, in which the pen stands upright, its nib doubling as a candle flame. It's a potently simple image, yet complex: the dripping wax suggests sorrowful tears; the pen's upright balance is perilously unsupported, like the Palestinian state itself; yet the backdrop of night sky, with its foully obscured moon, seems to reference the Amnesty International catchphrase about it being better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Few artists could have been more biblically destined for al-Ali's prophetic status. Born in Galilee, he was a victim of the nakba ("disaster") in 1948 when the Jews cleared the Promised Land of its previous inhabitants. He grew up in Lebanese refugee camps and prisons, scribbling protest cartoons on the walls, and eventually found work in newspapers. From 1969 onwards, his images featured the figure of Hanthala, the barefoot child who silently watches all the evils perpetrated in the Middle East. Hanthala became phenomenally popular in the Arab world, spawning a Garfield-like industry of coffee mugs, T-shirts, keyrings, and so on. But instead of a spoilt fat cat, here was a ragged witness to atrocity and political betrayal.
Naji al-Ali steadfastly declined to make speeches, allowing his cartoons to speak for him. I don't know whether he felt, as many visual artists do, that images are diluted by "explanation", or whether he figured he might stay alive a bit longer if he (and Hanthala) functioned as mute witnesses rather than quotable demagogues. In any event, his luck ran out in 1987, when he was shot in the head outside the London offices of a Kuwaiti newspaper he was working for. Reportedly, he'd recently been warned by the PLO to "correct" his attitude to Yasser Arafat - a warning to which he responded by lampooning Arafat once more.
Al-Ali's refusal to be the mouthpiece of a political party - even one representing his own oppressed people - is somewhat compromised by A Child in Palestine. The cartoons are surrounded by an armature of text. Abdul Hadi Ayyad, in a series of introductory essays, delivers exactly the kind of rhetoric that one might expect to hear at an anti-Israel rally. The "Zionist settler project" or "Zionist entity" drives out the "indigenous" population, but the indomitable Hanthala "proudly declares that he is prepared to grasp his Kalashnikov to find the answers". Mahmoud al-Hindi adds captions to the cartoons - "Palestinian children throw rocks at the Israeli road-roller (a symbol of continued land-appropriation confiscation and illegal settlement-building)". The Iraqi poet Ahmad Matar weighs in with: "Naji al-Ali's works were like a compass which always pointed towards Truth; and that truth will always be Palestine." Why do these words make me wince in suspicion, whereas al-Ali's cartoons make me wince in sympathy? Maybe because I'm aware that Israelis have their own truth which will always be Israel, and the words therefore smell of absolutist non-communication. Or maybe it's because al-Ali's artistry nuanced and universalised the political views he undoubtedly shared with the editors of this book.
In any case, al-Ali's views evolved over time, a fact which Ayyad, in his worshipful eagerness to present al-Ali as a timeless prophet, doesn't acknowledge. Joe Sacco, whose foreword strives for diplomacy, describes how "devastated" al-Ali was by the 1982 Lebanon invasion and notes that in the subsequent cartoons, Hanthala "lost his cool". That's one way of putting it. Hanthala stops watching and starts flagwaving (literally), kicking the Israeli map and throwing rocks. The crucified Jesus yanks a nailed hand from the crossbeam to throw a stone in support of the intifada. It is in such images that one gets a sense of al-Ali being unhinged, perhaps, by the unrelenting scale of Palestinian misery, and crossing a line into the militarised defiance that made his eventual assassination inevitable. And, while it can't have been easy for the editors of A Child in Palestine to choose a few dozen cartoons from among the thousands that al-Ali produced, I can't help seeing a political agenda behind their decision to favour the more militant ones at the expense of so many of his most awesomely sad and tender images. Al-Ali, in his prime, created visionary symbols of inhumanity and the pity of war which transcended the specifics of the Israel/Palestine conflict. A few of them are reproduced here, but most are not.
For much of his working life, al-Ali insisted that it was essential to retain hope. Some of his later cartoons suggest that he found it increasingly impossible to cling to that ideal, and that instead of chronicling the endurance of the Palestinian people during a horrible phase of their history, he may have felt he was paying witness - with Hanthala-like impotence - to a gradual genocide, a final solution that would exterminate forever his boyhood dreams of homecoming. If that's so, then this book will have two legacies. First, it will introduce British readers to al-Ali's formidable talent, albeit with a selection that doesn't do full justice to his greatness. Second, and very sadly, it may serve as documentary proof that the sword is mightier than the pen.
• Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel is published by Canongate.


text:
Billy Idol's music has gone through many alterations since his days with Generation X. Back then, it was punk rock with a pop flair. Then, on his solo EP, Don't Stop, it was boring dance rock. Now, on his first album as a solo artist, Idol has moved into mainstream power rock. The LP is full of energetic, straight-ahead rock & roll, and it looks like Idol may have finally found a comfortable niche.
Idol has a gritty, aggressive voice — suggesting a hybrid of Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed and Dave Clark. He's backed by a first-rate band of New York musicians who give his songs musical depth while keeping up a relentless pace. Admittedly, there's a disturbing familiarity about too many of the tunes here. Still, "Come On, Come On," "Hot in the City," "Love Calling" and "Shooting Stars" are powerful and catchy, and Billy Idol's combination of rock & roll energy and pop melodies makes this a very satisfying album.


text:
Above is video of the speech I gave at Colorado State University, entitled The Science of Morality: No Gods Required.
The video brightens after about 10 minutes, and notice you can watch it in HD. The Q&A at the end cuts off after a while because our recording space ran out.
Parts on YouTube: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, or the full playlist
I didn't use PowerPoint or Keynote for this talk, but Prezi. Here is my Prezi.
My first thought is that I was really impressed by Leaders in Free Thought, who sponsored the event. Great work, guys!
My second thought is that I was probably too ambitious in trying to cover divine command ethics, philosophy of language as it relates to meta-ethics, and moral epistemology in a single talk for a lay audience! I'm sure I talked over a lot of heads. Luckily, we did have a lengthy Q & A session afterward.
My third thought is this: The most common misunderstanding occurred when I used the word "survey." People thought I was saying we should take a survey of what people around the world think is right and wrong, and that can determine what is right and wrong. But as I say in the Q & A, that would be a kind of "planetary subjectivism," and was not at all what I was saying. The survey and observations around the world would be merely to discern what the subject matter of philosophy is, not what is right and wrong. Once the subject matter of philosophy is known, we can make objectively true statements about that subject matter on the basis of regular scientific evidence.
Here is my script as I intended to recite it from memory, though I'm sure the video is a bit different:
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for coming, and my thanks to Leaders in Free Thought, who invited me out here to CSU.
The title of my talk is The Science of Morality: No Gods Required.
And I want to talk about this No Gods Required part first.
A LOT of people think you can't have morality without God. In fact, when I was younger, I was raised a Christian and I used think you couldn't have morality without God. I thought: Don't you need a God who is watching your every move so you can be MOTIVATED to do good? I mean, without the fear of HELL to keep them in line, those crazy atheists must be out there doing whatever they feel like, like eating babies or having orgies or giving drugs to chipmunks and stuff like that.
But then, a few years later I did some studying and I lost my faith in God and I lost my fear of hell, and strangely, I didn't suddenly want to eat babies or have orgies or give drugs to chipmunks. I still wanted to be honest with people. I still wanted to treat people with dignity. And I still wanted to, like, help save the world or something. And it wasn't because I wanted to please God or because I feared hell, it was just because those seemed like good things to do!
But maybe that's not what people mean when they say you can't have morality without God. They don't mean that you need God to ACT morally. That's obviously not true. Heck, the two biggest philanthropists in world history are both atheists. So maybe what they mean when they say you can't have morality without God is that without God, nothing is REALLY right or REALLY wrong. Without God, it's all just a matter of human opinion. Without God, it's all just quarks and electrons bouncing around and there's no OBJECTIVE VALUE in the world at all.
But moral philosophers have been doing moral philosophy mostly without God for about 300 years, so… what's the ARGUMENT? Why would you think that objective moral value can't exist unless there's a magical diety behind it all?
Well, let's look at that claim a bit more closely. Here is how one Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, puts it. He says: "Without God, objective moral values don't exist."
"Without God, objective moral values don't exist."
Now, I want to point out right away that that's a strange claim to make, because usually, the phrase "OBJECTIVE moral value" means something like "moral value grounded in something beyond the attitudes of a person or persons." Right? If what you're calling "moral value" is just based off somebody's personal attitudes, that's called SUBJECTIVE morality.
For example: If you say that what's morally good for Ozzy Osbourne is whatever he thinks is good, and what's morally good for Paris Hilton is whatever she thinks is good, that's called Individual Subjectivism.
Or if you say that what's morally good in Germany is whatever most Germans think is good, and what's morally good in Japan is whatever most Japanese think is good, that's called Cultural Subjectivism.
Well, God-based morality says there's this person named God, and whatever he thinks is good, is good! So this is another subjective theory! If God approved of rape, rape would be good. If God approved of racism, racism would be good. God-based morality is a SUBJECTIVE theory of morality, just by definition.
So remember what William Lane Craig said. He said: "Without God, objective moral values don't exist." But actually, it would be better to say: "Objective moral values don't exist WITH God, because God-based morality is SUBJECTIVE morality."
So, then, how on earth can somebody like William Lane Craig say that God-based morality is objective?
Well, he does it by using a different definition for what "objective morality" means. For Craig, "objective morality" means "morality grounded in something beyond the attitudes of a particular species of primate: homo sapiens."
Now, I think this is a bit sneaky, and kind of weird. Why would objective and subjective morality be defined in terms of the attitudes of a particular species of primate? That's kind of strange.
That means if were visited by aliens and somebody decided to define morality in terms of whatever the aliens approved of, that new theory of morality would be an OBJECTIVE theory of morality according to Craig!
And I don't think that's what we usually mean when we talk about "objective morality."
So, look: you can define words however you want, but I don't think William Lane Craig's definition of "objective morality" is what ANYBODY thinks of when they talk about "objective morality." It's really just a trick so he can pretend that God-based morality is suddenly an "objective" theory of morality even though it's grounded in the attitudes of a person just like individual subjectivism is.
And by the way, there are other problems with God-based morality that I won't go into now. There's The Euthyphro Dilemma, for example, and there's – a really big one – The Problem of God Not Existing.
So… lots of problems.
So I don't think that if there was a God that would somehow give us objective morality. That would give us just another version of SUBJECTIVE morality. And I don't think there's a good argument for why there CAN'T be objective morality WITHOUT a deity.
But: I still haven't shown how objective morality DOES exist.
So let's get back to that first part of my title: The Science of Morality.
The question is this. In a world of quarks and electrons bouncing around, what IS morality? Can we measure it? Can we build a little box that will make little ticks when you hold it next to something that radiates moral value, like a Geiger counter, and then go around the world and figure out which things have moral value and which things don't?
How could something be REALLY good or bad or REALLY right or wrong if the natural world is all there is?
Well, when we talk about good and bad and right and wrong and morality and value, I think our WORDS tend to trip us up. They tend to confuse us. And I want to illustrate this with a story.
Who wants to be in the story with me? I need somebody in the story with me. Will you be in the story with me? Alright, great. What's your name? Okay, Kristen. Great. So here's the story. Kristen and I are on a date.
Kristen and I are on a date, and I'm a sophisticated guy, so we're at an art museum. And we're looking at paintings, and we're looking at sculptures, and then there are those whole rooms that are filled with weird objects and video cameras and TVs and crazy music and stuff and that just kind of ruins the mood between us so I take us back to the paintings and the sculptures and we're having a nice time, and then we come across THIS.
And Kristen and I stare at this… thing… for a minute and finally I say, "Wow, that is GREAT art. That is… amazing. Really great art."
And Kristen says, "What? What are you talking about? That's total crap. It's just a urinal. That is NOT great art."
And I say, "No! What's wrong with you? Can't you see? This is great art!"
And we go back and forth like this for a while but eventually we ask each other what we MEAN when we say "great art."
And it turns out that when I said "great art" I meant "something that was intended as art and had a lasting influence on lots of future artists." But what Kristen meant by "great art" was "something that was intended as art and is seen as beautiful and pleasing by most people who see it."
Well, we thought we were disagreeing, but it turns out we aren't disagreeing at all! We were just talking past each other. If we use my definition for great art, well, I'm right that Marcel Duchamp's urinal had a lasting impact on future artists. So it IS great art by MY definition. And if we use Kristen's definition for great art, then she's right, too, because MOST people probably don't find Duchamp's urinal to be beautiful or pleasing.
So we're both right, and we were just talking past each other because the words were tripping us up. We weren't being clear with our definitions at first.
But now, let me get back to my story. Kristen and I are so worked up that we just decide to keep arguing, anyway. Kristen says that HER definition of "great art" is better than my definition because it's closer to what MOST people mean when they talk about "great art." And I say "No, that's not true, because there are all kinds of ugly paintings and music and things that are considered great art, but definitely aren't beautiful, and if you look at lists that people make of all the greatest art works of all time, they're all really influential art works, so my definition of great art is better."
And we argue back and forth like this for a while and in the end it turns out to be really hard to figure out how you would even decide a question like that. How do you decide which definition for "great art" is the "correct" definition?
I mean, we could look it up in a dictionary, but different dictionaries give different definitions anyway, and they probably all have some definition that's close to MY definition for "great art", and they probably all have another definition that's close to Kristen'S definition, too.
And in the end, it's a question of how we want to use our word-tools.
Remember, words are just tools for communicating ideas. There's no particular meaning that's 'essential' to the sound "GREEAAATT AAAARRTTTTT." There's no essential meaning to that particular pattern of air blowing through my mouth and my meat-parts slapping together in a particular way. We just kind of all agreed roughly what we mean when we put that pattern of sounds together, because that helps us communicate with each other.
The problem is, we didn't all agree about the meaning of "great art" with enough precision. And that's what caused the argument between Kristen and I. We were using definitions for "great art" that were in the same ballpark, but definitely NOT the exact same meaning, so we got confused, and it looked like we were disagreeing when we really weren't.
Now, we don't have this problem when it comes to a really mature science like physics. Physicists agree to a high degree of accuracy what they're talking about when they use the word "atom," and so there's no confusion when two physicists talk about atoms.
But in some subjects, things are a bit fuzzier, like sociology. For example what's a "religion"? Well, we all have some agreement on what the word "religion" means, but still, there are lots of different definitions that people are using. So there can be some confusion when two sociologists are having a debate about religion.
But they usually figure out pretty quickly that they each have to define what they mean by religion, and once they've done that, then they can go out into the world and take surveys and make observations and see if anything in the world corresponds to their definitions of religion and what they're saying about it.
But in other subjects, there's so little consensus on the meaning of key terms of that subject matter that people who debate that subject matter end up talking past each other a lot of the time, like when critics are debating what the greatest art works are, or like when you're debating with your friends what the best movie of the year was. What does "best movie" mean?
So let's get back to morality.
I think the same thing is happening in moral philosophy.
You've got utilitarians like Sam Harris, who define "morally good" as "that which promotes the well-being of conscious creatures" or something like that. And you've got social contract theorists who might define "morally good" as "that set of social rules we would agree to if we didn't know what kind of life we were going to be born into." And you've got moral subjectivists who define "morally good" as "that which the speaker approves of." And it's easy for us to talk past each other, because we're using different definitions for our words.
But notice I'm not saying all moral theories can be right as long as we define our terms first. Definitely not. If you define "morally good" as "that which is commanded by God," then nothing is morally good, because nothing is commanded by God, because God doesn't exist.
Or if you define "morally good" as "that which has intrinsic value," well, I think that's going to be a problem, because I've never seen any evidence that anything has intrinsic value.
So lots of moral theories are just gonna be WRONG, even IF we are careful to define our terms first.
Now, what's really interesting here is that if Kristen and I got into a debate about whether Duchamp's urinal was "great art" or not, I think most of us would be able to see pretty quickly that if we want to resolve the debate and get any ANSWERS, we need to define what we mean by "great art" and then go out into the world and see what matches that definition, if anything.
So… why isn't this obvious when we have debates about morality?
I think part of the problem might be the PURPOSE of moral discourse. When we use moral talk, usually the whole point is to persuade someone to act a certain way, and to persuade someone, you need to speak with as much authority and power as you can. The whole point of moral talk is so that you can beat somebody over the head with your morals and say, "It's wrong to protect people who rape children. It's just wrong!" and in order to persuade them, you want to say "It's wrong in an absolute, intrinsic way and it's wrong according to any reasonable definition of morality!" Because the stronger you way it, the more impact you'll have, and that's the whole point of moral discourse, whereas it's not so much the point of art discourse.
And maybe even more important, we evolved to have certain moral motivations because those motivations were beneficial to reproduction in our social species, and so our brains are wired to feel very strongly that some things are just absolutely wrong or absolutely right and definitions don't change that. And in fact, neurological studies of what the brain is doing when we make moral judgments show that they are mostly emotional judgments that we rationalize later.
So maybe that's why it's hard to see that we can get past the word-confusion and start making progress on morality if we just define our terms.
So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that when you say "morally good" what you mean is "that which promotes the well-being of conscious creatures," and you provide a definition of consciousness, and you define well-being in terms of a particular brain state. Well, viola! That's a scientific question! It's a really, really HARD scientific question, and maybe not one we can answer very well for another few centuries, but it's still a scientific question. Which acts or laws or desires tend to promote that brain state in conscious creatures? That's a scientific question.
There really is an objective fact of the world about whether communism or capitalism does a better job of promoting the well-being of conscious creatures. There's an objective fact of the world about whether legalized abortion promotes the well-being of conscious creatures. There's an objective fact of the world about whether or not female genital mutilation promotes the well-being of conscious creatures. Those things might be very, very hard to measure with current technology, but IN PRINCIPLE those are scientific questions about quarks and electrons and the natural world.
And they don't depend on any person's attitudes, either. Even if the Nazis had won World War II and brainwashed everybody into thinking that killing people who aren't white Europeans is okay, it would still be an objective fact that killing non-white people would NOT generally promote the well-being of conscious creatures. That would still be an objective fact.
So Sam Harris' theory would still be an OBJECTIVE theory of morality, because whether something is good or bad would be independent of the attitudes of people.
But now, this might not satisfy you. You might say, "Okay, Luke. Sure. I get it. If we define 'morally good' this way, then we can go out and measure what's morally good or not according to that definition. And if we define 'morally good' in this OTHER way, then we can go out and measure what's morally good or not according to THAT definition. But I wanna know what's REALLY good or bad! Which set of definitions SHOULD we go with?"
And when I hear that concern raised, there are two ways I'm tempted to answer.
At first, I want to say "No. That's it. I know you WANT morality to be not just objective but also be, I dunno, written into the fabric of the universe, or something, whatever that means. I know you WANT there to be one true definition of morality, but that's just not how language evolves. People use moral terms in many different ways, so there is no 'one true definition' for moral terms. So sit down, think about this carefully, get over it, and then maybe go out there and do the science of morality! Go measure and test and figure out what it is that promotes the well-being of conscious creatures, or whichever set of objective facts about the world you want to investigate."
So that's one way I'm tempted to reply to this question.
The other way I'm tempted to reply is that while I don't think it makes sense to talk about One True Theory of Morality, because that's not how language works, I still think there might be something kinda LIKE that. And here's what I mean.
There are some limits on what you can reasonably call a theory of morality. You can't give a 30 minute talk about how gravity is really just an effect of the curvature of spacetime and then suddenly tell everyone that you've just explained your theory of morality. No, what you have is a theory of gravity, not a theory of morality. It's just not useful to suddenly redefine your words so radically that for you those words refer to things that nobody else in history has ever meant by them.
So, some theories or sets of claims are going to be more "about morality" than other theories are, at least in terms of the ideas that go along with morality when most people talk about morality.
But then, there might be a certain theory you could come up with that fits the assumptions of common moral discourse better than any other theory. We could go out and take big surveys of people and come up with lists of the ideas the are most commonly associated with moral talk – ideas like obligation and permission and praise and condemnation and rights and duties and actions that are "above and beyond the call of duty" and all those kinds of things that we talk about when we talk about morality. And some of these ideas would be more central to moral discourse than others. And then you could come up with a theory that makes sense of most of those ideas, and maybe that theory would be more "about morality" than other moral theories are.
Of course, you'd also want all the claims of your theory to be TRUE. So you couldn't come up with a moral theory that would account for EVERYTHING different people and cultures think about morality, because different concepts of morality can contradict each other, and also they sometimes refer to things that don't exist like gods and intrinsic value. But you could still come up with a moral theory that incorporates lots of common ideas associated with moral talk better than any other theory of morality and your theory could be one that makes only true claims.
So what's the picture, here? There's all these dozens of moral theories out there. The first, most obvious step is to pick out just the few that make only true claims. And then from those, you can pick the one that can account for the assumptions of moral discourse most closely.
And if you could do that, you wouldn't have the One True Theory of Morality, but you might have the One Most Universal Theory of Morality or something like that. And then you could go out and measure what is really, truly, objectively morally good according to that theory, and what is really, truly, objectively morally bad according to that theory, and you could get real answers to moral questions, and, perhaps – 2500 years after Socrates – we could finally have The Science of Morality.
Now, if we decide to do this – if we develop the SCIENCE of morality – what advantages can we look forward to? As I see it, the main advantage is this: We could come to know and agree on the moral facts through reason and evidence rather than through our conflicting intuitions.
Let me explain. How do most of us make moral judgments today? I think most of us take the advice of Jiminy Cricket. "Let your conscience be your guide." We close our eyes and we think about whether stealing music off the internet is right or wrong, and it either feels right or it doesn't, and that's how we decide whether it's right or wrong.
Of course it's not ALL intuition. There's usually SOME reasoning involved. For example you might have an intuition that pain is always bad, and through a series of logical arguments you might discover that in order to be consistent with that value you already hold intuitively, you really shouldn't be contributing to the massive pain of millions of animals by buying factory farmed meat. But maybe you have a different intuition, that fairness is more valuable than the absence of pain. And then you might reason from there to different conclusions. But we always come back to our intuitions about right and wrong.
But let's look at this again: "Let your conscience be your guide." I think Jiminy Cricket's advice is bad advice. How could that be bad advice?
First, remember that this is the SAME advice people used 200 years ago when most people approved of slavery, racism, sexism, and homophobia. When your moral judgments depend on your conscience, your moral judgments turn out to be an accident of the culture you live in, and you could end up endorsing some really awful stuff.
The second reason to NOT "let your conscience be your guide" is that it doesn't make any evolutionary sense. Why would primate brains have evolved a special morality module that was able to accurately detect moral truths by intuition? There's no evidence that this happened. And, the fact that people all around the world disagree so much about morality shows that even if we DID evolve a conscience, it is extremely faulty and not to be trusted.
The third reason to NOT "let your conscience be your guide" is that it turns out that our intuitive moral judgments are hugely influenced by irrelevant factors. Let me give you a few examples. If I walk up to you and say, "Hi! I'm taking a survey on morality. Would you like to participate? It'll only take a minute." And you say "Sure," and I'm holding a warm cup of coffee so I say, "Here, would you hold this for a second?" And I grab my thing down here and I say "thanks" and take the cup back, when you fill out the survey now, you will make more generous moral judgments about the situations described on the survey than if I had NOT had you hold the warm cup of coffee for two seconds.
That's what happens when researchers conduct this experiment. Our moral intuitions are very fickle.
Or, if you take the survey when you're in the presence of freshly baked bread, your moral judgments will be different than if you're NOT in the presence of freshly baked bread.
Here's another one. If I'm a researcher, and I go to a novelty store and buy a can of FART SPRAY, and I spray a little bit in a room – just a little bit, you can't really even tell that it smells bad, but subconsciously you can smell it – and then I invite a bunch of you into the room to fill out the survey, you will give less generous moral judgments than if I had NOT sprayed the fart spray in the room. That's what happens.
I can even change your moral judgments with magnets. There's a thing called a transcranial magnetic stimulation where if I point these magnets at a certain part of your brain just behind your right ear, it's called the right temporal-parietal junction, I'll temporarily disrupt communication in that part of the brain. And if I do that, the moral judgments you give will be more focused on the outcome of the actions your judging, whereas normally you would take into account not just the outcome of the actions but also the intent of the person who is acting. Our moral judgments change when somebody is pointing a magnet at the RTPJ right here behind the right ear.
So I can change your moral judgments with a warm cup of coffee, with freshly baked bread, with fart spray, and with magnets.
So for these three reasons, things are not looking good for our moral intuitions. Things are not looking good for Jiminy Cricket.
But look what happens if we develop a science of morality! NOW how do we get at moral truth?
We already know science works. Science cures diseases and flies us to the moon and gives us more new knowledge every YEAR than we gained during the entire Christian Dark Ages. When we make morality a science, we can leave our faulty intuitions behind and get REAL ANSWERS on moral questions that we can come to agree on.
I mean think about it. Special relativity is pretty counter-intuitive. Special relativity says if I stay here and I send my twin in a rocket to Beetlejuice and back, my twin will now be YOUNGER than I am. He won't just LOOK younger. He will actually BE younger. That makes NO SENSE to my intuitions. But guess what? I accept it. Because the scientific evidence strongly supports it.
And the same thing can happen if we make morality into a science. We can come to agree on the moral facts even if our intuitions don't agree, because we CAN agree on what the scientific evidence says. And that's the good news of the science of morality.
So just to review:
We DON'T need gods to have morality – and in fact, grounding your morality in God just makes morality SUBjective, because it's grounded in the attitudes of a person.
Second, we can have a science of morality if we limit ourselves to the theories of morality that make only true claims, and then we pick the one that captures the most ideas from our moral talk.
And third, when we develop the science of morality, we can finally really KNOW moral facts, and come to agreement about them, just like we come to agreement on other scientific facts, because our moral conclusions will be based not on our conflicting intuitions, but on scientific evidence.
Now I will admit, moral questions will be harder to answer when we make morality a science, 'cuz we can't just close our eyes and get the answer anymore. We have to send thousands and thousands of trained scientists out into the world to measure and test what really is moral according to the best theory of morality available.
But it can be done, and it's what we NEED to do if we want to really, truly know how to make the world a better place.
Thank you.
Transcript of Q & A section
QUESTION: Where can I go to hear more of your stuff and learn more about this.
LUKE: I have a website called CommonSenseAtheism.com. It's mostly focused on philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. On there I have a podcast called 'Morality in the Real World' where a philosopher friend and I are developing this kind of approach and then getting more specific about specific moral claims and whether they're true or not, but it takes a long time to do that, and so each episode is about 10 minutes and we're probably gonna do 100 episodes or something before we really solve any philosophical problems.
If you want to check out more of this: CommonSenseAtheism.com. Also if you want, you can click 'contact' on there and say "Hey, I was interested by this particular part" and I'll even be able to send you papers to read if you really want to dive deep into that. So yeah: CommonSenseAtheism.com.
QUESTION: You seem to have two options here, either morality is about intuitions, which you reject, or it's about scientific investigation, but what about the option of morality being about facts of reason, about rational thought – the categorical imperative. Why reject those? We wouldn't expect to find such things scientifically, because they're not the kinds of things you can find. So why reject that?
LUKE: Yeah. So the question is, maybe I've given a false dichotomy. I said that we could do morality by consulting our intuitions, or we could do morality by science. But maybe there's a third method: we could do morality by reasoning through it. There's a couple different ways you might do that.
One way is you start with your intuitions and you reason from that. So you might start with the intuition that pain is just bad, always morally bad. And then from there you might be persuaded by a series of logical arguments that if you hold that value already, if your'e gonna be consistent with that value that you already hold intuitively, then you shouldn't be eating factory farmed meat. And that would be reason, but it always goes back to an intuitive moral judgment.
But what you asked about was another option of reasoning toward morality – the categorical imperative. It's really hard for me to answer that. If there was such a thing as a categorical imperative such that, I mean one way to cash it out is that it would be somehow fundamentally irrational to do things that are immoral, or it would contradict human identity is another way to cash that out. I've looked at those and I wish that I could make one of those theories work, I just can't. It would make morality much easier, because we could solve moral problems from our armchairs, and we could think about it, and we wouldn't have to send scientists out into the world.
So I'm still exploring that and would very much like it to turn out to be the case that that works, and just can't find any way to make it work. Now maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody else already has, but you're right I just kinda skipped over that whole option and that's seriously a research program worth doing. There are some reasons why I'm not optimistic about that research program.
QUESTION: The little country of Bhutan has an interesting way of tracking its health among it's people. It's called Gross National Happiness. I think you could make a case that if you track Gross National Happiness and morality in those parallels, because we can track certain aspects of happiness: security, food safety, other things that other people need to achieve happiness – morality is simply a human condition… it seems like this would be one way to approach the scientific [approach to morality].
LUKE: …Bhutan is measuring not so much Gross National Product because it's not doing so well on that front, but it's measuring Gross National Happiness, and it is doing surprisingly well on that front given its economic status. Maybe one way to cash out the definition of morality is to talk about, basically, whatever maximizes human happiness. That's what we should be concerned with when we're talking about morality. And this is actually a pretty popular view. And if you are able to provide a specific enough definition for what happiness is, you could go out and measure what it is that promotes the most happiness. This would be hedonic utilitarianism or preference satisfaction utilitarianism or desire satisfaction consequentialism.
There are a couple of reasons why that isn't my view. I mean, the intuition here from John Stuart Mill or even from Aristotle is that happiness is the only thing that we value or desire, and I think that's gonna turn out to be false. We can often sacrifice happiness for other things that we desire. So I think that is a theory worth doing as a science – it's certainly worth figuring out what it is that promotes happiness, I think we would all care about that – but I think we're going to be able to find a theory that both makes more abundant true claims and is also more about the subject matter of morality in terms of capturing the assumptions of everyday moral discourse around the world. I'm hopeful that we can do even better than that.
But even apart from whether we want to semantically make the decision to call that morality, obviously we all care about what it is that produces happiness, so that's a valid research program anyway.
QUESTION: I'm not sure how you're reaching beyond just a large-scale intersubjective morality. So you speak pretty poorly about subjective accounts of morality – whatever God says is right is right, whatever Britney Spears thinks is right is right – and that seemed problematic, it seems you don't favor that very much. So you go on where you say okay let's try to capture overall moral discourse of people around the globe as best we can. Put that together. That to me just sounds like an intersubjective approach to morality, which you could make arguments for that.
But I don't see how science helps much with that in the intersubjective and scientific realm because let's say we do that. We get everybody's opinions about what they think is right or wrong. We put it together, and now we have the most popular intersubjective theory take on what is right and what is wrong. That doesn't sound like it would really help me in my moral thinking process.
So for example let's say hedonism – you know whatever produces the most pleasure, a utilitarian approach. That is what most people agree is morally agree. So I realize that, and then I'm faced with a moral decision, and I calculate how much happiness it will produce and how much it won't, and in the end I still think my intuitions tell me it's wrong, even though this intersubjective morality says it's right. It doesn't seem like it would be very useful to me in that situation. I would just disagree with it.
And for example this intersubjective approach might be biased toward what time you're at. Say a century ago you take the opinion of in general what do most people think about slavery: is it right, is it wrong? Well, okay, most people think it's right. Now I'm on my own and I think it's wrong, and I do the science calculation and most people think it's right, I still think it's wrong , it still doesn't seem to be that useful.
So I guess I'm saying it feels like the science will always have the is-ought gap between… you can determine what IS out there, but that doesn't necessarily determine what OUGHT to be out there. And the intersubjective approach doesn't seem like it would really help my moral intuitions much. I would still go by my moral intuitions, not by general people's moral intuitions.
LUKE: There were, like, 7 or 8 issues in there… You said that I seemed pretty harsh on moral subjectivism. I'm actually not that harsh on moral subjectivism, I just don't like it being called moral objectivism. So my complaint was that Dr. Craig was calling a morally subjective theory a morally objective theory. Actually I think it would be pretty easy to make a morally subjective theory that was correct according to its own definitions. If I define "morally good" in terms of what Luke Muehlhauser approves of, that's a subjective moral theory, and I could make rather trivially true claims. Like for example, ice cream has a great deal of moral value on that view. That would be very easy to measure.
The problem is more the semantic issue. I don't think it would capture very much of what we mean by morality.
There are a whole bunch of questions you raised where I think we're agreeing on more than you might think. Really what I'm trying to do here is not so much accept the problem of moral definitions or what's the One True Moral Theory and then solve it. What I'm more trying to do is just say it's a bad question and dissolve it. So I say there's not gonna be just one true moral theory. There's gonna be a lot of different theories that have lots to do with what we usually talk about with regard to morality. Some of them might be about how do we produce the most happiness, how do we produce the most pleasure – and those are all scientific questions.
So what you were saying about how even if we did this whole survey-taking of what the assumptions of moral discourse are and we picked the one theory that captured the most of those assumptions and we defined morality in terms of that, I would wanna say that that whole time when we're doing that, we'd have to be very conscious of the fact that language is constructed. So maybe if we find that theory of morality that most captures what we mean in moral discourse, then that's gonna be interesting, but maybe that's not gonna be your goal. Maybe your goal isn't to do with whatever it is… like let's say we go with the definition that morality is whatever creates the most well-being in conscious creatures – maybe you have other goals and you don't have a personal, internal reason for action to promote the greatest well-being for conscious creatures.
That's fine, I accept that, because I'm trying to dissolve this mystery and this force behind the word "morality" and just recognize it for the word-tool that it is…
The theory of morality that I actually deploy and didn't even mention tonight says that, for example, it is true that we have reasons for action to promote or condemn certain types of action because if I condemn lying that's gonna help me fulfill my desires in a lot of cases, because aren't gonna lie to me and thwart my desires. So it might be the case that you have reasons for action to condemn lying that you don't even know about, and so that's why this might still be a better approach than going with your intuitions because… for example let's say your intuitions say that there are a lot of cases in which lying is going to help you get what you want, and then we do the research and find out that lying is really destructive to happiness or something – it probably isn't it, but let's say it is. That would be a case in which I would say for your own benefit you would want to go with the science instead of your intuitions.
QUESTION: To some extent I feel like what you're getting at is what we already do in law. For example, our legal system is based around an agreement about what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing, but when I see something as illegal, I don't necessarily see it as wrong. Okay, our society says it's wrong, but that doesn't mean it really is wrong. So it might be illegal, but that doesn't mean it's wrong or right. In a similar case, in general most people think this is right… but that doesn't mean it's right. So to take my fickle, inner subjective opinion and say that somehow everybody's fickle opinion is better than my fickle opinion, just seems like [the same problem].
LUKE: It sounds like you were talking about how we would take a survey of the world and figure out what people think is right and wrong and then that would determine what we would define as morally right and wrong. That would be a kind of planetary subjectivism, where morality is grounded in terms of what most people on the planet value. What I was talking about was a very different issue, where I was talking about the semantic issue of what we decide to define as morality, how we decide to use that word-tool. The most practical way to use a word-tool is to use it in a way that meets two conditions. The first condition is that it successfully refers to things that actually exist. It's really unproductive to use words to talk about things that don't exist. And then the second one is that we generally want to capture what most of us are talking about when we use that word. That's why if I come up here and give a talk on general relativity and then I suddenly say I gave a talk on morality, that's just not useful.
I'm not saying we should take a survey of what most people think is right and wrong, and that would determine what's right and wrong. I'm saying something different. The survey part was just to resolve the semantic issue of what most people mean by moral terms, but there's still the matter of: Does the theory that has an account of those moral assumptions of moral discourse successfully refer to things in the real world.
QUESTION: You talk alot about evolution. I want to believe, and I like the idea that we can discover moral facts, and I wanna believe that there's… a population of moral truths that is universal, but I realized this year – I was talking to Eugenie Scott – and I've started to become what evolution in a biological context means. It means that there's multiple answers, and it depends what environment you're in. So as time progresses, and environmental circumstances change, it changes the moral landscape accordingly, and the moral landscape has to adjust accordingly.
So by doing these kinds of studies, I guess my question… do you think it's dangerous to presuppose that there's something or is it better to be aware that there is a constant change?
LUKE: This kinda goes back to one of the earlier questions from the previous gentleman, I didn't answer the question then. The question of: If we do this survey thing… aren't we just committing ourselves to this snapshot in time. Is that it?
QUESTION: I just fear that scientists… we're perceived in this one way, coming to tell you what's right, there's such a pushback to that kind of moral top-down direction that I think is dangerous.
LUKE: That's a very different question, then. I think most people are comfortable with top-down morality because most people are theists. Doing it scientifically is a very 'from the ground up' way to do morality because you've got thousands of different people and you can test their claims against the world and you could have your white coat on but you could be wrong and I could show you to be wrong because I could run the experiment and do the measurement. So this would be a really collaborative effort to find moral facts and it would be something that, like the rest of science, is totally amenable to correction by better data or new experiments and so, to me, it would be the opposite of a top-down morality. It would be like science is, where it's endlessly correctable, and accountable to the evidence instead of accountable to untestable assertions about divine commands or untestable assertions about brute moral facts that exist in a Platonic heaven.
QUESTION: Intrinsic in this system would be a kind of agreement to accept whatever comes out of your survey, as opposed to just being aware that different moralities work in different circumstances at different times.
LUKE: Again the survey is not about figuring out what is right and wrong, it's just about the question of what we generally mean by moral terms. So as long as we're clear that that's what we're talking about, that when I talk about "morally good" I'm using this specific set of definitions, like scientists are, then I think we resolve the problem. Because the problem usually is that we aren't clear about what we're talking about and we're talking past each other like Kristen and I were when we were disagreeing about great art but we hadn't provided a definition for 'great art.'
QUESTION: What's your opinion about the problem that if you do morality as a science, you won't be taken seriously as a science?
LUKE: Yes, there's a huge resistance in the scientific community to making any normative claims, especially moral claims. Science is very successful BECAUSE it doesn't engage in philosophy, and it sticks to facts about what IS in the world, and not about more fuzzy questions about what OUGHT to be the case. And so scientists are very understandably very resistant to this idea. But I think if it's explained to them that what we're doing is really just first settling the semantic issue, getting this conflict of definitions out of the way and just picking a definition and saying this is what we're talking about, then I think scientists will be quite happy to measure and test what it is that promotes the well-being of conscious creatures or whatever we're going with.
I think we just need to make the semantic issues very clear first. And then I think scientists will recognize that this does fall under the IS category, that this is a question that falls under their domain. It is a question about quarks and electrons that manifest themselves in terms of brain states or whatever we're trying to measure.
This actually goes back to another question that I didn't answer from a previous questioner about the is-ought gap. This comes from David Hume, a very famous passage about how in every previous vulgar system of morality I'm always encountering a moral argument that says something is wrong because it's commanded by God and then suddenly there's this gap where we're not talking about IS statements anymore but we're talking about OUGHT statements, and nobody's explained to me or justified what this gap is.
Now most people have read Hume to be saying that you can't demonstrate the truth of an ought claim by talking about is claims. But they probably haven't read the next chapter of Hume where Hume justified a bunch of ought claims in terms of is claims.
Think about it this way: Either ought claims are part of the world of is, or they're part of the world of is-not. If you're making ought claims and they're not part of the world of IS, I have to say I don't care about that. The other question is, if ought claims are not part of the world of is, how do they have an influence on matter that we would care about? So I think ought claims are part of the world of is.
A really simple way to say this is that one very uncontroversial type of ought is the hypothetical imperative where you say, if you want to get from Fort Collins to Denver you ought to go south. This is a very simple type of ought claim to justify. It's just a desire and a prediction. You recognize the desire to go from Fort Collins to Denver and you make a prediction that if you go south, you'll end up fulfilling that desire.
So this is an ought that is fully explained in terms of IS statements. An is statement about a desire that exists in someone's brain, and an is statement about the geographic locations of Denver and Fort Collins. I think it's gonna turn out to be the case that all the oughts we can justify have to come from the world of is, or else they have no impact on the world of matter that we live in, and they're just part of the world of is-not, and then I don't care about them.
QUESTION: …What if, when you go and do the scientific study about what we mean when we use moral terms… [we find that] we DO mean something religious [by these terms]? …Perhaps its the case that when you do the semantic study, the end result will be that religion is the correct answer based on the common agreement of terms rather than science, and I would think that would actually be more likely considering the majority of people in the world are going to appeal to some sort of religious institution in order to get their morality. How would we reconcile that with having science try to give us the answer?
LUKE: It's an excellent question. I think it's very plausible that one of the most common assumptions of moral discourse when we take that survey would be that morality has a transcendent source. I think that's very plausible.
We've encountered lots of these situations before. A really popular one in the literature is about the word "atom." The word atom from the very beginning in Ancient Greece… the word means, literally, "uncuttable." It means indivisible. It's something you can't cut down any further. It's the smallest constituent of nature, you can't divide it further.
We discovered around 1900 that you can cut atoms. But we kept calling them atoms. Why did we do that? Well, this very central assumption of what an atom is turned out to be false. But we didn't suddenly say, well, atomic theory is false. Because this word atom still successfully referred to all these other things that were part of the assumptions of atom discourse, for example that it was particular and discrete units that are used to build up the substances that we observe in life, that these atoms can combine because of their physical properties in different ways and can't combine in other ways… there are all these kinds of things that were part of the atom discourse, and so we decided to hang on to the atom discourse, even though the really central assumption that it was uncuttable… turned out to be false.
I think we can do the same thing with morality if we think that's gonna be useful to discourse. We can say well, it turns out that moral facts aren't transcendent because let's say naturalism is true and nothing is transcendent in that way. It would still be the case that we can make sense of talking about obligation, permission, praise and blame, actions that are above and beyond the call of duty, normative reasons, all these other assumptions of moral discourse, even if this one really central one of transcendent turned out to be false.
That's one way forward.
QUESTION: I'm less optimistic about the possibility of ridding ourselves of these intuitions that are so problematically mutually exclusive. I thought it was ironic for example, to discard intuitions by appealing to our intuitions, for example that it would be inappropriate to appeal to the smell of bread or a warm cup of coffee. All of us immediately, intuitively, know that that's not a legitimate consideration in moral judgment. That's an intuition that we have. And I suspect that as we begin this journey using science to discover moral facts, that again it's going to require all along the way a definition of terms, even if we stipulate them based upon what the majority of people believe – that we just won't be able to disentangle ourselves from the necessity of precise thinking, rational reflection. It sounds like a kind of naive scientism. So my question is: How do you see that relationship between moral epistemology, philosophy, and science. Do you really think there is some kind of philosophy-free, value-neutral science, that could be free of intuitions.
LUKE: That's a very good topic. When I get around to doing a Ph.D. program, that's what I'd like to write my entire dissertation on, right there.
There's no way to make this entirely scientific because at the very least we have the semantic issues. And those are more philosophical issues. So we have to resolve those types of issues and then we can do the science, which of course was what I talked about in my speech.
So how do we have an intuitions-free science of morality? We do it the exact same way that we have a relatively intuitions-free science about relativity theory. It also depends how you're using your intuitions. There are certain cases in which it's going to be legitimate to appeal to intuition when you're deciding how to define a term, but then there are going to be other cases where it's not, and I think the differentiation there comes from whether or not it's an essentially contested topic, which is a model of language that Gallie introduced in 1954.
I think that's a really good question and I think considerations like that are the ones that I worry about personally in doing this project, more than an of the others.
QUESTION: Would you agree that their may be some room to expand on what may be looking like a false dichotomy between a scientist and a philosopher? …Maybe morality is more like ecology, which is a very fuzzy science…
LUKE: Explicitly in this talk, morality would have to be a project that philosophers and scientists would have to work on… I think I'm actually probably continuing or pushing forward the distinction between philosophers and scientists because science is a particular set of methods that work a lot better than philosophical methods. I think philosophy is at it's best when it's almost science, as close as possible. And that's actually the dominant view in philosophy right now, that's called naturalism.
You said maybe this looks like ecology. There's actually a philosopher who is one that sees morality as a science who describe morality as the science of human ecology. His name is Owen Flannagan.
QUESTION: What you're saying is that science turns into a new religion of sorts because if science has all the answers, then anything that's scientifically proven as beneficial becomes morally permissible, then we can look to science to hold all the answers, just like many religions look to God to hold all the answers, when I don't think you've acknowledged the limitations of science. I'll be the first to pay homage to science and say of all the great things that it has done for humanity, but at the same time, think about some of the flaws in scientific viewpoints, and things change. For a while there we didn't believe the earth was round, we believed the sun revolved the earth, crazy things like that were conventional science… that later were proved to be exactly wrong…
Science to me doesn't give me any ways to live practically differently.
LUKE: The first was about science making mistakes and reversing itself. That happens – in some sciences it happens more than in others. Right now it's happening a lot in dietary science. The problem is that the other methods are even worse. So philosophy is even worse. And theology and astrology… is way worse. Science is socially constructed. It is a human activity. It just turns out to be the one that works the best.
So I'm not saying we should trust all the deliverances of science as gospel…
You also talked about science becoming a religion in that it's answering all these questions that religion used to answer. In particular, morality has been a central answer that religions have given and not science in the past. So this is another threat from science in that way. I think you're correct that science can't answer all questions, but I think what I'm trying to do, just because it's the most successful method, is try to figure out ways to hand off the questions to science as much as possible…
When you talked about, "Should I have scientists do experiments to tell me what I ought to do?" Again, remember though that we have to define what we mean by 'ought' in terms of things that exist in the real world. And then those claims are amenable to science.
You also asked how could morality as a science be useful to me? Let's say for the heck of it that you were going to stick to your moral intuitions about what's right and wrong, and you thought that pain was really morally bad. Science could show you that if you're gonna be consistent with that view, with that value that you hold personally, then you shouldn't be eating factory farmed meat. That could be the case. And by the way I'm using this example but I'm not even a vegetarian, so if I'm condemning anybody I'm condemning myself.
Science can figure out the things that correspond to the values that you already hold, and it might be useful to you in that way.
I know that it has done that for me in the past where I had wrong information about a particular topic, and when I had the correct scientific information, I actually changed my views about how I should be responding to that situation.
QUESTION: Do you think if we were able to view science as the way to prescribe moral truths to people, would that actually end up making a difference in any real-world problems?
LUKE: Obviously, there's so much horror in the world that it's easy to be a pessimist. This is the 21st century and we still have women living lives of incredible oppression in Muslim countries around the world, and even in 1st-world countries in some cases. So it can be easy to be a pessimist. I'm an optimist, maybe it's just a decision, but… I think about, for example, slavery. Slavery was accepted in most cultures around the world for thousands of years and then suddenly, in the space of a few generations, most of the world rejected slavery as morally permissible.
What happened there? Part of it was that we encountered the views of others. I think part of it was a lot of moral praise and condemnation. I think part of it was scientific research on how it's not correct that people of African descent are significantly anatomically… very difficult from, say, whites.
If you take the long view of not the last 5 years but the last 300 years, I think there's a lot to be optimistic about.
Previous post: Two Year Anniversary!
Next post: Excuses, Excuses, Excuses


text:
Cliffside Malibu is one of the most effective drug addiction clinics around because we fully realize that you are a unique person with unique issues. It is for this very reason that we will create an individualized treatment plan based on those unique issues and what will work best for you. You can find security in the thought that you will be treated with respect and have the attention you deserve at Cliffside Malibu. If you are facing drug addiction, please call Cliffside Malibu at (424) 320-3061 to receive the individual attention you deserve.
Drug Addiction Clinics
For many addicts, it will take a couple of drug addiction clinics before they reach lasting sobriety. If you have been through treatment, but relapsed when you made it back home, you should not give up hope. This only means that you have not found the clinic that is effective for you. You may have to research several different drug addiction clinics and maybe attend a couple of them before you find the one that is right for you. Drug addiction clinics are just as unique as you are in that each one has a different approach to helping you recover. You are unique because you have different issues that need addressing for you to reach sobriety.
What Drug Clinics Should Offer
Knowing which of the drug addiction clinics is right for can be a difficult task if you do not know what the clinics should offer. While it still may be a difficult choice, at least with some knowledge of what it takes to reach sobriety along with what you believe in personally, choosing one out of many drug addiction clinics will be made easier. One of the first things a treatment clinic should offer is a variety of treatment options. This is important because it takes many different treatments for you to heal. Moreover, because you are a unique person, none of the drug addiction clinics will know what will work for you until they get to know you and your addiction. A variety of treatment options means offering holistic and traditional programs as well as many different forms of group therapies and meetings.
Cliffside Malibu is one of the few luxury drug addiction clinics that offer a combination of Eastern and Western medicines in a luxury environment. What this combination of medicines does is provide you with a variety of options including holistic, adjunct, and traditional therapies. You can go from family therapy straight to massage therapy or from a journaling group to yoga.
Drug Addiction Clinics & Family
If you are still searching for a treatment center, you should know that the most effective drug addiction clinics will also focus on family. The reason for this is because the most effective drug addiction clinics understand that your addiction, no matter how lonely you feel, has affected everyone that you care about. In order to overcome your addiction, you have to face the realities of your addiction. This means that you have to face your family. You have to come to terms with how your drug addiction hurt your family and then begin to heal the relationships that were broken. Effective drug addiction clinics will help you and your family build a support system by changing the dynamics of your family. This is one of the ways to ensure that your sobriety lasts once you successfully complete your treatment.
As one of the most effective drug addiction clinics in California, Cliffside Malibu offers intensive family treatment. We understand that your family needs a chance to speak, learn about addiction, and heal. We also understand that it is crucial to your recovery to hear what your family has to say and know that they are there to support you.
Promoting Your Help
It is important for you to look at drug addiction clinics that will promote your overall health and well being. This means that any of the drug addiction clinics you consider should offer programs to help build your bodily strength, help you learn to deal with things mentally and emotionally, that will build up your self-esteem, and promote self-confidence. None of the drug addiction clinics will be effective if they only help you overcome your addiction because there are still the issues that led you to your addiction in the first place and the issues left after you are sober.
We did not become one of the most effective drug clinics by treating addiction. At Cliffside Malibu, we became one of the most effective drug addiction clinics, because we helped our guests in every way possible. We do this by offering things such as surfing, horseback riding, and hiking. At Cliffside Malibu, you will also find things such as yoga, meditation, massages, and a gourmet chef. We offer you a vast array of things to promote your health and overall well being because we understand that this will help you reach lasting sobriety.
Treatment Centers Should & You
What makes drug addiction clinics truly effective is their ability to see you and not just your addiction. This means that any treatment facility that you attend should first and foremost focus on healing you by giving you the tools and treatment options that will help you. Through doing this, the treatment clinic will be helping you overcome your addiction. The centers that focus only on your addiction are not truly helping you, because there is any number of issues that you are facing personally that need to be addressed. This is the only way to reach lasting sobriety.
This is what we do at Cliffside Malibu, we focus on you. We do this by offering you continuous support and a private, exclusive environment. This means that we have a limited number of enrolled guests so that you can receive the individual attention that you deserve. This also means that we never allow Cliffside Malibu to be advertised in any form of the media because we know how important your privacy is. At Cliffside Malibu, we focus on you.
For additional information on the exclusive drug addiction clinics at Cliffside Malibu, please visit our main Drug Addiction page.


text:
Telligen NE
1776 West Lakes Pkwy
West Des Moines, IA 50266
Fax Authorization Requests To
**E-mail sent over the Internet is not secure and should not be used to communicate PII (Personally Identifiable Information) such as birth date, place of birth, social security number, etc.; OR, PHI (Protected Health Information) directly to Telligen. Please be aware that Telligen cannot guarantee the confidentiality or security of any information you send to us over the Internet when using e-mail. Telligen shall not be liable for any breach of confidentiality resulting from such use of e-mail via the Internet. Telligen will not use e-mail to communicate confidential and/or health information unless the e-mail is secured in accordance with Telligen's E-Mail policy.