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Category: science
The Absurdity of Unexamined Positions
Recently I had an exchange with someone over climate change. It was short and frustrating. The basis of the exchange was a report—recycled from 2007 and given a new lease on life because of the recent book and film—on Al Gore's presumably exorbitant energy use in his home. Depending on which non-news site you chose, he either uses 34 times more than the average American or 21 times. The intent of the articles was to show Mr. Gore as a hypocrite, someone preaching the sermon but then balking at the walk.
It's true, he lives large. He has a ten thousand square foot home, which is more than five times the size of the average American home, and that doesn't include the grounds. But there was also no mention made of the carbon offsets he buys or the investments he makes in green energy or the money he spent upgrading a century old house to more modern energy efficiencies or the way he has specified the source of much of his energy so that a lot if not most comes from alternate sources. This was a standard-issue bit of simple-minded criticism that says if you do not live in a hovel when preaching about certain things, you're automatically a hypocrite. It is not, I should point, about forcing Al Gore to reduce his lifestyle but to force him to shut up. None of these people would care if he moved into a double-wide with solar panels and a hydrogen cell to live off the grid. Their purpose is to get him to stop talking.
As I said, the exchange was short. This was with a climate change denier fully invested in the belief that it is all a hoax. I was reminded of the mindset of occultists and alchemists, who at their base believed fervently that answers were unobtainable, that if you thought you had found the truth you were automatically wrong. No, few if any ever stated it so baldly, but it's obvious from the way they would avoid genuine experiment, deny all arguments that might contradict received wisdom, and generally evaded any conclusion that suggested they were in pursuit of the unattainable. Science had to rid itself of this obdurate self-imposed blindness before it could flourish and it seems clear that we are burdened with some variation of it still.
But I wondered, just what drives this kind of selective self-censorship?
Well, obviously a lack of understanding. The science is complex and people often have difficulty grasping causal concepts that seem to contradict personal experience. When your city is frozen in the grip of a record-breaking snow storm it's difficult to reconcile the assertion that global temperatures are rising. Difficult but not impossible, especially if the following summer comes with record-breaking heat, for perhaps the fourth or fifth consecutive year. (Climate has changed in St. Louis. When I was a kid, three feet of snow in December was not unusual, snow that lasted through February sometimes. Now? People are stunned when we have a foot that lasts a week, if that. Summers are hotter. Certain insect patterns have shifted. Things have changed and when I look for explanations the only model that conforms to experience is global climate change.) Lack of understanding can be corrected, though. People can learn. They may not want to but they can.
Sometimes, though, they go down a cul-d-sac and get stuck in a plausible dead-end. Staying there, though, depends on things having little to do with evidence or logic.
Consider: the rejection of climate change makes no sense. Addressing the problem of where we get our energy is a technical issue, a matter of engineering. There are several reasons, perfectly sound ones, to change the way we do this. Pollution is the simplest one. What kind of a world do you want to live in? One with soot, particulates, toxicity? The expense of defending against such things is high, depending where you live. Environmental degradation is another. Tearing up mountains to extract coal, leaving ugly holes, spilling the effluent into waterways, drilling—and fracking is worse. Look at satellite images of fracking-intense areas and the clouds of waste gas. And of course earthquakes where few if any had occurred before. And the damage to water tables.
Jobs is the cry. Displacing workers. Well, building a whole new industry would seem to be a jobs-positive thing. The technology and industries to not only build solar and wind would expand the jobs market, but also the construction of the networks, distribution, and upgrading and maintaining the grid (which needs it anyway, regardless of the energy source), all these things mean jobs.
The expense! The expense we currently shoulder in artificially maintaining obsolete systems should by now be common knowledge. The expense on taxpayers subsidizing industries that are collapsing not to mention the downstream expense of cleaning up after the pollution. The expense of people made sick. The asthma rates in coal country are rising. We pay an exorbitant amount to maintain the illusion that coal and oil are the only means to accomplish what we want to.
Someone like Al Gore comes along and starts pointing this out. You might quibble with some of his details, but in essence he has a sound argument. Instead of attacking the argument—which might lead to some edifying consequence, like all of us learning something useful—his character is attacked. This is not an uncommon tactic. Some people seem to feel a person has to be virtually a saint in order to hold and disseminate an opinion. But if what he says is supported by the science, what difference does it make how he lives? What is it about his lifestyle that invalidates the message?
He's asking other people to change but, presumably, he won't.
What exactly is he asking most people to change? If tomorrow your electricity came from wind turbines instead of a coal-fired plant, what has changed for you? Electricity is electricity. The costs? Costs aren't rising anyway? Your taxes aren't going to subsidize the industry? Or is this more akin to the fear of "death panels" presumably inevitable with universal health care? We go along with this and next year someone from the government will take away your car or truck? Transportation is already changing, it will continue to do so, and in ten years you may find you don't even want your car, but that's beside the point. Such a fear is a boogeyman used to keep us from addressing the problem. My question stands: what exactly is he asking you to change?
The question of costs is not irrelevant, but as I say, they're going up anyway. Maybe in the long run there might be some relief if part of the cost is not in cleaning up so much detritus. But that requires long term thinking outside your immediate sphere. You have to consider the community, the country, the planet. Most people find that difficult, if not to achieve then to sustain.
Lifestyle. Your lifestyle will change.
That is almost unanswerable because it's so nebulous. As I suggest above, change is coming anyway, but probably not what you expect. On the simple question of how you get your energy, what changes? Still, not an irrelevant point.
There will, perhaps, be less available energy. To do what? We've been undergoing a small (perhaps not so small) revolution in energy efficiency for lo these last few decades. Our houses are full of devices that operate on far less electricity than their ancestors required. That's not likely to stop. But we can look at Europe to see the numbers and discover that the very thing which will provide jobs will also suffice to power your lifestyle.
But I suspect the thing feared in terms of change has nothing to do with actual resource. What will change is some aspect of identity.
From what to what?
Basically, the changes in policy required to address climate change would be a net positive whether the science is flawed or not. Breathing cleaner air, securing the potability of our water, lightening our touch on the ecologies are all desirable and come with economic benefits regardless. If it turned out by some odd oversight that we got the climate change model wrong, so what? We would have built a new energy grid based on cleaner models and generally improved the well-being of the commonwealth. If we aren't wrong about climate change, we can add saving the world for humanity as a bonus.
But like someone who doesn't want to give up steak for dinner, we treat climate change like vegetarianism. It doesn't matter that the science may be correct about the health benefits, we still want our meat. It's a question of identity.
We burn oil and coal! It's American! All this wind and solar is somehow…somehow…feeble.
Perhaps the deniers can't imagine building with such tools. Perhaps they can't accept joining in a global cooperative effort not being invented or run by America.
Whatever the reason, short-term vested interests love you. Because they are able to count on you as foot soldiers in the fight to forestall the imposition of regulations on them. They do not want to be told what they can or cannot do and this is just another species of limitation on their personal vision of Who Counts.
But that's understandable. That's greed and avarice. What's the denier's excuse? Being somehow joined with the mighty by association with the self-styled giants of industry?
I accept the science involved. A cold snap here and there isn't enough to convince me all the rest is a phantom. But it doesn't matter. Accepting the need to change the way we use this planet means so many other things, including eventually taking the power to dictate from people who have no business having it in the first place. Climate Change Denial costs so much more and fails to address everything else that goes to the need to change.
When Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House in a fit of thoughtless national pomposity, he empowered a mindset that we're still having to put up with. A mindset that won't debate, won't consider, won't yield, and won't change. not because the thing it rails against is wrong but because it cannot stand not being right.
Just musing on the amazing quality of light. I've been reading several science books lately, one in particular (The Invention of Science by David Wootton) that goes into considerable depth about actual Seeing as essential to the transformation of culture from a pre-scientific to scientific basis. But all of them deal with light as a founding subject for the apprehension of the world. Einstein won his Nobel because of the work he did on photons, Newton began with a study of optics, and quantum mechanics wouldn't be giving both the joys and headaches of our present understanding of nature if not for the whole revelation about quanta and photons and wave functions…
It is essential to everything we are, whether we can see it or not. As Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff and you cannot think of stars separate from the light.
So a couple of images for you, showing the marvelous manifestations of light.
Caught out the window of the car on our way back from Pittsburgh.
Stepping out of my car in an underground garage, early morning, where an opportune window let this beauty in.
Have a good week.
We Prospered: Leonard Nimoy, 1931 to 2015
He was, ultimately, the heart and soul of the whole thing. The core and moral conscience of the congeries that was Star Trek. Mr. Spock was what the entire thing was about. That's why they could never leave him alone, set him aside, get beyond him. Even when he wasn't on screen and really could be nowhere near the given story, there was something of him. They kept trying to duplicate him—Data, Seven-of-Nine, Dax, others—but the best they could do was borrow from the character.
I Am Not Spock came out in 1975. It was an attempt to explain the differences between the character and the actor portraying him. It engendered another memoir later entitled I Am Spock which addressed some of the misconceptions created by the first. The point, really, was that the character Spock was a creation of many, but the fact is that character would not exist without the one ingredient more important than the rest—Leonard Nimoy.
I was 12 when Star Trek appeared on the air. It is very difficult now to convey to people who have subsequently only seen the show in syndication what it meant to someone like me. I was a proto-SF geek. I loved the stuff, read what I could, but not in any rigorous way, and my material was opportunistic at best. I was pretty much alone in my fascination. My parents worried over my "obsessions" with it and doubtless expected the worst. I really had no one with whom to share it. I got teased at school about it, no one else read it, even my comics of choice ran counter to the main. All there was on television were movie re-runs and sophomoric kids' shows. Yes, I watched Lost In Space, but probably like so many others I did so out of desperation, because there wasn't anything else on! Oh, we had The Twilight Zone and then The Outer Limits, but, in spite of the excellence of individual episodes, they just weren't quite sufficient. Too much of it was set in the mundane world, the world you could step out your front door and see for yourself. Rarely did it Go Boldly Where No One Had Gone Before in the way that Star Trek did.
Presentation can be everything. It had little to do with the internal logic of the show or the plots or the science, even. It had to do with the serious treatment given to the idea of it. The adult treatment. Attitude. Star Trek possessed and exuded attitude consistent with the wishes of the people who watched it and became devoted to it. We rarely saw "The Federation" it was just a label for something which that attitude convinced us was real, for the duration of the show. The expanding hegemony of human colonies, the expanse of alien cultures—the rather threadbare appearance of some of the artifacts of these things on their own would have been insufficient to carry the conviction that these things were really there. It was the approach, the aesthetic tone, the underlying investment of the actors in what they were portraying that did that. No, it didn't hurt that they boasted some of the best special effects on television at that time, but even those couldn't have done what the life-force of the people making it managed.
And Spock was the one consistent on-going absolutely essential aspect that weekly brought the reality of all that unseen background to the fore and made it real. There's a reason Leonard Nimoy started getting more fan mail than Shatner. Spock was the one element that carried the fictional truth of everything Star Trek was trying to do.
And Spock would have been nothing without the talent, the humanity, the skill, the insight, and the sympathy Leonard Nimoy brought to the character. It was, in the end, and more by accident than design, a perfect bit of casting and an excellent deployment of the possibilities of the symbol Spock came to represent.
Of all the characters from the original series, Spock has reappeared more than any other. There's a good reason for that.
Spock was the character that got to represent the ideals being touted by the show. Spock was finally able to be the moral center of the entire thing simply by being simultaneously on the outside—he was not human—and deeply in the middle of it all—science officer, Starfleet officer, with his own often troublesome human aspect. But before all that, he was alien and he was treated respectfully and given the opportunity to be Other and show that this was something vital to our own humanity.
Take one thing, the IDIC. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination. It came up only a couple of times in the series, yet what a concept. Spock embodied the implications even in his trademark comment "Fascinating." He was almost always at first fascinated. He wanted before anything else to understand. He never reacted out of blind terror. Sometimes he was on the other side of everyone else in defense of something no one seemed interested in understanding, only killing.
I'm going on about Spock because I know him. I didn't know Mr. Nimoy, despite how much he gave of himself. I knew his work, which was always exemplary, and I can assume certain things about him by his continued affiliation with a character which, had he no sympathy for, would have left him behind to be portrayed by others long since. Instead, he kept reprising the role, and it was remarkably consistent. Spock was, throughout, a positive conscience.
On the side of science. I can think of no other character who so thoroughly exemplified rational morality. Spock had no gods, only ideals. He lived by no commandments, only morality. His ongoing championing of logic as the highest goal is telling. Logic was the common agon between Spock and McCoy, and sometimes between Spock and Kirk. I suspect most people made the same mistake, that logic needs must be shorn of emotion. Logic, however, is about "sound reasoning and the rules which govern it." (Oxford Companion to Philosophy) This is one reason it is so tied to mathematics. But consider the character and then consider the philosophy. Spock is the one who seeks to understand first. Logic dictates this. Emotion is reactive and can muddy the ability to reason. Logic does not preclude emotion—obviously, since Spock has deep and committed friendships—it only sets it aside for reason to have a chance at comprehension before action. How often did Spock's insistence on understanding prove essential to solving some problem in the show?
I suspect Leonard Nimoy himself would have been the first to argue that Spock's devotion to logic was simply a very human ideal in the struggle to understand.
Leonard Nimoy informed the last 4 decades of the 20th Century through a science fictional representation that transcended the form. It is, I believe, a testament to his talent and intellect that the character grew, became a centerpiece for identifying the aesthetic aspects of what SF means for the culture, and by so doing became a signal element of the culture of the 21st Century.
Others can talk about his career. He worked consistently and brought the same credibility to many other roles. (I always found it interesting that one his next roles after Star Trek was on Mission: Impossible, taking the place of Martin Landau as the IM team's master of disguise. As if to suggest that no one would pin him down into a single thing.) I watched him in many different shows, tv movies, and have caught up on some of his work prior to Star Trek (he did a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode in which he played opposite William Shatner) and in my opinion he was a fine actor. He seems to have chosen his parts carefully, especially after he gained success and the control over his own career that came with it. But, as I say, others can talk about that. For me, it is Spock.
I feel a light has gone out of the world. Perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but…still, some people bring something into the world while they're here that has the power to change us and make us better. Leonard Nimoy had an opportunity to do that and he did not squander it. He made a difference. We have prospered by his gifts.
I will miss him.
Obsession Point
I have a friend who likes to engage me on our points of departure. He's a self-admitted conservative, I am not. He's a sincere Christian, I'm an atheist. Looking around at the current culture, you would think that should make any conversation we might have problematic at best, impossible at worst.
Yet we carry on the occasional hour, two-hour, sometimes three hour conversation and never once descend into anger or dismissive rhetoric. And yes, we talk about religion regularly. We talk about politics. We talk about meaningful living. It's the kind of exchange of ideas from different perspectives that seems both rare and uniquely pleasurable. Would that we taught kids growing up how to appreciate this kind of conversation as, at the very least, an æsthetic pleasure.
Consequently, when he questions me on priorities, I tend to listen.
A couple weeks ago, after the monthly jam session (he runs a church basement coffeehouse to which I've been going and participating for more than a few years now) we hung around and started talking about current subjects. My opening statement concerned the new movie Noah and the absurd fact that the studio has decided to put a disclaimer on it to appease religious reactionaries who are bothered by "historical inaccuracies." I expected a laugh over the ridiculousness of this—these are not people who have much patience for that kind of shallow literalism—but instead what followed was a discussion of my obsessive attention to people like Ken Ham and the anti-evolution crowd and biblical literalists in general.
"Why do you pay any attention to them?"
Well, I replied, somewhat glibly, stupidity is fascinating.
Patiently, though, my friend worked at that. Really? Aren't there better things to focus your attention on than the obdurate intractability of intellectual ostriches? Don't you have, like, books to write?
At the end of the conversation (which is not to say that it's over) I had to concede that I spent far too much time and mental energy worrying over the misreadings, misinterpretations, manglings, and malignancies of what is a minority example of entrenched ignorance. Like watching a neighbor gradually destroy his property (and being unable to do much about it), or watching a slow-motion train wreck, or even repeatedly viewing and complaining about a very expensive yet utterly brainless film, it is both attractive and repellant to observe this particular bit of cultural shadow-play.
The answer to the question has occupied me now since. Why do I give them so much of myself?
The glib answer is that they draw attention to themselves in such a way as to seem important and relevant. Paying attention to them feels, on a shallow level, like being engaged. Noticing them, knowing what they've been saying and seeing what they're doing, seems like being a responsible agent in my own culture. Every time they manage to censor discussions in schools about evolution or try to force prayer into the classroom or some other culture-war battleground is pushed into the news, being aware of it just seems the thing to do.
A somewhat less glib answer is that the very real political power such groups seem to enjoy worries me. I don't want to live in a country designed by biblical literalists. And determining how they're wrong and why is basic to any kind of pushback.
And of course, since this conversation took place, we have the incident of the FOX television affiliate in Oklahoma blocking fifteen seconds of the new Cosmos program, the 15 seconds dealing with evolution, and my blood boils. I react. I become insensed. And I immediately go to write a new blog post about how stupid this is and how malevolent this kind of nonsense is and how—
Which is, actually, a waste of my time. Really, there are better-qualified people doing exactly that. You can find links to some of them on the sidebar over to the right. You want to read a better-informed and more current tirade against this kind of thing, go to Freethought Pharyngula—P. Z. Myer is an evolutionary biologist and apparently has more time, energy, and inclination than I do to keep abreast of all this nonsense—or check the science blogs to which I maintain links.
I don't have to do this.
And yet…and yet…I keep doing it. Even here, in addressing a different kind of question, I'm thrashing about and striking back. Willful ignorance, asserted as if it is a positive attribute, with an insistence that it is Right and Truth and we should all bow to its inevitable godlines MAKES—ME—CRAZY.
Because, at base, I loathe my own ignorance. I loathe that part of me that desperately wants to be right, whether I am or not. Because I am aware of my ignorance and strive to correct it and because I see that as an important fight it disturbs me—more, it frightens me—when others not only don't see the worth in that fight but are dedicated to preventing the triumph of knowledge.
So, I suppose the simple answer to my friend's question is—fear. Those people scare me. They are the ideological descendents of Inquisitors, witchfinders, book-burners, imperialists of dogma, stone-throwers, and censors. Because I read Lest Darkness Fall and Fahrenheit 451 and my imagination is such that I can see what a victory for them would mean for people like me.
And because I honestly lack any kind of faith in those who are my intellectual and cultural kindred that we will win this fight.
But that still doesn't fully address the challenge he laid at me feet. Why do I pay so much attention to all this when I could better serve my own purpose and the purpose of the civilization I support in so many other ways?
Because, when combined with all of the above, this has become a rut. It is easy. And it feeds my sense of relevance. But really it's a paltry diet. There are richer meals to be had, that would be more beneficial, to me and to others. So it is an itch which has become easy and habitual for me to scratch. And in certain company, it's a sign that I am part of a certain group of like-minded.
It's a poor excuse. I could be doing better things with my time and frankly getting more out of my intellectual life. Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to change their minds, and those who nod along with me when I dive into one of my tirades don't need me to tell them about this.
I think it is worth paying attention to when tax money goes to something like Ken Ham's Creation Museum. That's an abuse of public trust and a violation of the law, frankly, and should be made public and stopped.
But I don't need to go on about Ken Ham's idiocy.
The spot that itches has grown raw and inflamed from repeated scratching and no salve is in sight. I need to leave it alone. I have a book on mathematics to hand, another about the history of science fiction, and still another about World War I. Yes, I have a couple of books dealing with the assault of reason, which is not only from a religious reactionary quarter—reason is under assault from many quarters—but I'm a fiction writer. My job is to tell stories about the world and because I write science fiction I can do a little prognosticating. I have to stop pissing away time on pointless subjects.
Besides, I really do think they'll fade. When I sit myself down and really examine it, the world view we define as that of Reason will maintain and eventually the nattering naysayers will diminish. It's just difficult to see that day to day and believe it when there are people worrying over the "historical" inaccuracies in a Hollywood film about a mythical event.
So I wish to thank my friend for opening a door and pointing out that I've been perhaps wandering the wrong hallway for a time.
This is why we must cultivate relationships with people we disagree with.
It Hurts
By now, I'm sure, many people know about the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. Bill Nye, he of the bow tie, the science guy, stepped up to the podium to have it out, toe-to-toe, with Ken Ham, erstwhile champion of creationism, founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky which has been the subject of continual mirthful derision by anyone with even a scintilla of understanding about science. They were to debate evolution versus creationism, which in my mind is like debating the similarities between Einstein and Sasquatch. Other than the assertion by certain folks that they are somehow (a) equivalent and (b)…well, really, there is no "b" in this formulation.
Apparently even a poll conducted on Christian Today shows that Bill Nye pretty much mopped the floor with Ken Ham, who answered not one single question put to him by Nye in any useful way. Only 9% of respondents apparently saw Ham as the winner. Of course that won't be the end of it. After the debate, a number of self-styled Christians presented questions for Nye which they, presumably, thought would stump him. Buzzfeed posted several. Go take a look, then come on back. (You can also see the entire debate there.)
What's that phrase? "The stupid…it hurts."
Was that unkind? Sorry. (Not really.) But while any single one of these can be dismissed as, oh, lack of attention, missed something in biology class (or astronomy), didn't see that special on NOVA, collectively this amounts to willful ignorance at best.
"If humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" Seriously? Do you really not know how dumb that is? You came from your parents—we all did—so why are there still parents? Sorry, that was flip, but it does, actually, point up the problem, albeit in a rather crude and simplistic way.
And noetics? That isn't part of any segment of this debate, so…?
There was a time I would get mightily energized by this kind of thing. I admit I had a deep-seated interest in being on the "right" side of this debate. I still do, but it hardly gets me out the door anymore because I realized somewhere along the way that what we've been witnessing in the efforts of people like Ken Ham, as strenuous and perhaps sincere as they are, is the death spasm of a world view that doesn't work. It never did, but there was a time that understanding that didn't make much difference, except to a few intellectual outliers here and there. The fever pitch of condemnation coming from them is the sound of panic as the world prepares to leave them behind.
No, I'm not talking about the death of religion. I do not believe that is possible. I'm only talking about a very public formulation of a view of religion that has as its primary purpose nothing more than the regimentation of the faithful and the casting out of the new. I'm talking about a narrative that seeks to impose and deny. Impose its substance and form and deny any countervailing view. I'm talking, really, about style.
Style is about identity. When we talk about it that way, as style, it seems insignificant in the larger scheme of things. Fashion. And much of it is ephemeral. But shift it to something else, as in artistic expression, and it takes on a bit more meaning. The style of a writer is that writer's voice, personality—identity. There is something so deeply personal about style in this sense and we all recognize it. We instantly recognize a musician with whom we are familiar by the style of playing. Unknown canvases by painters declare identity in the manner of brushstroke or photographs betray their creators by the particular angle, frame, contrast. Style at this level is inextricably linked to identity and when that style is declared no longer valid, a kind of death attends.
Because this is æsthetics, something utterly vital and intrinsic to our sense of self, yet so rarely discussed when any list of what makes us human gets trotted out for debate. How we see the world and how we react to what we see, this is æsthetics in action and it defines us. It defines us culturally, historically, and individually. You can see it in that list of questions, in many ways so pathetic, when the question is framed in terms of awe and wonder. A sunset, the amazingness of the world—even that fey reference to noetics—these are questions of reaction and interpretation to sensory experience, filtered through a value system that provides us with a quality of self grounded in our relation to the matrix of reality through which we move: æsthetics.
Ken Ham's museum displays exhibits showing humans coexisting with dinosaurs. At some level, this is a world he wishes to have as real. What kid doesn't love dinosaurs at some point? It's inexplicable. I'm continually amazed at what seems to be a persistent fascination across generations. Part of us really wants there to be dinosaurs. Not only that, but dinosaurs in our midst, at least at some point.
Dinosaurs aren't in the Bible. In fact, I know of no holy book in any culture that mentions them unless you want to see dragons as some neolithic abstraction of dinosaurs. (They're not, they emerge out of very different pools of myth, namely serpents, the Worm, but after the discovery and ultimate understanding of fossil dinosaurs dragons became more and more visually conforming to them.) Yet even the most ardent of creationists are fascinated. There is no mention of them in Genesis, they would never have fit on the ark, and there's no mention in that story of any animals left behind (the song about the unicorn notwithstanding). Had they been, we would have found much, much fresher bones, not buried nearly so deep.
At some point people like Ken Ham came to accept the reality of dinosaurs, not as deceptive deposits from Satan to worry our overly-curious intellects, but as species in their own right. Intentionally or not, they had to accept science in order to make the effort to write them into their stunted history of the universe, which has opened them to eventual extinction as examples of mainstream thought, much less champions of any kind of reality.
In a way, the debate just passed was totally unfair. Ken Ham kept pointing to his narrative as its own evidence, offering nothing beyond it to answer the evidence-laden arguments of his opponent. He wasn't even in the same debate, really. He was there to insist that all these things Bill Nye represents should be ignored in favor of a story. He insists that the story is sufficient and this other thing, this science thing, is nothing but an evil distraction from what he thinks is important. The sad part is he probably doesn't even know why that story is important.
It's important because all wonder-based growth begins as a story. We're fascinated, entranced, and there's magic in the narrative. So much magic that we want to know more. And so we go looking and if we look honestly we find so much else that transcends the modest confines of that first story. We find universes of wonder, which we might never have looked for without first having been delighted by a story. Ken Ham found a story that amazed him.
But then he stopped. He stopped looking, because, it seems, he never wanted to leave that first moment of childlike wonder, wanting it to be everything. It's sad because while we can revisit it and we can experience the same sensation again and again and again, with new discoveries, if we try to freeze that moment and keep it, unchanging, it either fades…or rots…all on its own. What some folks do then is build a museum in their hearts to preserve a memory that is no longer there, leaving us with the surrounding edifice and an echo. Without new sounds, new sights, new growth, the museum calcifies and eventually becomes a fossil, never buried, bleached and empty.
At some point, Ken Ham built that museum out in the open for everyone to visit.
Apparently, fewer and fewer go. It possesses novelty, but no genuine wonder. And without wonder, what is there?
National Day of Idiocy
We should have a National Day of Idiocy to celebrate our rich heritage of public figures who make asinine statements.
I find it both fascinating and revolting how a certain faction reaches for the Holocaust at every opportunity in order to retain their illusion that just about everything that makes them even mildly uncomfortable is part and parcel of the horrible paradigm that led to a slaughter which some of their supporters think never even happened.
The mayor of Charlotte, N.C. declared May 2nd a Day of Reason. It also happens to be the national Day of Prayer. While some may see this as pure hype and opportunism, there's common factor between the two things—both have to do with finding guidance. I doubt the majority of people see much conflict between prayer and reason—in fact, most would likely conjoin them, if not as philosophical counterparts at least as practical allies—but there are always those who will insist on seeing Evil in everything that is not christian.
So, the Enlightenment led to the Holocaust (because of moral relativism). My my. I suppose that's why Hitler kept burning books, because he was such an Enlightenment fan boy.
This also overlooks things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Spanish expulsion of Jews, the Thirty Years War, the murder of Giordano Bruno, the Albigensian Crusade…
Of course, all those things were, I suppose, in response to moral relativism?
No, this is typical ahistorical nonsense from people who can't seem to pull their heads out of the heavenly clouds. It would be laughable if not for its scope. Lamar Smith of Texas is proposing a bill to eliminate peer review in government-funded science programs. It's a bit more complex than that, but in essence Smith wants technology programs, not basic research, and clearly does not understand how science is conducted or even why it's important. And he's on the Science. Space, and Technology Committee. No, wait, he's the chair of the committee.
Laugh, cry, or go on vacation. The only question is how these people got where they are and have the ability to disrupt so much by sheer assertive nonsense.
What might follow now, as in past posts, would be a lengthy discourse on the nature of reason and why these people are wrong, but I'm tired and really, if you already find what they're saying and doing crack-brained then you don't need the lesson. I applaud the mayor of Charlotte for having the chutzpah to declare a Day or Reason in a state that thinks prayer will prevent Obama from being re-elected. (I'll give you all a minute to digest that.) I'd like to see a few more politicians stand up to the idiocy.
Maybe we should establish a national Day of Lunacy on which we all find someone steeped in misinformation—you know, people who think FOX news is actually news?—and attempt an intervention. Get them to a lecture on the scientific method. Make them watch an episode of NOVA. Take them to lunch with Neil de Grasse Tyson.
What I would very much like to see is a genuine response among enough people matter to defend reason and science and instead of it just being a cool trendy thing that gives us new toys every few years actually elevates the level of national discourse.
Yeah, I still dream occasionally.
Meaning, Cults, Freedom
Recently, I finished reading Lawrence Wright's new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollwood, & the Prison of Belief, about Scientology. It's a lucid history and examination of the movement. I wrote a review of the book over at the Proximal Eye, here. In that review, I touched on a few of the concerns I harbor in regards to religious movements, Scientology in particular, but all of them in general.
The central question in Wright's book—and indeed in others, for instance Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner Of Heaven about Mormonism—is the question of volitional surrender. Why do people hand over the keys to their being to institutions and ideologies that are often based on dubious claims, led by people with clearly autocratic tendencies, to live lives of functional servitude, if not physically certainly intellectually?
There are separate questions here, concerning different stages. For those born into a group, being raised within its codes and customs, the Outside is by definition alien and the individual is required to do exactly the reverse of the adult who comes into that group from the Outside. The same question can apply to the apostate who has grown up knowing nothing else—why would you throw over all that you know to embrace this Other Thing? (The Amish offer an excellent example of the problem, with their practice of rumspringa, a kind of wanderjahr for the youth to go see the outside world and decide for themselves whether to stay or leave the community. It would seem to be a fair practice, offering freedom of choice, but how fair can it be? One can read a book about another culture, "know" it intellectually, but that's a far cry from being able to operate within it, or understand it on any visceral level. Instead, it's a kind of wilderness test, which more than likely causes sufficient anxiety that a return to what one has known one's entire life is virtually guaranteed except for the most adventurous—which may serve the community by culling out those so independent-minded who may cause problems later by nonconformity.)
It would be easy to dismiss certain problems with cultism by seeing past eras as offering essentially little to counter the claims of a charismatic proselyte offering a path to transcendence, but the fact is most of these movements seem immune to any kind of counterargument for those who seem determined to join something that offers them such a path. For the first generation of Mormons, it didn't matter that Joseph Smith was obviously coming up with his revelations out of his own head. When his wife called his bluff on polygamy, all she managed to do was sheer off a splinter group and increase the resolve of the core followers. What was happening was a sophisticated con, but it didn't matter, not to those surrounding Smith and later Brigham Young. It was at that point no longer Smith's revelation but theirs. He couldn't have stopped if he had wished to. The intricate and alchemical brew of group coherence had happened and it had become Another Thing, an Experience that was true as an experience, regardless of the facts or the motives behind its inception. The followers had created it and made it its own entity.
Which would suggest that the thing being believed in is less important than the clear need on the part of the acolyte to believe.
Subsequently, this creates a hermetic seal around the object of belief, because belief is not real unless it is absolute. Criticism of the tenets of faith are not so much attacks on details as on the act of believing. The whole being of the believer becomes so intertwined with the thing believed as to be one and the same, inseparable. Personal. And yet, curiously dispassionate. It's not so much a choice as an inevitability, a recognition, an "of course" moment, a "how could I have been so blind?" revelation…
…which automatically renders any question of "how can I be so blind?" inadmissible, unhearable, unsupportable.
It has nothing to do with intelligence. It's all about meaning.
The central question of all philosophy is simple: Why am I here? Even philosophies that seem to render this as an unanswerable—and therefore purely academic question—start from there. It's a good question. What is my purpose in this life? Religion supplants the inward-directedness of this by offering more cosmic possibilities, often of an unknowable nature, which require belief. Faith. No matter what, there is a purpose, a point, and even if I can't see it, it is at least there. Meanwhile, here are some guideposts, some rules, some practices that will keep me on a path more or less in sympathy with this higher purpose. By serving this belief in a telec universe, our own sense of purpose can be, if not answered, at least validated, even if the cause is abstruse or abstract.
Trusting that purpose will be fulfilled simply through faith is not sufficient for the organizations commanding the obeisance of their membership. If there is a purpose, then actions must be taken to fulfill it, and in lieu of any other clear program, conversion becomes their raison d'être. They must be seen to be purposeful. What higher purpose, then, than to change the world. The clearest way to do that is to convert the world to their cause. (This is functionally impossible, because there has always been and will always be competing doctrines, but it does raise an interesting question of what would they do if they achieved this end? After the point at which everyone believed in the same thing, what next?) And so the continual proselytization such institutions sponsor. (This has the added benefit of redirecting any kind of skepticism from the proselytes potential to ask questions of their own faith into a concern for the potential converts lack of faith.)
There are many definitions of cults, some of which contradict, but at base it is a tricky thing because a "cult" bears sufficient semblance to well-established religions that the only apparent difference is size. If a charismatic preacher with a hundred followers claims to speak directly to god, he's a nut. But if the pope makes the same claim, it is accepted as a matter of faith and accorded a kind of respect the preacher cannot command. Size. A hundred people can be deluded, but a billion? At that level, we tacitly acknowledge that Something Else Is Going On.
My own test has to do with permeability. Is there egress equal to ingress? How easily can people leave? What restrictions are placed on individual interaction with the so-called Outside World, if any? It's one thing to claim that people are free to leave at any time, but if the organizational structure requires a cutting off of contact, a limitation of information from outside the group, whether physically imposed or simply a matter of conformity to the group, part of its identity, then it becomes a question meriting a closer look. Cult? Or religion? Or, more accurately, cult or church? The Amish offer an apparent open door, but it's not really. Young Amish go out on their rumspringa utterly unprepared because all their lives up to that point have been lived in a bubble that limits information, limits experience, limits contact, and then makes it an either-or test. (That the limits are self-imposed does not matter since they are self-imposed in order to avoid group censure.) They are unequipped to make the kinds of judgments and choices so many of us take as a simple right to associate with whom and in what way we choose. (The big difference regarding the Amish is they do not proselytize. They don't go out actively recruiting. This, to my mind, removes them from cult status and makes them simply what might be called a Pocket Culture.)
A cult guards itself from the Outside by demanding its members shut out anything not wholly contained within the cult. It actively discourages interface with the world at large. Sometimes it will go so far as physically impede such contact.
But the members will accept this. The question brought up by Wright's book is, why?
If one genuinely believes that their salvation is at stake, that they risk losing an eternal soul should they question—if, in other words, fear is the motive for strict adherence to a set of doctrines and behavioral restrictions—then it is possible one is being abused. We have ample evidence and example of abused children remaining intransigently loyal to their abusers. The possibility of inhabiting another condition, whether "better" or not, is unthinkable, because they risk their identity.
Within the precincts of certain ideologies, part of the experience is literally seeing the world in a different way. The "truth" of the doctrine is exampled in this seeing. Things "make sense" in ways they never did before. (It doesn't matter here that this new way of seeing can happen with any conceptual breakthrough and that if we're lucky it happens all the time, throughout life, as a natural part of learning.) That apparent "clarity" can become so important that anything which endangers it must be avoided, actively shut out. Questions about the central doctrines simply cannot be entertained when the stakes are so high.
In this way, the apparent glassy-eyed acceptance of conceptual weirdness within certain cults makes sense as the only possible path for someone who has achieved a fragile balance because of a framework of belief and is afraid of losing it by questioning the very beam on which they now stand. The tragedy is that this balance should be theirs no matter which beam they stand on, but the institution has convinced them that it is not theirs should they question or leave. People feel they have found a home, but a home is a place from which you can come and go as you please, bringing back what you find, enlarging it and decorating it with new things. The door is never shut in either direction. Wright's subtitle posits "the prison of belief" and that pertains when the door is shut and you either don't leave or if you do you can never come back, which turns the world to which you've escaped into just another prison.
Ironically, the one in the deepest cell may be the figure at the center of the movement. The founder. Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, all the others. None of them could stop being who their followers thought they were. Ultimately, it killed them all. They had even less freedom to leave. Their task was to design the prison and always be in it. One wonders if they in any way fulfilled their own definition of purpose.
As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote.
I didn't watch last night. Couldn't. We went to bed early.
But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish.
To my small surprise and relief, Obama won.
I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers. I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election). I will not miss wincing everytime some politician opens his or her mouth and nonsense spills out. (This is, of course, normal, but during presidential years it gets much, much worse.) I will not miss…
Anyway, the election came out partially the way I expected, in those moments when I felt calm enough to think rationally. Rationality seemed in short supply this year and mine was sorely tasked. So now, I sit here sorting through my reactions, trying to come up with something cogent to say.
I am disappointed the House is still Republican, but it seems a number of the Tea Party robots from 2010 lost their seats, so maybe the temperature in chambers will drop a degree or two and some business may get done.
Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, pulled 350,000 votes as of nine last night. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got around 100,000. (Randall Terry received 8700 votes, a fact that both reassures me and gives me shivers—there are people who will actually vote for him?)
Combined, the independent candidates made virtually no difference nationally. Which is a shame, really. I've read both Stein's and Johnson's platforms and both of them are willing to address the problems in the system. Johnson is the least realistic of the two and I like a lot of the Green Party platform.
But the Greens are going about it bass-ackward. Vying for the presidency when you can't even get elected dog catcher in most states is hardly the way to go about it. What would she do if by some weirdness she got elected? I think it fair to say a Green presidency this morning would guarantee both major parties working together for the foreseeable future against her. No, what they need to do is start winning local elections. Start with city councils and school boards, work up to state legislatures, then a governor or three, and finally Congress. Yes, that will take time, maybe far more time than anyone has the patience for, but for goodness sake, start.
Which leaves me feeling mixed about the next four years.
Here is what I would like to see happen. Obviously, Joe Biden is not going to run for office in 2016. Even if he did, I doubt he'd win, but I think he's V.P. the same way Dick Cheney was. An ace in the hole if something happens to the Pres, but not a threat in the next election. Therefore, the House Republicans have no excuse but to work with the Democrats to get something done. However you spin it, the last four years have been, in my view, a criminal abdication of responsibility on the part of the GOP, all to "make sure Obama is a one-term president." They have squandered the People's confidence and time and treasure in a party feud that frankly has no real basis other than on the fringes.
That said, the next four years should give them permission to get something done for the country. They don't have to work to defeat Obama in 2016, he's not running then. Anything that gets done, they can take credit for. Whoever runs for the Democratic nomination in 2016, it will be a repeat of 2008—two brand-spanking new candidates. (Romney has said he won't run again. We'll see.) So there is no reason other than the meanest kind of pettiness to keep blocking.
It is time we got over this artificial divide about capitalism vs. socialism. We are supposed to be grown-ups here, labels shouldn't scare us. The best antidote for that kind of fear is to actually learn something about what scares you, and as far as I can see most of the people who are so terrified that Obama is some kind of socialist (or communist!) are exercising the same kind of intelligence on the subject as those who believe he's a Muslim or is not a citizen. (They are exemplified by the sign carrier demanding "Keep your government out of my MediCare!") For pity's sake, people, read a book!
I've said this before, probably to little effect, but I will say it again, Capitalism is a system, not some kind of organic natural law thing. As such, we determine its shape and how it should be used, not the other way around, and it is the same with any other system (like Socialism). After the Great Depression this country put in place a number of socialist ideas and whether certain folks wish it to be true or not, they have worked well for us as a nation.
Here are a few things that people should consider. One, any economic system is, at its simplest, simply a method for organizing latent wealth. By latent wealth I mean the potential product in a given community. (You can live on a mountain of diamonds but if some kind of organizing principle is not applied to take advantage of those diamonds, they just sit there. The system you use organizes the work needed to exploit the resource. But let's be clear—the person or corporation that brings that system into that community does not by dint of that fact own the labor, the land, or the total product. The community living there has to give permission, cooperate, and assist in implementing the organizing system, and therefore when Elizabeth Warren made her famous statement that "you didn't build that all by yourself" that is what she meant, and anyone who claims not to understand that I think is being deliberately obtuse.) Therefore, we should be willing to apply the methodology best suited to solve specific problems. We are a polyglot nation, we already use a variety of methodologies depending on region and circumstance, we need to stop being knee-jerk reactionary about this subject.
Consequently, we need to understand a couple of things in slightly different ways. Currently, we have a problem with large businesses extracting latent wealth from communities and shifting it away from those communities, in fact away from our national borders altogether. One of the chief tools to counter that is taxes. Tax dollars drain off a portion of that wealth and return it to the community. Taxes fix the location of a certain proportion of generated wealth. Bitch about government spending all you want, the fact remains that money gets spent, in the main, here and therefore helps sustain the community.
To a lesser extent, this fight over minimum wage and Right To Work is misguided. Requiring businesses to pay a fair wage to their employees also serves to keep that wealth local. You don't build a business in Idaho and then, because shareholders are complaining that their dividends are too low, shift those jobs out of the country to increase bottomline. It should be illegal for businesses to take advantage of location for fiscal purposes while utilizing outsourcing in order to extract money that then does not return to that community. Right To Work is merely a tactic to suppress local ability to retain local wealth. We need to start looking at these two things this way or we will see ourselves the richest Third World nation on the planet.
I want to see the military-industrial complex curtailed if not shut down. Eisenhower warned us of this, but his warning was not based on something that hadn't happened. The Spanish-American War is our most famous example of a war begun by private industry for the sole purpose of increasing profits. We are locked in a cycle of perpetual preparedness and in order to justify the expenditures, we engage in constant military conflict. We have provided the United Nations with the backbone of its policing power for decades, and while this made sense in the aftermath of WWII when most of the world was devastated, it no longer does—the world has recovered, they can afford to pony up soldiers and materiél. I support the idea of the United Nations, but the United States has been shouldering a disproportionate share for decades. I suspect the main reason we have not stopped has entirely to do with the money-making of the defense contractor sector.
Along with that, we must pull back from the blatantly unConstitutional internal security and intelligence practices that have become worse since 9/11. I was sorely upset when Obama reauthorized the defense authorization act.
But worse than the standing military, that act, along with others, has allowed us to do an end-run around Posse Commitatus by militarizing local police forces. Our police have become more and more akin to the Stazi in make-up and outlook and this has to stop before we are so inured to it that we can't recognize loss of civil rights until the cop is knocking on our door for a warrantless search of our home.
A large step to undoing this would be to do something about this absurd war on drugs. I am not a fan of drugs—hell, I never even smoked a joint—but our response has been distorting of our courts and our police and our national priorities. The only thing that keeps us from doing something rational is the huge amounts of money involved at all levels. This has to stop. We can't afford to keep doing this, not so much from a fiscal point of view but from the effect it has on all of us, a coarsening of our national psyché, a desensitization to individual circumstance.
Lastly, I would like to see an effort made to address the pathetic state of our educational priorities. We are becoming a severely divided nation, not so much along class lines (although that is true, too, and I suspect the two are linked), but along the lines of the Knows and the Know Nothings.
Todd Akin sat on the House subcommittee for science. Need I say more? (Yes, I probably do.) All right. Akin is a supporter of creationism. I don't have any problem with someone espousing that view—what I have a problem with is someone with that view serving on what should be a science committee, and with people being okay with that. If that were not enough, his statements about women's biology demonstrated that he knows little—or doesn't care—about actual science (never mind what his views on women's rights are), and this is a very serious problem, not so much that an elected official should be ignorant along these lines, but that he is representative of people who are even more ignorant. That goes to education.
No Child Left Behind was one in a string of legislative actions that turned schooling into a horse race. Getting the scores up are all that matter, so our "ranking" doesn't fall. This has nothing to do with what it actually taught or what kids really know when they get out of school. We need a serious reform lest we keep producing people who, through no real fault of their own, believe the Earth is only six thousand years old and understand next to nothing about biology, never mind evolution.
And I'm sorry—just because you have decided in advance that you don't believe something doesn't make it either not true or give you the right to keep others from learning about it. Nor does it let you off the hook from knowing enough about it to make an informed decision about rejecting it.
I am not by disposition an isolationist, but I do believe this country has been engaging the rest of the world in the wrong way. We have been—always—very proactive when it comes to defending our business interests overseas, and the overwhelming amount of our foreign policy is less individual-oriented as it is corporation-oriented. Granted, this simplifies things—but it also distorts things and leads us to make bad choices in places where we don't know the culture. We're paying a heavy price for that from the Fifties. Our priorities need to change from corporatocracy to our oft-stated and seldom-deployed belief in the individual.
There are other things on my mind, but that's enough for now.
That's what I would like to see happen.
What do I expect?
We have been engaged, at street level, in a battle over what it means to be an American, and the ingredients have gotten bizarre. We have forgotten somewhere along the way that our right to have that battle is our chief defining national characteristic, that winning it is both impossible and beside the point. Being able to disagree and still have barbecue together has always been the American miracle, and we've been losing that.
But I expect it to continue. Both parties, plus the corporate backing of both parties, have been feeding that conflict because, well, it's been good for business. In the crossfire we have forgotten what is genuinely important and started handing over our liberties like good soldiers in an endless war. So in truth, I expect any real progress to happen on the margins, at times and in places where national attention is elsewhere, under conditions of exhaustion, when no one is paying much notice. The bread and circuses will continue—well, the circuses, anyway, I'm not so sure about the bread.
The world chimed in recently in polls that asked who other countries wished to see win the election. In the run up, surveys in over 20 countries indicated a vast preference for Obama—the only two that favored Romney were Israel and Pakistan. Hm.
But for now, what I'm looking forward to is a few weeks with considerably less politicking. I'm a bit frazzled from concern. I have some fiction to write and Christmas to prepare for.
The thing I'm most pleased about? Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren. I'll leave you to figure out why.
Have a good day.
My World of Tomorrow
This weekend I'll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon. I've only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we'd been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years. Until that year I hadn't even known such things happened.
Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life's ambitions. Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it. It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future. The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.
I've written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful. My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present. I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place. I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.
And I liked that world!
It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition's sake. It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed. It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.
True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated. But they were always shown as examples of where not to go. You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us "Be careful, or it will turn out this way." We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as "if this goes on" parables.
You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways. You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build. You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.
You could see the future.
And what did that future offer? By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because. I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender. I understood that building is always more important than tearing down. I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.
Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics. You can get to them by many paths. I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.
I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.
So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future. A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.
There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die. She's 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them. She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.
In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn't have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn't so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.
This is not the world I imagined. Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education? How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea? This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible. This is evil. This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.
So I write. I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue. It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope. I can't help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.
I still have hope. It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world. If that's naïve, well, so be it. Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.
See you at Archon?


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Yesterday the Gardai told me the remains in Tuam were famine era and they were not conducting an investigation.
So this morning I sent them this helpful map of the site.
It shows that, yes indeed, 48 famine era bodies were discovered in 2012 on the site of the old workhouse. But that archaeological dig was about 50 or more metres away from the septic tank where the 796 children's bodies are believed to be buried.
If it sounds confusing I promise it's not if you're there. The rawest recruit on his or her first day out of Templemore would grasp it straight away if they visited the site.
I also asked the Gardai should the modern era grave not be examined to conclude all deaths were of natural causes before making public declarations that "no impropriety" occurred here? I threw in a few other obvious questions which I won't bore you with because I have no answers to them. There has been complete silence from Garda HQ today.
This episode is going to be an interesting test of Acting Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan's mettle. There are no legacy issues involving her predecessor, this cock up has happened on her watch and it is entirely up to her to resolve it. Which she must do for fear the Gardaí earn the reputation of being the kind of police force that cherry pick what they do and don't want to investigate.
The silence from Gardai was matched by lack of specifics from government about its inter-departmental scoping excercise. Normally chatty handlers and pols weren't returning my calls and when Minister for Children Charlie Flannagan took the Topical Issues debate in the Dail this afternoon it was easy to see why. He had nothing concrete to add to the sum of human knowledge whatsoever. There'll be scoping … which will inform a review for government … which will help cabinet decide on the next step … which will come in a month.
My attempts too to track down who might now have the Bon Secours documents from The Home were passed from agency to agency inconclusively. Which was much more successful than my fruitless ringing around members of the religious order.
I will use today in the future when talking to journalism students as a pretty good illustration of Stonewalling.
But things are moving within the Catholic Church beyond the prying eyes of the Fourth estate. A newly retained PR called me to say he had just been hired by the Bon Secours nuns but had nothing to say and didn't envisage having anything to say on behalf of his clients any time soon. Roughly an hour later Archbishop Diarmuid Martin called on the nuns to do the right thing. Within a half an hour of that the public relations man had become gainfully employed and this statement popped into my inbox.
The nuns are being a bit Jesuitical I couldn't help but notice. There's no denial of knowledge of the burials. Why not? Can we infer some knowledge of the practice from this? If there is some awareness of what was going on that then makes the absence of any promise to cooperate with the government inquiry even more notable.
The promise to engage with the local committee is potentially problematic too. All that the majority of them I have met and spoken to want to achieve is erecting a plaque with all the names of the 796 children on it and then leave the site undisturbed. They are uncomfortable with the thought of their community becoming the locus of a major exhumation and forensic investigation and can you blame them. If the Bon Secours order wanted a veil quietly drawn over the past the very people who brought this to public attention may be their best allies.
Meanwhile the world wants to know what we are doing about the Tuam babies. I have tried to answer the same question in the last 24 hours on Australian, French, British and Dutch radio and to journalists calling from Brazillian, Indian, American and Swedish newspapers. I know nobody listening can have been impressed.

subset: commoncrawl


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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Airdrie, Marina and Lauren visited at suppertime. They had been to Playland, and had a lot of stories to tell. It's funny how sunny weather cheers everybody up.
5 comments:
Great news !
Home made chicken broth must be better than the one from the hospital...
JH is doing great too. He is off ALL the tubes now, and he can dress properly, take a shower (that's great) and feels himself.
They removed half of the stitches - the other half will be tomorrow. And friday - home ! At last !
We are moving straight away to the country, for a nice and well-earned rest - at my parent's place. I am so happy to pack !
The children are coming back tomorrow (Sibylle) and friday (Olivier and Hélène). So everything happens at once, and the family is going to be reunited. We are going to through a very quiet family party for the girl's birthday this week-end - they turned 11 and 14 during summer camp. Birthday cake, presents, grandparents, cousins, family... that's all I long for. Simple things indeed, but so worthy !
- July 25, 2007 at 4:18 AM
I am so happy for both Derek and JH. The very little experience I had with not being sble to shower after surgery lets me relate a bit.
Good luck and hopefully we'll see more progress as time goes on.
- July 25, 2007 at 5:43 AM
Wonderful news.Thanks,Karl.
I can see that chicken broth graduating into 'meat,potato and two veg.' before long.
Our best to Derek and to J.H. too.
- July 25, 2007 at 7:12 AM
- Christa Giles said...
Hooray for icecream and home baking :) Nose tubes don't sound like much fun, happy that he's past that point now!
- July 25, 2007 at 12:36 PM
Great news! Thank you for the ongoing updates.
- July 25, 2007 at 1:29 PM


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The full moon signifies the beginning of another cycle. In April, it feels like the beginning of spring, new life, and light. I like to do moon readings because it reminds me of the way time passes and allows me to reflect on each month. This one feels especially significant because it's right before my birthday and I'm being forced into a lot of growing recently. I want to share it with you because I think it showed me some general lessons that help when we're experiencing new beginnings. Maybe they aren't applicable to you right now, but they resonated with me.
Let go of control and stability.
Find stillness inside yourself.
Recognize that the world hurts you, hold yourself gently.
You have so much to offer, trust yourself.
Accept change and death. Say goodbye in your own way and fill the empty space with something beautiful.
Joy will come.


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Many cases of deadly clear-cell ovarian cancers and endometrioid carcinomas appear to arise from disruption of a previously-discovered tumor-suppressor gene, according to new RNA sequencing studies of cancer cells.
Mutations in the tumor suppressor gene ARID1A occurred in almost half of the clear-cell ovarian cancers and a third of the endometrioid carcinomas analyzed by David G. Huntsman, MD, of the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, and colleagues. In contrast, no ARID1A mutations were identified in a group of high-grade serous ovarian carcinomas.
"The mechanism by which somatic mutations in ARID1A enable the progression of benign endometriosis to carcinoma is unclear," Huntsman and co-authors concluded in an article published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"However, our findings are consistent with a critical role for ARID1A mutations in the genesis of a substantial fraction of ovarian clear-cell and endometrioid carcinomas," the researchers added.
Similar findings were published simultaneously in Sciencexpress, an online edition of Science.
Ovarian clear-cell carcinoma accounts for 12% of all ovarian cancers diagnosed in the U.S. and an even higher proportion of those in Japan, according to background information provided by the authors. Clear-cell carcinoma accounts for the second largest number of deaths from ovarian cancer -- trailing only high-grade serous carcinomas, which account for 70% of all ovarian cancers.
Both ovarian clear-cell and endometrioid carcinomas are associated with endometriosis, the authors noted. However, the genetic events associated with malignant transformation had not been determined.
Aberrations in ARID1A had been identified in breast- and lung-cancer cell lines. Huntsman's team had previously identified variants in a small number of clear-cell ovarian carcinomas and cell lines by means of whole-transcriptome RNA sequencing (N Engl J Med. 2009; 360: 2719-2729, Bioinformatics. 2010; 26: 730-736).
Continuing their investigation of ARID1A in ovarian cancer, Huntsman and colleagues sequenced whole transcriptomes of 210 ovarian carcinomas and an ovarian clear-cell carcinoma cell line. Additionally, the team measured expression of ARID1A-encoded BAF25a -- a key protein in chromatin remodeling -- in 455 ovarian carcinomas.
The results of their analysis showed ARID1A mutations in 55 of 119 (46%) ovarian clear-cell carcinomas and 10 of 33 (30%) endometrioid carcinomas -- but none of 76 high-grade serous ovarian carcinomas.
Loss of BAF25a had a significant association with ARID1A mutations (P<0.001) in ovarian clear-cell and endometrioid carcinomas but not high-grade serous carcinoma.
"The mutations are common in ovarian carcinomas that are associated with endometriosis ... but not in the unrelated high-grade serous carcinoma," Huntsman and co-authors wrote. "This suggests that the mutations may be pathogenic, rather than random, events."
"It is possible that defects in genes that alter the accessibility of transcription factors to chromatin, such as ARID1A ... will help to define ovarian clear-cell carcinomas and endometrioid carcinomas," they added.
Huntsman and co-authors reported that they had no relevant disclosures.
Reviewed by
Zalman S. Agus, MD Emeritus Professor
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, BC-ADM, CDE, Nurse Planner
Primary Source
New England Journal of MedicineSource Reference: Wiegand KC, et al "ARID1A mutations in endometriosis-associated ovarian carcinomas" N Engl J Med 2010; DOI:1056/NEJMoa1008433.
Secondary Source
SciencexpressSource Reference: Jones S, et al "Frequent mutations of chromatin remodeling gene ARID1A in ovarian clear cell carcinoma" Sciencexpress 2010; DOI:10.1126/science.1196333.


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University of Legoredo
The University of Legoredo
UL Home of the Freedom Fighters
The University of Legoredo sits on the outskirts of LegoCity. It is on the far side of Fort Legoredo and off of
Exit 5 of Interstate 491.
The University of Legoredo provides the LegoCity metro area a center of education. UL
offers many programs such as Biology, Chemistry, Criminal Justice, Culinary Arts, English, Forensic Science, French, Geography,
History, Mathematics, and Spanish.
The campus is closed for the Summer beginning June 1st until August 7th. Classes resume
Monday, August 8th, 2005. The campus is closed for the 2005 summer session because of renovations to the Lecture Center,
the addition of 3 more "Smart Classrooms", the laying of the foundation of a new Lecture Center, and the regular yealy maintanence
of the rest of the classrooms. Faculty offices are also being renovated and moved into new places to coincide with the
new divisions.
Some new things being added to the 2005-06 academic year:
* A new Political Science Program with a joint ULSA Assembly internship
and classroom lectures.
* A newly re-modeled soccer field.
Please Check Out the Charity game UL Freedom Fighters vs. LegoCity Monarchs
Friday, August 5th. All benefits will go towards the LegoCity Medical Center!
College Catolog:
History Department:
Hist 100- Western Civilization I
Hist 101- Western Civilization II
Hist 105- Legoian History I
Hist 106- Legoian History II
Hist 117- Western Hemisphere Studies I
Hist 120- History of the 20th Century
Hist 123- History of the 19th Century
Hist 126- History of the 18th Century
Hist 129- History of 1400-1699
Hist 135- Medieval History
Hist 155- African Studies I
Hist 156- African Studies II
Hist 172- Asian History I
Hist 173 Asian History II
Hist 200- American History
Hist 202- British History
Hist 204- Russian History
Hist 206- Chinese History
Hist 209- Latin American Studies
Coming Soon!
Coming Soon!
Enter supporting content here


text: What would be your recommendation(s) for a sub-£200 DVD player which, as closely as possible, meets the following requirements:- 1. Best possible picture quality. 2. Good stereo sound (I am not interested in surround). 3. 'Real' FF/REW picture search i.e. smooth, continuos search (as with VCR's) of, as a minimum, circa. 7x and 14 x normal playback speed. 4. DVD-R compatibility (BTW, what is VR mode in a DVD-RW context?) 5. Well laid out remote handset with easily operable/ sufficiently large buttons for the main transport controls i.e. play, stop, pictures search etc. 6. Svideo (preferably, but not essentially, through Scart) and RGB output. 7. 'Pure' NTSC compatibility (I believe this is better than PAL60? - I could be talking ********, but I vaguely remember reading something about this - further/correct info. would be appreciated) 8. Smooth/quiet, quick acting/responsive transport. 9. Available in black. 10. Bit rate indicator. Items 1- 7 are important, 8-10 would be nice, but not essential. Apologies if some of the above are obviously included on every machine known to man, but I'm fairly new to all of this! Finally, I notice that the Sony DVP-NS700, which used to be £400 (maybe even £500 ?) is now available at circa. £150 (R2) and £190 (Multi); What is the general opinion of this machine? How does it measure up to the above criteria? TIA.


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A 68-year-old former police officer who was brutally bashed in an attempted carjacking has told his attackers to "get a life".
Trevor, who does not want his last name revealed, was set upon by a gang of youths last Saturday, when returned to his BMW after walking his dog on Victoria's Mordialloc Beach.
He was knocked to the ground and punched several times.
"As I turned, they hit me right on the side of the head, twice," he said.
"The second one obviously broke my nose in three places...
"They said, 'if you don't give me the keys I'll kill you and the dog'.
"It wouldn't have taken any longer than a minute or two… I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."
The thugs raided his car for his keys before running off.
Two of the attackers are believed to be men aged in their early 20s.
One is described as 182cm tall with dark skin.
Another is described as a 177cm tall with a slim build. They were wearing hoodies at the time.
Trevor said he hadn't been as alert as he usually was as it was a suburban street, but he "sure as hell would be now".
"Give yourselves up, get a life and have a brain and be a bit more manly rather than hitting old guys from behind," he said.
Taskforce Tense, established to crack down on the city's gang crime including the notorious APEX gang, is investigating the assault.
Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019


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ROYAL OAK – Another resident is suing the city because of its new zoning ordinance that allows patients to use but not grow medical marijuana.
Christopher Frizzo, 47, a qualifying patient who has multiple sclerosis, filed a lawsuit Monday in Oakland County Circuit Court. He isn't seeking monetary damages.
"He wants Royal Oak to repeal its ordinance that limits medical marijuana from being grown or cultivated and if they won't do it he wants the judge to declare the Royal Oak ordinance unenforceable and void," said Neil Rockind, one of Frizzo's attorneys.
Rockind, who is representing Frizzo pro bono, served the city with the lawsuit in person. He was following up on a threat to sue made during public comment of the Jan. 24 City Commission meeting.
"I think the way some politicians and localities are approaching medical marijuana is hurting patients when it's their job to protect people like Christopher Frizzo," Rockind said. "I marched down to City Hall with the lawsuit in my hand and told the city clerk you'll be getting to know me."
The Michigan Medical Marijuana Act passed by state voters in November 2008 allows qualifying patients to grow to up to 12 medical marijuana plants or have a caregiver do it for them if both are registered with the Michigan Department of Community Health.
Frizzo's lawsuit says he has no caregiver and grows his own medicine because he has limited mobility and financial means.
In a phone interview, Frizzo said medical marijuana reduces the severity of his muscle spasms and nausea while increasing his appetite.
"In minutes, the nausea and sick feeling goes away. It likes a miracle," Frizzo said.
He also said he was reluctant to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit because he didn't want to divulge that he was growing his own medical marijuana and risk being targeted by police or criminals.
"I do feel endangered now," Frizzo said. "The city created an ordinance and a situation that puts me at risk but I'm going forward with this case to help patients. The city shouldn't be doing this to people."
City Attorney David Gillam said he knew the ordinance that commissioners passed 4-3 would lead to lawsuits based on public comments at the meeting.
"I'm not surprised," Gillam said. "We'll file our answer with affirmative defenses. I expect the city and Mr. Rockind will file briefs, appear for a hearing and the judge will make a ruling. I don't expect a trial."
Adam Leslie Brook, 42, of Royal Oak filed a lawsuit Thursday, alleging he will have to make costly and unnecessary efforts to obtain medical marijuana if he can't grow his own. Brook's lawsuit seeks an injunction to permanently prevent the city from enforcing the ordinance against him, damages, costs and attorney fees.
That lawsuit also sought a temporary restraining order prohibiting the city from enforcing the ordinance against Brook. However, Gillam said it was denied.
"The court reviewed documents and decided in this case there was no irreparable harm," Gillam said.
A hearing on the injunction is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Feb. 16 before Oakland Circuit Judge Rudy Nichols
Another medical marijuana user sues Royal Oak – dailytribune.com.


text:
Man charged with attempting to kill girlfriend
Man charged with attempting to kill girlfriend
ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky. —
An Elizabethtown man was charged with trying to kill his girlfriend.
The 21-year-old woman told police Robert Williams choked her until she lost consciousness and threatened to shoot her in the head.
Police said the woman jumped out of a moving car to get away, but Williams stopped and dragged her by her hair back into the car.
He was arrested on attempted murder, drug and weapons charges.
Williams is being held on a $75,000 bond.


text:
Had a cup a Joe and took in the view.
John and my foot.
The dude.
Jason and max taking in some rays.
After looking at it for so long cranking out a jump into er seemed too good to pass up.
My spot in the van. Pretty chill.
Had to stop by my house so we decided to crank out a game of pool.
And we're off!


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100+ Free Facebook Book Promo Sites: Annotated to save you time, money and mistakes! by Frank Daley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A very informative book for anyone getting started in self-publishing and marketing their books. This book includes helpful hints, things to do and things not to do, all the early stages of marketing that we authors usually have to learn on our own.
The list of Facebook groups is enough to give this book 5 stars. It may seem easy to find groups on Facebook to advertise your novels in, but it really isn't as easy as one may think. This list will surely get you started. I also like how Mr. Daley stresses over and over again the reality of using Facebook groups as your only means of advertisement.
This book also indicates how review swaps are perceived by Amazon, which I believe can't be stressed enough.
Overall, what Mr. Daley is attempting to do with this informational book hits the mark and I recommend it to anyone who is just starting in the business.
View all my reviews


text:
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After last weeks enjoyable visit to the home of Aberfeldy whisky I thought I would have a look at their latest offering, a 16 year old sherry finished single malt.
Aberfeldy 16 y.o, 40%abv, OB.
On the nose it is sweet with honey, toffee, orange, mild oak and an unmistakable sherry hint.
The palate is smooth, honeyed and almost buttery. Light hints of raisins, tea and cloves are present, underneath the classic Aberfeldy notes of honey, orange and a slight vanilla oakiness.
The finish is again, sweet and smooth but quite short. Leaves a oaky and spicy (cloves) finish.
This is a very pleasant dram and quite drinkable. I found my sample seemed to evaporate surprisingly quickly. Essentially it is a slightly more refined version of the 12 y.o and a slightly cheaper version of the 21 y.o with the added twist of a sherry influence. Its definitely the missing piece in a range that jumps from £35 to £120.
At the time of writing I am not sure how much this will retail for however judging by the price of the Aberfeldy 12 and the Aberfeldy 21 I am assuming it will be sitting somewhere in the £50 to £60 range.


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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
I may wash my hair tonight in my tumpen. First time for that. Sunday I went to the public "hot showers which was expensive and falsely advertised. ie them being hot. Probably wont do that again. I want to bust out the solar shower, but am not sure how to do that. I live in a town.
I have not reallly been to UB yet, not for another 6 weeks. We flew in there, but it was night and them immediately off to Zuum Mod.
Not much else to report. I dont spend much time with my host family as they are both docotrs and hardly ever home. I study alot, listen to Harry Potter on my computor and even busted out my LOTR DVDs for awhile.
Here is who I miss: YOU!
Great to here from the various Monahans and Redmonds. I love you guys. Glad you made it on Dad! I miss you sosososososo much!
Love, C
6 comments:
- Deirdre said...
- This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
- June 23, 2009 at 4:53 AM
- Deirdre said...
hi Cakey I really miss you a lot. I hope your having fun! is it hot or cold in Mongolia. It has been really warm in Rapid.You are a great sister!:) I love you!
- June 23, 2009 at 7:03 AM
- Lynn H. said...
Hi Caitlin!
I have no idea what I'm doing with this, so I hope you end up reading my post and it doesn't get lost in cyberspace due to my ineptness or ineptitude or whatever the word is! I've never done this before! However, I wanted you to know I got your voice mail last week, and I couldn't respond right away...I was in Daytona Beach as an AP Reader, and the rules were kind of tight (we weren't allowed to use our phones during the day when we were doing the reading). But I have been thinking about you SO much and hoping all is well. I checked into your blog today and I'm loving it. It's great to learn about all your adventures. Maybe the dairy thing will work out eventually...the smell might just sort of go away for you and you'll find dairy products palatable once again. :) I love you so much, and you're never far from my thoughts.
Love, Lynn
- June 23, 2009 at 7:09 AM
- Mark said...
Hey, Caitlin,
I'm going to try this again - messed something up the last time. It's so good to read your blog, and I'm sorry you had a rough time recently. The whole food/sleep thing - yes, very important. I'm going to try to get a care package off to you this week - maybe some special Michigan stuff. Oh, and I'm drinking coffee as I write this, in your honor. I hope you get some decent food/drink soon - that's a challenge, I'm sure.
The kids are all fine - rambunctious and ungrateful, but fine. Sophia is driving me crazy with her complete lack of common sense and her inability to set a halfway decent example for Maurie and Zora, but whatever. She's working for her grandma at the gift shop this summer, so that helps. Oh, and Maurie wants to buy a battery-operated dirt bike. And, Zora is going to get "I love Mom" tattooed on her arm. They're hilarious, these kids.
Okay, I'd better work. Know that we all love you a ton, and miss you. Hang in there-
Aunt Sue
- June 23, 2009 at 8:10 AM
- kate said...
Hey sweet cheeks! The dairy probably isn't pasteurized, which is why it smells and tastes different. Summer has arrived here, it has been in the 90's. I'm getting new windows put in this week, exciting. We have 70 high school students here for a summer camp, so I have to be to work early every day. Now I know what town yr in, I wonder if I can google-earth it. I'm having fun assembling items for an eventual care package hahaha.
- June 23, 2009 at 8:12 AM
- MurphandPatti said...
Hi, sweet granddaughter. We're getting a nice rain here as I write, after a hot and humid day yesterday.
About that washing your hair in your tumpen -- what on earth is a tumpen? Anyway, you're hanging in there just great; you're adaptable with a capital A and always have been. Keep remembering that there i a legion of people here who love you tons.
Gramma and Grampa M
- June 23, 2009 at 9:13 AM


text:
Groz Particle Fuel Tank Filter
95 Ltrs Per Min (10 micron)
About the product
The Groz Fuel Tank Filter is designed primarily designed for gravity flow conditions, although it can sometimes be fitted to a pump dispensing system depending upon the flow rate. Thanks to its clear plastic bowl, this diesel filter allows the user to identify any debris or particles within the fuel. It also has a drain point at the base of the bowl for the easy removal of filtered contaminants. These fuel storage tank filters for diesel should be changed when the flow rate of the system starts to slow, as this may be an indication that the filter is full.
Features of the Groz Fuel Storage Tank Filter:
- 10 micron bowl filter
- Maximum flow rate of 60litres Per Min
- 1" F BSP Inlet/Outlet
- 1 1/8"-12 M UNF Filter Thread
- Suitable for diesel and petrol
- Includes 1 x filter head and 1 x filter element
Product models and features
(ex. VAT)
|Groz Particle Fuel Filter Complete
|10 Micron Diesel Particle Filter
Paper Filter
Application - Gravity/Pump
Max Flow Rate (lpm) - 60
Pressure (bar) - 10
Inlet/Outlet - 1" F BSP
Filter Thread - 1 1/8"-12 M UNF
Diesel and Petrol
Product Accessories
(ex. VAT)
|Groz Element Only