Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Government, Politics, Preparedness, Religion, Science, Society
From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.
Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States – and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.
That’s President-elect Obama, in his weekly radio address this morning, announcing his top science advisors.
Compare that to the mindset we’ve put up with from the Bush administration, the latest round of which was announced yesterday:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration announced its “conscience protection” rule for the health-care industry Thursday, giving everyone from doctors and hospitals to receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.
“This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.
The right-to-refuse rule includes abortion, but Leavitt’s office said it extends to other aspects of health care where moral concerns could arise, including birth control, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research or assisted suicide.
Science hasn’t been a priority for the last eight years – conforming to ideological and religious demands has been. That may be a good way to make your political base happy, but it sure as hell is a bad way to deal with the problems we face as a nation and a planet.
Even with the misgivings I may feel about the prospect of an Obama administration, this is a very welcome breath of fresh air. We’ve got real problems facing us, and for once in a long while it feels to me like we have adults back in charge of dealing with them.
Jim Downey
Cross-posted to UTI.
You better watch out,
You better all cry,
You better all pout,
AFA is telling you why:
The evil gays are coming to town.AFA‘s making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out
Who’s naughty and nice.
The evil gays are coming to town.They’ll get you when you’re sleeping.
Or even when you’re awake.
Evil gays are bad, not good,
So be good for God’s own sake!You better watch out,
You better all cry,
You better all pout,
AFA is telling you why:
The evil gays are coming to town.
The evil gays are coming to town!
Jim Downey
*with apologies to J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie. HT to Sully. Cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.
Filed under: Government, Humor, Music, Politics, Religion, Society, YouTube
An old friend sent me a link to a video the other day. I’ve been busy enough getting ready to go on vacation next week that I hadn’t taken the time to sit and watch it.
I wish I had – it’s hilarious. Obscene, ranting (in a musical sort of way), but very funny. Well, it is to me, anyway, though if you’re a fan of Sarah Palin I imagine that it will make your head explode.
Heh.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Apollo program, Bad Astronomy, Discover, Pharyngula, Phil Plait, Politics, PZ Myers, Quantum mechanics, Religion, Science, Society, String theory, tech
Bits and pieces this morning.
Phil Plait has Ten things you don’t know about the Earth. A couple in there I didn’t know, or only knew incompletely.
The LHC goes online tomorrow. You can play with a cool simulation here. This is actually a very big deal, something on the order of the Apollo program in terms of size, complexity, and being a threshold event.
Play with your brain: Mighty Optical Illusions.
Be afraid, courtesy of Pharyngula.
Perhaps more later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, General Musings, Pharyngula, Politics, PZ Myers, Religion, Science Fiction, Society, Terrorism, Violence, Writing stuff
[This post contains mild spoilers about Communion of Dreams.]
I’ve had some people say that the Edenists I created for Communion of Dreams are just absurdly overblown – that I have unfairly mischaracterized both fundamentalist religion and radical environmentalists. I don’t usually argue with people who say things like this – my goal is not to convince everyone that my book of speculative fiction is right in all of its particulars. I just hope that they will continue to pay attention to the world around them, and see what is happening.
Like this item, via PZ Myers:
Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?
* * *
Clearly then, “evolutionists should not be allowed to roam free in the land.” All that remains for us to discuss is “What should be done with evolutionists?” For the purposes of this essay, I will ignore the minor issue of Western-style jurisprudence and merely mention possible solutions to the “evolutionism problem,” leaving the legal details to others:
- Labor camps. Their fellow believers were high on these. But, my position would be that most of them have lived their lives at, or near the public trough. So, after their own beliefs, their life should continue only as long as they can support themselves in the camps.
- Require them to wear placards around their neck, or perhaps large medallions which prominently announce “Warning:Evolutionist! Mentally Incompetent – Potentially Dangerous.” I consider this option too dangerous.
- Since evolutionists are liars and most do not really believe evolution we could employ truth serum or water-boarding to obtain confessions of evolution rejection. But, thisshould, at most, result in parole, because, like Muslims, evolutionist religion permits them to lie if there is any benefit to them.
- An Evolutionist Colony in Antarctica could be a promising option. Of course inspections would be required to prevent too much progress. They might invent gunpowder.
- A colony on Mars would prevent gunpowder from harming anyone but their own kind, in the unlikely event they turned out to be intelligent enough to invent it.
That’s an excerpt from the close of the piece, after the author has gone through some effort to define who ‘evolutionists’ are (he seems to mix up socialism, communism, Nazism, and support for slavery. No, really, he says that ‘evolutionists’ are all of these things.) Feel free to read the entire piece.
Now, as one commentor over at Pharyngula said, “that’s some weapons-grade crazy.”
My intent here isn’t to get into a discussion on this particular fellow’s pathology. It is simply to point out that this stuff is out there, and in my experience is fairly widespread. He’s just down the road from me about 100 miles, and growing up and living in the Midwest I have met plenty of his type. There are a lot of people who would take such an eliminationist approach to all their perceived enemies. Unfortunately, as we have also seen with the Earth Liberation Movement, there are also those who claim to be radical environmentalists who are willing to take violent action. Melding two such groups was an easy step in my mind.
Don’t misunderstand me – I am not claiming that all religious adherents are violent extremists. Nor are all environmentalists. Hardly. But these groups are out there. They are not a figment of my imagination. And if we forget that, or ignore them, we may find ourselves in a world akin to Communion of Dreams (or someplace worse.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Fireworks, Government, Heinlein Centennial, Religion, Society, Violence
(I was busy with the Heinlein Centennial last year for the Fourth, and didn’t post anything. I thought this year I would post something I wrote two years ago, and I hope you enjoy it.
Happy Fourth!
Jim Downey)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thoughts on This Day
One birthday, when I was nine or ten, I woke with anticipation of the presents I would receive. Still in my pajamas I rushed into the kitchen where my parents were having coffee, expecting to get the loot which was rightfully mine. My father happily handed over a small, wrapped box. I opened it eagerly, to find a little American flag on a wooden stick. My father said that since my birthday was July 4th, he thought I would appreciate the gift.
Horror-struck first at not getting anything better, then a moment later at my own greed, I guiltily told my parents that I thought it was a fine gift.
After a moment, of course, my folks brought out my real presents, and there was a fair amount of good-natured teasing and laughing about the little trick they had played on me.
That was almost 40 years ago, and I can no longer tell you what presents I received that day. But the lesson in expectations and perspective my dad taught me that morning always remained with me. My dad had been a Marine, fought in Korea, and was a deeply patriotic cop who was killed while on duty a couple of years after that birthday. I have no idea what happened to that little flag on a stick, but I do still have the flag taken from my father’s coffin, carefully and perfectly folded at the graveside when we buried him.
I’ve never looked at the American flag without remembering what a fine gift it really is and, as so many others have written, what it represents in terms of sacrifice. I love my country, as any Firecracker Baby is probably destined to do. You just can’t ignore all that early training of patriotism, fireworks, and presents all tied up together.
But that doesn’t mean that I am blinded by patriotism. As I’ve matured and gained life experience, I’ve learned many other lessons. Lessons about tempering expectations, living with occasional disappointment, accepting that things don’t always work out the way you plan no matter how hard you work, how good your intentions, or how deserving you are. Still, you learn, grow, and do the best you can. This, it seems, is also the story of America. I believe we are an exceptional people, holding great potential, with our best years still to come. But nothing is guaranteed. We must honestly, and sometimes painfully, confront our failures, learn from them, and move on. The original founders of our country were brilliant, but flawed as all humans are flawed. Some of their errors led directly to the Civil War, that great bloody second revolution of the human spirit. That they made mistakes does not negate their greatness; rather, it shows us our potential even though we are not perfect. They knew, as we should know, that only we are responsible for our self-determination. Not a king, not a God, not a ruling political class. Us.
Today we’ve been gifted with a small box with a flag inside. A token of our history. Let us not take it for granted. Let us not think that the thing itself is more important than what it represents. Let us look on it and declare our own responsibility, our own self-determination.
Happy Independence Day.
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, General Musings, Government, NYT, Preparedness, Religion, Society
Here in the Midwest there is a real and significant problem with meth – to the point of paranoia on the part of both the population and government. This has led to laws restricting access to certain precursor drugs and chemicals, reports of environmental damage (meth labs tend to produce some really nasty chemical contamination), and the development of special task forces of local, state and federal police agencies to target meth production and distribution. It is the War on (Some) Drugs on steroids.
So it is fairly easy to see how something like this can happen:
Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor
GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this tiny town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.
Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.
* * *
But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.
Ah, yes, that is a bit of a problem.
Read the whole piece, and you’ll likely be astonished that this guy was able to pull off this con job for so long. He had no documentation. He claimed that he didn’t need a warrant to enter people’s homes and businesses. He got by on cop-like swagger, a black T-shirt that said “POLICE”, a cop-wannabe car, and a short haircut.
Oh, and on the fact that the local police and government wanted him to succeed for their own purposes.
See, this is the thing. Pesky things like due process and respecting the civil rights of people slows down drug investigations. Or terror investigations. This can frustrate cops at about every level, who see a problem and honestly want to fix it. Along comes someone who says that he has the solution, and it is easy to believe him.
This is what the Wars on Drugs and Terror have brought: a willingness to trust authority at the cost of civil liberties. A willingness to cut corners to ‘meet the threat’. A perception that we’re in a crisis, and only by extraordinary means can we survive.
It starts by recognizing a problem. Then, because identifying and targeting a problem brings with it increased budget and power for the agency/department tasked with dealing with the problem, there is a tendency to inflate the problem, convince the public that the problem is growing, or deeper than initially thought. Things spiral, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. Unchecked, this positive-feedback loop takes on a life of its own, until it culminates in stupidity and horror.
This is the basic mechanism of what happened with the Inquisition. With the Salem Witch Trials. With the Red Scare(s). And now with the Wars on Drugs and Terror.
Think that I am over simplying? Here’s what Bill Jakob’s attorney, one Joel Schwartz, said about how his client got into this mess:
“It was an innocent evolution, where he helped with one minor thing, then one more on top of that, and all of the sudden, everyone thought he was a federal agent,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I’m not saying this was legal or lawful. But look, they were very, very effective while he was present. I don’t think Gerald is having the drug problem they were having. I’ve heard from some residents who were thrilled that he was there.”
That right there explains why and how these things happen. The way to stop them is well known: legal protection and due process. Those mechanisms were developed slowly over the centuries, with notable culminations in Magna Carta, our own Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We ignore those protections at our peril.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to UTI.
Filed under: Daily Kos, Emergency, Flu, Flu Wiki, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Preparedness, Religion, Society, Survival
One of the ‘front page’ writers at Daily Kos is very much concerned about public health issues, and preparations for a pandemic or other public health emergency. He’s also one of the people responsible for the Flu Wiki. He had a good post up today at dKos about how this issue is playing out in the current presidential election. In the discussion of that post, there was one comment in which the author said this:
Our Emergency Rooms are in Chaos Now …
…without a pandemic.
We are in no way prepared for anything out of the normal. Republican misrule has mazimized corporate profits in medicine while minimizing social welfare benefits. Unprofitable activities like emergency preparedness have gone wanting.
If we have a pandemic, pray hard.
I am not a person of faith. I don’t write about that much here, though if you follow any of my links over to UTI, you’ll certainly see what I have to say about religion there. So the thought of praying for help in a pandemic would never occur to me – I would much rather do something practical to prepare for such an emergency, like getting our hospitals ready.
And I don’t think that the author of that comment is saying that we should only rely on prayer – just expressing some exasperation with the current situation, the current mindset about what role hospitals play in our society. Daily Kos is, after all, a blog devoted to electing progressive democrats and pushing liberal values like a good universal health system.
Anyway, first consider how prepared you are for a possible pandemic, earthquake, whatever. Personally. You have to take responsibility for yourself and your family. As I have written before, there are a lot of good resources with excellent information on what steps you can take to insure your own survival in an emergency. And then investigate what steps you can take to help your local government, your community, to better prepare. It is a very complex problem, and they will likely welcome your help. This will be a step I will likely be looking into in the future, now that our care-giving responsibilities are done and I am recovering.
If prayer is important to you, then by all means, pray. But that shouldn’t stop you from doing what you can to also prepare in more tangible ways.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Health, Pharyngula, PZ Myers, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Society, Writing stuff
Hello, my name is Jim. I’ve got a writing problem.
Via PZ and Evolutionblog, news that blogging (and writing in general) is actually a therapeutic form of self-medication:
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.
Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.
Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.
OK, I don’t know about doing it ‘compulsively’, but I do know that writing has always been a way for me to cope with stressful events in my life, and I can honestly say that writing about caring for Martha Sr for the last year of her life with Alzheimer’s helped me keep some hold on my sanity.
Likewise, writing at UTI about the absurdities of modern life, with a particular emphasis on the effect of religion and politics, allows me to blow off a little steam and keep things in perspective. Some dialog with others, getting feedback and another perspective, also helps, and is the appeal (to me) of blogging over just writing for myself. This blog has a different emphasis, though there is some overlap (and why I cross post a fair amount between the two). I tend to be more personal here, and to tie things more often to the vision of the future portrayed in Communion of Dreams.
And as addictions go, it’s a lot less self-destructive than many options.
Jim Downey
(A slightly different version of this is at UTI.)
Filed under: Feedback, Flu, Heinlein, movies, Pandemic, Religion, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Writing stuff
A discussion over on UTI about a post I made there took a bit of an odd turn, engendering some interesting discussion about polygamy. This morning I made a comment that I thought I would share here, since it does relate directly to some of the things I do in Communion of Dreams. You’ll see what I mean.
Heinlein’s use . . . of non-standard family structures got me thinking about many of these issues when I was very young, and helped me form my opinions intellectually before getting into emotional commitments.
I tend to think that the serial monogamy that we see as a default in Western countries reflects the differences between societal conventions and evolutionary inclinations, with a big helping of “we live a whole lot longer now than early humans did” thrown in for good measure. It is rare to see a marriage last more than ten or fifteen years these days, and I think that makes a lot of sense – when most humans lived until 30 or so, it would make sense that pair-bonding would be a good strategy to raising and protecting children into early adulthood. That would mean a “marriage” of about the length I mention above.
But we live a lot longer now, and people grow and change throughout their lives. So it is unsurprising to me that divorce is common (something like half of all marriages end in divorce) as a way of dealing with these changes. Some people find a way to grow in tandem with their partner, and some find ways of allowing a certain freedom of definition for each partner within the structure of an ostensibly conventional marriage (some, of course, do both). Different cultures have found different strategies to accommodate these stresses – some allow for polygamy of the ‘conventional’ sort (think the Mormon or Islamic variety), some make divorce easy, some de-emphasize marriage itself, some ‘look the other way’ when one or the other partner in a marriage cheats or has a formal concubine system.
A fairly recent development in all of this has come to be known as polyamory – defining relationships as being more open and less “possessive”. There are some fairly well-known practices and practitioners, such as Penn Jillette. This attitude pretty well covers most of Heinlein’s alternative marriage structures and can work for some people, though it would understandably require a different sort of approach and mindset than what is commonly considered about marriage/love/relationships. In an homage to Heinlein I had originally used alternative family structures as the “norm” in my SF novel set about 50 years from now (a survival-strategy response to environmental conditions), but early readers of the book got too hung up on that so I changed it. Perhaps if/when I am an established author I can get away with it, as RAH did.
Children? I dunno – don’t have any, by choice. Not an issue for me, in several senses of the term.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
To me, the novel actually does work better the way I had the family relationships defined before, with a group marriage built around a small number of adults who have just a couple of fertile people at the core. This would allow for those precious few who are able to have children (remember, the fire-flu plague had not just killed vast numbers – it also left most people who survived it sterile) to do so with minimal stress, the rest of the family caring for them and the children born into the family. Think how it would be otherwise: the few fertile couples trying to have and raise children in a society desperate for kids, maybe even willing to steal them or force child-baring couple to give their children to others.
But this change was just too hard for some people to wrap their heads around comfortably – they wanted to turn it into something about sex rather than about children. Maybe they felt threatened by the idea, since the time-frame of the novel was so close to our own. I dunno – my head doesn’t work that way. So I made the change, and tried to work in enough explanation for the type of ‘family’ that exists in the book, while removing the polyamory element. So far no one has commented on the current version as being a problem for them, and that is likely how it will stay.
Jim Downey
(Again, if you didn’t recognize the quote used in the title, shame on you. It’s from this.)
Communion Of Dreams 