April 2006

• “These are some messed-up monkeys…”. I could not have said it better myself: Dance, Monkeys, Dance.
• John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, says that a nuclear-armed Iran is still years away — and he’s being attacked by the ultrahawks for pointing out the facts. The IAEA report released yesterday confirms that Iran has enriched uranium to the 3.6% level (far below that needed for building a weapon) and that all declared nuclear material is accounted for.
• C’mon, you gotta love a site that calls itself Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly. I found these folks thanks to Crooks and Liars. They have a book of the same name out now, as well:

The problem with simply calling Bill a liar is that one has to be aware of one’s lies for them to really be considered lies. We’re not sure Bill qualifies.

• And another great blog has turned up, this time thanks to Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Don’t Stop the ACLU is an obvious counterpoint to the ranting one finds almost daily at StoptheACLU.com. I do like their house rules:

Welcome to Don’t Stop the ACLU, where we won’t call you names or threaten to break your jaw just because we disagree with you. We invite everyone to post comments here, especially dissenters. The only stipulation is this: you must treat us and your fellow posters with respect at all times. Proper debate is about ideas. No personal attacks, no malice, no threats (veiled or otherwise). We’re all adults here. Check your ego at the door.

Paul R. Pillar, former senior Middle East intelligence analyst for the CIA, makes a compelling case that the Bush administration cherry picked intelligence to sell the Iraq war to the public, and that the intelligence work that was done was driven not by a desire to find the truth, but rather to supply backing for a predetermined viewpoint on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Rajeev Ravisankar, a student at Ohio State University, explains that the fundamentalists we should really be worried about aren’t of the Islamic variety:

[I]t is in fact the Christian Right which seems to be standing against the values often associated with the United States. Individual rights are impeded by their staunch opposition to abortion and the promotion of contraceptive use. Equality is trampled in their stance against gay marriage. The establishment clause of the 1st amendment is eroded as a result of their efforts to inject religion into public schools via intelligent design… It is high time for the media and the American population to reject Christian fundamentalist attitudes and demand policy driven solutions to address the real problems facing this country.

How does a religion become evil?

Well-intentioned people can do things and justify behavior that contradicts what’s at the very heart of their religious tradition, and it can descend into cruel and violent behavior. One example is a belief in absolute truth. People who believe they have God in their pocket and know what God wants for them have proven time and again that they’re capable of doing anything because it’s not their will but God’s will being carried out… You have millions of Christians fixated on Armageddon theology. They spend a great deal of time watching TV preachers, picking apart Bible verses, looking at headlines in the news, patching together pieces of information to create a sort of image that “Jesus is coming on Tuesday.” But when I read the New Testament it’s pretty clear Jesus says nothing like, “On Judgment Day how much of your puzzle did you piece together?” He says, “When I was hungry, did you give me something to eat, and when I was thirsty did you give me something to drink?” The mandate of following Christ involves reaching out to people in need, and peacemaking. Whether Jesus comes next Tuesday or in a thousand years is really God’s business.

Lewis Black reveals the whackjob underbelly of the religious right:

Jerry Falwell said that the reason that September 11th happened, the reason that God allowed it to happen, was because of certain people in our country. People like, and I’m quoting, ‘the pagans,’ which is a motorcycle group. Feminists; he brought up feminists. He used the word even. ‘God,’ I thought, ‘I haven’t heard that word in a while. Did he really think it was feminists? Is that what upset God? That women, a number of years ago, had decided to leave the kitchen, and enter the work place, and demand equal wages, and demand power equal to a man? That’s what upset God? That God looked down into the kitchen, and there was not a stew on the oven and the spice rack was in disarray, and He said, ‘I will SMOTE them!’ And I couldn’t believe it, he said that God had actually talked to him and said, these were the people. That was the reason. It was those people, and that was the reason God allowed this to happen. And I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ Because God had called me 12 hours before, and he said, the reason he was upset was because of people like Jerry Falwell.

• At Daily Kos, a contributor calling him/herself “shock” explains that fundamentalist values are not quite an oxymoron, just misguided by defensiveness.
• Here’s a fact one rarely sees acknowledged by the rightists who rant about and “invasion” of “criminal aliens”: Among the first American soldiers to die in the invasion of Iraq was Jose Gutierrez, a Guatemalan who entered the US illegally in 1995. An American is still alive today, because this “criminal alien” gave his life for this country. And it turns out that Hispanics are dying in the war in disproportionate numbers.
• PZ Myers points us to a recent discussion of race and biology by John Wilkins:

That the human species has geographic variation is not at issue. It clearly does, as Feldman’s colleagues have argued. It just doesn’t support the standard racial typology. Alleles had to evolve and spread somewhere. But they do spread, too… So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen indicates that humans nicely group into distinct populations of less than the 54 found by Feldman’s group (probably a lot more – for instance, Papua New Guinea is not represented in their sample set). And this leads us to the paper by the Human Race and Ethnicity Working Group (rare to see a paper that doesn’t list all the authors). They rightly observe that while there are continental differences in genetics, there is no hard division, and genetic variation doesn’t match up with cultural differences per se. There is a genetic substructure to the human population, but it isn’t racial.

• Courtesy of the Skeptics Circle, Urizen at Intelligent Party examines the ways in which the dogmatic mindset leads to the denial of objective reality.

This tendency [towards denying the existence and significance of an objective reality] is a result of a number of things, but mostly it’s a result of dogma. Religious dogma, political dogma, cultural dogma—the common denominator is the steadfast reliance on ideas that don’t respond or correspond to reality. Most of it, I suppose, tends to be tied to religious/theistic dogma, given that speculation about metaphysics (not to mention many religions’ teachings that the material/corporeal world is not something to worry about and is only a means to an end) is likely to lead to a disdain for the material world, and therefore a disdain for empirical fact… The limitations of what we know about the world are significant enough without people deliberately ignoring the things we do know for the sake of expediency.