Stroke = Bliss

This is an interesting video brought to my attention by What is Enlightenment Magazine. I have experienced this bliss momentarily before myself. The most vivid experience I had of it did not come from a formal meditation but from a process called "image streaming" where you verbally describe your mental imagery. It is a good mental workout that is supposed to synchronize the brain's hemispheres.

We are constantly worrying even when we don't know what we are worrying about. This is an important apparatus for our survival as it keeps us wary and it drives us towards innovation and preparation for perceived or imagined threats. But this process exist even when we feel like we are not worrying there is a continuous loop of time mapping/identity formulating/ future speculation/danger monitering of the environment that goes on behind the scenes and keeps us in a tense state. When the input is overridden it is shockingly freeing (as was the case with the woman's stroke).

We are constantly seeking this experience in various forms of entertainment, fantasy, drugs, etc... We know we can over-ride that neural circuit, but for most of us it only happens in degrees and only rarely. Some people can train themselves to do it at will, but it is so far not possible to know whether this is a genetic trait that only some are capable of or all of us can do. I strongly believe only a few are capable of it, in the same way that only 1 in 50 million people (a guess) can throw a 98mph fastball for a strike. You are either born with the potential or not.

I believe that this state of peace is one of the primary rewards in the reward/punishment system that nature uses to funnel humans down to specific behaviors. When everything is right with the world (we have our sex, status, and protection of our offspring) we are at ease. And being at ease makes us appear even more attractive because others see us as successful. When we don't have these things, we live in a more tense state which is our body's way of telling us "you will not get the reward of freedom and peace until you figure out a way to aquire sex, status and protection of your offspring".

Drugs, fantasy, meditation, spirituality are ways to tap the reward without aquiring the darwinian currency. We were designed by nature to be obsessive worriers. Our ancestors who were not, did not survive long enough to breed as much as those who were. (Hitchens comes to mind here-"created sick by Gawd and commanded to be well"- an indictment not only of the Abrahamic religions but also of Buddhism which exists under the same complete lack of acknowledgement of human evolution).

Even the Dalai Lama has speculated about a future technology that could induce this state. Even just a taste of it made available for everyone on a regular basis could change the world more than a trillion prayers, sermons or holy books. Just a specific electrical current in the brain (imagining this were safely possible with some device) could truly be the next big advancement in human technology (a new paradigm larger than the computer, the atom bomb, or the microscope).

I suspect that such a device would be unfathomably difficult to construct due to the variation in human neuroanatomy, but it is without doubt theoretically possible.

Pat Condell on Fitna

Psychic coincidence? I didn't see the last post before making this one.

I am happy to report that Pat Condell has contracted with the Dawkins website to make available a CD of his extraordinary YouTube comments. Here he is talking about Fitna. His elucidation rivals Dawkins or Harris, and he says things they aren't allowed to.

My Work is Done

I swear this guy really should be getting paid for making these videos. I just wish I knew how to make somethng like this, but I wouldn't have the time to do it even if I could.



I checked Rotten Tomatoes. The film really did get a 9% positive review. The comments are absolutely scathing, take a look. So either 91% of reviewers have an anti-religious bias, or the film is absolutely terrible.

Fox News Goes Liberal!

The conspiracy is so vast now that Fox news has put up a review of Ben Stein's "Expelled" ripping him to shreds in true liberal fashion. Some crap about "exaggeration" and "distortion". Hey whatever happened to freedom of speech?

From Fox News:

"Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, "Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck. "

"What the producers of this film would love, love, love is a controversy. That’s because it’s being marketed by the same people who brought us "The Passion of the Christ." They’re hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here, since there’s a visit to a concentration camp and the raised idea — apparently typical of the intelligent design community — that somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the Holocaust. Alas, this is such a warped premise that no one’s biting. "

"The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this. Who cares, really, if "Expelled" is anti-Semitic? It will come and go without much fanfare. "

Me again. I just want to know how this liberal god hating homosexual latte drinker slipped through the cracks at Fox news.

I know that Sean Hannity is a closet homosexual, but really, he must have been paid off bigtime to get this thing written.

Why do people laugh at creationists?

This is a great series on youtube dissecting lies, distortions and misrepresentations of creationists with facts and evidence. This episode (22) addresses Ben Stein and his falsehoods.
Stein says that there has been almost no advancement of evolutionary theory since Darwin. How can any human being POSSIBLY take someone who says that seriously?

These videos are very entertaining and well recommended.

PZ Meyers on Expelled

PZ Meyers one of the more famed science bloggers has made a very simlpe observation about the movie "expelled" (in which he was thanked for participating in the credits, yet promptly expelled from the theater when the produce realized he was there during a public showing).

Meyers writes over at Pharyngula:

The simple falsehood at the heart of Expelled

"I have to make this really, really simple for the "Hitler was an evolutionist" dimwits.
There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight.

If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.

It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out — and many idiots have. Farmers have known it for millennia, when they set aside particularly fruitful seed stock or especially robust farm animals for breeding, and eat the rest. Nazis used this elementary logic when they decided to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Eugenicists used it when they wanted to argue for shifting the distribution of certain properties in a population.

It ain't "Darwinism". It's self-evident, obvious, selbstverständlich, apparent, évidente, transparent. The KKK knows it, farmers know it, dog and horse breeders know it, the Nazis knew it, they didn't need Darwin to spell it out for them. Blaming that on Darwin is awesomely stupid.

Darwin's real contribution, the one that had everyone smacking themselves in the forehead and wondering why they didn't think of it first, was the realization that the natural environment does the killing — that natural selection shapes heredity. The idea of culling populations is not only so easy that a hate-mongering cretin can think of it, but that weather, bacteria, viruses, parasites, predators, etc. have been doing it for eons, with no intelligence required, and that mindless microorganisms have been far greater agents of hereditary change than the worst the Nazis ever accomplished; does Charles Darwin also get the blame for that? Darwin realized that the environment has consequences and can shape the generation-by-generation passage of hereditary traits in populations, and that examination of the natural world reveals that it has been doing exactly that. He realized that ubiquitous forces that are so simple we take them for granted have been quietly and slowly sculpting our heredity since the beginning of life on earth.
When clueless creationists argue that Darwin led to Hitler, or worse, throw away buckets of money making elaborate propaganda films arguing such nonsense, it's worse than inane. It's as if they have completely missed the point of the idea they are damning. "

Yes, these IDers have never been able to make a single valid point without distorting something, which is one of the main things that drew me away from ID. They simply can't come up with a good idea that really challenges the prevailing understanding.

Expelled

I had the pleasure of catching comedian Ben Stein on the Bill Oreilly comedy show last night talking about the Intelligent Design propaganda piece "EXPELLED".

Stein claims (and I absolutely do NOT believe him) that they originally set out to make some sort of movie about the intelligent design versus evolution contraversy, and in the process of researching for the movie he was surprised at how little evidence there was for evolution, and how ideas of intelligent design were not given fair play. In the process, they were able to trick Dawkins and other notable quotables into participating in the movie (which was going under a different name with no apparent agenda at the time of the interviews).

For me, the statement that there is little evidence for evolution is hysterically absurd and impossible to take seriously. Being a former IDer myself who thought evolution may have been directed by a designer, I was very quickly persuaded by evidence to the contrary. I couldn't have been persuaded dragging kicking and screaming away from my faith by something with "very little evidence". Sorry. The evidence is overwhelming.

In my conversion process, I found time and again that the IDers made cases that were easily swatted away by the elite scientists (read "the best scientists in the world in the field"). Even while rooting for the IDers I eventually became embarrassed by them while I watched them get man-handled by people who clearly had better evidence on their side, and much greater numbers. Thus, I was initially persuaded and have since gone on to be solidly persuaded. And who cares about Ben Stein? Why do all these economics professors and lawyers think that *I* should give a hoot what their opinions are on evolution?

Stein gave the example that no species has ever been observed to have evolved. This is like planting grass seeds and staring at the ground for 5 minutes and stating "no grass has ever been observed to grow from grass seed, this is grounds for skepticism. We can see the lawns and the fields and we can see the grass that has been already attached to the seed, but we cannot observe the grass shoots actually coming from the seed after 5 minutes. Somebody MUST have glued them together somehow."

Amazingly he cited dogs and said that no new species of dog has been observed to have been formed. Every breed of dog from the miniature Doberman to the Mastiff are a recent variation of an animal almost identical to today's Wolf from around 12,000 years ago. In just that short amount of time, selective breeding has led to all these amazing variations. Does it take a rocket scientist to see that if you expanded that time period to a million years (100 times that much) or 10 million years (1,000 times that much) it would lead to different species? How stone cold visionless does a person have to be to make Stein's argument?

But the truly chunk blowing part of Steins spewage was the insinuation that Darwin's ideas led *directly* to the atrocities of the Nazis. This is morally and intellectually deplorable, and a silly argument to boot. This would be the equivalent of blaming Jesus' ideas for the Spanish Inquisition. I've never seen anyone dumb enough to do that. But Darwin gets the blame for making the Nazis what they were despite the fact that anti-Semitism was around long before Darwinism. And despite the fact that after all this time since Darwin, tomes upon tomes of new information about genetics and zoology have made the theory of evolution as solidly confirmed as a scientific theory could possibly be. A century and a half of hard work by thousands of people have confirmed that Darwin's basic ideas were correct time and time again. How can someone blame a man for discovering a truth about how nature works? Hitler's distortion of the ideas and atrocities have nothing to do with Charles Darwin's personal ethics (by all accounts he was a very conscientious and ethical man), and especially *nothing* to do with whether our current understanding of Darwinian evolution is true. It is an appeal to emotion, which people who don't have evidence on their side always seem to do.

I think many intelligent people who have little science education and sit on the fence will watch this movie and be particularly embarrassed by this sick tactic (which apparently is one of the main themes of the movie).

The desperation of the ID community is obvious. Losing doesn't phase them, and they prey on the willing ignorance of those they preach to.

Liberal Conspiracy at San Diego Aquarium

I just returned from San Diego, a treacherously lovely city in April.

However, I find I must alert all Republicans, conservative think tanks, and Steven Colbert to the alarming activity of the San Diego Aquarium during an election year. Much to my shock and dismay, the so-called "Aquarium" has, as its main attraction, an extended display on so-called "Global Warming". By "global", I assume they must mean the whole planet, which is absurd because everybody knows it's never warm in the South Pole. As proof of this liberal conspiracy, I was able to smuggle my camera into the museum. Too all conservatives, a warning, you will find the content of the following images deeply disturbing. Caution is advised.

In the picture above, the graph clearly displays a liberal bias, notice the use of the PAST or (as it is called by liberals) "history". Clearly this is a thinly veiled critique of the Iraq War and the liberal obsession with the causes of the war and "accountability". Rather than focus on the future, the liberals continue to dwell on the PAST. The absence of alternative theories, again, betrays the liberal bias of co-called "science". Liberals only know what they are against.

The third and fourth pictures clearly illustrate the common Liberal conspiracy theory that so called "big business" or "industry" is the cause of atmospheric warming, ignoring sunspots, volcanoes and pigs. Notice the flat screen television meant to imply technological sophistication.

The picture at left is a favorite technique of Liberals - the "before and after" pictures. Of course, Liberals don't show the BEFORE the "before and after" pictures, when there were jungles in the Antarctica. Tens of millions of years ago, the Antarctic was a near tropical zone. Evidence that the "globe" is significantly cooler since then is conveniently ignored: such as snow, such as ice, and such as penguins.

My eldest daughter being programmed by a liberal conspiracist. Knowing that children are drawn to TVs instead of fish, the "Aquarium" uses these high tech devices to reprogram our children. Is it a coincidence that this display is being shown during an election year? I think not.


The final picture is an illustration of the Liberal Conspiracists attempt to fool parents into thinking that the highly disturbing content of the so-called "Global Warming" display will be forgotten. The children innocently color in an Octopus at the end of the program. It's not even a real Octopus, like it would be if it were a real Aquarium.

Sunspot activity and Global warming

A picture says a thousand words.

Solar irradiance decreased dramatically from about 1980-1987, while the average global temperature increased. The current level of solar irradiance is roughly what it was 25 years ago, but the average global temperature is about 0.4°C higher.

Almost NOBODY in climate science uses this as a serious piece of evidence against anthropogenic global warming anymore.

The only reason people like Mike would come up with this is because they selectively search for things on the internet in hopes of supporting what they already have decided that they want to believe. Same for evolution. Instead of absorbing the mountains of evidence for it first, these people will selectively search the internet for the handful of people scribbling out their favorite conspiracy theories.

McAmerica

Does the political season ever embarrass the hell out of you?
To be honest, I still think Obama will beat McCain (he's up on him 5% right now), but I am not particularly excited about it because I question his ability to change the major problems. I truly believe, as I've always said, that just because he is tall and has a deep voice, he will attract people, even some republicans who are fed up with Bush. I saw a few of them today at a message board who declared they would vote Obama. I can't see McCain outgunning Obama in the debates. I maintain we are looking at a landslide. If Obama can easily power through the statements of his pastor and the continuous replays of Fox news and talk radio trying to milk it for all its worth with hardly a scratch in the polls, the man can weather anything.

It will be nice to listen to someone giving a speech from the oval office who doesn't send shivers of embarrassment up my spine. It will be nice to have a leader who doesn't strut around like a cowboy, and has a more nuanced sensibility. But how did we ever get to this point? How is it that so many people crave being lied to if the lies tell them what they want to hear? "The surge is working", "global warming is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore and sponsored by the national academy of sciences to get grant money". It gets to the point where it's just not worth listening to anymore. It just amazes me that human beings, being as disinterested in honesty as they are, even got this far with civilization. It surprises me every day that traffic lights direct traffic, and that my paycheck is in the mail every other Friday, and that the salad bar is always well stocked. It always surprises me how everyone pretends to love each other on holidays and then talk behind each others' backs within a week.

Mostly, I hope that Obama unites the country. Conservative talk radio and punditry with it's continuous exaggerations, lies, and hatred of any opinion but it's own has done more to divide and self-destruct this country than any other factor in my opinion. The talk show hosts have mastered the understanding that if you just say something- it becomes true. Politics is not like science where facts and data can trump opinions. In politics just saying something makes it true- "Man made global warming is a hoax, there's no evidence for it", "Obama is a racist", "Liberals hate America" etc... You would be amazed at the sheer volume of citizens who have these ideas ingrained tightly into their being and search desperately for evidence to make them true. They have the AM dial to get it branded into the brains day in and day out as one more straw man argument lures them into accepting a false dichotomy, partitioning off the wild fields of reality into phony caricatured segments which their pea brains can categorize.

I hope that an Obama presidency begins to end this bullshit. I doubt it though.

Elephant Art

From onegoodmove.org
This is amazing.

The Earth is Cooling!!!

One of my hobbies, as you all know, is listening to right wing talk radio. Especially when they mumble about global warming. Today was an interesting day in the news because there was a gigantic ice shelf which collapsed off of Antarctica that experts attribute to GW (one denier I debate actually said that this was evidence against AGW because the earth was warming more at the poles and not everywhere equally). One scientist predicted that this shelf would break off in 30 years at current warming rates. He said that around 10 years ago. He was too conservative in his estimate by around 20 years.

Another news stories was how Lake Tahoe is expected to change and lose it's crystal blue color due to warming. I pictured Rush Limbaugh at the yearly golf tournement there trying to explain how the Liberals ruined the water.

But the funniest thing I am hearing lately on right wing talk radio is how global warming has stopped, thus disproving the theory of anthropogenic causes. You won't find this claim anywhere other than right wing talk radio and right wing news. Why? Because it's fucking laughable. This winter has in fact been the coldest one in a number of years, partly due to La Nina. What they forget to mention is that it is still something like the 16th warmest winter this century.

But this same shit has happened before. They never learn their lesson and they prey off the ignorance of their listeners. Take a look at the graph below:

The talk radio host I heard today coming home from work was going on and on about the incredible cold snap, and the media conspiracy not to mention it as overwhelming evidence of the failure of global warming theory.

The fact is that the same thing happened in 1982, 1991-1992, 1999-2000 during the period of the most accelerated warming! EVERY TIME the warming came back stronger than ever, as can clearly be seen on the graph.

These fucking people can't even understand basic elementary school trend analysis for Christ's sake. If every year isn't substantially warmer than the one before, that's perfect evidence for them and their beliefs.

Nothing stops these people from misinforming the public. They are just like the creationists (wait, many of them are the creationists). Their hypocrisy knows no limits. And once again, I just can't believe I live in a world full of this many stupid and brainwashed people.

What is Your God Delusion Index?

Link from onegoodmove.org.

I am happy to say I am a normal person. I did have a few points however.

Urban Ninja

Ha, the joke is on all of us desk sitting gen exers who always laughed about how unrealistic our video game heros are. Unbelievable.

Enlightenment 2.0

I finally finished watching all of the beyond belief 2 enlightenment 2.0 video presentations. Wow, there is some really good stuff here. The egos of the presenters are unexaggeratably (I know this is not a word, leave me alone...) immense. There is so much disagreement, and I just love how Sam Harris clarifies everything at the end so succinctly. The man really is the best speaker in the house. After listening to the semi-effette pluralistic goody-two shoesness of people like Jonathan Haidt and David Sloan Wilson, two atheists doing their best to redefine then defend religion, Sam comes out with some zingers that had me laughing out of my chair. He states that Jonathan Haidt, though fully condemning North Korea for it's oppression, will no doubt find a clever way to hold the Islamic societies to different standards. Sam assures us that whatever way Jonathan comes up with doing this, it will be a "masterpiece of political correctness", LOL. Exactly. Secondly, David Sloan Wilson characterizes Sam's writings, builds a strawman and beats the stuffing out of it. Harris stands at the podium and says that Wilson told him privately during the conference that he had never actually read Sam's writing, and quips about how he wish he had been mic'd for the conversation.

I finished watching the conference with this very fascinating Daniel Dennett interview. I hope they do this conference every year and make it available to watch. There are some really fascinating presentations here. This is the best thing I have ever found on the internet of it's kind.

Founders of Christianity were Potheads?

Just read an article on Moses.

An Isreali researcher has just released a paper asserting that Moses was probably high as a kite (and then some) when he heard God recite the ten commandments. He was also, most probably, totally stoked when he saw the burning bush.

The article states that "mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times." This is according to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

"As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics..."

The drug of choice, in those days, was brewed from the bark of acacia trees. The ancient drug apparently contains the "same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic... ayahuasca is prepared."

In another article on the same subject Shannon is quoted as writing:

"In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings... On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being ... many identify this power as God."

Once again, one marvels at the ironies and contradictions at the root of religious belief.

The so-called "War on Drugs", for example, has always been closely tied to the conservative Christian ethos. No doubt, religious believers of all stripes will dismiss Shannon's assertions out of hand. Easier to believe in a sky-god that handed Moses stone tablets than to believe that tribal, religious zealots, several thousand years ago, took psychedelic drugs. Gee, just like now. Think of it, the founder of Christian "morality" could have been a "pothead". A drug induced haze is likely responsible for thousands of years of not just religious war & peace, but all the great works of art, music, literature, sculpture, painting, political writing, etc... even Jesus. Does it get better than that?

One could argue that the war on drugs, if it had been in force in Moses' day, could have stopped Judaism *and* Christianity DEAD in their tracks. Hmmm.... On the other hand, just think of all the Bach Cantatas we would be forced to give up, the architecture, literature and painting... Maybe religion is worth it.

Pass the bong...

There has never been and never will be a successful "war" on drugs.

The Audacity of Hopelessness

About 3-4 years ago I decided that near death experiences and other supposed evidences of life after death are about as likely to be valid as bigfoot or the lochness monster. The reasons I have for believing this are precisely the reasons reasonable people have to disbelieve bigfoot or lochness. After years of outspoken certainty of LAD, many people were baffled at my changing of sides on the issue. The standard claims of "he's crazy", "He's bitter" as reasons for not believing were sent my way.


Several people became fascinated and have become almost pseudo-stalkers such as Michael Gilmore and Lou Famoso who regularly tries to get me to add him to my facebook list (I can't believe the guy even remembers me). These people feel compelled to check up on me, possibly to see if their prayers of me getting struck by a lightening bolt or having a heart attack were answered, and that maybe I can bolster their desperate pleas for hope with a turn around story ("I died and yes Lou, Archangel Michael really does have gigantic gleaming biceps, wow you were right all along!").

As I've said before, my turnaround came not from bitterness, but a close reading of things I had previously avoided or ignored- human nature invented by natural selection, neuropsychology etc.. I came around only kicking and screaming. Although it is impossible to rule out life after death, all of my most powerful arguments for it have been drastically undermined in the past few years by new experimentation (they were already drastically undermined, I just didn't have the knowledge base to understand why).

NDE's, OBE's and alien abductions are almost synonymous by my lights. NDE's are more compelling because they occur near death, but the veridical claims have not been verified despite serious effort, and due to recent inducements of OBEs and feelings of a sensed presence (mainline attributes of NDE's) using brain stimulation and magnetic helmets etc... it is perfectly clear to all but the most insistent people that these feelings are created by manipulation of the brain. There is not an actual presence there, and you are not actually leaving your body.

There seems to me to be very little wiggle room left for the hypothesis that people actually do leave their bodies. After scouring OBE message boards I realized that scores of people were consistently unable to verify *anything* they supposedly saw out of body. They very commonly had overlapping attributes of NDEs (lights, tunnels, sensed presences, joy, bliss, realer than real experiences etc...). So I can infer logically that these experiences are overlapping and intertwined with the NDE. And I think I can infer logically that people almost certainly will never be able to prove that they can see out of body, because they almost certainly can't. A handful of interesting stories and anecdotes are expected. I have known at least two people who are sure they saw bigfoot, for instance.

I suppose also, the older one gets and the more experiences one has the more clear it is that people by and large are simply full of shit (my own natural propensity for gullibility and desire to exaggerate the significance of variance random experiences is also a case to be made for the shallowness of my prior belief). Particularly when they want to or need to believe something which gives them hope. They cry foul at the audacity of hopelessness. It bothers them so much they feel the need to stalk me. And the fact they need to know whether I believe or not is a tell that they really don't believe it strongly themselves.

What makes people happy?

Great story. Tip to onegoodmove.org.

The Banality of Evil

It may have been Eli Wiesel who most forcefully made the connection between banality and evil during the holocaust. Evil doesn't truly show itself in the grand and twisted schemes of an evil genius, but in the workaday and humdrum life of all its ministers.

"Nazi women epitomized the everyday 'banality of evil.' Carrying out traditional women's roles.... they cooperated with war, genocide and terror by ignoring it and helping to create an image that all was well." -- Claudia Koonz, Competition for Women's Lebensraum.'

Even the banalities of the Limbaughs, Coulters and Hannitys of the world pale in comparison to the nameless clockwork figures who ideologically tic and toc inside our government. Consider the EPA and the kinds of ministers George Bush has crammed it with - little ideological drones who punctiliously pursue the dictum of their master.

It has been known for decades that Mercury is a neurotoxin and that it is especially lethal in children. It has poisoned our fish supply and has become so concentrated in the larger sea mammals, such as dolphins and whales, that they are inedible. Period. Even so, this doesn't stop the Japanese from ladling out this toxic brew of Mercury laden flesh, every day, to their school age children. They continue to hunt whales and dolphins for food. Apparently, the much vaunted intelligence of the Japanese only goes so far.

In the United States, under the direction of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the EPA was (and presumably still is) under direct orders to stop all efforts by the States, otherwise known as federalism, to individually regulate mercury pollution. In some cases, the EPA requirements would have allowed plants to put more mercury into the air, not less.

"Many state officials believed under the federal trading program "some plants could go totally unregulated. That was totally unacceptable to many states," Becker said."

"About the same time, Nevada objected to the EPA's wanting to flood its power plants with pollution allowances far beyond the amount mercury the plants actually produced. That approach included a large bloc of allowances to a coal burning plant that had been shut down because of clean air violations."

The science behind the lethality of mercury is demonstrable and unquestioned by any peer-reviewed scientists. Fortunately for the United States and our children, a federal appeals court struck down Bush's big money-friendly approach for mercury reduction. Bizarrely, Bush's plan would have allowed plants with excessive smokestack emissions to buy pollution rights from other plants that foul the air less, effectively making the net change in our mercury pollution - Zero.

Some in the media might snarkily refer to this post as an example of "Bush Derangement Syndrome". If so, then explain to me who staffed the EPA and set their agenda? Explain to me any reasonable rationale for why we should continue to bathe our landscape in mercury?

This is one of the most neurologically toxic metals known to man, yet Bush & Cheney think the "economy" comes first.

Well, whose "economy"?

It's certainly not the "economy" of the children suffering from Mercury poisoning, or their mothers and fathers. It's not the "economy" of the fisherman netting fish that are too poisonous to consume. It's not the "economy" of the states whose rivers & lakes are increasingly too toxic to enjoy.

I think we all know whose "economy" Bush & Cheney are protecting.

Jonah Goldturd

I saw this guy try to hawk his book "Liberal Fascism" on the daily show, and John Stewart made mincemeat of him. Using the words "Nazi" and "Fascist" as adjectives for the group of people who brought us the civil rights movement, is quite a feat of the imagination. There is no question that certain political ideologies can use civil rights concepts in order to strong arm policy, but to conjure up connotations of wartime Italy and Germany is really pathetic. In this segment, Alan Colmes actually goes on the offensive:




Here are the basic points of Goldberg's argument. Note that he goes out of his way to insist that he is not *really* comparing liberals to Hitler et al. Whatever.

Sex, Texas & Walmart

Just read that the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals "ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment." Apparently, those beacons of morality and civilization (read religion) (Alabama and Mississippi) still ban their sales.

Sherri Williams, owner of a sex toy business, was quoted as saying: "I think the courts are finally listening to the people," Williams said Wednesday. "You have 'Sex and the City,' 'Desperate Housewives' and other shows promoting what society is doing. I think the courts have finally opened their eyes and looked around, which is a miracle in the South."

In related news, the unabashedly Christian Walmart has begun selling lubricants, such as 'Wet', in its pharmaceutical sections. Since Walmart is probably the state store of Alabama and Mississippi, I have to wonder if the morality police have taken notice? Selling the lubricant in the pharmacy is a neat dodge. Since it's in the pharmacy, I suppose it's a medicinal "sex aid" or a "relationship aid". However, morality police should take note, flavoring the lubricants surely crosses the line into sex toy. After all, what possible medicinal use could Mango be?

The elegant toy above is $215.00 and is called the Dutch Delight (love the cork). The website states that the "Oooms and Grosemans’ “Dutch Delight” dildo was commissioned for the “Dutch Souvenir” project initiated by .ekwc in the Netherlands in 2003. Check it out here.

I wonder what kinds of memorabilia the Alabama souvenir project commissions? - the Alabama Chastity Belt tastefully emblazoned with the Crucifix?

Beyond Belief 2.0

Beyond Belief 2.0

Last year I had the huge pleasure of watching this entire 3 day seminar. It was extraordinary, and now version 2.0 is available for viewing. It took place October 31st- November 2nd.

I just finished watching Sam Harris' lecture. Nothing particularly new was introduced. But the question/answer/debate at the end was ELECTRICAL. The furious war between him and Scot Atran (whose views of Islam are in many ways diametrical to Sam's) continues. Harris says that Atran is "utterly wrong" and "irresponsible". Atran says that Harris "doesn't know what he's talking about" concerning Islam and hastens to add that not a single person at the conference knows what they are talking about concerning Islam. Harris tells Atran that he owes it to himself to have a public debate against someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who does know Islam firsthand. Atran considers it, but this was in October and as far as I know no such debate has taken place.

Washington Post/ABC News Poll

* The economy: Dems led Republicans, 52% to 33%
* Immigration: Dems led Republicans, 40% to 37%
* Iraq: Dems led Republicans, 48% to 34%
* The budget deficit: Dems led Republicans, 52% to 31%
* Taxes: Dems led Republicans, 48% to 40%
* The U.S. campaign against terrorism: Dems led Republicans, 44% to 37%
* Health care: Dems led Republicans, 56% to 29%






<--- Picture of Pat Robertson's face while reading latest poll results.

HubDub

I am endorsing Hubdub.com

The website is still in it's infancy but it is a great idea. You use play money to bet on a myriad of news outcomes. Odds are made based on monetary values of voters on each possible outcome. You can also invent your own questions. Some news stories provide wagers for the long term and others short term. There is a leaderboard for top players. So far I am 5/5 on my bets. But after superbowl Sunday I won't be anymore I'm sure. Check it out.

Hell Freezes Over

Is this the makings of a landslide for Dem's? The neocon talk radio slime ball network is fractured. They hate McCain more than they hate Hillary!!!

And it's looking like nobody is going to stop McCain. He was nowhere in the horserace a handful of weeks ago and then all of a sudden I think he became the default candidate when everyone gave up on Guiliani and Romney.

Ann Coultergeist appeared on the bewildered Fox News in front of a pale faced Sean Hannity to say that not only would she endorse Hillary if she goes up against McCain, but she would *campaign* for her! No, I'm serious.

Christian Scare Tactics

The American Denial of Global Warming

Every American should watch this talk. This is PRECISELY what is going on.

Oreilly Says Something True

Break out the champagne, Oreilly said something true. Once in awhile he does.



And drawing from the godfather of the modern conservative movement himself, here is Newt Gingrich. This is the most perfect distillation of the Conservative political motivation to obscure the global warming issue as any I've witnessed.

The Horse Thief

Nothing more perfectly symbolizes the incompetence of George Bush, a man who stole the Presidency, than the "revelation" that his beloved painting is about a horse thief. That Bush took this painting "at face value", seeing *only* what he wanted to see in it, sums up his life and presidency in a way that a thousand words never could. (To call him a dolt would be a radical understatement.) One wonders, nevertheless, whether he will ever see the painting for what it really is. Nothing else has shaken him from his fantasy world of incuriosity, ignorance and denial. In Bush's fantasy world, God has made him President, Iraq continues its steady march toward peace and democracy, global warming is a politically motivated liberal hoax, and in New Orleans he is a hero, etc., etc., etc...

From the WP

The Horse Thief

Scott Horton blogs for Harpers: "George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a
painting which he acquired after becoming a 'born again Christian.' It's by W.H.D.
Koerner and is entitled 'A Charge to Keep.' Bush was so taken by it, that he took the
painting's name for his own official autobiography. And here's what he says about it:
'I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our
mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of
a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is
us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley
that we serve One greater than ourselves.' . . .

"Now, however, Jacob Weisberg [has tracked] down the commission behind the art work
and he gives us the full story in his forthcoming book on Bush, 'The Bush Tragedy'."

Weisberg writes: "[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders
who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words,
the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.

"Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D.
Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled 'The Slipper Tongue,'
published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking
horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska.
The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the
illustration bears the caption: 'Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not
Have Been Caught.'"

So, Horton writes: "Bush's inspiring, prosyletizing Methodist is in fact a
silver-tongued horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the
Bush presidency."

Global Warming Denialism Part 3

So enough of this denialism bullshit. If you're not a trained climatologist, I couldn't give a flying fuck at the end of a gun why you think the scientific consensus is wrong. As for Joe Blow denialist off the street-he has nothing at his disposal but a bunch of poorly understood, faith based, cherry picked arguments absorbed from the mouth of his favorite talk radio host. In short, he has the free-will of a termite.

So what do the vast majority of experts *actually* believe the deal is with AGW? Here's their main arguments and refutations with references if you care to learn about them:

(and refreshingly, Al Gore has absolutely nothing to do with any of this)

Scientific studies have shown that the current warming is not natural.

There are many basic scientific facts which can only be explained if the current global warming is being caused by an increased greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere from humans burning fossil fuels. For example, the planet is warming as much or more during the night than day. If the warming were due to the Sun, the planet should warm a lot more during the day when the Sun has influence. Greenhouse gases trap heat all the time, so they warm the planet regardless of time of day. Another example is that the upper atmosphere is cooling because the greenhouse gases trap the heat in the lower atmosphere. If warming were due to the Sun, it would be warming all layers of the atmosphere.

We know it's warming, and we've measured how much.

Scientists have a good idea how the Sun and the Earth's natural cycles and volcanoes and all those natural effects change the global climate, so they've gone back and checked to see if they could be responsible for the current global warming. What they found is:Over the past 30 years, all solar effects on the global climate have been in the direction of (slight) cooling, not warming. This is during a very rapid period of global warming. (2) (3)

A recent study concluded:“the range of [Northern Hemisphere]-temperature reconstructions and natural forcing histories…constrain the natural contribution to 20th century warming to be <0.2°c>

You can see this in the third graph here (5), where the dotted lines are just from natural causes, and the full lines are natural + human causes.

If that’s not enough to convince you the Sun isn't responsible, consider the fact that no scientific study has ever attributed more than one-third of the warming over the past 30 years to the Sun, and most attribute just 0-10% to the Sun. So the Sun certainly isn't a large factor in the current warming. They've also looked at natural cycles, and found that we should be in the middle of a cooling period right now."An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that 'Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years(6)

So it's definitely not the Earth's natural cycles. They looked at volcanoes, and found that a) volcanoes cause more global cooling than warming, because the particles they emit block sunlight b) humans emit over 150 times more CO2 than volcanoes annually So it's certainly not due to volcanoes.(7) Then they looked at human greenhouse gas emissions. We know how much atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased over the past 50 years (8)

And we know from isotope ratios that this increase is due entirely to human emissions from burning fossil fuels. We know how much of a greenhouse effect these gases like carbon dioxide have, and the increase we've seen is enough to have caused almost all of the warming we've seen over the past 30 years (about 80-90%). You can see a model of the various factors over the past century at the bottom of the page(9). The correlation with CO2 modeled temp is ridiculously close.

This is enough evidence to convince almost all climate scientists that humans are the primary cause of the current global warming.

If you think they're wrong you'd better have a good fucking reason. Because if their right, the denialist is a major part of the problem.

Global Warming Denialism Part 2

One scientist I heard made this remark concerning AGW- "When the science is on your side, you debate the science. When it's not, you attack the messenger".

Al Gore is certainly the messenger, and his name alone seems to be considered as an argument by the non-science trained denialists (who again, are almost all right wing ideologues with no science understanding who are trying desperately to protect corporate interests at the expense of truth. They are basically people rooting for their favorite football team).

So here is the long list of arguments made by the global warming denialists. I didn't make this up. This is a compilation of several other brainstormers and people with degrees studying climate science who have more knowledge and experience in debating denialists. I added one that I thought was missing from their list and I'll start with it-

From "The Top 10 Ways to Tell That a AGW Denialist Hasn't Done Any Honest Research" (warning, far more than 10)

*Attacks the sensationalist media as if the hype itself is evidence that AGW doesn't exist at all.

*Criticizes (or just mentions) Al Gore like that's a piece of evidence

*Claims that as many or more scientists doubt AGW as agree with it.

*Asks a simple question like "If humans are causing global warming, what made the planet come out of the last ice age?"

*Claims the current warming is part of a 'natural cycle' and doesn't know what causes natural cycles.

*Claims the current warming is due to the Sun even though no scientific study has come to this conclusion.

* Claims "Global warming has stalled" due to too small of a sample size in temperature data which flattens the graph and misrepresents overall trendlines.

* Makes a political remark (i.e. communist, liberal, etc.) as a refutation

* Makes a conspiracy remark (i.e. it's just the UN trying to take over the world). Or my personal favorite, "follow the money"

*Thinks scientists haven't considered the fact that climate has changed in the past, or that Mars is warming.

* Thinks the greenhouse effect is unproven

* Thinks that one volcanic eruption emits more CO2 than humans have in 5,000 years.

* "It's snowing in Vermont in the middle of winter. Where's global warming?!"

* Can't answer a simple scientific question (i.e. how is the observed increase in greenhouse gases NOT causing warming?)

* Cites JunkScience, Fox News, right-wing blog, Inhofe's site, etc..

* Makes absurd claims with zero citations

* Blames global warming on water vapor, cow farts, beer/soda carbonation, etc.

* "Models are just guesses" or "we can't predict the future"

* "Soon they're going to tax us for breathing!"

* Cites one outlying study and claims it disproves dozens of others which are in agreement

* Cites one scientist who has ignored the data and contradicted thousands of others

* "Warmer is better"

* "More CO2 is good for plants"

* "They predicted global cooling/an ice age in the 1970s"

* "They can't even predict the weather right for next week"

* "The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and we only have good data for 50/100 years"

* "Scientific consensus has been wrong before" or "the scientific consensus used to be that the Earth was flat!"

* Does not know what a peer reviewed journal is.

* Presents old theories already proven wrong as "new evidence"

* Uses a small part of an article taken out of context while the main article (complete) would contradict them

* States a political think tank as a "reliable source"

* Confuses vast timespans in the past with small windows of time in the present

* Argues that any advancement toward clean technologies will put us back to the stone age

* Quickly turns the issue to China and India and away from the science.

* Has a Christian fundamentalist worldview

* They complain about the word "consensus," as if the word did not imply that alternate theories were considered or as if the IPCC process did not include and consider skeptic opinions such as Gray, Lindzen, McKitrick, et al. They were considered, the consensus was reached. Get over it.

* Global warming science is labeled "fear-mongering," which ironically overlooks that claiming that there is a global conspiracy is the only clear fear-mongering present

* They use any variation of the glib "why is warming so bad?" line, which fails to consider the results of past warming on earth (extinction of most species on the planet; look up the Permian Triassic Extinction)

Global Warming Denialism Part 1

I love the anthropogenic global warming debate more than the evolution vs creation debate for a couple of reasons. They are both very similar in that they are science issues with large unidirectional consensus that are systematically attacked by a group of very angry people with an obvious agenda. These people, amazingly, are usually led by someone with a giant megaphone who surprise! has no degree in science.

Anthropogenic Global Warming(AGW) is more interesting in a way because it is not a wholly religious issue. It is a politically motivated debate over an issue which has already begun to have direct consequences within our lifetimes. Almost all AGW denialists who are non-scientists are right wing ideologues. Why is this? The obvious reason is that corporate interests have the most to lose over climate change policies which may restrict the way they do business.

What is fascinating is that these right wing ideologues will continually blame the left for "politicizing global warming". The main man to blame of course, is Al Gore. So you have a whole group of science uneducated right wing talk radio/Fox news listeners who jump on the global warming denialism bandwagon despite the overwhelming worldwide science consensus that AGW is true, and blame Al Gore for scaring the shit out of everyone. The obvious question is, how could anything be more of a display of "politicizing" a science issue than a bunch of armchair crackerjacks ignoring a worldwide science consensus over data they are completely incapable of understanding, and claiming that all these peer reviewed science papers in peer reviewed science journals are wrong, while their favorite talk radio guru (who has never taken a college level science class in his life, let alone one on climatology) who totally cherry picks his data and is an unashamed transparent spokesman for corporate interests just *happens* to be right.
Don't worry, I left nothing out. There are *no* peer reviewed papers in peer reviewed science journals by AGW denialists. Only debates over the *degree* at which mankind is causing warming.

Within the scientific community, the consensus is overwhelming and ever growing that mankind is responsible for the preponderance of warming. There is not one credible science agency left which is not in accord. This is not to say that every climatologist agrees. But the denialist ranks are shrinking as new evidence has come in.

None of this deters people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage-Weiner, and it certainly doesn't deter their listeners who swallow their upchuck blindly like baby chicks from their mother. They know what their ideology demands that they believe, and by Gawd they will find a way to make it so!

I have had the wonderful fortune of witnessing cross-arguments from denialists and climate experts recently and I have learned a hell of a lot about this issue. It has been highly entertaining. I mainly observed, since I am no climatologist. I didn't understand all the numbers and everything, but I learned the gist of the denialist motivation and I hope to share it in the next two entries.

Letter Avaliable at Target

I was just at my local Target store, and was astonished to notice the new paperback version of Letter to a Christian Nation. My eyes bulged out in amazement. Target doesn't exactly have a huge book selection, and this was one of them. How did Sam pull this off?!?!

I bet it's not at Walmart. If anyone goes to Walmart let me know if it's there.

The Portable Atheist

Got my copy last week and just starting reading a few entries. This is a 480 page book full of excerpts from famous writing over the ages from people like Lucretius, Conrad, Orwell, Einstein, Russell, Spinoza, Mill, Darwin, Hume, Hobbes, Marx, as well as the modern "new atheism" writers. 47 people in total.

I have yet to understand why the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is included. He was a Persian poet from 1048-1123. There are widely varying translations of this into English in volving huge disputes, and people claim Kayyam was anything from a mystic to an atheist. I haven't read it, but my preconceived notion is that he was a mystic misinterpreted as a nihilist by people who didn't understand Sufism. Don't quote me. I have a feeleing however that including Kayyam in an atheist reader would be like including a Buddhist writing as a prop for atheism. I've long suspected that Hitchens deeply misconstrues the things that Harris harps on and this may be a case in point. But I'll look at it and get back.

There were three poems I read that seriously touched me. I have yet to develop into a steadfast poetry fan, but these really hit home and I can see why they were included. Two by Philip Larkin and one by Thomas Hardy.

Church Going- Philip Larkin
Aubade- Philip Larkin
God's Funeral- Thomas Harding

Nonzero- Robert Wright

This Robert Wright book is not related to his masterpiece "The Moral Animal". It is a very well done and well researched book arguing for "directionality" of evolution in both the cultural and the biological realms. Wright uses the concept of "nonzero sum" from game theory. The idea being that greater frequency of win-win scenarios involving things like cooperation, symbiosis, and community are at the tip of the arrow of evolution. This as opposed to the zero sum win-lose game where one party wins at the expense of the other.

Wright's thesis is that the way information is transferred through evolution and natural selection pretty much guarantees a culmination of greater nonzero sum games as evolution proceeds. He even goes on to speculate that things like love are pretty much guaranteed by the process of evolution.

He then addresses the problem of consciousness and where it fits into all this. Is it epiphenomenon just coming along for the ride or something more ingrained? I believe Wright is geniunely agnostic and open minded to this question which makes his attitude very refreshing and appealing to people. He started off his career with interests in psychology, evolution and human nature just when "sociobiology" turned into "evolutionary psychology" in the 70's. His book "The Moral Animal" was one of the first popular offerings of the new ideas at the time.
I first noticed Robert Wright in an issue of What is Enlightenment? magazine. This is a good interview available online.

There is also a TED talk he gave about the concepts of his book.
He was a journalist for Slate and here he has this great site -meaningoflife.tv where he interviews famous thinkers about these topics.

The Moral Instinct

This very long article by Steven Pinker has been gaining popularity in the NY Times. I glanced at the first page when it came out, but today I finally got around to reading all 8 pages. It really is a masterpiece of an essay. It will really challenge the way most people think. But as always, those who really need to read it won't, and even if they did they wouldn't grasp it.
- Aaron, The Proud Elitist

Cheers professor Pinker.

Beck From the Dead

Right Wing tool Glenn Beck has a hemorrhoid surgery go bad and he contemplates suicide in the hospital. I can't stand Glenn Beck. He is a global warming denialist and a patsy of the religious right. Recently he said that it was good that the U.S. was 38th in healthcare because one of the parameters of quality healthcare was access for the poor. And, his reasoning goes, since the U.S. has probably the worst level of access for poor people, Glenn saw that as a good thing for our healthcare system. See, our taxes are made a miniscule fraction lower by not having to provide quality care to the losers of our society (about 1/6 who are uninsured). Thus, we have a really good system. Here's a little visual to help you out:

Beck states- "The politicians are right that we have a health care crisis in this country,". "Where they're wrong is that it's not going to be solved by government, it's not going to be solved by getting the HMOs out, it's not going to be solved by a new marbled-lobby health center," he said. "It's by hiring people that understand about caring for people."

This is utter bullshit. The workers do care, just as much as they do in any other country. That's what originally got them into the field in the first place. What Glenn will not admit and does not wish to understand is that a great cause of the problem is that healthcare is run as a big business. As long as the dough rolls in, nobody of any importance is complaining. Nobody that is... but the people.

So Glenn wants to launch a campaign to fight fight FIGHT the symptoms without acknowledging the problem. That's his job. That's why he makes the big bucks.

Matt Taibbi Telling it Like it is

What makes this doubly wonderous is that he does it right in front of white house spin secretary Tony Snowjob.

"You can send any shit up the flag pole and all these reporters will be fucking soluting right away"

Tourettes Guy Has Died

Apparently Danny was in a car crash awhile ago. He recently died in his sleep. He made millions of us feel good about ourselves for brief periods of time. He will be sorely missed. I hope he is in a better place.

Gotta Love it!

I was into the writings of Sam Harris before this whole fashionability of "atheism" came into vogue (thanks to Pat's tip). I was surprised at how much attention was received. I was accustomed to keeping up to date with the latest writings on these issues. So it took me a long time before I really realized that this was not my own selective attention, but a national and even worldwide phenomenon. I was happy to see this ad appear in the New York Times:

Mormonism

This cartoon was banned by the Mormon church, but I have it on word from an ex-Mormon that it's all true.

Now, even if there were a god of some kind, would it really matter whether you didn't believe anything at all, or you bought into this utter horseshit?

Rabbi Wolpe versus Sam Harris

Rabbi Wolpe vs. Sam Harris Debate

I thought this was a really great debate. The moderator did little to interfere, Harris and Wolpe were visibly in fighting mode with hackles raised, new territory was explored not covered so much in prior debates, and Wolpe (though not remotely convincing) handled himself pretty well and had some pretty clever things to say at times. Harris meets the challenge well, and at the end you feel the audience is sympathetic towards his views.

Judging from their reactions, I believe that the audience watching this debate was left mostly with an attitude of- "There might be something out there, but this religion shit is really not cutting the mustard", which I think is a success. The pressure being put upon the religious is working in dramatic fashion. The talking points are out and about all over the media (despite incessant attempts to distort Sam's position), and they are forcing the religious to become more honest about the meaning of their faith.

It will not collapse overnight. What happens when you change your position (as I've done a couple times), is you begin to discover on your own the points which other people have already made to you. Your own inner dialogue starts to challenge you with observations that feel as if you made them up, despite the fact that they are the same ones others have been telling you all along, you just weren't listening deeply and you weren't capable of allowing them to sink in. Finally you change your position on your own and credit yourself for having thought it through in your own unique way. Only years down the road do you realize that it was another person who really did the convincing. And you'll never admit it publicly. Give it some time, you can mark my words. The fruit of the recent books by Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins is still about 2+ years away. Suddenly alot of people will start making an Exodus away from their faith, and it won't be clear what caused it, and the atheist books won't get the credit.

Chickenshit in NJ will enjoy seeing Harris debate a Rabbi ;-)