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Trying to make science respectable again

22 August 2009 | Author: Jack

Forty years ago Americans were fascinated by science.

Science gave us Moon landings, microwave ovens and airbags. Science promised to end the drudgery in our lives, feed the hungry, extend our lifespans and cure our illnesses. Science was our great hope for the future.

In the last ten years or so we’ve seen our fascination with science replaced with disdain for intellectualism (see Anti-intellectualism is destroying America-FreThink.com and Anti-intellectualism-WayoftheMind.org)  and a return to fundamental theism. Under the influence of the ignorant and poorly informed, Americans have been encouraged to view science with scorn if not outright hostility. Science has been pitted against religious belief in what some portray as a winner-takes-all cage match. Where once Christians appreciated the contributions of science to our society they now consider science to be an effort to discredit their god. Science is being cast as the anti-Christ, the harbinger of the apocolypse. Theists claim that science is essentially atheistic and that atheists worship science instead of worshiping god. By attempting to conflate atheism with science they can dismiss the value of science with a clear conscience. Since scientists have failed to uncover any physical, conclusive and irrefutable evidence in support of a god, scientists must be anti-theism in the minds of the religious.

Atheism is the lack of a belief in gods. While the majority of those in the hard sciences identify themselves as atheists there are scientists who self-identify as theists.

A study has shown atheism in the west to be particularly prevalent among scientists, a tendency already quite marked at the beginning of the 20th century, developing into a dominant one during the course of the century. In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed “disbelief or doubt in the existence of God” (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings). The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences. Expressions of positive disbelief rose from 52% to 72%. (Source-Wikipedia)

This would indicate that science is not an exclusively atheistic field of study nor does it require an atheistic attitude to be a scientist.

Since theists can’t hope to do away with science they hope to pollute it with theistic mythology and ill-disguised attempts to turn theism into science with claims of an Intelligent Designer. Fundamental theists insist that science proceed from their bias alone. They insist that science adopt their conclusion (god did it) then make the evidence support that conclusion. They appear to be oblivious to the dishonesty inherent in this effort.

CreationismBothTheoriesTheists insist that evolution be taught as one theory among several and that ID is just as valid a theory as evolution. They make no effort to do the testing and research that may or may not substantiate their claims. Instead they insist we accept their claims just because they say we must.

As a result science has become diluted with nonsense and hampered by having to defend itself against poorly constructed and completely baseless claims of bias and atheism. Many of the complaints that theists lodge against scienceaccuse science of being materialistic. This betrays a lack of understanding of the
nature of science as well as ignorance of what “materialism” means.

But there are those in the sciences who are devoting themselves to making science popular again. They are doing their best to dispel the rumors, counter the lies and fight the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being spread by science’s detractors.

Chris Mooney, author of ‘Unscientific America,’ talks about the significance of Pluto’s demotion from planet, the belief that vaccines are linked to autism, and the role played by religion.

Mooney, author of the 2005 bestseller “The Republican War on Science,” and his coauthor Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke University, seek to explain how Americans have come to minimize science in a time when, they assert, we will need it most — as global warming, advances in genetics and the possibility of large-scale engineering of the Earth’s climate loom in our future.

Pointing to what they see as a deep-seated streak of anti-intellectualism in this country, the authors write: “Americans built the bomb, reached the moon, decoded the genome, and created the Internet. And yet today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles.”

While not excusing the half of American adults who don’t know that the Earth orbits the sun once per year, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say that scientists hold the key to a better public understanding of science.

Religion is the reason they think they can’t accept evolution. That’s because they are told by their pastors from the pulpit, all across the country, that evolution is an assault on their identity, their moral universe and their ability to raise children who get taught this. So there’s been an attempt to create a hermetically sealed environment in the conservative Christian community that keeps this stuff out. And that’s a huge problem.

What’s preventing people from embracing science? We know it is religion, but do we really know why people are creationists? When I look at how many scientists approach the evolution issue, I don’t see that understanding.

If I read ScienceBlogs, what I see are endless eloquent refutations of the creationists based on science. It’s been done to death. Obviously, that doesn’t convince anybody. And that’s because people who don’t believe in evolution are not driven by scientific considerations. So that’s not how you should be trying to reach them

Clearly the Web is going to be part of the answer because there is no avoiding it. But I don’t think science-centered blogs or Twitter are going to be the way to reach beyond the people you are already reaching.

So you look at what kind of things have reached beyond. My best example is YouTube videos that go viral and get millions of views. There’s a couple of science videos that have really caught on. The Large Hadron Rap is the best. It’s rapping about the Large Hadron Collider. They go in the tube and they’re rapping about the fundamental nature of matter and what they’re going to discover, but it’s just cool. They are being nerds, but they are being fun nerds. It really was a smash hit.

Scientists are going to have to have a culture change. They will have to realize that it is important to train people in more than research. And the necessity of that is born out of the numbers game. Only a small number of people in graduate school today are going to be researchers because there aren’t enough positions. It will be a realignment of priorities for universities, granting agencies, and scientific societies.

I think a lot of executives at media companies need to have a mind-set change and stop thinking science coverage is death for ratings. That’s not necessarily so. The Discovery Channel is not doing that badly. Clearly, you can cover science well. The media needs to get over the “I’m-a-pissed-off-middle-school-student-and-science-isn’t-for-me” kind of mind set. Science coverage should be high-standard, it should be entertaining, it shouldn’t make them lose money. (Source-L.A. Times)

I wish them well. They face organized and well-financed opposition.

UNSPECIFIED - 1955: (FILE PHOTO) Actor Don He...

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What we really need is a Mr. Wizard for the 21st century.We need someone who can explain science and its findings in a way that is both entertaining and educational. We need to expose youngsters to the full history of the sciences as well as what the future could hold for a science-based society.

At the same time we need scientists like PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins to continue to speak out and expose the efforts of theists to compromise science and get around the scientific method. Atheism and science warrant separate defenses as they are not necessarily yoked. Just as not all scientists are atheists, not all atheists follow science. Both approaches to understanding our natural world may frequently come to similar conclusions, but that does not imply either correlation or causation.

We owe it to future generations to preserve our national dependence on and confidence in science.

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Are you a Seekaholic?

15 August 2009 | Author: Jack
A human brain.

Image via Wikipedia

The following Salon article raises interesting questions regarding our brain’s insatiable need for stimulation. Are we hard-wired to seek?

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat’s brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain’s lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he’d found the brain’s pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn’t look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were “excessively excited, even crazed.” The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn’t experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, “where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy” (and Panksepp wasn’t referring to Bing).

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It’s why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,” Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting “enter” to get our next fix.

But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. “The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,” Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we’re restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a “CrackBerry.” (Source-Salon)

If you found this post via StumbleUpon, you might be a seekaholic. If you found this post by searching for the tags, you might be a seekaholic. If, after reading this post, you click on the following links to other articles on human nature, you might be a seekaholic.

There’s no shame in that. It appears being a seekaholic is a natural state for humans.

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Is this “health care”?

13 August 2009 | Author: Jack
Faith healing sign, Mr Toad's Wild Ride, Disne...
Image by gruntzooki via Flickr

This is being sponsored at one of the largest local hospitals. You know, a hospital, where educated people work who have been trained in medicine; where I might one day wind up in serious condition, depending on these people to save my life. It’s a place I would expect to find critical thinking, scientific approaches and a general attitude of disdain for new-age hucksterism.

Obviously I am very wrong.

Holistic Healing

This class will introduce energy maps of the body, its meridians, chakras, auras and bilateral pathways and will teach many principles and techniques for healing and relaxing to enhance immune function and well-being.
Date and Time
Third Monday of every month
9:30 to 11 am
Location
Sharp Memorial Outpatient Pavilion
Classroom A and B
3075 Health Center Drive
San Diego, CA 92123  (Source)

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Skepticism or, knowledge trumps belief

17 July 2009 | Author: Jack
Historian of science and Skeptics Society foun...

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Skepticism is what motivates many of us to say “I want to know” instead of “I want to believe”.

Belief is only a component of knowledge. Belief is a temporary stop on the road to knowledge, not the goal.

Michael Shermer has composed a clear and concise explanation of the role of skepticism not just in science but in life.

The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled to the clicker culture of mass media where attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, at the movies, on the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist the Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and PSI. UFOs and ETIs. JFK, RFK and MLK—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and Tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. Such claims are an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. The truth is out there. I want to believe.

What I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence does not always coincide. And after 99 monthly columns of exploring such topics (this is Opus 100), I conclude that I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know. I believe that the truth is out there. But how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Science begins with the null hypothesis, which assumes that the claim under investigation is not true until demonstrated otherwise. The statistical standards of evidence needed to reject the null hypothesis are substantial. Ideally, in a controlled experiment, we would like to be 95 to 99 percent confident that the results were not caused by chance before we offer our provisional assent that the effect may be real. Failure to reject the null hypothesis does not make the claim false, and, conversely, rejecting the null hypothesis is not a warranty on truth. Nevertheless, the scientific method is the best tool ever devised to discriminate between true and false patterns, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and to detect baloney.

The null hypothesis means that the burden of proof is on the person asserting a positive claim, not on the skeptics to disprove it. I once appeared on Larry King Live to discuss UFOs (a perennial favorite of his), along with a table full of UFOlogists. King’s questions for other skeptics and me typically miss this central tenet of science. It is not up to the skeptics to disprove UFOs. Although we cannot run a controlled experiment that would yield a statistical probability of rejecting (or not) the null hypothesis that aliens are not visiting Earth, proof would be simple: show us an alien spacecraft or an extraterrestrial body. Until then, keep searching and get back to us when you have something. Unfortunately for UFOlogists, scientists cannot accept as de­finitive proof of alien visitation such evidence as blurry photographs, grainy videos and anecdotes about spooky lights in the sky. Photographs and videos can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations (aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, even Venus). Nor do government documents with redacted paragraphs count as evidence for ET contact, because we know that governments keep secrets for national security reasons. Terrestrial secrets do not equate to extra­terrestrial cover-ups.

So many claims of this nature are based on negative evidence. That is, if science cannot explain X, then your explanation for X is necessarily true. Not so. In science, lots of mysteries are left unexplained until further evidence arises, and problems are often left unsolved until another day. I recall a mystery in cosmology in the early 1990s whereby it appeared that there were stars older than the universe itself—the daughter was older than the mother! Thinking that I might have a hot story to write about that would reveal something deeply wrong with current cosmological models, I first queried California Institute of Technology cosmologist Kip S. Thorne, who assured me that the discrepancy was merely a problem in the current estimates of the age of the universe and that it would resolve itself in time with more data and better dating techniques. It did, as so many problems in science eventually do. In the meantime, it is okay to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure” and “Let’s wait and see.”

The principle of positive evidence applies to all claims. Skeptics are from Missouri, the Show-Me state. Show me a Sasquatch body. Show me the archaeological artifacts from Atlantis. Show me a Ouija board that spells words with securely blindfolded participants. Show me a Nostradamus quatrain that predicted World War II or 9/11 before (not after) the fact (postdictions don’t count in science). Show me the evidence that alternative medicines work better than placebos. Show me an ET or take me to the Mothership. Show me the Intelligent Designer. Show me God. Show me, and I’ll believe.

(Source-Scientific American)

Those who believe without question fail to do the work required to justify knowledge. Knowledge is open-ended, it welcomes skepticism. The scientific method requires skepticism. Skepticism is anathema to untested belief. Science welcomes contrary theories. “True Believers” either mock, rail against or ignore contrary evidence and contrary opinions. If your theories can’t deal with the evidence, discount the evidence. Don’t, whatever you do, rethink your opinions or reconsider your beliefs.

Skepticism raises the standard of evidence to a high degree. It doesn’t accept the easy or popular answer. Shermer mentions the skeptic’s mantra, “show me”. Show me that what you believe is real, true, sensible. Don’t tell me, people tell stories all the time. Show me.

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The Family a.k.a. the Christian mafia

15 July 2009 | Author: Jack

Has anyone else been slightly blown away by the recent revelations about “The Family”, another secret organization for the wealthy and powerful White cabal in D.C.?

Just when we thought “Good old boy” clubs had become passé, just when we thought we’d seen the last of former Skull and Bones members holding positions of power and influence, here comes “The Family”.

As the Republican Party implodes, the public is becoming aware of a secretive Christian society known as the Family or the Fellowship. The group was founded in 1935 in opposition to FDR’s New Deal and its adherents subscribe to a far right Christian fundamentalist and free market ideology. A minister named Abraham Vereide founded the Family after having a vision in which God visited him in the person of the head of the United States Steel Corporation (no, I’m not making this up). The Family has a connection to house on C Street in Washington, D.C., known simply as C Street. Officially registered as a church, the building serves as a meeting place and residence for conservative politicians.

Few members of the fellowship talk about the group’s mission. The organization organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast that is attended by the president, members of Congress, and diplomats from around the world. Earlier this year, Obama presented his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the event. According to Jeff Sharlet who wrote a book about the group, the Family’s philosophy is based on “a sort of trickle-down fundamentalism,” that believes that the wealthy and powerful, if they “can get their hearts right with God … will dispense blessings to those underneath them.” True believers in market orthodoxy, Family members think that God’s will operates directly through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”

The Family’s current leader Doug Coe is secretive but enjoys considerable political influence as a spiritual adviser. When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, himself a visitor and a kind of honorary alumni at C Street, compared his political difficulties involving his affair with an Argentine woman to those of biblical King David, the South Carolina politician was falling back on a central figure in Family theology. You could “almost hear Doug Coe’s voice” coming out of Sanford, Sharlet remarks.

C Street’s stately red brick, $1.1 million building is subsidized by secretive religious organizations and is located a mere stone’s throw away from the Capitol. Lawmakers who live there include Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN); Bart Stupak (D-MI);Jim DeMint (R-SC); Mike Doyle (D-PA); and Sens. John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Sam Brownback (R-KS). The lawmakers, all Christians, live in private rooms upstairs and pay an incredibly low rent — a paltry $600 — to live at C Street.

When they’re not philandering and violating their own professed Christian morality, C Street members push for the projection of U.S. power abroad. As Obama went to Port of Spain, Trinidad for the Summit of the Americas in April, Ensign who criticized the president for shaking Hugo Chávez’s hand. (Source-http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/2016)

According to the Washington Post the house is owned by Youth With a Mission D.C. Youth With a Mission is one of the most extensive Christian fundamentalist para-church organizations on Earth, and YWAM founder leader Loren Cunningham has publicly outlined a vision for Christian world-control.

In a 2008 promotional video, “Reclaiming 7 Mountains of Culture”, Loren Cunningham describes a vision he shared along with the late Campus Crusade For Christ founder Bill Bright and late Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, in which Christian fundamentalists could achieve world domination by taking over key sectors of society such as business, government, media, and education.

Francis Schaeffer is widely credited as one of the most influential theologians of the 20th Century Christian right. Among the myriad ministries of Bill Bright’s behemoth Campus Crusade For Christ is the Washington D.C. ministry Christian Embassy that targets Pentagon leaders for evangelizing.

The C Street House is run by a secretive Washington ministry known as The Family, or The Fellowship. Over the past year and a half, The Family has gradually come to public attention, mainly due to journalist and Harpers editor Jeff Sharlet’s ground breaking book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The Family runs the yearly National Prayer Breakfast and maintains a network of Capital Hill prayer groups which have enjoyed the participation of both top GOP but also top Democratic Party Congress and Senate members.
As Cunningham introduces Reclaim 7 Mountains of Culture, “It was August, 1975… and the Lord had given me, that day a list of things that I had never thought about before. He said, ‘This is the way to reach America, and nations, for God.’ ”

The video continues with a narrator who declares, “In every city of the world, an unseen battle rages for dominion over God’s creation and the souls of people. This battle is fought on seven strategic fronts, looming like mountains over the culture, that shape and influence its destiny. Over the years, the church slowly retreated from its place of influence on these mountains, leaving a void now filled with darkness. When we lose our influence, we lose the culture and when we lose the culture we fail to advance the kingdom of God. And now, a generation stands in desperate need. It’s time to fight for them and take back these mountains of influence.” (Source-http://www.open.salon.com/blog/tre_gibbs/2009/07/11/c-street_house_and_the_family_-_america_needs_to_see_this)

…what makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations, two things, you said that it’s secretive. Indeed the leader of the group describes, he says, the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have. And the other things is the nature of the influence they want to have.

The family began, it’s the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington and it goes back seventy years. And the founder believed that god gave him a new revelation saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out, he believes god came to him one night in April in 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful. And that these powerful men who were chosen by god can then if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism. (Source-http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/rachel-maddow-show-christian-conservatisms)

Think of C-Street as a TWO-WAY half-way house — except all of the house residents and visitors hold positions of tremendous elected power.
Some of the residents and visitors are RECEOVERING addicts, like former long-time cocaine addict Zach Wamp.
Others are heading into or dealing with CURRENT addictions, like sex addicts John Ensign and Mark Sanford.
And either way, the ultra-secretive house sponsor (who praises Hitler, Mao, and Stalin as role models) get free access with, and leverage over, these former and new addicts.
Nice set-up — that is, if you are a powerful politician who needs a place to live, who is willing to swear to secrecy, and who is willing to pretend not to see evil. (Source-http://blogs.nashvillescene.com/pitw/2009/07/wamp_defends_c_street_house_as.php)

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Americans, enjoy a thoughtful 4th of July

4 July 2009 | Author: Jack

Take pride in your accomplishments, be happy you’re American.

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Election won’t change Iran

27 June 2009 | Author: Jack

Lila Ghobady has written a powerful statement about the Iranian elections, and why the country won’t change no matter who was elected.

Why didn’t I vote in the latest elections for the president of the country of my birth, Iran? Because no matter who is the president of Iran, they would stone me!lila7

As an Iranian woman, I require big changes in order to convince myself that a change in president would mean an improvement of my basic rights as human being inside Iran.

I was among many Iranians who decided not to vote in the recent [s]election. We boycotted the sham election in my motherland and have not been surprised by the results publicized by the mainstream media, both in Iran and elsewhere. This puppet regime has never considered the people’s wishes and has always acted in the interests of the few who are in charge of the prison called Iran. Cheating, lying and hypocrisy are the specialties of the religious demagogues that maintain the farce that Iran is a democratic state.

A quick look at Mousavi’s political biography reveals him to be a fanatic Khomeini supporter and a fanatic hard-liner similar to Ahmadinejad and others in control of the Islamic regime. His reign as Prime Minister was one of the darkest times in the history of Iran’s Islamic regime in terms of censorship and human rights violations. He is also backed up by the Rafsanjani mafia family, who have stolen oil money for their own family interests while 70% of the population lives in poverty. So ingrained as he is in a system of corruption and exploitation, that how could anyone believe that Mousavi genuinely wants reform?

Please click over and read the full article. Lila makes a compelling argument that Iran will remain unchanged no matter who prevails in the elections.

Lila Ghobady is an exiled Iranian writer-journalist and filmmaker living in Canada since 2002. She has been involved with human rights since working as a journalis in Iran and has continued her work in Canada when she arrived as a refugee. She has worked as a Producer and associate Director of internationally-praised underground films along fellow exiled filmmaker Moslem Mansouri before leaving Iran. Her recent film Forbidden Sun Dance has been well-received in several countries. As a journalist, she received the title of BlogHer of the Week for her Review piece on Slumdog Millionaire in March 2009. Lila has received her Master’s degree in Canadian/women studies from Carleton University in Ottawa.

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The Left’s Limbaugh

24 June 2009 | Author: Jack

Keith Olbermann:

While I tend to agree with many of your opinions, you come off as mean spirited, as if your desire was to become the Limbaugh of the left. I don’t respect Rush’s rudeness and egotism, his shallow intelligence and tendency to foam at the mouth while pontificating. I dislike his style, and because of that I spare myself the agony of listening to him any more often than absolutely necessary.

Speaking of Limbaugh, Keith, may I add that I see far too much of him watching your show. If the man is as easily dismissed as intelligent opposition as you almost nightly contend, and I agree his can be, why continue to give him additional exposure on your program? The less exposure he gets the better. Let him talk, but don’t make those of us who tune in to hear you have to listen to so much of him.

OK, enough about him.

Keith, I feel your frustration. I share it. But I try not to feed it.

No matter how well you can defend your opinions, when you show more interest in humiliating the opposition than informing me of the facts I get uncomfortable. I’ve never liked bullies, even after I reached an age where they no longer bothered me personally (30-something). I don’t like smart bullies. I don’t like bullies of any stripe. And you, sir, are a bully.

Maddow and Stewart seem to be able to bring me the same information you do without the uncomfortableness. They use satire and humor to expose the same silliness that appears to giving you a near heart attack. They make me think about issues, you want an emotional reaction. That’s one of the many things I dislike about religion, it thrives on emotion. I’m not unemotional, but I certainly try to balance my emotions with thoughtful consideration.

By the way, none of you conduct an interview as well as Charlie Rose or James Lipton.keith_olbermann

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Iran’s all a-Twitter

16 June 2009 | Author: Jack

Just read Clay Shirky’s perspective on the election turmoil in Iran. It’s hardly surprising he’d focus on the technological aspect.

“… this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.” (Source-Anthropology.net)

Extraordinary, you bet. Unprecedented, no doubt. A positive development and one that produces the tangible results of greater freedom for all Iranians? Too early to tell, but the initial signs aren’t good.mousavi-supporters-enghelab-to-azadi10

That the disagreement over the election results is so profound and involves such powerful figures in Iranian society is frightening. This is not a situation I see calming down any time soon. Thankfully we don’t (yet) endure a theocratic government, so it’s hard for some Americans to appreciate what it means to have the Ayatollah oppose the election results. Here we know Pat Robertson hates the president, so what? But there, it’s a serious situation.

So far Iran has shut down access to many websites and blogs, thrown out the Western press and, according to something I read on Friendfeed today (failed to get the link), the government is actually creating phony “anti-Ahmadinejad” sites so they can harvest the names of Iranians who register or leave comments there.

Let’s hope whatever happens in the near future there it stays within their borders and doesn’t spill over to the rest of the world. There’s no way in hell we can afford (literally and figuratively) to be involved in international conflicts on three fronts. We may have to establish priorities; Afghanistan may have to wait if Korea or Iran become a larger and more immediate threat.

Posted in International | Comments

not a fact but a fancy

27 May 2009 | Author: Jack

Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot commit…

G W Foote

G W Foote

When the Atheist examines, denounces, or satirises the gods, he is not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God, for he does not admit the existence of any such being….

We attack not a person but a belief, not a binge but an idea, not a fact but a fancy.

G W Foote, “Who are the Blasphemers?” in Flowers of Freethought

Posted in Atheism, Free Thought, Government, Philosophy | Comments
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