Rod Smith for Governor

I was quite bothered by a Rod Smith for Governor commercial I saw, here in Florida. The Democrat’s commercial focused on the issue of stem cell research and, while he is admirable in calling out the President directly, it is a shame that he also made use of misleading semantics.

“President Bush was wrong to veto stem cell research… In the Senate I fought for stem cell research. The Republicans killed it.”

First of all, Bush did not veto stem cell research itself — instead, he vetoed Federal funding for the creation of further lines. (Again, an odd position to take for Bush, the man who condemns all such research as murder. Why preserve the current lines?)

Secondly, “the Republicans” did not “kill stem cell research.” George Bush vetoed the aforementioned bill to extend funding. Despite the fact that he is a Republican, he is only one, therefore a reference to him in the plural would be incorrect. Also, many Republicans did support the bill, I would imagine. Lastly, it is possible that Smith is referring to the option of passing a bill over the Presidential veto. It is possible that not enough Republicans signed on to the bill to pass it after the President vetoed it, but this is not made clear by Smith’s language.

Misleading information is disgraceful in any context to the speaker and, often, the cause. It is lamentable that Smith would make use of this language to foster an us-against-them mentality that already pervades our culture too much.

The War on Reason

Today the New York Times reported on a rather discouraging development inside the administration’s Department of Education. Earlier this year, Congress created the SMART grant program for impoverished college students. On the application, college students must specify their major to make sure that they are eligible to receive Federal assistance.

Of late, “Evolutionary Biology” has disappeared from the list of approved majors. That is, if a student is majoring in evolution, they can no longer receive assistance from the government. The omission is especially odd because, although the DoE insists that this is a clerical error, the generation of the list is an automated process. That implies a deliberate action on the part of someone with a high enough standing to have access to the list.

The war on reason continues — and this time it appears that elements within the administration have overtly acted on their prejudice against the offensive science of evolution.

As mentioned earlier in my posts, the Religious Right views the fight against evolution as a moral issue: if we are all random creatures governed by chance — they contend — then we have no moral imperatives, no guidelines, and no purpose in life. Besides the fact that this argument is grossly invalid, it is all the more outrageous that so many people subscribe to it wholeheartedly.

This is wrong: it is wrong to supersede fact with ideology in the face of demonstrable truths. It is wrong to shortchange our youth in the name of religion, and it is wrong to wage war on the truth that you fear.

“The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.” –Thoreau

Large sums of money

The United States spent three and a half billion dollars last year researching ways to combat and detect improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Anytime I hear a large number, I leap to my calculator and do quick math with that handy rule of thumb I heard in some Save the Children commercial. Remember: it takes eighty cents to feed, clothe and house one human being for one day.

Three and a half billion dollars would care for a person, at that rate, for almost twelve million years. If you divide by a lifespan, even a very long lifespan, like a hundred years, you get nearly one hundred and twenty thousand (119,863). What is this number? That is the number of lifespans for which a person could be fed, clothed, and housed, cradle to grave, with the amount of money the Pentagon spent combatting IED’s in Iraq.

Now the time comes for a comparison: I would chalk up the nearly one hundred thousand civilian deaths in Iraq as a direct consequence of the war. I ask you to think of the more than two hundred thousand people who would benefit if this war had otherwise not been so fought, the country not so destabilized and destroyed, and that money spent on charitable donations. Some two hundred thousand people could have benefitted directly. Instead, hundreds of thousands are dead and the country is engulfed in turmoil. And our government continually misplaces its financial priorities in such an offensive manner as I have demonstrated.

One Small Step

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14393611/

“DETROIT – A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.”

Amazing news. It’s reassuring to hear that, even in these demagogic and dystopian times, our liberal activist judges can still legislate from the bench and coddle the Islamo-Fascist terrorist killers — I mean, protect our civil liberties.

One small step, for man. This is very good news, indeed.

WWII, anyone?

http://ironingtheflag.com/#ohnos

Unless we pull our 140,000 troops out in the next 4 hours, we will have officially been involved with Iraq for longer than we were fighting the Nazis.

Mike Gallagher

I have to stop watching Fox News.

Mike Gallagher, on Fox News, in defense of profiling: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim.”

That’s just not true. With a heavy sigh I repeat that the Unibomber and Timothy McVeigh are were not Muslim, nor were the Christian activists that blew up abortion clinics. Or were all of them — for some ad hoc apologia — not terrorists?

It only takes one counter example to refute a universal claim. I just want people to think.

Tony Snow

Tony Snow, White House Press Secretary: “You can’t go overboard when you’re trying to protect lives.”

Of course not. Let’s sort everyone by race and put them in internment camps. Hey, as long as we say we’re trying to protect lives, we can do whatever the Hell we want. That’s what Tony Snow just said.

On the surface it seems endearing and heartfelt — “We’re doing everything we can to protect you!” But if you read a little deeper it quickly becomes “We can do anything we want if we say we’re trying to protect you.”

I urge everyone to reject the politics of fear and safeguard your liberty. Eternal vigilance against your own government is the price of freedom.

Sean Hannity

I caught a couple minutes of Sean Hannity haranguing a Democratic strategist, accusing him of wanting to “cut and run” — Bless the strategist that thought that one up — and lecturing him that, “We’re watching the rise of Nazism right now.” His guest, whose name escapes me at the moment, pointed out that it was the Democratic party that rose to fight Nazism against the protests of the Republicans, but that erudite and demolishing rebuttal was quickly drowned by more poorly thought out complaints from Hannity.

“Islamo-Fascists are coming to kill us right now!” Hannity blared. We call that demagoguery in the sane world. “The Democrats want to call the President a liar every day!”

He is. I won’t present the evidence here — it’s readily available. But let’s pretend for an instant that he was a liar, regardless of the evidence. What is wrong with exposing him as a liar, even in the hypothetical? For what reason would it be better for us to blindly follow a liar than to do our best to expose him? What reason? Why, at all, should any one person stay silent in the presence, and under the faulty leadership of a liar?

Hannity’s side of the argument also made heavy use of the bandwagon fallacy, at which I simply scoffed.

I wish I could get a transcript, go through line by line, and just rebuke every point, every idea spat forth. I wish I could be on that show, but I would probably just vomit with rage at the lack of productive conversation, of compassion, of listening by either side; and at the excess of one-sided rhetoric and closed-mindedness. It’s really sickening and sad.

These are important conversations. So many people believe it is wrong to criticize the President during a time of war. But certainly that must not always be the case. Certainly the morally upstanding citizens in Nazi Germany felt compelled to speak out against their leader. (See my previous post on the comparison between Bush and Hitler’s rise to power, and then rethink Hannity’s assertion that “We are seeing the rise of Nazism today.” The irony is palpable.)

Or: let’s all get together and start from scratch and consider the alternatives in Iraq. That would be a good, productive conversation, the conclusions of which would be vitally important for millions of individuals. How come that never happens? I do my best to stay open minded. If you can convince me we should stay in Iraq — or do anything other than trying to get out and hand things over to the UN — then I am open for discussion. I am open because I realize the importance of these issues in today’s society.

BP Redux

Today the news comes out that BP is shutting down an Alaskan oil field because of a corroded pipeline. The field accounts for almost ten percent of America’s oil production.

I find it ironic that, in light of BP’s previously mentioned commercials that paint them as the saviors of the global climate, the truth comes out that they had let their pipeline corrode for seven years without checking it.

It is likely that BP’s bottom line will hurt from this significantly. But it is also possible that this will hurt them less than if they had inspected and repaired their pipes on a regular basis. In that sense, the inerrant motivator and capitalist Lord Profit has resulted in this situation, which is perilously close to hurting both the environment and the consumer.

In short, BP is like every other company in a barely regulated and ludicrously moneyed industry: the only thing that matters to it is the bottom line. If that means leaving its pipes unchecked for several years at a time, which is perfectly legal, or if it means forgoing research into alternative fuels because it may well not produce any immediate profits, then that’s exactly what BP will do.

If you speak English

I saw a bumper sticker a few days ago that said, “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If it’s in English, thank a soldier.”

Besides the prima facie simplicity and absurdity of the message — for example, should the Latinos in Miami not thank a soldier, for they are likely reading bumper stickers in Spanish? — there is another claim that is mistaken.

The only time this country has been invaded — and had to defend our soil against the soldiers of another country, threatening to overthrow our government and institute their own — was, with a stretch, the War of 1812. (For technical purposes, I won’t count the American Revolution, seeing as how we arguably weren’t a country at the time.) I will remind readers that, during both of the above instances — 1812 and the Revolution, both of which we instigated — the only language we would have been forced to speak if dominated and occupied would have been English with a funny accent. Not German, not Japanese, not Arabic. There was no threat that we would all be speaking Arabic because of 9/11, or because of Iraq; or Russian because of the Cold War. We, as a country, and our government and our way of life are not threatened. A solider has never saved me from speaking another language.

Errata: During WWII, I believe, the Germans landed a submarine somewhere in Florida and four soldiers were captured. As well, the Japanese sent over incendiary balloons that landed in the Pacific Northwest. I refer you to my earlier claim that neither of these instances would threaten the national language of America.