Saturday, March 24, 2007

24 Mar 2007 09:17 pm

Fixing the Patriot Act

Now we know who knew about that "secret" provision stuffed into the Patriot Act to enable the firings of the US Attorneys without Congressional review. I wonder what talking point Charles Krauthammer will haul out to defend this one.

24 Mar 2007 08:29 pm

Homer on the Computer

A classic 30 seconds:

24 Mar 2007 06:57 pm

Face of the Day

Protestors wearing "Karl Rove" masks stand in front of Shenendoah Country Club to protest an appearance by Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove at the annual Republican Lincoln Day dinner March 24, 2007 in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Rove is giving the keynote speech for the Jackson County Republican party annual party. (Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty.)

24 Mar 2007 06:44 pm

Harlots

The Christian movement for more modesty for women's clothing is a real one, if a pale shadow of the kind of strictures in most Islamic countries. Here's a survey of young Christian men and their views on modesty. And here are some replies:

Ladies, this is where you can get confused. Many women would think guys are ‘all about’ women who flaunt their bodies. I am here to attempt to speak for us Christian men fighting the fight for purity. Women like this disgust and frustrate me. They take advantage of something that God intended to be beautiful. They lure men away from that which they truly love. They make men like me fight and struggle, and cause many to fall. THESE WOMEN SHOULD NOT BE ADORED OR FOLLOWED! Christian sisters, please do not think that this attention is anything more than a result of short-sighted shallow men who are sexually frustrated and unwilling to follow God’s plan for sex. To me, women who flaunt their bodies make me turn my head, repulsed, and pray that God would guard my heart, eyes, and mind, and that somehow He would show them His infinite love, and that they don’t need to act in this way to be loved.

It's all the fault of the women, see? That makes some Christian men mad:

It actually really angers me. I find it disrespectful. I don’t think they get it. Do they realize that they have just caused someone to have sexual thoughts about them in their mind? Now the guy feels bad because he fell AGAIN and the girl wiggles on her merry way. If an unsaved girl dresses this way it doesn’t bother me that much, because really how would she know better? But a girl who says she is a Christian, and she says her body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. When that girl flaunts her body in a sexual way, I get really frustrated, because she should know better! Another thing I would like to know is..where is her father??!! He is a man, he knows how we think, how can he let her go out dressed like that??!!

Maybe D'Souza's Christianist-Islamist alliance has more potential than I thought.

24 Mar 2007 04:27 pm

The Non-Voice of Objectivity

"So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first persons -- and a lot of magazine first persons too -- are written in the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They're the voice of the Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody cares about journalists. They're not normal people. So choose a first person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think about which one will help you tell the story. You'll see that in very subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock interesting things." - Michael Pollan, giving good advice on writing about nature and science.

24 Mar 2007 04:12 pm

Rumsfeld on 9/11

A glimpse of what happened in the Pentagon that day.

24 Mar 2007 04:02 pm

HRC's Lobbying

A defense from Michael Petrelis. He cites Human Rights Campaign spending last year of $1.2 million on lobbying. It sounds impressive until you realize that that's out of $39 million in 2006 income, according to their annual report - around 3 percent of the total. In contrast, they spent 21 percent of their income on fundraising for more dollars. In total, they say they spent another 19 percent of their budget on "federal, field electoral and legal advocacy" in 2006, an election year, and 25 percent on "Public Policy, Education and Training". The categories are vague to me (perhaps deliberately so) and I may be missing something. I'm not an expert on these things and I don't want to misrepresent them. If readers more familiar than I with lobby groups can analyse and inspect the report here, I'd be grateful. All I'm trying to do is figure out if HRC as a whole is giving people value for money. Maybe readers can help.

24 Mar 2007 03:25 pm

Bushies and Ideologues

Ideologues have a right to be offended by the comparison.

24 Mar 2007 02:41 pm

The View From Your Window

Hanoi, Vietnam, 9 am.

24 Mar 2007 02:13 pm

Quote for the Day

"This is why, in the end, the greatest victims of torture-as-usual are the rest of us, the informed public. A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization's greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity," - Slavoj Zizek, in the NYT today.

24 Mar 2007 01:37 pm

Bikes

Want to reduce carbon emissions and fight the diabetes and obesity epidemic? Paris has the right idea.

24 Mar 2007 12:33 pm

Go, Gonzales

This is the final straw, surely. We now know he directly lied about his involvement in the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys. A month ago he said this:

"So far as I knew, my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers,' he said. "Where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that's what I knew... That is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on," he said. "That's basically what I knew as the attorney general." ...

"Many decisions are delegated," he said. "We have people who were confirmed by the Senate who, by statute, have been delegated authority to make decisions." Mr. Gonzales then repeated: "I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood."

Yesterday we found out that

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at a meeting last Nov. 27, 10 days before the dismissals were carried out, according to a Justice Department calendar entry disclosed Friday.

Of course the relevant emails came out after a suitable delay, to keep the press at bay. No one can have any confidence any more that the AG isn't a liar. He has lied to Senators; he has lied to the press. He's got to go.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

24 Mar 2007 10:46 am

Drugs and Toxicity

One way to measure the dangers of various drugs is to examine how toxic the drug is at various levels. Can too much kill you? And how much is too much? Here's an interesting article on what we know scientifically about the matter. Money quote:

The most toxic recreational drugs, such as GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) and heroin, have a lethal dose less than 10 times their typical effective dose. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, often called "ecstasy") and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or "roofies") and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. I've found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. My surmise is that smoking marijuana is more risky than eating it but still safer than getting drunk.

Alcohol thus ranks at the dangerous end of the toxicity spectrum. So despite the fact that about 75 percent of all adults in the United States enjoy an occasional drink, it must be remembered that alcohol is quite toxic. Indeed, if alcohol were a newly formulated beverage, its high toxicity and addiction potential would surely prevent it from being marketed as a food or drug. This conclusion runs counter to the common view that one's own use of alcohol is harmless.

The least toxic drug known to humans is now illegal. The most toxic is available at Safeway. None of this makes any sense at all. And yet we continue to imprison people for ingesting substances far less harmful than others freely available. One has to wonder what the prohibitionists are smoking. Maybe nutmeg.

24 Mar 2007 05:38 am

Debating The Big Wow

Well it's the weekend and this blog has been covering some arcane ground in the debate about science and faith. So here's an email exchange prompted by this blog between Stuart Hameroff from the University of Arizona and Sam Harris. It's long and if you're uninterested, skip to the next post. But I find it fascinating to observe two minds engaging each other on these fundamental issues. Hameroff emailed me first about Sam's comments about the Big Wow theory I posted about here. Here's Stuart's email:

I am writing because my work was mentioned in the 'Big Wow' post by James Greer in the context of your discussion with Sam Harris. The controversial theory of consciousness I developed with Sir Roger Penrose (called Orch OR for orchestrated objective reduction) can potentially bridge the gap between science and soul.

Sam writes:

Granted, there are still many gaps in neuroscience into which a soul might still be inserted, just as there are gaps in our understanding of the cosmos into which the faithful eagerly insert God, but such maneuvers are utterly without intellectual merit.

I strongly disagree that Orch OR is without intellectual merit and challenge Sam to show that it is.

First, by soul I mean that consciousness (and/or unconscious processes) may be accompanied by: 1) nonlocal interconnectedness among living beings, 2) interaction with a Platonic wisdom, or cosmic intelligence inherent in the universe, and 3) existence outside the body.

I am not claiming proof of the soul, but of a scientifically plausible explanation for it based on these three factors. The potential explanation involves quantum theory, a poorly understood but indisputably accurate field of science. Orch OR proposes that consciousness is a sequence of momentary frames, or conscious events occurring in the brain roughly 40 times per second (faster or slower depending on arousal etc), coupled to high frequency EEG brain waves called gamma synchrony.

Each conscious moment is a quantum event – a coalescence of unconscious quantum possibilities to definite values ... a collapse of the wave function, or quantum state reduction. The particular values selected in each reduction define conscious experience and control behavior.

Roger Penrose suggested such events are reconfigurations at the most basic, irreducible level of Einstein's spacetime continuum, called the Planck scale (describable by quantum gravity, string theory etc). Infinitesimally smaller than atoms or quarks, the Planck scale is quantized and nonrandom – it has specific geometry, information and logic.

Plato had suggested an abstract world of pure truth, form, aesthetic and ethical values. Beginning with mathematical laws, Penrose placed Plato’s world in patterns of Planck scale geometry. So the fundamental Planck scale may encode the cosmic blueprint ... Platonic information embedded (perhaps evolving) since the Big Bang (Big Wow?) in nonlocal patterns in quantum logic repeating at varying scales…like a hologram throughout the universe. Call it quantum logic of the universe (QLU).

In his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose suggested that such information/logic could influence our conscious perceptions and choices. Although Penrose avoided any reference to religion or spirituality, others were struck by potential analogies to divine guidance, the way of the Tao, may the force be with you, etc.

Penrose didn't have a good neurobiological structure for quantum computation in the brain, but I did. Since 1972 I had studied computing capabilities of microtubules - structural lattices inside neurons which organize their activities. I also knew that anesthetic gases selectively erase consciousness solely through very weak quantum forces. Roger and I teamed up and put forth our Orch OR model based on quantum computing in microtubules in 1994.

Neuroscience and mainstream philosophy attacked our theory even before it was published, and continue to do so. Nonetheless Orch OR remains viable, completely consistent with known neuroscience and can also account for aspects of the soul.

1) Interconnectedness among living beings can be accounted for by nonlocal quantum entanglement. 2) Interaction with cosmic intelligence may be influence by Penrose noncomputable Platonic wisdom embedded in Planck scale geometry. 3) Existence outside the body: According to Orch OR, consciousness occurs at the fundamental level of Planck scale geometry, normally in and around microtubules between our ears. But when brain coherence is lost, quantum information related to consciousness and the unconscious mind remain in the universe, distributed but still entangled.

So I believe that science can in principle accommodate the soul through the application of quantum mechanics to neuroscience.

In a strange twist, atheist scientists and philosophers (Sam Harris – whom I met at the Beyond Belief conference in La Jolla - is actually one of the more reasonable ones) have become “holier-than-thou”. However the neurocomputational model on which they base their case for how the brain produces consciousness is flawed, as I show in a forthcoming paper in the journal Cognitive Science.

I would like to hear Sam’s comments on this paper, and would be happy to debate him or anyone else on whether science can provide a plausible explanation for the soul. I say yes.

One final comment. Sam also said

"While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us."

I agree. Although Descartes separated mind and matter, it is logical to assume they both derive from a common underlying entity, e.g. the doctrine of neutral monism, put forth by Spinoza whose common underlying entity was a God responsible for the scientific laws and harmony of the universe. Modern physics indicates both matter and mind derive from Planck scale geometry.

Sam replied to Stuart as follows, and Stuart responded. Here's the exchange in a fisk-like dialogue. Sam's response is in italics.

Dear Stuart

I'm not sure what I wrote that got construed as an attack upon Orch OR. There is nothing about my criticism of religious faith that entails materialism. Whenever I get the chance, I am very quick to say that I do not know what the relationship  between consciousness and matter is. While I have never understood how your microtubule account solves "the hard problem" or closes the "explanatory gap," this is a very different criticism than I have leveled at religion. And I have never said (or thought) that what you and Penrose are doing is "without intellectual merit."

Thanks ... as I said in my post to Andrew, you are among the more reasonable of the people I met at the La Jolla conference. I could only stay there one day but Paul Davies said that after I left you endorsed what might be construed as a secular Buddhist position. Is that true? Comparisons between Buddhism and quantum physics go way back.

I do not rule out the possibility of our finding some sound, scientific reasons to believe in things that appear very spooky to most scientists at present--from telepathy to mathematical idealism. And the fact that I do not rule such things out has made many atheists uncomfortable.

Good for you.

I do not foresee, however, our finding good reasons to believe that the Bible was dictated by an omniscient being who disapproves of sodomy but occasionally fancies human sacrifice. These claims really do strike me as being "without intellectual merit." Of course, on this and all fronts, I remain open to compelling evidence.

I agree with you. My take is that there exists a fundamental Platonic wisdom embedded in the Planck scale (along with qualia, spin, charge etc) which has inspired mankind to write the great books and act 'in the name of God'....but man being man, many such efforts are misdirected, coopted and perverted.

I defined the soul in such a way to be agnostic...(which is what you are sounding like rather than atheist) But I was responding to your comment

Granted, there are still many gaps in neuroscience into which a  soul might still be inserted, ... but such maneuvers are  utterly without intellectual merit.

By implication at least, Orch OR is one such maneuver "utterly without merit". Are there any others based on sound science?

But lets talk about faith vs reason. In my article in press in Cognitive Science (on my website - have a look please, since you are a neuroscientist - I argue that the faith of neuroscientists (based on brain=mind=computer) that conventional neurocomputation accounts for consciousness is illogical and refuted by evidence. Reason is NOT on the side of the neuroscientists.

I'll continue my own debate with Sam next week. The last two posts in our blogalogue are here and here. But this has been for me at least a fascinating diversion. I also found out that Stuart Hameroff is Bob Kaplan's cousin - yes the Bob Kaplan who writes for the Atlantic and whose book was the focus of our book club a few years ago. Small world.

Friday, March 23, 2007

23 Mar 2007 09:09 pm

Sanjaya!

He's going to win it if the ornery and mischievous start voting; and she's going to starve.

23 Mar 2007 08:08 pm

The Drunkest Hacks

Gawker has a contest.

23 Mar 2007 07:03 pm

HRC Latest

The editor of the Washington Blade weighs in. He makes some fair points. But two questions remain unanswered, and they merit an answer. The first is about Senator Clinton's speech to HRC. Pace Kevin Naff and John Aravosis, no one has claimed that Clinton was the only candidate invited to address HRC's board. The real question about the speech is: why was it not announced beforehand? Why was the press not told? Why was it not on the senator's public schedule?

The content was no secret - a video of the event appeared almost instantly on the web. So why were the press thrown off the scent? You'd think HRC would be thrilled with the attention. You think Focus on the Family would hide the fact that a leading Republican candidate addressed them? Please. The official explanation is that it was a Board Meeting and thus closed to the public. The usual exclusiveness and secrecy. So why release the video? My fear is that either HRC (the group) or HRC (the senator) believes that wide press coverage of Senator Clinton addressing HRC would be damaging to both. So they did it on the downlow. They're intimidated by the far right. It's the same defensive crouch we saw when Clinton could not even rebut Peter Pace's comments on the "immorality" of homosexuality a couple of weeks later. The implicit message is: Clinton will back us but only if we keep it quiet. This is a political version of the closet, and it simply won't wash. If HRC wants to endorse Clinton, fine. But welcome her and endorse her in the open in the light of day. Have her address the group with the press present. Get clear promises from her. Hold her accountable in office. Instead, we got a classic example of HRC's dysfunctional secrecy, cravenness and partisanship. And we risk the same mug's game that we went through with her husband. If Clinton isn't comfortable standing up in public in front of the press defending gay rights to a gay group, then she has no business addressing it in the first place. Cut out the defensiveness. And cut out the secrecy.

The second question is one posed again by Naff. It's simple. How many members have paid the recommended minimum membership fee of $35 in the last year? HRC has the answer. They won't tell us. They feel contempt for the press and for much of the gay movement. In Naff's words:

HRC should answer the questions raised about its actual membership and resolve this distraction once and for all.

How about it?

23 Mar 2007 06:15 pm

Dum Spiro Spero

"While I breathe, I hope" - my reader's inspiration (from the same Latin root) - is a phrase not from the Bible but from Cicero. It's also the state motto of South Carolina.

23 Mar 2007 06:06 pm

National Security

Which party has the edge? It was once a truism that it was the Republicans. After this crew, and their bungled wars, it's a different story.

23 Mar 2007 05:12 pm

Life, Death, Life

A reader writes:

I was diagnosed with kidney failure before I was 22. I was so young. I can barely conceive of such youth, now. I was not really diagnosed. It was more like being mauled by a bear, or hit by a truck. I was out of my head and unconscious for a few days, but the sickness was easy for doctors to diagnose.

In the beginning, as I realized the gravity of my illness, I did not take it well. I was completely disoriented and confused. Only my mother and father kept me going. Gradually, as I adapted to this new way of life, I struggled to cope.  I saw people give up when there was still hope, and they died. I started to think "don't give up hope, when there is still hope left." Later, I found a quote which I have held as my own, "while I breathe, I hope." I don't know where it came from, perhaps from the Bible? I don't know.

The summer I got sick, I had just graduated from college and I would begin graduate school in the Fall. The nephrologist who was assigned to me was a young man. He told me that I was not to worry, that he would do all my worrying for me. He told me not to cancel my plans for graduate school, that graduate school was the best place for me. I did not take him up on his offer to do all my worrying for me, but I did go to graduate school.

I am thinking about this because of John and Elizabeth Edwards's decision to continue their campaign. It is a good decision.

I agree. When I went through a similar experience, I found this book by Anatole Broyard particularly helpful. Only the Gospels helped me more.

23 Mar 2007 04:46 pm

Face Of The Day

Britain's Prince Charles takes tea with some of the residents of Whiteley Village, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, 23 March 2007. By Chris Young/AFP/Getty.

23 Mar 2007 04:17 pm

BBC Watch

It's another institution that could do with a lot more transparency and accountability. This story seems pretty damning to me.

23 Mar 2007 03:49 pm

Romney Explodes At A Christianist

Concerned Women for America's Sandy Rios got into a major spat with governor Mitt Romney over marriage equality at a small gathering with various religious conservatives. She talks about her private confrontation with Romney here on her radio show. Money quote:

"He was absolutely furious with me. He completely lost his composure and his temper."

She goes on to say that she won't support him and would prefer Giuliani over Romney because "whatever is convenient at the moment seems to be the position [Romney] endorses."

A smart-ass reader adds:

So she prefers Rudy because she wants a guy who can control his temper and won't flip-flop for political expedience. There's a brilliant choice.

23 Mar 2007 03:27 pm

The Danger of Drugs

An interesting analysis of the Lancet study I linked to earlier. A reader states the obvious:

The results seem pretty self evident to me. As someone who has done his fair share of drinking and smoking marijuana, I know which one had significant negative effects if I did too much of it. In short, smoking too much pot just made me sleepy. It never made me emotionally volatile, or had me doing things I regretted the next day. It never caused me to spend hours in the bathroom vomiting. It never left me incapacitated with a terrible hangover the next day.  All of my worst party-related experiences in college were the result of too much booze, not too much pot.

As for gateway drugs, I did cocaine once in my life, over a decade after I smoked my first joint, and, interestingly enough, at the end of a night of heavy drinking.  I never felt the urge to do stronger drugs after smoking marijuana.

What is wrong with our politics that the bleeding obvious has to be denied by almost every single politician?

23 Mar 2007 03:13 pm

Mindless Mencia

Every time his awful face and moronic humor arrives on the television screen, one lunges for the remote at light speed. He's dumb, racist, and unfunny. But other comics claim he's also a plagiarist of others' jokes. I posted a pretty damning YouTube on this a while back. Now check this out: a side-by-side comparison between a joke by Bill Cosby and a joke by Carlos Mencia (not his real name). See for yourself:

23 Mar 2007 02:52 pm

Krauthammer in a Nutshell

Chris Orr gets it right:

a) It's okay for the president - not just legally, but morally - to fire any and all U.S. attorneys any time he feels they are not adequately pursuing his priorities; b) it's okay if those priorities include getting more members of his own party elected; and c) the whole thing is a pseudo-scandal until the evidence of explicit obstruction of justice reaches a threshold where it is beyond dispute.

Yep, that's about it. And the real problem with Gonzales is that he didn't come out and defend this brazen politicization of the justice system to the Congress in the first place. No word from Charles about the bypassing of the Senate with the secret clause slipped into the Patriot Act. But avoidance of such matters is no longer that rare. Charles used to be one of sanest, fairest conservative commentators around. But defending Bush through thick and thin and even torture has clearly taken its toll.

23 Mar 2007 02:26 pm

The Danger of Drugs

A new survey in the Lancet comes to a sane conclusion about the relative dangers of various drugs:

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was ecstasy.

That's why we criminalize pot and ecstasy, and allow massive distribution of booze and tobacco. Marijuana is a gateway drug, after all. If you smoke it you might move on to far more dangerous substances, like beer.

23 Mar 2007 01:50 pm

The Pillowman, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your post about The Pillowman is very interesting; it's a play about which I have profoundly mixed emotions, but your thoughts on it are very illuminating. It's interesting to note that McDonagh wrote the play over ten years ago—apparently all of his works were written in an astonishing burst of creativity that covered a year or two. Since then, he has been parceling out the works; now, he’s turning to film. Obviously, he couldn't have had the current political situation on his mind when he started typing, but the play certainly speaks to the moment in which we find ourselves.

If you haven't seen or read it, I highly recommend his play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It's an even more astonishing piece, to my mind — a farce about terrorism and the IRA — but what a bracing piece of work. For now and for all time, he exposes terrorism as the last refuges of fools, morons, and the morally bankrupt. It probably doesn’t read as well as it plays, but plays like a house on fire.

As to your remark about not being sure what happened in the play, when it opened on Broadway, a number of fans in the Broadway chat rooms speculated that the entire play was yet another of Katurian's stories, and, in fact, had never happened at all. It's a notion that certainly supports one of the play's major themes, on the unbridled vitality of the writer's imagination. I wrote a piece about the production’s design, and when I put this point to the set and lighting designers, they insisted that such an idea had never occurred to them. Still, it seems possible to me ...

The play is great precisely because it transcends any particular moment in time or history and because it is open to multiple levels of interpretation, even about the basic facts in the play itself. McDonagh is clearly, it seems to me, one of the most brilliant playwrights alive today.

23 Mar 2007 01:41 pm

Clinton's Mark Penn Problem

A liberal takes a shot:

I really am not against Senator Clinton or her presidential candidacy. But I really would like to be rid of Mark Penn and the kind of unimaginative, narrow - and narrowing - thinking that he signifies in American politics.

23 Mar 2007 01:34 pm

The View From Your Window

Norwich, Vermont, 10.51 am.

23 Mar 2007 01:20 pm

Paws In Stripes

Never under-estimate the power of beagles.

23 Mar 2007 12:57 pm

Karl Rove's Permanent Minority

I spent part of last night absorbing the latest comprehensive Pew report on trends in public opinion over the last decade. It's a devastating indictment of the Bush-Rove strategy for conservatism and the Republican party. They may have created the most loyally Democratic generation since the New Deal with the under 25s. But check the other findings out. Party identification is now 50 percent Dem and 35 percent GOP. The country is now divided in two over the question of whether military strength is the key to ensuring peace; in 2002 62 percent were hawks and 34 percent were doves. Religious intensity is falling; acceptance of gay people is rising. The younger generation is the most secular of any. Support for the military has never been stronger - people don't blame the troops for the war. The country is divided down the middle on torture, but still in favor of preemptive war in some circumstances. Sorry, Dinesh, but women's equality and freedom are values now overwhelmingly popular among all groups, including Republicans, and strongest among the young. Since Bush has been president, there has been a sharp decline in the number of Americans favoring "old fashioned values about family and marriage." In the last ten years, opposition to gay marriage has dropped ten points and support has risen ten points. There has also been a striking twelve point increase in support for affirmative action over the past decade - all of it among whites.

It turns out that Karl Rove has gone a long way toward securing a permanent majority in American politics ... for liberals and Democrats. The collapse of a coherent, freedom-loving, reality-based conservatism is surely part of the reason.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

23 Mar 2007 12:23 pm

Super Troopers

The military is bringing technology and bio-technology to make US soldiers the most advanced fighters in the world. call it the human enhancement project. I linked to Noah Schachtman's blog post on mind-reading earlier today. Here's a more comprehensive piece on the latest developments.

23 Mar 2007 11:25 am

Sleep Deprivation

The cut-ups on many conservative blogs mock the idea that depriving people of sleep indefinitely is anything close to torture. Stalin disagreed. But one blog decided to find out what happens to the brain when deprived of sleep. Here's part of the journal. This is the post after 126 hours without sleep:

i am certiain i am hearing audioty hallcunations - i hear a cat mewo despite thatfact thast i own no cats. i also hear a weird series of bleeps in different tones - i cannot find the sourceo f them. i snap in and out of an almost trancelike state wher i look at a random object an space out. ifeel delirious, a frien came over to check on me asi told him to, and he thought it was funny that my statements were halfbaked nonsensical jibberish. i no longer simply walk - it is more of a staggerlike lurchin g. my balance is also off. out of the corner of my eyes i believe im seeing visual disturbances an interruptions. no hallucinations - i imagin thos come muhc later - just ripples an slight distortions in my periphial. it may not even be a true hallucination, just delerium.

That's after five days. Now imagine this continuing for the better part of a month - in solitary confinement, and often in shackles and stress positions, as the Bush administration has done to prisoners at Gitmo. And think of the quality of intelligence we're getting at the end of it. The point of torture is now and always has been only torture. The full log is here.

23 Mar 2007 11:24 am

The Pakistan Problem

It's more than a problem; it's a nightmare waiting to happen. This symposium helps explain why.

23 Mar 2007 10:46 am

"I Can't Believe I'm Defending the American Girl Doll Racket"

But he is, Blanche, he is.

23 Mar 2007 10:34 am

Science and Faith

Sam Harris and I aren't the only ones debating and blogging about this eternal subject. A new blog has a new post on the subject. Money quote:

There's a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to as “faith”, that “rational” habits of mind and “magical thinking” cannot coexist in the same skull without leading to a violent collision.

We are not talking about worries that one cannot sensibly reconcile one’s activities in a science which relies on isotopic dating of fossils with one’s belief, based on a literal reading of one’s sacred texts, that the world and everything on it is orders of magnitude younger than isotopic dating would lead us to conclude. We are talking about the view that any intellectually honest scientist who is not an atheist is living a lie.

I have no interest in convincing anyone to abandon his or her atheism. However, I would like to make the case that there is not a forced choice between being an intellectually honest scientist and being a person of faith.

23 Mar 2007 10:10 am

Europe's Internal Myopia

Bruce Bawer vents at the way the European press slimes and smears sane critics of Islamism.

23 Mar 2007 09:30 am

The Rights of Children

An engrossing inter-Catholic blog-debate. This is the post that started it. Money quote:

Ultimately, the tension created by the children’s rights movement is captured in a single question: Whom do we trust to care for the child? Once the state assumes the authority to speak for a child, what happens if the parents fall into a category of people-for example, drug abusers, prisoners, the mentally incompetent-who tend not to act in a way that is most supportive of a child’s future autonomy?  Under Dwyer’s prescription, these parents would bear the burden of proving their worth before the state permitted them to act as parents. It is not difficult to imagine future calls to expand the category of those presumed to be unfit parents to include individuals who would threaten their child’s autonomy by passing on misogynist or homophobic religious beliefs. When parenthood exists as a creation of the state, the boundaries of state power become difficult to discern.

The debate continues here, here, here and here. Larkin pops up, of course.

23 Mar 2007 08:55 am

That Chip In Your Brain

Yes, the Pentagon can read minds. They think it will improve the performance of American soldiers.

23 Mar 2007 08:33 am

"The Pillowman"

I was at the opening night of Martin McDonagh's astonishing play, "The Pillowman," at the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, directed by Joy Zinoman. It's the best contemporary play I've seen in a very long time, and one that seems to me to speak powerfully to our current moment. (Full disclosure: I was at the opening because my other half has a minor part in the ensemble cast.) The production is reviewed here and here. Many will find its subject matter shocking, although there is minimal gore in the production.

The play is set nowhere in particular but in a police state which practices torture. A writer, Katurian, is arrested because he has written unpublished short stories about tortured and murdered children. We are told by the interrogators that three children have recently been murdered in ways eerily similar to the writer's stories. The suspect is also told that his retarded brother has been detained, interrogated and is being tortured. Katurian can hear his brother's screams in the adjoining cell. Katurian is threatened with torture as well - is stabbed in the face with a pen, hooded, beaten up, and hooked up to electrodes (which are never used and might be phony for all we know). Eventually, Katurian confesses to the three murders. I won't give any more plot twists in case you get to see it.

But by the end of the play, I was unsure whether any child-murders had actually taken place. We find out in the play that some confessions are false; in fact, a majority turn out to be false. And yet some other confessions may also be true. And we realize that, in fact, when torture becomes a tool, the possibility of actually discovering any reliable truth is itself a chimera. Coercion destroys empirical reliability. No jury of peers is allowed to weigh both sides of the issue; no independent police force collects evidence; no independent judiciary ensures that a trial is fair; no lawyers operate with equal standing with respect to the evidence, which is itself filtered through the police; interrogators, for their part, lie and lie again. And the interrogators - one sounds like Bill O'Reilly in his passion for protecting children - have good intentions. In a world like this, truth is a fantasy, and reason is always subject to the distortion of violence.

Yes, of course, I could not help but think of the military justice system set up by Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsfeld for alleged "enemy combatants". At the heart of most such cases, the fact of torture or the threat of torture renders any solid grasp on the truth impossible. Some argue that being concerned with torture in the KSM case is to miss the forest for the trees. I can only reply by asking them if they really believe every word of every boastful claim made by the tortured Khaled Sheik Mohammed? I have no doubt that some of what that Islamist monster confessed is true; but I'm sure some of it isn't. And after his being tortured, I don't think there's any solid way to determine which is which. That's why he will never go to trial; and the families of his victims will never know for sure who really killed them on 9/11. This matters - not as a question of "moral vanity" but as a question of empirical truth. When "enemy combatants" can also be American citizens, detained on American soil, like Jose Padilla, we are closer to McDonagh's nightmare than we might imagine.

The problem with torture is not just that it produces bad intelligence, but that its existence and even the possibility of its existence taints all evidence and all testimony. It is simply incompatible with the entire justice system in the West since the Enlightenment and incompatible with military justice as well.  That is why it is illegal. Once it is endorsed, as you see most graphically in "The Pillowman," nothing is believable and everything is believable. Eventually the truth becomes merely one narrative's power against another - one set of stories told by one group compared with another set of stories by another. The issue of veracity is settled by power, not reason, by force, not justice. This is the Schmittian vortex into which the West has been hurled by the Bush administration. This is the vortex from which we have to escape. Under this president, it's impossible. But the next one will have a momentous choice.

23 Mar 2007 07:53 am

Colbert Is Right

Trust your gut.

23 Mar 2007 06:51 am

Why We Went To War, Ctd.

This is a long email, but worth it:

Interesting post on the Butler report and the British case for war in Iraq. You miss, however, the critical phrase in Lord Butler's quote. You cite Butler as saying: all competent intelligence communities "sincerely believed" that Saddam both "possessed and was bent on acquiring such weapons." Then comes the critical clause: everyone agreed, even "Hans Blix when he first took UN observers back into Iraq."

That is, of course the rub.  Blix believed, until he did the research on the ground...and then he concluded that Saddam had no meaningful WMD capacity, in a series of reports delivered to the UN and available to every government and every intelligence agency (and the rest of us, too).

In other words, there was uncertainty; there was an internationally mandated program to reduce that uncertainty; that program did so; its results were consciously ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. Those who did so were wrong. They choose to believe and act on what they wished to be true, rather than on what the best available hard data told them.

You say that you think the truth lies between outright deception and the impossibility that leaders of such demonstrated honor as Bush and Blair could lie to their publics. Probably so:  but it matters a great deal how close to one pole or the other of that dichotomy the answer falls. On the issue of WMDs, the answer is clear. Anyone who thought that Saddam's WMDs presented a significant risk after reading, with care, Blix's reports in early 2003 was not paying attention. I refer you especially to the Wall Street Journal's coverage of this issue, which included a summary of the materials Blix declared unaccounted for, and the possible significance of those materials' survival.

As Blix reported in February, 2003: "UNMOVIC is not infrequently asked how much more time it needs to complete its task in Iraq. The answer depends upon which task one has in mind - the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and related items and programs, which were prohibited in 1991 - the disarmament task - or the monitoring that no new proscribed activities occur. The latter task, though not often focused upon, is highly significant - and not controversial. It will require monitoring, which is "ongoing", that is, open-ended until the Council decides otherwise." In other words: with inspections in place, Saddam's freedom of action would continue to be deeply impaired.

Given this, to argue for war after the first few weeks of 2003 on the basis of an existential threat from Iraqi WMDs (the "mushroom cloud over Manhattan" trope) required either flat rejection of the on the ground reports, or deceit about their meaning. My guess is that both tacks were taken by various members of the Bush administration, composed as it was of fantasists and cynics (and some who mixed both traits), and that the Blair team, more realist than their American counterparts, were the more purely deceitful.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

22 Mar 2007 11:41 pm

Glenn and Andrew

A reader writes:

Here’s something I don’t understand: this recent pettiness and blog-style jabs that two guys, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, throw at each other. I have been reading the blogs for about 6 years and understood why it was that at one time, links and praise between the two of them made sense. But now it seems that neither understands that there is a different way of blogging and putting one’s personality across. Glenn is more upbeat and has less passion for political philosophy differences. A lot of the linked-to news is upbeat. Glenn’s trademark is the three letter commentary. 

Andrew is very open and personal on his blog. He lets the world hear about his personal life’s details: his family, his physical ailments, his pets, music, religion. Andrew also blogs in a stream of consciousness way so that mental contradictions happen. If one watches a breaking story on the cable news channels, one can see that reporters get it wrong, then somewhat right, then wrong again, and finally figure out what truly happened in time for the evening news. The stream of consciousness-like writing means that one will contradict himself as he formulates an opinion for the column or book. Since both bloggers write columns and books, evidence of contradictions or lack of convictions should be found in those mediums, not the blogs themselves. 

Both bloggers have much more in common philosophically than they have in conflict. I love reading both blogs to be exposed, in ways that seem to connect to me, to the latest in electronic gadgetry, porkbusting, space stuff, philosophy, discussions within conservatism, gay things, and a general holding of feet to the fire. This leads me to another question. Is it that libertarian-ish thinking people don’t come together in a meaningful political way because we find other people who think like us to be, well ... pricks?

How to respond? I think the reader has some good points. I'm not sure what Glenn thinks. I do believe there's a reason that libertarian types do not form movements. We're not joiners by temperament. I think what distinguishes us is occasional orneriness. But the joy of the blogosphere is what this reader has figured out. Don't just read one blog. Read a lot. Enjoy the disagreements when they help illuminate real issues. And don't forget that behind these screens are humans: full of vanity, wounded pride, moods, misunderstanding, and occasional sulks.

22 Mar 2007 09:34 pm

The Insane Logic of John Yoo

It would be funny if the Bush administration hadn't taken it completely seriously.

22 Mar 2007 09:25 pm

The End of the Conservative Era?

The signs are ominous, according to the latest polls. You can download it here (PDF). And you can feel it in the culture. When history is written, I predict Karl Rove will have a major legacy: the creation of a permanent minority party.

22 Mar 2007 08:07 pm

Face of the Day

An Iraqi boy stands next to US soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division and members of Iraq's National Police patroling in Baghdad, 21 March 2007. Iraqi Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi called today for talks with the country's insurgent groups, as the Pentagon claimed Al-Qaeda is using children as fodder in their brutal war in Iraq. (By Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)

22 Mar 2007 07:52 pm

Mr Integrity

Tom DeLay denies writing a sentence in his own book.

22 Mar 2007 07:26 pm

Gilded Age Update

Forget rent-a-village. Why not rent a whole country?

22 Mar 2007 06:30 pm

Blair Ain't Bothered

A chav is unleashed at Number 10, Downing Street.