Imagine the Quaker
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archives | newquaker.comSaturday, July 03, 2004
Moore finds the real WMD. I convinced my daughter L. to go with me to see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. She's fought me over it for a week now, but finally couldn't handle my persistence any longer. She hates documentaries, she says, but she sat through this one from beginning to end. It is brilliant, classic Moore, only better. It has the same documentary devices Moore uses in each of his films—celebrity ambushes, well-timed musical accompaniments, man-on-the-street interviews, personal stories, measured humor, clever innuendoes—but this picture seems to have regained the bitter energy that made his first film, Roger & Me (1989), arresting cinema. Not only did he manage to capture that weird sense of surrealism I was feeling about America as Bush et. al. were making up stories about Iraq for a gullible public and a shocked-and-awed Congress, but he also confirmed for me this administration's simple contempt for Americans. At no point in the film did I sense that my government was being led by principled Christians: The Bush Administration is headed by poseurs and frauds. If nothing else, they are the real Weapons of Mass Destruction. If you don't believe that, then go to Flint, Michigan, and see why Moore continues to feature his home town in his films ... or just go see the movie.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 9:15 PM
Little Hominid May Have Been Failed Experiment
WASHINGTON - A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution that never quite made it, scientists said on Thursday.
The little fingernail clearly belongs to an adult and was found last summer at a site where much larger hominids classified as Homo erectus lived, said a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues.
It is the smallest adult fingernail fossil found dating back to the time of Homo erectus, the species of pre-human that dominated between 500,000 and 1.7 million years ago, the scientist's team writes in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The science team believes the fingernail find shows that early humans lived in little groups that became separate and distinct for a while, and then came together every few thousand years or so, swapping genes and then parting ways again. Dramatic climate and environmental changes known to have occurred during those times forced groups to move together again, and perhaps drove some into extinction.
This particular early human was found in an area that would have been a volcanic ridge 900,000 years ago. The science team is working, as anthropologists often do, from fingernail fragments—and guessing what the rest of the creature looked like.
There were bite marks on the left part of the fingernail, suggesting an early but complex pre-human social structure that created in this hominid the beginnings of nail biting as a stress reducer, said the scientist.
The stress factor could have led to the pre-humans' extinction, the lead scientist said. On the other hand, he said, "nail biting leaves the fingernail unattractive, lessening the chances for gene swapping."Satire using a shortened, barely re-written, slightly altered news article by Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent, Reuters, July 1, 2004. Used with permission.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:59 AM
Friday, July 02, 2004
On skepticism and air doughnuts. Petitio principii (begging the question) is an informal fallacy wherein one assumes as a premise in an argument the very conclusion that is meant to be proved. We also call this reasoning in a circle or perhaps "making air doughnuts."[1] The fallacy shows up now and again, and even appears recently in an article by Pascal Boyer in the March/April 2004 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. There Boyer argues that explicit religious belief, although a genuinely natural phenomenon which uses reason in its expression, nevertheless "requires a suspension of the sound rules according to which most scientists evaluate evidence." He likens religious belief to the more common errors of reason to which we must all be prone. He says:
"To some extent, the situation is similar to domains where science has clearly demonstrated the limits or falsity of our common intuitions. We now know that solid objects are largely made up of empty space, that our minds are only billions of neurons firing in ordered ways, that some physical processes can go backwards in time, that species do not have an eternal essence, that gravitation is a curvature of space-time. Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy."[2]
In other words, by pairing our native, human reasoning ability with empiricism and modern scientific method, what common sense proclaims to us as true really turns out to be just plain false.
Philosophers do make a distinction between common sense and "naive realism," and they mark this distinction because usually what skeptics mean by common sense is actually a made-up view ("naive realism") which is so ridiculous as to be easily refuted using ordinary devices straight from the skeptic's toolchest. So we could argue, for example, that even scientists don't believe naively what Boyer says they do, any more than anyone else believes it, but that's another issue entirely. What's remarkable here is that Boyer wants to get to the view that religious belief suspends the rules of evidence by first adopting rules of evidence that don't permit suspension. He doesn't go on to say that all religious belief is false, but that's really his point. In the process, he ends up just doing a wheelie on your lawn.1. Okay, so I just coined the term "air doughnut," suggesting that we can do in the mind what an evil teenage can do with his car in someone's yard—the act might give the perpetrator much amusement, but all he's left us with is an annoying circle that requires much effort to remedy.
2. Skeptical Inquirer (28:2) March/April 2004
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:58 PM
Monday, June 28, 2004
Who's minding the store? While listening to the radio, you will occasionally be interrupted by a loud, annoying buzzing sound, an out-of-date vestige of Cold War angst, which concludes with the announcement that "This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, blah, blah." The problem is not so much that this system is inadequate as a warning system for any national emergency—the problem is that this system is pretty much all there is. I know this excludes Tom Ridge's color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, which keeps shifting between yellow and orange, as if we know what on earth all that means, but there really isn't anything else. Since there are no federally-mandated standards for emergency alerts, what we currently have is a conglomeration of warning systems shouldered by local and state governments.
After 9/11, a group of leading state and local disaster response officials banded together to form the nonprofit Partnership for Public Warning (PPW) for the coordination and improvement of disaster warning programs in the US. Well, frustrated now by the federal government's slow movement to overhaul warning systems, the partnership is considering disbanding. They meet today to discuss whether there is any point to their continued work on this problem.
Current warning systems are a sorry patchwork, said Art Botterell, a founding partnership trustee and a former US and California emergency official. "One of these days, there will be a terrorism event, or an emergency where a lot of lives could have been saved," said Peter L. Ward, an earthquake warning expert and former chairman of the partnership. "It will be a political scandal. Then billions will be thrown at it." Warning systems are also fragmented within the federal government, said John Sorensen, a research and development staffer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "There's one system for weather, one for hazardous materials, one for terrorism," he said. "We don't have a comprehensive national warning policy that encompasses all hazards." Even within the federal government warning systems are fragmented , said John Sorensen, a research and development staffer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "There's one system for weather, one for hazardous materials, one for terrorism," he said. "We don't have a comprehensive national warning policy that encompasses all hazards." So far, the only federally controlled medium that carries all alerts is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather radio, but you have to have a special NOAA weather radio to get an alert. It also has to be turned on. When you're asleep, you can't hear "This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, blah, blah." [Source: AP, June 27, 2004]
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 8:48 AM
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Rumsfeld has contingency plan if more US troops needed in Iraq
"The real task of security is not to flood a country with more and more troops," he told BBC Television from Istanbul.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. Army was making contingency plans for more troops, should commanders in Iraq request reinforcements to help Iraqi security forces deal with an upsurge of violence. "That does not mean that we will necessarily need them, that means we will do the prudent planning," he added. "Heck, if we need more soldiers, we'll make more—I'll just bring back the Draft."
The United States has about 140,000 troops in Iraq joined by nearly 25,000 other foreign forces. Other U.S. defense officials have said the Army is preparing for any need for an additional 10,000 to 20,000 troops, although they have not been requested by American commanders in Iraq.Satire using a shortened, barely re-written, slightly altered news article by Charles Aldinger, Reuters, June 27, 2004. Used with permission.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 3:12 PM
The haunting. As I reread Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel, I can't let loose of his declaration that "The sinner saved by grace is haunted by Calvary, by the cross, and especially by the question, 'Why did He die?'" Perhaps this is the difference between our salvation and that which is attributed to the heresy of universalism—not only do we know where we stand in our relationship with God, but we must carry feelings of guilt over how that new relationship came to be. It is not the guilt of sin, but rather the guilt of undeservedness: a true sense of remorse at our having been given a treasure that we ourselves don't deserve, can't replace, and are unable to forget. As we walk in the light, still the shadow of the Cross is there with us always.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 1:37 PM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
