Guest post by John Hickman:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is rarely subtle but there was an important subtext to his recent comments about the Mosque scheduled for construction in lower Manhattan on Fox & Friends. Gingrich said the following: “You know, Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.” The false parallel hidden in plain sight is between ‘Nazi’ and ‘Japanese.’ Gingrich was a history professor so he knows that how the enemy is identified is crucial in determining how countries fight their wars. Where ‘Nazi’ identifies a political ideology and movement rather than all Germans as the enemy during the Second World War in Europe, ‘Japanese’ identifies an entire people as the enemy during the Second World War in Asia. That is consistent with the how the United States waged that war. German industry rather than the German population was the primary target for the American aerial bombardment of Germany. The Japanese population, however, was the primary target for the American aerial bombardment of Japan. Very few German Americans were interned in United States during the Second World War while most Japanese Americans in the continental United States were interned.

This is more than just old history because Gingrich drew the historical parallel between “radical Islamists” and both the ‘Nazis’ and the ‘Japanese.’ The slipperiness in his comments is that if he had just intended to designate just the political ideology and movement rather than all one billion plus Muslims on the planet he picked an especially poor target. After all, no Islamist terrorist group is attempting to build a house of worship in lower Manhattan. They are just Muslims. Gingrich seems to want to have it both ways.

Similarly convenient ambiguities characterize other contemporary expressions of xenophobia in America. Are the politicians demanding state and local enforcement of immigration laws or arguing for chopping up the 14th Amendment worried by undocumented immigrants or are they appealing to anti-Hispanic sentiment? Is the conspiracism of the Birthers an expression of actual concern about Barack Obama’s nationality or hysteria at having lost control of the White House to someone who is not white?

American history is punctuated by eruptions of xenophobic nationalism.  Religious bigotry and economic insecurity made Roman Catholic Irish and German immigrants the targets in the decades before the American Civil War. Racism and economic insecurity made Chinese immigrants and African Americans targets in the decades that followed. The historical eruption of xenophobia that most resembles what we see today occurred during the First World War and the immediate postwar years.

Although forgotten by most Americans, including most of the descendants of the victims, German immigrants and ethnic German-Americans were subjected to official repression and populist hate when the administration of Woodrow Wilson marched the United States into the First World War, a decision that was deeply unpopular with many Americans. Members of the 100,000 strong American Protective League monitored their German American neighbors for signs of antiwar sympathy. German American community leaders were publicly humiliated by mobs. One poor German immigrant was lynched by in mob in Colinsville, Illinois. State and local governments spent a surprising amount of effort targeting German language and culture for repression. German language newspapers and schools were closed. Public libraries purged their shelves of books published in German. Some 27 states passed laws prohibiting teaching German language or teaching other subjects in German. In April 1919, some five months after the end of the war, Nebraska authorities went so far as to enforce a state statute forbidding instruction in German by arresting and fining a Missouri Synod Lutheran Sunday School teacher for telling his class Bible stories in the forbidden tongue. Even the U.S. Supreme Court of the period, so bitterly conservative that it affirmed the constitutionality of long prison sentences by state courts for membership in a communist party or the distribution of antiwar leaflets by anarchists, found that Nebraska had gone a little too far.

Imperial Germany was not the existential threat to the United States that it was portrayed in the press at the time. Neither are radical Islamism and the Mexican drug cartels today. Despite the tendency toward instant panic the United States remains remarkably secure from anything other than a nuclear attack carried out by another nuclear weapons state and that has become very unlikely since the end of the Cold War. German Americans were not a major domestic threat to national security during the First World War as they were portrayed in the press at the time. Neither are American Muslims or Hispanic Americans today. Populists exploited fear, ignorance and selfishness about minorities then, just as they do today.

What is different between now and the period when German Americans were subjected to a xenophobic frenzy is that the White House is not complicit. Where the Wilson administration was irresponsible, the Obama administration has not encouraged xenophobia to divert public attention from the rotten economy and two seemingly endless wars, although it could be doing more to discourage the viciousness.

However the potential of Islamophobia and Hispanophobia for mobilizing voters has been recognized by several of the Republican 2012 presidential hopefuls. As the 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush showed with the Willie Horton television advertisements putatively about violent crime but actually about race, the fear and hate that drive bigotry can get you elected president in America. That matters because successful campaign themes are often reflected in subsequent policy making.

That the temptation to exchange patriotism for nationalism is most intense when Americans confront an economic crisis or an unpopular war is no surprise. Where patriotism is hard, nationalism is easy. Loyalty to a state based upon commitment to ideals like liberty, equality and democracy demands more from people than claiming membership in a nation that is defined by exclusive identity markers like language, religion and race. Where patriots are responsible for drawing boundaries around a political community to include everyone who lives and works in society, nationalists are free to insist on arbitrary boundaries drawn around a narrow political community based on privileged belief or descent. The primitive in-group/out-group impulse is never far beneath the surface of human motivation and nationalist demagogues are always ready to take advantage of it. With Americans anxious about the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and two of the longest and least conclusive wars in our history, it is unsurprising that some Americans have succumbed to the temptation. The irony is that so many of them are the descendants of people who were themselves subjected to same behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As the world trundles from recession to man-made (’natural’) disasters, we keep looking for scapegoats and quick fixes. Those who know what needs to be done are also keenly aware of so-called political realities. “Never gonna happen” seems to be the motto that carries the day.

–Lobbyists and fossil-fuel interests own the government. Kick them out and restore ethical democracy? Never gonna happen.

–Out-of-control US deficits stretch as far as the eye can see. Raise taxes from 4th lowest in OECD? Never gonna happen.

–As we pass 390ppm atmospheric CO2, 2010 is shaping up to be the warmest year on record. Put a price on carbon to reduce emissions? Never gonna happen.

–Hundreds of billions of dollars per year leave our country for energy imports. Jump start domestic renewables? Pay for them with a gas tax or feebates? Create a clean-energy economy and reduce the trade deficit? Never gonna happen.

–Unprecedented warming-related changes to the natural world create an accelerating parade of man-made ‘natural’ disasters. Respond with international agreements and responsible energy legislation? Never gonna happen.

We are ignoring the elephant in the room. The news cycle focuses on current near-zero interest rates, monetary policy (the “Fed”) and what can be done to stave off deflation or “fix” unemployment before the next election. Our eye is so far off the ball, we’re not even in the right stadium. Though exacerbated by corporate interests and decades of so-called “free market” (gang-bang) economics, every single last one of our economic problems relates to the unholy triad of unsustainable business practices, resource depletion and a warming world.

As my friend Lou Grinzo remarked on the Cost of Energy site, when the world finally wakes up to this terrifying reality in a few short years, the pundits will no doubt blame the scientists for “not making a convincing enough case.” I agree. That’s what I fully expect a sputtering Rush Limbaugh to croak out of his windpipe as the lights flicker out in his studio for the final time.

The case has been fully made, and we are seeing the results on a daily basis. While the right continues to insist that a warming world will be “more pleasant” and “good for crops,” the reality is different. This year’s firestorms in Russia and a year ago in Victoria, Australia are unprecedented events in human history. Flooding has increased dramatically worldwide. The dreaded tropical disease dengue fever is moving northward to Florida. The great lakes are heating up. Pine beetle larvae are no longer being killed by winter frosts in North America, and tens of thousands of square miles of formerly healthy forests are being destroyed, leading to a vicious cycle of increased carbon emissions as the dead trees decay. The winter 2009-2010 epic snowstorms in the US northeast are exactly what would be expected as warmer global temperatures force more moisture into the air. The pH of the ocean has decreased dramatically from about 8.2 to 8.1, leading to stress on coral reefs and a dramatic drop in plankton, the base of the entire marine food chain.

Yet the fossil-fueled denial machine continues to run in overdrive. Warren Buffet last year paid a 25% premium to invest $41 billion in Burlington Northern railroad, which delivers 297 million tons a year of coal to the nation’s power plants. Texas money is flowing into the 2010 California election to promote Proposition 23, a reversal of AB32, the nation’s most stringent greenhouse gas law. Though we are at or near peak coal, the coal industry continues to act as if coal is here to stay. Even as overwhelming evidence of a warming world is literally splashed across hundreds of millions of TV and computer screens, US public opinion on the reality of anthropogenic climate change continues to move towards skepticism.

In a private discussion which has spanned several years, a friend of mine maintains climate change is overblown, and that the real risk is “all of the taxes and regulations that are being proposed [which] will mean a longer period of economic malaise. And that puts it mildly.” I asked this friend if he would bet me $1,000 on the factual outcome of anthropogenic climate change, payable in 10 years (when it would presumably have become undeniable). He refused to take the bet. He won’t risk $1,000 of his own money, but implicitly he’s willing to sit by and risk trillions of dollars in losses to the global economy as we continue to destroy year on year the bounty of ecosystem services on which all industry rests.

This is a sad, sad state of affairs. And it reflects universal human tendencies to think locally and base calculations on a singular goal of short-term local gain. It stands to reason that our brains are wired that way, since for most of human history people stayed in their tribe of birth, and never traveled beyond their horizon.

The only thing standing between us and coming catastrophe is our ability to learn to think longer term and to face up to these problems we have brought on ourselves with filthy energy. Yes our behavior matters. Every time we fire up our car engine or flip a light switch or thermostat, we must remember that. We are killing ourselves with a quadrillion piston strokes. It’s no different than if we ate a little slow poison every day. And it’s not like with poison where one day we would suddenly just keel over.

At some point, if we don’t stop pinning our hopes on this bankrupt and unsustainable consumer economy, it won’t be that some of us will merely lose our jobs. We will wring our hands as the US teeters on the edge of losing its superpower status. More and more will be out of work permanently because the economy will stay broken. There’s not enough credit in the world to fix it. Little by little people will begin to accept that the jobs are not coming back. The social safety net will unravel, and once again the weak will perish. We will elect corn-pone fascists with their “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric and they will try to return to the old ways and crank up dirty and unsustainable production even more and still it won’t be enough. Unless we’re among the lucky few who’ve managed to become super-rich, we will watch as every modern convenience we enjoy is stripped from us, because we simply won’t be able to afford it anymore. We will despair as a warming world creates unending conflict, refugee crises, and a degree of instability we won’t be able to manage. For the first time in centuries, we could come to know global famine. Even the super-rich have to eat. And they alone can hire private armies to make sure they do.

That’s one possible future. Or we could close The Big Disconnect and do something smart about it. Thomas Friedman and many others have proposed solutions, but we don’t want to hear them. “Never gonna happen.” If you think so, please read the above paragraph again. If you think I’m exaggerating, you need to read Eaarth by Bill McKibben.

–President Obama needs to lay this out as a real, current, unprecedented generational challenge, not some kind of “energy independence” lip service such as has been parroted by the last seven American presidents.

–We need immediate revenue-neutral carbon feebates, coupled with tariffs on dirty imports to persuade other countries we mean business.

–A smart grid and national Renewable Portfolio Standard, with a phase-out of all US coal plants by 2025 at the latest.

–Active government participation in the renewable sector, with grants of billions–not millions for commercialization–not research. This would lead to tens of thousands of new, non-exportable jobs. We don’t need alternative energy. We need energy that doesn’t kill us and that supports economic growth on a resource-constrained planet. And we need to re-frame the national discussion accordingly.

Some readers will no-doubt accuse me of alarmism or hysteria. They will compare these predictions to the way-off-base ones Elizabeth Clare Prophet (my mother) made in 1989 about a Soviet nuclear strike on the US. They will accuse me of fanaticism and apocalypticism.

To which I say, WAKE UP, it’s later than you think!

The difference is that I’m not claiming inevitability. Nor giving unsupportable timetables. I’ll even link here to Ray Kurzweil, whose climate optimism I’m sympathetic to. Stephen Hawking, on the other hand thinks we are going to need to leave earth to survive, and he’s arguably the “smartest man in the world.” I’m hardly out on a limb.

Regardless of who’s right, these are slow-motion catastrophes that will unfold for all the world to experience. It won’t be a spectator sport. Because these conditions of ecological collapse took decades to set in motion, they will take an equal amount of time to slow or stop. And they are already underway. Unlike spiritual pronouncements of apocalypse, these are straightforward and observable movements of planetary physics. And that physics has begun to affect the global economy. Most importantly, unlike mythological threats of “divine retribution,” the outcome is completely in human hands.

I wanted to chime in with my two cents about the question of scientific morality. Sam Harris has laid out his arguments in much more depth and detail in both his TED talk The Moral Landscape and followup essay.

Today, there’s an article over at Cosmic Variance by Sean Carroll disputing Harris’ central premise from a traditionalist viewpoint. I won’t quote from it here, since you can read Carroll’s argument yourself. Following is an expansion on my comment which is a general refutation of his points:

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This is a recitation of a traditionalist view, which cannot manage to see human beings for what they are, complex systems of biomachinery. Because of all the complexity and the opaqueness of human motivation, it seems we cannot even arrive at a consistent set of principles for deriving morality.

But this is false. We simply haven’t gotten there yet. Once the human brain is reverse engineered and understood, once commonalities are established between people with *seemingly* different moral viewpoints, we will begin to unravel this mystery.

And let me qualify here that morality is not about quantification or maximization of individual happiness, but about maximization of a set of environmental and social conditions conducive to individuals maximizing their *own* happiness through the widest possible range of choices which they can make without dramatically impacting the *opportunities* for the happiness of others.

So we can exclude the idea that people would, for example, be scientifically required to make others happy by staying in an unfulfilling relationship, selling goods below cost, or otherwise “helping others” in ultimately unhelpful ways. A scientific understanding of morality would have to recognize the legitimacy of differences, competition, and ultimately personal boundaries. In fact, the holding of firm but flexible boundaries between the various orbits of sentience and interdependence in the social landscape would be of prime concern to any scientific statement of moral *ought-ness*.

Bottom line, our moral instincts are shorthand about what our minds have analyzed to be the best methods for human flourishing. We can rightly exclude brain pathology from this discussion. Just as we would exclude any piece of broken machinery from the analysis of functioning models. Moreover, we can (or should) understand that our primitive internal moral instincts are hopelessly subjective and self-serving. Which should motivate us to strive toward a true, advanced, and inclusive universal morality. But in order to do so, we have to be willing to put our precious subjectivity on the chopping block.

As Sam Harris correctly pointed out, morality is concerned with the well-being of conscious creatures. It is a departure from one set of goals of our biological machinery–that of amoral reproduction and domination of genetic competitors–to another finely tuned set of goals. Civilization and prosperity has finally given our altruistic and cooperative natures a means of expression. Empathy provides some measure of understanding of those who are suffering. Mirror neurons tell us we should care about them.

We are fortunate enough to have available to us a wealth of information about conscious systems, and we are soon to get a lot more. To imply that that no consistent pattern or theory exists in this data is laughably short-sighted.

I’m willing to concede this is a human-centric viewpoint. But since human flourishing is tied in with the flourishing of ecosystems which include other species, science based morality would inform a broader-based view of ecosystem and social sustainability. This is the new science of morality, and it is in its infancy. I fully expect the naysayers to continue until such time as the discipline becomes better established. It will be a cooperative effort between neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, zoologists and environmental scientists, to name a few. This is the human equivalent of a “theory of everything.”

The fact that a “theory of everything” is elusive hasn’t stopped physicists from looking for it, nor should it slow, even in the smallest degree, our progress toward a scientific understanding of morality. Like many other objections to science, this seems to be largely about other disciplines not wanting to cede power to a new objective regime they cannot control. That is where the study of morality is headed–toward the realm of evidence which may challenge all of us to redefine and abandon long-cherished but outworn beliefs.

In the past, I’ve discussed how Easter has been co-opted and corrupted by Christianity from what had been a pagan festival of fertility. What was once a celebration of life and our sexual nature has become for most Christians a mythology of a composite character drawn from Ishtar, Horus and Eostre. This wild tale of “an all-powerful god from outer space [who] decided to send his unborn son on a suicide mission to planet Earth” has been mocked by Bill Maher. But even worse is the idea of a God-man who died for the expiation of human “sin,” then made a bodily resurrection. If true, that would be a horrifying refuge–a “get out of jail free” card for the most immoral and irresponsible among us. But that’s what they’re claiming. That’s what they would have us celebrate, instead of the “circle of life.” That transition from something primal and real to a pallid and degenerate mythology is well documented, so I don’t need to elaborate further.

But trying to prop up this house of cards at Easter 2010 must be like living in a carnival fun-house. The distortions, lies and fantasies have piled on top of one another so quickly, there isn’t time to even evaluate them any more. The only thing that’s left for a person of faith to do to maintain their world view is to just stumble from the crooked floor to the warped mirror: deny, deny, deny and keep praying. When that fails, accuse the secular of persecution, and all manner of imaginary crimes, all the while appealing to people’s fears of a godless society.

The real arguments over religion have lost any of the relevance they might have once had. Even ‘debates’ have become a joke, with believers increasingly recycling every fallacious argument, no matter how many times or ways they’ve been called on it. It’s now just “defend the faith at all costs.” ”Whatever you’re claiming, it’s wrong,” they repeat in various ways with growing desperation to anyone who remains sympathetic.

But even the religious are being forced to admit the news has become surreal. For an atheist, it’s hard to muster any more than feeble outrage. The scandals keep rolling in, and nothing ever gets done. I mean, at what point do you just throw up your hands? Should that be my response to the Pope protecting child rape and torture and refusing to own up to it? Really, who thought they’d live to see that day? Who thought they’d live to see the day those demanding Papal accountability would be compared by the Vatican to persecutors of Jews.

I guess I’m not quite that cynical. I’m with Christopher Hitchens, who recently called for the arrest of said Pope. I still think people can snap out of their stupor to see religion for what it is. I still think we’d live in a better world if we got rid of our double standards and held people accountable for their delusions. Whether we’re talking about the Tea Party or the defenders of the Vatican in 2010, we’re having a far-right flameout of epic proportions. The only good news is that it can’t last.

The future still points toward greater rationality and coming to grips with age-old human follies. Those who have reaped the short-term benefits of the cover-ups, the lies, the unasked questions, the failure to challenge authority, or just plain incuriosity are in for a rude awakening. It can’t come soon enough.

So to that end, here’s a few samplings from today’s Easter-basket of denial:

Cardinal Tells Pope: Faithful Not Influenced By Gossip

“Also with you are the faithful who do not let themselves be influenced by gossip,” Sodano said in Italian, using the word “chiacchiericcio,” which means chatter or gossip. “May the Lord continue to sustain your mission at the service of the church in the world.”

In his Easter message, the pope did not address the scandal that encompasses high-profile abuse cases in several countries including Ireland, France, the United States, Mexico and his native Germany. More and more people have come forward complaining that as children they were victims of abuse by religious leaders, and that the church did little or nothing to stop it.

So now the heinous crime of sexual abuse by trusted priests has become “gossip.” That’s almost as rich as Bill Donohue’s outrageous claim on Larry King Live that priests were not pedophiles because their victims were post-pubescent. You think I’m kidding:

The head of the influential Catholic League says that the priest who allegedly sexually abused 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin did not engage in pedophilia because ‘the vast majority of the victims [were] post-pubescent.”

Bill Donohue made the argument during a raucous debate on Larry King Live Tuesday night, during which he repeatedly pointed the finger to homosexuality — rather than pedophilia — as the cause of the church’s sex abuse problems.

“You’ve got to get your facts straight,” Donohue said, addressing sex abuse victim Thomas Roberts. “I’m sorry. If I’m the only one that’s going to deal with facts tonight then that’ll be it. The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That’s not pedophilia, buddy. That’s homosexuality.”

A rather surprised panel of commentators — which included pop icon Sinead O’Connor — then began to debate at what age, exactly, does sexual attraction to children cease to be pedophilia.

Donohue argued the age at which children become “post-pubescent” is around 12 or 13.

Coming from the likes of Donohue, this line of reasoning is not even shocking. But wait, there’s more. Secularism is now not only responsible for “hatred of God,” mass murder and man-boy love, but now also loneliness in old age:

Secular Society A Fast Track to Loneliness

“I have emphasised human loneliness this Easter because that is what expert observers of our society are saying is a real problem,” Dr Jensen said.

“It is what we would expect to occur given the secularist philosophy we have embraced.

“This philosophy emphasises the individual and individual rights, it invites us to invent our own lives and it undervalues commitment to other human beings.

“It is a recipe for loneliness and the path to a very lonely old age.”

Bishop Fisher said godlessness in the 20th Century led to Nazism, Stalinism, abortion and mass murder in his Good Friday address while in a similar address Dr Jensen said atheists hate god.

And finally, here’s the worst rotten Easter egg hiding under the fake plastic religious grass, an unrepentant murderer using the Bible to justify his killing:

Scott Roeder Gets Maximum for Tiller Murder–Life, With No Parole for 50 Years

In January, Roeder was found guilty in Tiller’s murder as well as of assault charges stemming from his attack on Tiller. It took a jury just 37 minutes to find him guilty.

During today’s day-long sentencing hearing, Roeder read a lengthy statement in his own defense that included details descriptions of abortion procedures and the fetal reactions to them.

Roeder admitted that he killed Tiller and compared an abortion to premeditated murder. He said that the state of Kansas was to blame for the abortion “holocaust” through its law legalizing abortions.

“The blame of George Tiller’s death lies more with the state of Kansas than with me,” he said. “George Tiller was their hit man.”

The statement cited the Old Testament of the Bible, as well as a book by Paul Hill entitled, “Why Shoot an Abortionist?”

Roeder also criticized the court’s handling of his trial, arguing at one point that prosecutors were allowed to show “pictures of George Tiller lying a pool of blood,” but he was not allowed to introduce pictures of aborted fetuses.

[...]

“If I didn’t do it, those babies would die the next day,” Roeder testified, describing how he shot and killed Tiller in a church vestibule.

Roeder’s testimony, gruesome at times, proved immensely difficult for Tiller’s family, who openly cried in court. He detailed how he walked up to Tiller at the Reform Lutheran Church, put a gun to the doctor’s head and pulled the trigger.

He told the jury of how his religious faith had convinced him that what Tiller was doing was wrong and how he had considered cutting off the doctor’s hands with a sword. When told Tiller’s clinic had closed and asked if he felt regret, Roeder replied simply, “No I don’t.”

Cutting off a doctor’s hands with a sword. Seems Christianity and Islam are not that different, after all. In what crazy alternate universe do the good people of Earth let such systems go unchallenged, and even celebrate them?

I’ve maintained that religion and spirituality are inversely correlated with high-functioning intelligence.  (previous article, Religion Rots Your Brain And We Must Say So) There are plenty of notable exceptions such as Francis Collins, current director of the National Institute of Health (NIH). My answer to this is that such individuals have to work even harder to keep the critical thinking part of their brain separated from the part that holds scientifically untenable beliefs. Collins believes he has a personal relationship with the mythical character of Jesus Christ, and that God had a hand in guiding every stage of evolution. I think it’s pretty strange to have someone with those strongly held beliefs managing a $30 billion/year science budget, and I’m not the only one.

Yesterday I also became aware of scientist Robert Lanza, MD, a high achiever–even a genius–by any standard. Lanza is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology(ACT) and Adjunct  at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. For some inexplicable reason, Lanza has decided to break scientific protocol and engage in wild speculation about the spiritual and philosophical implications of quantum theory that would never pass scientific scrutiny. His book on the subject is called Biocentrism. His beliefs are so far outside the mainstream of his field, he’s managed to earn both the praise of Deepak Chopra and the scorn of Daniel Dennett and other “real” brain scientists. Lanza is also promoting a kind of new-age fundamentalism in the garb of (pseudo) science:

Judgment Day is Coming: Science Suggests Judgment is Inescapable

Will kind people be rewarded for their good deeds? Will the wicked be punished? Yes, according to a new interpretation of recent experiments. Although our science is too primitive for us to fully comprehend, there is a direct and proportional price to pay for any act of cruelty or injustice.

Science suggests that there are consequences to our actions that transcend our ordinary, classical way of thinking. Emerson, it turns out, was right: “Every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.”

I remember fishing on a warm summer night. Now and then I could feel the vibrations along the line linking me with the life prowling about the bottom. At length I pulled some bass, squeaking and gasping into the air. It was a puzzle to feel a tug, and to be conscious in that precise moment of a part of me, which, as it were, was not a part of me, but scale and fin, circling the hook, slow to strike.

Surely this is what Spinoza, the great philosopher, meant when he contended that consciousness cannot exist simply in space and time, and at the same time is aware of the interrelations of all parts of space and time. In order to have knowledge of a pout or a pickerel, I must have somehow been identical with them.

[...]

This may not unsettle you, except perhaps on a warm moonlit night with a fish gasping for life at the end of your rod. I knew then, at that moment, that Pagel’s conclusion was right. Only it wasn’t my consciousness that was the only one, it was ours. According to biocentrism, our individual separateness is an illusion. Remember the words of Omar, who “never called the One two,” and of the old Hindu poem: “Know in thyself and All one self-same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole.”

There was no doubt; that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the mind of every animal and person existing in space and time. “There are,” wrote Loren Eiseley, noted anthropologist, “very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, ‘We are all one − all melted together.’”

Yes, I thought, we are all one. I let the fish go. With a thrash of the tail, I disappeared into the pond. [emphasis added]

Physorg is now reporting that this sense of “oneness with everything” that underlies so much new-age mumbo-jumbo has been correlated by experiments with damage to the right posterior parietal region of the brain.

Selective brain damage modulates human spirituality

Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, true empirical exploration of the neural underpinnings of spirituality has been challenging. However, recent advances in neuroscience have started to make the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible.

“Neuroimaging studies have linked activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking,” explains lead study author, Dr. Cosimo Urgesi from the University of Udine in Italy.

Dr. Urgesi and colleagues were interested in making a direct link between brain activity and spirituality. They focused specifically on the personality trait called self-transcendence (ST), which is thought to be a measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors in humans. ST reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one’s self as an integral part of the universe as a whole.

The researchers combined analysis of ST scores obtained from brain tumor patients before and after they had surgery to remove their tumor, with advanced techniques for mapping the exact location of the brain lesions after surgery. “This approach allowed us to explore the possible changes of ST induced by specific brain lesions and the causative role played by frontal, temporal, and parietal structures in supporting interindividual differences in ST,” says researcher Dr. Franco Fabbro from the University of Udine.

The group found that selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase in ST. “Our symptom-lesion mapping study is the first demonstration of a causative link between brain functioning and ST,” offers Dr. Urgesi. “Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness. Thus, dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors.”

These results may even lead to new strategies for treating some forms of mental illness. “If a stable personality trait like ST can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas,” suggests Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome. “Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders.”

Since my mother was a world-famous “spiritual” performer who claimed to speak for a pantheon of disembodied spirits, and who was also diagnosed with lifelong epilepsy, eventually dying last year of Alzheimer’s disease, this article is incredibly relevant and explanatory for me. This really was all in her brain, and there was nothing whatsoever she could do about it.

But getting back to Lanza–who just might have similar brain damage–I would respond that the very essence of life is individuality. The very goal of life is self-actualization. We are not all one with everything. And our self-awareness is not transferable–at least not with current technology. Of course it is good to feel empathetic, and to recognize that we are all made of the same basic particles. But I am not you, you are not a fish, a bicycle is not the same as a multi-barrel machine gun. It is making such distinctions, and keeping categories and identity straight that is one of the main goals of human knowledge.

An existential understanding is also vital for life, that we neither promote false hopes, nor fail to apprehend our limitations. Having a realistic assessment of self-other-world, is vital to our outlook and mental health. Now we see it’s also dependent on having a healthy physical brain.

If Lanza really thinks he is onto a new “theory of everything” that will render space-time putty in our hands, make us all one, and make death obsolete, he should be willing to subject that science to the same scrutiny and incremental discipline as every other scientist who came before him. Otherwise, he’s neither promoting self-awareness nor science. His public work so far has shown a reckless disregard for his intellectual debt to others, abdication of his responsibility not to pollute the integrity of the scientific method in public discourse, and above all a stark failure to know his rightful place on the mountain of ideas.

An article forwarded to me by a friend brings up the old New-Age argument, this time dolled up in pseudoscientific garb.

Comes Robert Lanza, MD, a biologist, proposing to rip up the scientific frame in favor of his pet theory, “biocentrism.” He proposes that one day we will discover that time and space are both products of consciousness, and will be able to move through them at will:

Sometime in the future science will be able to create realities that we can’t even begin to imagine. As we evolve, we’ll be able to construct other information systems that correspond to other realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time.

Immanuel Kant declared in 1781 that space and time were real, but only indeed as properties of the mind. These algorithms are not only the key to consciousness, but why space and time − indeed the properties of matter itself - are relative to the observer. But a new theory called biocentrism suggests that space and time may not be the only tools that can be used to construct reality. At present, our destiny is to live and die in the everyday world of up and down. But what if, for example, we changed the algorithms so that instead of time being linear, it was 3-dimensional like space? Consciousness would move through the multiverse. We’d be able to walk through time just like we walk through space. And after creeping along for 4 billion years, life would finally figure out how to escape from its corporeal cage. Our destiny would lie in realities that exist outside of the known physical universe.

Go read the whole article. It really doesn’t get any better. Just another breathless fantasy to help us escape from the reality that we have short lives, over which we have very limited control, and we must spend them on a small insignificant planet, and we die all-too-soon.

I find the article extremely vague and unconvincing–bordering on intellectually offensive. If this is true, let Dr. Lanza define the parameters of his new world so we can all take advantage of expanded awareness and “travel through time in three dimensions.” Until then, it’s just another fantasy conjecture by a “frame ripper” which distracts the gullible and muddies the waters of what we do actually know. It’s so nice that he’s laid it all out for us in one small essay, and destroyed our quaint little scientific understanding.

He’s as wrong as non-scientists about the implications of quantum theory. People think that it is conscious observation that changes the behavior of particles. This is wrong in two ways:

1) Even if thinking could affect the position of particles, any real-world object has so many particles that the effects of any number of conscious real-world observers would null out. For example, one gram of carbon has 12 x 602,214,150,000,000,000,000,000 carbon atoms (Avogadro’s number).

2) It is bombarding a particle with another particle or wave that changes its position or velocity. This is what Heisenberg meant when he said “observe.” It doesn’t mean consciously “look at.” It means “bounce another particle off of,” stealing or adding energy or momentum.

Lanza’s also wrong about dreams. Simply, they are simulations our brains create, very similar to the ones we create while awake. When we walk into a room, we mostly see a simulation of the room. The human visual system can only take in a very small amount of detail at once (from the tiny area of the retina called the fovea), which is why we often don’t notice small changes in our surroundings if they happen slowly.

So here we have someone who might as well be illiterate about both quantum theory and the nature of dreams proposing a new theory of time. Biocentrism? Huh?? He might as well be that medieval town crier (previous article) talking about how in the future announcements and music would travel thousands of miles through thin air. I wouldn’t have bought airtime from him, or invested in his radio station, would you?

There is an underlying reality, governed by energy and particle interaction, however incomplete may be our perception of it. That reality, even when we stop believing in it–as Philip K. Dick wrote–doesn’t go away.

Lanza is proposing basically solipsism, an old philosophical saw. If we create our own realities, why don’t we live in a perfect world of our own choosing? Why don’t all the men have harems and the women Prince Charmings? Why don’t we all live in castles like kings? Why do children in the Third World not get a say about whether they are killed by malaria or crushed by faulty and flimsy construction every time there’s an earthquake? Why don’t their minds create a better reality for them? Are we really to blame their faulty thoughts for their horrible predicament?

So much of this philosophical bollocks rests on a misunderstanding of the subjective-objective divide. In a subjective sense, we do create our own ‘realities’ and we can move through time and visit the past in our memories. But let’s not confuse that with the universe that is, and would continue to exist even if all consciousness and life on Earth were snuffed out by a giant solar flare. That universe is the one I’m interested in learning about (with all the people still in it, naturally). And it doesn’t care one whit about the fantastic mental contrivances of Robert Lanza, MD.

To really get where this is all headed, it’s interesting to note Deepak Chopra had the following to say: “Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness [are] original and exciting” and that “his theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence.”

Once in a while you strike Facebook gold. The kinds of discussions I used to have here on BSJ seem to be migrating, with everyone else, over to what has turned out to be the irresistable social media platform. Blog integration will eventually happen, and unfortunately will require a total rework to bring the two worlds together. In the meantime, please friend me on FB to keep up with the latest stuff I used to post here.

Now, presented for your entertainment, the discussion between BlackSun and BV, prompted by this tweet:

Reliance on God is like software that has to phone home for authorization. Atheism is the patch (crack) that lets it run on its own.

BV: And some just observe with no religion or ideology

BlackSun: BV, everyone has an epistemology. Some rely on revelation, subjectivity, direct unchecked experiences, scripture or authority. Others rely on their wits and double-checked observations under laboratory conditions from multiple observers.

BV: Fair nuff. Let me say this: God doesn’t matter.

BlackSun: Not to me, and maybe not to you. But to billions it does, and they vote, fight, and miseducate their children based on those ill-formed concepts.

BV: Yes. None of which negates what’s still existing as the life neither me nor thee created.

BlackSun: So let me see–you want it both ways.

BV: Life doesn’t exist without our say so? I was under the impression it did.

BlackSun: First you said God is not important, then you implied he/she/it created life. Which is it? Or are you one of those permanent fence-sitters who uses both sides of the argument depending on what’s convenient?

BV: Are you one to jump to hasty convenient conclusions? I never implied there was a god that created life. I’m talking about life not god.

BlackSun: OK, fair enough. Life exists. What is the point of that tautology?

BV: Where did it come from?

BlackSun: Life? Abiogenesis is pretty close to being understood. Evolution through natural selection is very well understood.

BV: Are you satisfied to let that stand as your definitive answer to the question Prophet?

BlackSun: It’s what I said, isn’t it, BV? What are you, the host of “Who wants to be a theist?” Um, “Sir, is that your final answer??”

In case you didn’t really get it, I’ll make it easy for you. Abiogenesis and Natural Selection.

BV: No I’ll make it easy for YOU Sean. You don’t know where life comes from. And your answer, even with your flatland theories, pales to what is truly being asked.

Tis a mystery, life. It certainly is alive though and I’m sure I’m better served to put it in that category of what can be better observed than to know about. …a position that allows a crack to let it run on its own, as it were. It’s alive for chrisssake! Who did that and what shall we call it?!

BlackSun: A fine surrender, sir. Well played.

BV: No surrender at all Prophet. Sword or olive branch suits me equally.

Nobody gave us life, there’s never been a god. There’s only just been life, the creator, upbuilder and sustainer of all. This life doesn’t need us a whit but by its absence it can drop the body in a minute. Therein is the source of us, a higher power to our quaint thinkers. How may I increase its grace or marshal it to do my bidding? Only by the more aliveness in me, that is the church worth finding!

Call it evolution if you like but abiogenesis or selection didn’t create this ground of being. This ground of being has always been, and gives rise to our gardens and apples and discrimination and separation and good and evil. Every sacred scroll from every culture has been grasping at these dynamics through mythology. It’s the literalists and logical positivists who turn symbol into concrete.

Concrete > Symbol > life. Which direction? Peace.

BlackSun: “ground of being” = meaningless in your vernacular–doesn’t really explain or even describe anything, just a vague sense you have. Atoms and molecules and people give rise to gardens and apples through well understood physical and biological principles. Plants are a highly advanced form of nanotechnological self-replication, and in a sense, so are we.

But the way you describe it, everything = nothing = a tree = a pack of bubble gum = sword = olive branch. That is intellectual surrender by any definition.

A lot of words to say not much. Doesn’t really add to knowledge or even “being.” Back to the tautology, or down to a weak relativism. This is very primitive stuff. Avoids discipline, taking sides, separating known from unknown, boundaries. It’s easy to claim advancement when there are no wrong answers and everything is everything.

Which works as a kind of Zen poetry I guess, but myths are myths and understanding what this whole experience of life is about takes a lot more than metaphor. It takes hard work, which is why few people bother. But somehow, we’ve got to move beyond this simplistic stage to a place where people stop being so threatened by knowledge and begin to value it.

By the way, this was not at all the subject of my post, but new agers always take the bait, because it seems you want everything to be “connected” by some form of energy that ties back to God even if you don’t want to give it that particular name.

If I had to give it a name it would be “physics,” I suppose, which underlies all chemistry and biology. We are not physics, though our existence may be defined by it. If you wanted to call that a “ground of being” then I wouldn’t disagree. But it’s not alive, doesn’t communicate or form personalities. It’s a definition of how the component parts of this whole experience relate to one another and give rise to stars, people, apples, swords and olive branches.

The bottom line of what I was really saying is just rely on yourself and accept your place as an advanced mammal in a flesh and blood world–who’s going to live a short time and then die without a trace. That’s it. If you just stick with “the more aliveness in me” part as long as you possibly can, you’ll be fine. And I think a little appreciation for the hard work done by scientists is in order. They’ve certainly made our lives better. We’re incalculably lucky to have been born at all. Luckier still to have been born at a time of such profound understanding unprecedented in human history.

A mere few hundred years ago, we didn’t know our ass from a hole in the ground, or a black hole. Now we understand a great deal about the universe and our place in it. We also understand how our bodies and minds function. Come on, you can at least stop feeling above it all long enough to manage a golf clap.

BV: Dear Concrete: All the science and scientism I’m sure gets a clap for more data and understanding. And none of it can explain what grows the grass besides late-stage catalytic events. It is life itself you cannot know objectively because that is what’s looking. And you cannot account for it. I’m “above it all” not enough to at least know to admit that.

BlackSun: Using the word “scientism” is basically a cry of “I won’t, I won’t” uttered with eyes shut, fingers jammed in the ears. BV, now you’ve sent up the white flag in a mighty blaze of fireworks.

What a waste of breath and life that whole discussion was. Stubborn and petulant to the very end. But I’ll manage to use it somewhere somehow to illustrate for someone’s benefit the true depths of ignorance we humans face. It’s a wonder any of us have learned anything at all. You say “none of it can explain” when you’ve just failed to either look at or accept the explanation. The fault in that situation, I’m afraid, doesn’t lie with the explainer. Now you’ve officially and permanently exhausted my patience.

The Old Man And The Cartoon
by J.P. Christiansen

Once upon a time,
in a country small, up north,
near close to sea and fjord,
so peaceful and pleasantly agreeable,
there lived an innocent and friendly old man
who loved to draw cartoons to express his thought.

He looked out upon the great, wide, wonderful world,
and to his amazement found religious strife and killings
practiced by people called Muslims.

Living, as he did, among fellow, open-minded citizens
who valued human life and human values above all else,
he decided to draw the prophet of Islam in a cartoon.

The image which appeared, like magic, on his paper,
was of the prophet’s head wrapped in a turban,
and in the turban rested a round, black, lit bomb.

People first thought the prophet was about to commit suicide,
but, after contemplating the drawing for awhile,
it became apparent some other meaning might be hidden.

Some of the believers of the religion called Islam,
lived in the small country, up north,
and when they saw the cartoon of their beloved prophet
depicted in such a blasphemous manner,
thought it might be a good idea to show the cartoon
to other followers of their beloved, peaceful religion.

They set upon a journey to countries far away in the big world,
where they soon found other adherents of their religion.
Together they decided the cartoon might be of use
to incite hatred of the heathens, up north,
and so it came to pass,
dear children,
that masses of Muslims went out to burn and kill.

They wanted to show the small, peaceful country,
up north,
that people, of different faiths and opinions on life,
had better temper their freedom to think, talk, and act,
‘cause if they didn’t,
the prophet’s holy men and warriors would come after them.

The religious leaders of Islam pronounced that the old man
should die for having drawn their prophet in unflattering light,
and he had to go into hiding from the theistic thugs hot on his trail.

The old man survived for several years,
and one day he got an invitation to travel to a big country
on the other side of the ocean.

It appeared that certain folks, over there, in America,
wished to hear the tale of the old man and his cartoon.
He learned that in America many different people and religions
co-existed mostly in peace,
and that America might be a safe place to show himself.

When he arrived,
he learned that many people were afraid of him and his cartoon,
and that only a very few newspapers and television-stations
had dared show the cartoon to their viewers.

He realized that many inhabitants of America
were somewhat immature in their intellectual convictions,
and had to be protected from their own mental habits
by not being exposed to certain images and words.

The old man thought it humorous that editors of print and image
would tow the line of a mentally unstable person and his believers;
after all, weren’t these moderns atheists, Christians, Jews, or Other?

He went on to be interviewed by reporters and T.V. personalities,
and soon found out that the believers of Christianity and Judaism,
in particular, showed support for the old man and his cartoon,
some even calling him a hero and fighter for freedom of expression.

Being an old and wise man, he knew they supported him
because various religions tend to dislike each other,
and by praising the old man,
could gain support for their own religion.

This type of behavior of conversion, dear children,
has been playing-out for many, many centuries…
ever since the so-called prophets of religion
suffered their psychotic episodes of hallucinations and visions
to be imposed on the rest of the world.

Once upon a time,
in a country small, up north,
near close to sea and fjord,
an old man drew a cartoon of a prophet’s head with a lit bomb in his turban,
and guess what, children,
nobody knew that beneath the big, black, lit bomb,
there nested many little bomblets waiting to go out in the big, wide world
to spread the good words and news about Islam.

Good night, children, and sleep well.

Solar showdown in Calif. tortoises’ desert home

In a redux of the Cape Wind debacle and other misguided public opposition, (previous article) dumb environmentalism is again standing in the way of humanity’s Bright Green future. A utility-scale solar plant is now being held up over a few dozen tortoises. And it’s not the only one. The government is now sitting on 150 applications for solar plants. And what happens now could have an impact on all of those projects.

The Bureau of Land Management has received more than 150 applications for large-scale solar projects on 1.8 million acres of federal land in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. In California alone, such projects could claim an area the size of Rhode Island, transforming the state into the world’s largest solar farm.

BrightSource Energy wants permission to construct three solar power plants on the site that together would generate enough power each year for 142,000 homes, potentially generating billions of dollars of revenue over time.

The sun’s power is used to heat water and make steam, which in turn drives turbines to create electricity. Built in phases, the project would include seven, 459-foot metal towers, a natural gas pipeline, water tanks, steam turbine generators, boilers and buildings for administration and maintenance. Each plant would be surrounded by 8-foot high steel fencing.

The site has virtually unbroken sunshine most of the year, and is near transmission lines that can carry the power to consumers.

We must do the right thing. Which is whatever it takes to get these projects fast-tracked.

BrightSource President John Woolard warned in government filings released last month that heavy-handed regulation could kill the proposal. He did not mention the tortoises directly but referred to “unbounded and extreme” requirements being placed on the company.

At a time when the White House is pushing for the rapid development of green power, Woolard predicted the outcome in the California desert would reverberate widely.

The large-scale solar industry “is in its infancy, with great promise to compete with conventional energy,” Woolard wrote. “Overburdening this fledgling industry will cause it to be stillborn, ending that promise before it has truly begun.”

The Sierra Club wants regulators to move the site closer to Interstate 15, the busy freeway connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas, to avoid what it says will be a virtual death sentence for the tortoises. Estimates of the population have varied, but government scientists say at least 25 would need to be captured and moved.

I find myself siding here with opponents of government regulation. We need to cut this red tape, now. The Sierra Club should know better, and prioritize their goals. We need to save humans first, then we can worry about the rest of the species.

I’m not unsympathetic to the need for preserving biodiversity. But climate change will kill more species than the Sierra Club can possibly imagine. Some people over there need to see the bigger picture, and fast.

Last night I watched CNN coverage of a shaken Kurt Westergaard, after he survived an attempt on his life by a crazed axe-wielding Muslim. Westergaard entered his panic room and called police. When cops showed up, the intruder threw his axe at them, and they shot him.

The courage demonstrated by a mild-mannered cartoonist in the face of global Islamic death threats is an inspiration. I wish I could say the same about our supposedly ‘free’ press. As the camera followed Westergaard around his home, it passed a framed image on the wall of his studio of the now infamous cartoons.

Damn if they didn’t blur the image! That single act speaks volumes about our collective cowardice in the face of a threat we neither fully understand nor have the courage to confront.

Fifteen minutes of the global newscast was filled with numbingly familiar stories of the ongoing terror and violence committed by Islam. It wasn’t just the attempted Al Qaeda Christmas bombing of a US jet, but the despicable slaughter of over 100 people at a volleyball tournament in Pakistan.  On the prior program, Christiane Amanpour was interviewing various Islamic scholars and radicals to determine whether Islam was a “religion of peace” and whether or not the Quran “justified violence.” This is the most ridiculous discussion of all.

But back to Westergaard. In the wake of the spasmodic 2005 Muslim tantrums over his cartoons–the torching of buildings and the killing of upwards of 50 people, the Western press decided the story was just too hot to handle.

Bad, bad idea.

The cartoons should have been published again and again until we were all sick of seeing them–by everyone who cares about a free press. Let the Muslims rage. Let them rage. Like any two-year-old throwing a tantrum, they would eventually have recognized they weren’t going to get anywhere. By not doing so, we capitulated, and the attention was directed back on Jyllands-Posten and Westergaard, who–incredibly–remain in fear for their lives five years after the event.

By blurring a passing shot of cartoons in the home of a cartoonist who’s just been attacked for drawing the very same images, we give tacit consent to the idea that there must be something wrong with what he did. We admit that there are some ideas which are just too dangerous and some groups (notably radical Islam) for which the price of criticism is just too high. We have completely given in.

Make no mistake, this is a desperate world war between Islam and human rights. At this stage, Islam is winning. Let’s call Amanpour’s question what it is: a variation of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many Muslims are moderate, and who think they are a “religion of peace,” a great many others use violence to get what they want.

They are all Muslims, so Islam cannot be considered a “religion of peace” until the moderates convince every last extremist to renounce violence. Prominent Islamic leaders could speed this along by issuing a fatwa disavowing violent passages in the Quran, and by loudly and publicly condemning each and every act of violence. This is altogether too rare. Which puts the ball back in the West’s court as to how to deal with the problem.

We can rightly try to isolate extremists and court moderates. But we must never forget that they all take their inspiration from the same book. It is the book which is the problem, and the book which must be de-legitimized.

One Muslim scholar quoted Jesus saying “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” And he is correct. Jesus was quoted as having said that. (Matt 10:34) Both the Bible and the Quran clearly have violent passages. Far fewer Christians than Muslims act on those words. But that’s missing the point. Christians who justify violence with scripture are just as crazy and morally bankrupt as Muslims. The key is to reject scripture as the arbiter of any moral standard, and treat it like the ordinary work of literature it is.

We must judge religions and the actions of their adherents based only on a standard of universal human rights.

Since we guarantee press freedom, there is no reason any cartoon should not be published. Someone said to me, “but there are a billion Muslims, and they’re not going away.” Precisely. Which is why in order for the West to coexist with people with such wildly different values, we need to strictly enforce and promote our own in our own societies. Let them flog and behead people in their homelands. Let them censor. Let them rage. We will have no part of it, nor will we participate in their idolatry of their ‘Prophet’ by making special exceptions to the rules governing public personas in how we portray him.

If we allow Muslims to impose their totalitarian rules in democratic countries, we have become cowards who don’t deserve to enjoy the hard-won freedoms we take for granted. And we endanger courageous commentators who are only stating the obvious in an undeniable way. We should ask ourselves if Muslims would be so upset about the cartoons if they weren’t right on the mark.

The truth hurts, and it also has the potential to set Muslims free. All we need is the courage to keep telling it.

I don’t suffer fools gladly. As BSJ moves into a new decade, I’ve decided that certain subjects are not worth discussing, just as people who hold certain extremist opinions are not worth debating. Still, there’s no shortage of tin-foil-hatters who like to pretend there is life in their dead-end ideas. The further removed they get from reality, the more their behavior begins to resemble the desperate begging of the religious, praying in vain for help (or acceptance) that will never come.

I get the sense that, birthers, 9/11 ‘truthers,’ climate change deniers, Alex Jonesers and other New World Order nutjobs all have this one thing in common with fundamentalists: They think that wishing will make it so. They feel that if they, “believe” their delusion strongly enough, that if they can somehow convince enough people–or better still–make their case “heard” by the “mainstream media” that there will be a “great awakening” through which their delusion will carry the day. Then they imagine that everything wrong with the world will be ‘exposed’ and put right.

It’s a very, very old story.

So I’ve updated my comment policy to reflect this. Birthers, Truthers, Climate Deniers and fundies are trolls. It’s not merely that some can be trolls, it’s that the very act of posting such opinions defines trolldom. Such posts contribute nothing of value about the subject being discussed, yet shout loudly about the psychology and poor mental skills of the person posting the ‘information.’ They’ve replaced analysis with wishing and willing, proving Hume right when he said (of non-objective thinkers) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

The bottom line is this: I have no interest in debating these subjects, only debunking. If someone has truly new information that has been properly vetted and survives the critical thinking process, then I’m very, very glad to hear from you. I have a lot to learn, and there is much we do not know about many subjects including the climate, the brain, and our government. But I set the bar very high.

What that means is please post nothing less than peer-reviewed data that is properly documented,  and would survive rigorous scientific analysis and is worthy of acceptance by organizations like the NAS, AAAS, or the Royal Society. Lack of certainty about such subjects is no excuse for wild posturing. As I’m fond of saying, you don’t have to know “everything” to know “something.”

If you Google the ‘fact’ you are planning on posting and all you get are a bunch of conspiracy sites, then you ought to plan not to post it here, because I will delete it and block your IP address faster than you can say “Bullshit!”

I’m just no longer interested in spending the finite time I have left on this earth entertaining nonsense. If you wonder why, check out this fruitless exchange I had over the holidays with a former CUT member:

It appears that at least some folks are still deluded with the “Anthroprogenic Global Warming” scam. Haven’t you been following the latest news ? (Google search “Climategate”). The one-worlders hijacked the environmental movement decades ago. They are using it as a Trojan horse to set up their global government to be financed by, guess what,..Carbon Taxes!

Carbon dioxide is NOT a harmful gas and does NOT contribute to the warming of the planet. If anyone is interested in finding out more about the lengths and depths of this scam, look up Lord Monckton, advisor to former British Prime Minister Thatcher. He is probably one of the most knowledgable and articulate debunkers of this man-made global warming hoax. He has posted a detailed report called “Caught Green-Handed” on his website.

Re: Black Sun Journal comment–I delete any comments which say words to the effect that “AGW is a scam.”

I do support an eventual global government. Pollution, people, goods, money flow across borders. We are becoming too interconnected to manage the world without some form of global legal cooperation.

I’m sorry I’ve been down this road too many times and won’t put much time into arguing with anyone about climate change. It is real, documented and accelerating. The information is overwhelming. It’s something close to mental illness to deny it. It’s psychologically very hard to deal with the fact that our lives and industry could be destroying the Earth’s capacity to sustain future generations. But that’s exactly what’s happening, and nature doesn’t give a crap what anyone thinks about it.

America is falling far behind, in no small part thanks to the utter unforgivable willful stupidity of people who would rather ruminate about conspiracies than listen to their scientists and deal with the problem. Fortune favors the bold, and in this era, the boldest thing to do would be to tax carbon, shut down the coal plants and stop importing oil over the next 20 years. Then shift all that capacity to wind, tidal, geothermal and solar power, for both fixed installations and electrified transportation. (Nuclear as currently designed is too expensive).

It would be the single biggest stroke of genius America could accomplish and it would put us back in a position of global leadership. It would make us a leading exporter of green energy solutions. But we probably won’t because we’ve become a nation of pussies who refuse to change. We’ve elected a series of leaders who’ve failed to confront difficult issues of finance, energy, and effective use of our massive military strength. And many of us want to pretend some evil conspiracy is stealing everything from us rather than realizing we’ve ruined it for ourselves by becoming hopeless fossil fuel addicts–and filling our atmosphere with nearly double the natural concentration of CO2. Clearly you do not understand the carbon cycle if you deny this. Every year the world burns through a million years of stored carbon. Plus we continue to burn rain forests which took thousands of years to grow.

We’re too afraid of owning up to our shadow and joining the rest of the world in a low-carbon economy to be worthy of being its leader. It’s a damn shame. China will kick our ass–both in being green and becoming a 21st century political and economic power. They’ll burn all their coal AND simultaneously build out a green economy, because they’re smart, realize what’s happening, and they think long-term. Even if there’s a global carbon treaty, China will delay implementation until the last possible minute. Then they’ll sell us geoengineering schemes to make us pay for fixing the damage they caused.

Or we can just keep trying to negotiate this away from a worst-case scenario. China might change its behavior if the rest of the world moves together with concerted action. They do care about their global image, since their coming dominance is based on their continued trade relations.

Seriously, I don’t want to sound insulting, but this denial BS is just killing me (and the planet). I have ZERO patience for it, OK? Or was that not clear from the article?

regards,

Perhaps you’re right. I realized by way of our exchange that I simply don’t know enough about the subject (AGW) to argue about it. I am not a climate scientist. It’s better to let the experts duke it out.

All I know is it looks mighty suspicious. Why would the scientists at East Anglia University be conspiring to manipulate data? Why would they be trying to supress other scientists who disagreed with their theories? Why were they defiant even in the face of a Freedom of Information request, to release their data, computer codes, etc. so that other scientists could check their work?

Thirty-five years ago the scare was global cooling. Now it’s global warming. But wait a minute, they’ve changed it again to “climate change”. They don’t know for sure if the global temps are trending up or down, but it doesn’t matter. As long as they can convince folks that human activity, left unchecked, will ultimately cause an environmental catrastrophe.

I said I wasn’t going to argue about it and here I am arguing.

On other fronts; I’m not sure what you were referring to when speaking of “birthers”. As far as “truthers” go, I, myself, am convinced that the attacks of 9-11, 2001 were a “false flag” operation orchestrated by rogue elements within our own government. As you have repeatedly said, the info is out there. In my view the evidence is overwhelming. What is so frustrating is that the conspirators, and we know the names of the major players, are still out running around free when they should be in jail awaiting trial for treason and mass murder.

Being a former staff member of the Summit Lighthouse, I usually stop by your website to check for any new SL/CUT-related articles. I apologize that I haven’t read and digested all of the material on your site. By the way, I was saddened to learn that your mother passed away a few months ago. I found out when I was browsing through David Lewis’ website. This delusion of ascended masters just goes on and on doesn’t it?

If I attempt any more posts, I will avoid the climate subject. And I will be more diligent to eliminate all typos and mis-spellings before pressing the submit button. It’s embarassing. My eyesight is not what it once was.

Again, a small dose of critical thinking should dispel those rumors. First, the government can’t manage to keep much of anything secret, even the smallest events are subject to leaks. Second, there were again hundreds of scientists and engineers involved in the forensics on the WTC, and a stack of reports several feet thick, documenting the most heavily photographed news event in history. So in order for there to have been a “false flag” attack, every one of those investigators has to be an idiot, a stooge, or both. I don’t like Bush, but to suggest that he or Cheney or someone else sworn to protect the Constitution would knowingly slaughter 3,000 Americans is to defy all reason.

All these conspiracy theories serve a twisted psychological agenda. It’s self-congratulatory and condescending toward those rubes like me who accept the “mainstream” explanation.

Sadly, the plain unvarnished truth is we were attacked and humiliated by a few guys with knives who used the element of surprise to turn our own technology against us in a horribly effective way. That’s again, like climate change, a very sobering and difficult reality to face. It puts the responsibility squarely back on us, where it belongs.

That is why I don’t allow birthers, truthers, or climate deniers any leeway. That stuff is the product of weak and twisted minds, a total corrosion of knowledge. Sorry.

A dose of critical thinking. If the world trade center buildings collapsed because of fires, then why was explosive residue found in dust samples from ground zero?

You don’t hear much about this in the mainstream media. NIST never even checked for explosives. It took the research efforts of independent scientists to expose it. Google search “Active thermitic materials discovered in world trade center dust”.

Thermite and thermate are explosives. Nano-thermite is even more energetic as the particles in the mix are ground down to microscopic size, thus increasing exposed surface area, accelerating the reaction. How did nano-thermite, a high-tech explosive, get into the dust samples? Maybe those few guys with knives pre-planted it there to throw us off.

False flag attacks are nothing new. Governments have used this tactic to further their agendas for a long time. The U.S. sunk the Maine so that we could enter a war with Spain. Hitler had the Reichstag torched so he could blame it on his political enemies and further consolidate power. Look up the “Northwoods” documents. A plan was on the table for President Kennedy to approve where we were going to kill Americans so that we had an excuse to invade Cuba. Even the Gulf of Tonkin incident which helped get us into the Vietnam war is now understood to have been a staged event. And still some people say our government would never do such horrible things. As Peter Josephs said in his film “Zeitgeist”, ‘If 9-11 was not a false flag attack, it would be the exception to the rule.’

I don’t give the slightest credibility to any of these theories. There’s any number of reasons those chemicals could have been there (if they were), with the collapse and burning of two 110 story buildings, complete with a shopping mall and train station underneath. See, conspiracy theories are not falsifiable. This takes them out of the realm of evidentiary investigation.

You bring up those chemicals as if it were conclusive. Really if there were chemicals, all it proves is that there were chemicals. Then the difficult work begins of figuring out why they were there. It’s not enough to say thermite –> therefore explosive demolition –> therefore false-flag attack. Those are leaps of logic not even the Golden Gate Bridge could span. But when you’re working backward from your preferred conclusion, none of that matters to your broken brain. (Ooooohh. NIST didn’t check for explosives. Ooooohhh, they whisked away the steel beams. That PROVES it.)

Critical thinking is the key. Break the addiction to delusion. Start today.

Zeitgeist, Loose Change and the like are pandering fantasy stories. Fairy tales for the modern tin-foil hat crowd. This stuff is so patently absurd as to be offensive. I won’t even talk to anyone who spouts this drivel. I’ve tried, and I can’t watch for more than about 20 minutes. The logical fallacies, non-sequiturs, guilt-by-association tactics, historical misrepresentations and lies pop out of the screen at such a furious rate it defies description. These are propaganda films of the worst kind. You should be ashamed of yourself for even quoting this horseshit. Did you ever stop to think why expert historians and political scientists avoid it like the plague?

Did you really read the NIST report? Or are you just taking these charlatans’ word for what it says and what it doesn’t say. Here’s a direct quote from the NIST site:

12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”

NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.

The responses to questions number 2, 4, 5 and 11 demonstrate why NIST concluded that there were no explosives or controlled demolition involved in the collapses of the WTC towers.

Furthermore, a very large quantity of thermite (a mixture of powdered or granular aluminum metal and powdered iron oxide that burns at extremely high temperatures when ignited) or another incendiary compound would have had to be placed on at least the number of columns damaged by the aircraft impact and weakened by the subsequent fires to bring down a tower. Thermite burns slowly relative to explosive materials and can require several minutes in contact with a massive steel section to heat it to a temperature that would result in substantial weakening. Separate from the WTC towers investigation, NIST researchers estimated that at least 0.13 pounds of thermite would be required to heat each pound of a steel section to approximately 700 degrees Celsius (the temperature at which steel weakens substantially). Therefore, while a thermite reaction can cut through large steel columns, many thousands of pounds of thermite would need to have been placed inconspicuously ahead of time, remotely ignited, and somehow held in direct contact with the surface of hundreds of massive structural components to weaken the building. This makes it an unlikely substance for achieving a controlled demolition.

Analysis of the WTC steel for the elements in thermite/thermate would not necessarily have been conclusive. The metal compounds also would have been present in the construction materials making up the WTC towers, and sulfur is present in the gypsum wallboard that was prevalent in the interior partitions.[Italics added]

How can people really believe that scientists are that stupid that they would miss controlled demolition in a forensic analysis? I think it’s a way of a lot of dumb people make themselves feel better about their low intelligence, i.e. taking the piss out of ‘high and mighty’ scientists.

Someone’s making money off of other people’s gullibility. Nothing at all new, of course. There’s a sucker born every minute. The worst part is, these types of delusions play the same role as religion in keeping people stupid, off-track and out of the way of the real and ongoing machinations of power. In this sense, the conspiracy theories serve two purposes, one intentional (making money for the purveyors) one accidental, (they become tools of mass consciousness control, a diversion that actually preserves the status quo). Did you ever think of that??

Lenin was on to something when he talked about “useful idiots.” Now please don’t bother me with any more of this nonsense. It’s neurological abuse. I had to figure out if you were really that naive, your brain really that dysfunctional, and based on the fact that you’re still not dropping the conspiracy charade, it seems that you are.

Sorry to be blunt, but after all the bullshit conspiracies I put up with in my life, I tell it like it is. Remember, I was born to my delusional parents. You followed them intentionally. Big difference. And it seems people who fell for the Ascended Masters are more likely than average to uncritically accept conspiracy theories.

As one of the most powerful liars in the world, Matt Drudge takes perverse pleasure in twisting facts to fit his right-wing denialist agenda. He’s got this down to a fine art, cherry-picking and sometimes re-writing actual headlines from newspapers around the world. He editorializes by the way he groups stories, often making it seem like there is a groundswell of evidence for his tea-party talking points. It’s a hell-in-a-handbasket approach, with breathless exploitation of every possible logical fallacy (which gets him a direct line to the paleo-Republican amygdala). Add a dose of mean-spirited schoolyard taunts, and you have the essence of the Drudge Report.

All that hyperbole gets him tens of millions of page-views daily and a virtual lock on the news cycle. Proving that a free press is not much of a guarantee of anything, except that those who shout what people want to hear in the loudest voice control the conversation.

Drudge can be counted on to trumpet every major or minor storm. Never mind what’s happening with the climate, he locks his jaws onto every degree of winter weather like it was a hunk of red meat. ‘RECORD STORM BLANKETS MIDWEST…BLIZZARD…ICE STORM…CHILL MAP…THOUSANDS WITHOUT POWER. “See, I told you so!” And if some climate protest ever gets snowed out, he’ll tell you all about it with self-righteous derision. When nature turns on the oven, and it’s above 40 Celsius (104 F) like it has been in Australia the past day or so, Drudge is silent.

His usual cherry-picking is bad enough. But today, that was punctuated by something even more insidious–outright lying. How do you lie with a headline? By grouping it with others and fostering deliberate semantic confusion about the facts.

Here’s the headlines:

NO RISE OF ATMOSPHERIC CARBON FRACTION IN PAST 160 YEARS, next to this one:

SNOWSTORM SQUELCHES CLIMATE CHANGE PROTEST

What a bunch of buffoons!!!! Right?

The first headline linked to a story in Science Daily.

Wow, I thought, that’s unusual, since it’s well-known that CO2 has gone from pre-industrial levels around 265 ppm to the current 389 ppm. What’s up? I was expecting to read about how thousands of scientists had all collectively made an error in measurement, were now correcting it, and “the whole of climate science is being re-evaluated.”

Not.

The story is talking about the percentage of atmospheric carbon which remains in the atmosphere (about 45 percent) vs. that which gets absorbed by the ocean and other carbon sinks. As atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen, what this means is that 55% of it is still being absorbed. That is expected to change as the oceans become saturated with the gas. So not only will ocean acidification get steadily worse, but the oceans will eventually lose their ability to absorb carbon altogether.

Drudge can read, he knows damn well the headline doesn’t mean what it seems to imply, yet he ran it anyway. If there is a definition of failed journalistic ethics, this is it. I’d go a step further and call it just plain evil.

From Science Daily:

However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

Given the stakes, what this study really means is that we have to be even more careful because we might be nearing a tipping point at which the oceans suddenly become saturated. At that point we would get more than a doubling of the portion in the atmosphere, leading to a non-linear increase and even faster temperature rise than expected. We really need to know if this is going to happen. If it does, it’s a problem so huge as to not even be able to be expressed in financial or human terms. The changing of the chemistry of the seas, which make up 3/4 of our planet’s surface poses an existential threat like no other. Essentially what this study documents is the incredible service we’ve enjoyed. Our oceans have at no cost removed over half of the human CO2 pollution from the atmosphere for the last two centuries.

This is something vital to our continued existence, and it may halt or reverse at any time. We need to know when that time might be, and we should all be very concerned in a very personal way about reaching it.

But thanks to Drudge, the GOP can toast the new decade tonight in blissful ignorance of our peril, because there’s been “no increase in the atmospheric carbon fraction.”

Can’t get through the season without saying something about the annual “War on Christmas,” that perverse ritual when Bill O’Reilly, Bill Donohue and the whole gang of U.S. cultural conservatives get themselves all riled up because the government no longer grants them the religious privilege to which they’ve become accustomed.

No Angels, No Stars

Just four days before Christmas, Sonoma County’s acting administrator has ordered that all religious symbols be removed from Christmas trees erected in county-owned buildings.

“I understand the concern about government endorsing religion or a doctrine, and I respect that is not our role,” acting county administrator Chris Thomas told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

Thomas’ order on Monday, Dec. 21, meant all stars, angels and anything else smacking of religion had to be immediately removed from the trees, the newspaper reported.

The county administrator made his decision based on a complaint filed by Irv Sutley of Santa Rosa, a disabled veteran with “a long history of protesting the use of religious symbols in government settings,” reported the Press Democrat.

Commenters were predictably worked up into a lather:

Once again, this fool has allowed evil to prevail. Who paid for the decorations? (As if that is truly the issue.) So, why is the religion of atheism is allowed to over ride the desires of everyone else? This stupidity is offensive to God!…

Atheism should certainly be declared a religion. People like Mr.Sutley have nothing better to do than feel sorry for himself as a “disabled????” veteran which was so quickly used as some kind of excuse for his bitterness?…

Angelo, these idiots are not “brothers in Christ”, but children of the devil. As for Thomas and Sutley being created by God, there is an implication here that is false. Their wrong choices are not created by God, nor does God will that they rebuke Him. The Church does not hold these two fools in “high esteem”; “God is no repector of men”. To hold an anti-Christ is high esteem does not do justice nor does it enact charity, but serves vanity and the devil….

If Chris Thomas believes that a star is a religious symbol for “some people” and should be removed, then just think of the endless possibilities. Should the red star be dropped from the California flag? How about the bear — it must be a religious symbol for somebody somewhere…

I found this all highly amusing. So I replied:

Oh, the outrage!! I’m sure it was fun while the Christians had an unquestioned majority. But now the numbers are falling and Christianity is only one religion among many, and non-believers are recognized as legitimate citizens. So the shoe is on the other foot. Religious symbols must be eliminated from the public square because it is not the role of government to appear to favor one religion over another. Either you display them all or you display none. Christians don’t seem to be happy with either. If they can’t have a monopoly on holiday displays, they start pouting.

But get real. Faith is a personal matter, and if your faith is strong you shouldn’t worry about symbols being displayed in public. Display whatever you like in your own homes and churches. Anything else is just the petulance of a waning constituency and should rightly be ignored in a pluralistic society.

UPDATE: Apparently, Sonoma county has bowed to pressure and rescinded the ban. And on it goes…

“How can we ever agree, Like the rest of the world, We grow farther apart.
I swear you don’t listen to me, Holding my hand to my heart… Holding my fist to my racing heart…”
–Hand Over Fist, Neil Peart, 1989

After dealing with a particularly intransigent commenter for the past week on my Facebook page, I began to think of our CO2 problem in psychological terms–as very similar to a severe substance addiction. I’ve known several people who struggled with their alcoholism and drug abuse for years before finally gaining the humility to get themselves into a recovery program. It’s a little like what the world is doing right now.

All the posturing in Copenhagen still represents the final stages of global denial. Watch them squirm.

Everyone knows we are going to have to make changes from top to bottom: From how we produce energy, to redesigning products, to the way we manage trade and international relations. Everything will have to shift toward being in harmony with–rather than in opposition to–nature.

Everyone–and I mean even the most strident obstructionist deniers–knows what’s going on. We’re on the cusp of a fundamental shift that will radically change everything about our lives, economies, and governments for the better. And it’s coming whether people want to face it or not. But some very wealthy interests will lose in the coming transition–and lose very big. There’s a couple of hundred trillion dollars to be made peddling the Earth’s remaining carbon. That’s a lot of money and power arrayed against our Bright Green future.

Still, the worst the deniers can do is to delay action–hopefully not long enough to pass the Earth’s point of no return. That’s the high stakes game of Russian Roulette they’re willing to play, to get their grubby hands on as much of that pile of filthy soot-covered money as they can.

Even so, I think it’s an exciting time to be alive. I know we will all have much better lives after the Energy Transition. If we get our act together, the Metricene period (H/T Lou Grinzo) is likely to be the most prosperous, peaceful and healthy time in human history. Or, if the deniers win, it could be an unmitigated disaster.

Honestly, though exchanges like the one I just had with my Facebook friend could easily bring me to the brink of misanthropy, I remain hopeful that our better natures will prevail.

So without further remarks, here’s my Twelve-step program to beat carbon addiction:

1. Admit we are powerless over combustion and that it has made our world unmanageable.
2. Come to believe that only harnessing a Power greater than fossil fuels can restore us to sanity and prosperity.
3. Make a decision to turn our energy & economy over to the care of Nature as we gain a better understanding of its principles.
4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of our civilization.
5. Admit to Nature, to ourselves, and to our fellow human beings the exact nature of our excesses.
6. Become entirely ready to accept natural limits & expunge the curses of short-term thinking & lack of global systemic management.
7. Humbly engage in introspection to understand how we got so out of touch with the natural ethics of the world which spawned us.
8. Make an inventory of all the ways in which C02 has harmed our fellow citizens, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct financial amends to climate change victims wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continue to take annual carbon inventories and when we exceed scientific limits, promptly admit it and take corrective action.
11. Seek through constant research to improve knowledge of natural systems, and to amply meet human needs while preserving them.
12. Having had an economic and political awakening, we have gained the courage to practice these principles in global affairs.

Comes now Arsalan Iftikhar, an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com, and contributing editor for Islamica magazine in Washington, to claim that religions don’t inspire murder.

Clearly, they do.

Iftikhar claims:

First of all, someone simply saying “Allahu Akbar” while committing an act of mass murder no more makes their criminal act “Islamic” than a Christian uttering the “Hail Mary” while murdering an abortion medical provider, or someone chanting “Onward, Christian Soldiers” while bombing a gay nightclub, would make their act “Christian” in nature.

Simply put; murder is murder and has no religion whatsoever.

Let me try to wrap my head around this logic. He just gave three clear examples of religion inspired murders, then a blatant non-sequitur. It’s worse than a non-sequitur, it’s an out-and-out contradiction of the very facts he just presented.

I know Iftikhar wishes it were otherwise. He condemns the Fort Hood atrocity. If it were an isolated incident, he’d have a point. But the famous website The Religion of Peace has documented over 14,000 separate acts of Islamic murder since 9/11. And the count goes up almost every single day.

In the U.S., we are still freshly smarting from the Christian murder of Dr. George Tiller. The case of the LGBT center shooting in Israel is barely 3 months old.

Iftikhar is in a monumental state of denial. Of course we should not respond by demonizing all Muslims. Most are peaceful people, if a bit overwrought in the name of their Prophet. But this is a Muslim problem, and it must be dealt with by Muslims if they want to avoid the backlash. The way forward is through facing the cancer of militancy by going to the source: the murderous language in their central scripture, the Quran. For it is the Quran (and the Bible, and nearly every other Abrahamic scripture) that contains the violent passages.

The most peaceful religious people are the ones who ignore their scriptures and follow humanistic ethics. It would not be inaccurate to say that adherents who kill unbelievers in the name of their God are technically the most faithful. They are doing what they have been told will secure them a place in heaven.

Editorials slamming “new atheism” as “strident,” “tedious,” “uninformed,” or the kicker, “fundamentalist” crop up every week like new mushrooms sprouting on cow dung after a rain. They dish out the same false claims, straw men and ad hominem attacks against high-profile atheist intellectuals, and get thrashed for it every time on the same grounds by other atheist writers. Then there’s the variant that promotes accommodation of believers, expressing concern that we are too harsh, we need to woo people with honey rather than vinegar. It’s just good “marketing,” you understand.

Most of the time I don’t comment on these stories, it’s just too repetitive. If we’re turning people off, then believers should be all-too-happy to see us fall on our faces and commit rhetorical suicide.

In this case, it’s Hitchens’ new film that’s being targeted. Instead of engaging with the debate, Ottawa Citizen editorial page editor Leonard Stern tries to act as if he’s above it all, explaining to Hitchens how childish it is to discuss the claims religions are actually making.

My favorite trope, which Stern plows like a familiar rut, is the “literal-mythological” dichotomy. It involves the comparison that while some fundamentalists take the patently absurd stories they read in the bible literally, atheists are guilty of the same thing when they mock them. “No one really believes those absurdities anyway, so mocking them proves nothing.” Or–they do in fact believe absurd stories, but it doesn’t matter because we are ignoring the true (and far more complex) purpose, function and dynamic of how religion is “actually lived.”

Wilson really believes, for example, that Noah crammed all those animals on a single boat. I wonder how many times Hitchens has patiently crunched the numbers for his pal, calculating the mass of the animals in order to show that Noah’s task was an engineering impossibility.

The problem with this pedantic brand of atheism is that it conceives of religion in very narrow terms. Religion is ridiculous for Hitchens because, in his view, it means that you necessarily believe that Eve was made from Adam’s rib. No disrespect to pastor Wilson, but this ignores the reality of how religion is actually lived.

Hitchens is pedantic, and a nerd to boot. Welllll…..Really?? It’s not important that they believe that stuff? It’s not important that otherwise sensible people go to church and take communion, in which they pretend that a cracker and some wine becomes the literal body and blood of a person who may have never existed, but even if he did he’s been dead for two millenia. This is far stronger than a belief, it’s action. And to prove how seriously they take it, try walking out of a Catholic church sometime with the “host,” and see the kind of death threats you get. Or desecrate a “host” and post the picture on the web. Two thousand comments later you might start to understand how strongly they really do believe in the very absurdities we are talking about, and how much a myth can very much affect real life. If myths are so beneficial and not harmful to society, shouldn’t host-desecration cause a lesser offense than constitutionally protected flag-burning?

A different sect of so-called moderates want to see their children full-immersion baptized even though it would be patently absurd to think going swimming in a special pool gets you anything other than wet. But they consider this some sort of conditioning that–notwithstanding hair dryers–makes it impossible for their kids to later renounce their faith. For the record, I’d call it a form of hypnotic shock induction to reinforce childhood indoctrination and prevent defections. But that’s just me.

So it’s ritual, then. Humans have performed rituals for all sorts of nonsensical reasons throughout history. Believe it or not, I’m OK with that so long as no one gets hurt. Most of what we humans do has very little concrete purpose, so if doing a rain dance makes you feel better about yourself, or gives you a sense of control over your crops, I’m fine with that. I’m even fine with people being baptized or taking communion. I’m fine with chanting, I’m fine with people sitting around thinking positive (or negative) thoughts. I’m fine with rituals involving talking to the dead (as long as you don’t pretend they talk back).

And this is the point. Rituals can’t hurt anyone unless they are claimed to be something beyond the symbolic. And that’s where the problem comes in: they nearly always *are*. No one wants to think their rituals are meaningless. People think chanting changes the world. They think their positive thoughts affect matter. There’s no end of absurd claims people make about their wishing and willing. When one group makes such concrete claims, then expects others to accept it literally, it becomes a problem. What they are really asking non-believers to do is to grant unearned respect for their sheer earnestness–even if the end result is opaque or useless.

It’s galling to me that religions claim to offer people objectively valuable purpose and meaning, yet thousands of them perform different and often conflicting rituals. If there was really a God watching up in the sky–he could only see these as billions of thoughts and sentiments blended into a haze of vague desiring and begging for “something more.” I think any God worthy of the name would find it all rather amusing: “Children, children, be of good cheer, I regret to inform you I can’t prevent you all from dying some day, so in the meantime–do your homework, love each other and your planet, and eat your vegetables.”

Stern continues:

I’ve known many devout people from a variety of faith communities. They are religious in the sense they believe there is purpose and meaning to the universe. They believe in a creator — an infinite presence that our finite minds cannot comprehend but know is there. They believe it’s important to feed the poor and help the sick not just because it alleviates human suffering but because doing so contributes in some inchoate way to the cosmic order.

Vague, vague–piles and heaps of vague. I love the use of the word inchoate. Talk about about an intellectual surrender! We see the next fallback position of the confused apologist is to say that it’s really not about belief anyway, but about action, “how you live.” This is just a bastardized version of humanism (but to them, humanism’s “not good enough.”) We humanists feel that how we treat each other and the kind of world we make has ultimate value because it’s all we have and all we will ever have. The apologist distorts this to say that treating others with kindness could only have meaning if it pleased the Almighty, “contributed in some inchoate (ill-formed and incomplete) way to the cosmic order,” and upped our chances at immortality. That’s just naive Pascal’s Wager tripe anyway.

The humanist makes the greater contribution, because she does it without the expectation of any other reward than feeling good. The only ‘cosmic order’ of any consequence to humanity comes through the promotion of human unity and the alleviation of suffering.

The point here is that moderate religion stripped of the hierarchy, belief, and ritual is at its core humanism. It came from naturally evolved morality, which is based on reciprocity and empathy. And that’s the stuff we all strive for, strive to become better at, strive to express in ever more powerful world-changing ways. Or we should. The problem is that any religion that is based on the reification of myths is bound to drain resources, talent and time from accomplishing things in the here and now. It’s bound to be less agile at responding to the changing circumstances of life, since it’s based on stories that have remained the same for hundreds of generations.

Believers are taking up a large portion of their brain power running an overlay simulation that they attempt to blend seamlessly with the natural, observable world. In this sense the myths become very important to them because without them the simulation collapses. Without the attendant grandeur and promise of eternal life, finding motivation or purpose becomes, well, what it really should be, a personal, interior journey.

And what of the myths themselves? There are good ones and bad ones. Believing in stories that are absurd and impossible cannot be good for anyone. Look at the damage the idea of original sin and the virgin birth does. It turns ordinary “good” Catholics into crazy deranged people blocking access to birth control and abortion services and ensuring the spread of the deadly plague of HIV around the world. How much suffering can be laid at the feet of this one despicable idea?

Sure there are positive metaphors and lessons in myth: renewal, sacrifice, loyalty, betrayal, superhuman strength, conflict, or intelligence. But we have to evaluate each one. Is it a good myth? Or does it promote the same old pathologies of abuse of hierarchy or authority. Does it help people see things as they are? Or will it confuse them further?

Stern seems to think it doesn’t matter–that even false histories can have value:

The Canadian theologian Rabbi Gunther Plaut talks about how American tradition mythologized the frontiersmen, presenting them as enterprising pioneers and courageous adventurers. The truth, of course, is that many pioneers, having failed in the east, had no place to go but west, and were motivated as much by a desire to get rich as anything else. “But Americans have preferred to see their past in an idealized light, (emphasis added) and their admiration of the value of personal independence and frontier virtues has itself shaped the psychology of the nation.” In the same way, says Plaut, Biblical narratives “mirror the collective memory of our ancestors, and in the course of centuries this record became a source of truth,” incorporated into “the consciousness of the people.”

“Preferred to see their past…” But what is the value of ‘truth’ that’s not true? And if we accept a historical error of our collective memory as truth, is it not corrupting? Stern tries to assert the value of biblical stories that are not literally true by bringing up false perceptions about frontiersmen. I think he’s arguing against himself. Romantic notions of history blunt the real lessons of that history. If we have a rose-colored view, it’s just as bad as a blinkered one. Let’s just take off the rose-colored glasses altogether and see things for what they are. That includes Bible stories and other myths. Let’s ask whether the story we’re reading makes a point of value measured against modern, universal, inclusive human ethics.

Stories that directly conflict with science are the most corrosive, and so should be out at square one. Tossed, kaput. That means “creation,” the talking ass, the virgin birth, water into wine, the Eucharist, the Resurrection, and all the rest. Myths are only valuable inasmuch as they provide a supportable moral lesson, cautionary tale, or inspiration. Many things about the great American explorers were laudable. But that doesn’t mean some of them weren’t also deeply flawed. Since when did their ambition to get rich become a moral failing on its own? Doesn’t it matter more *how* the explorers’ fortunes were made? And whether they treated the native peoples ethically? Those are the questions we should be asking, because they require greater nuance. The answers can be brought to bear on how we should behave as we explore our own frontiers today.

In the end, this is not a battle between religion and atheism, nor even between literalism and metaphor. It’s a battle between glossing over unpleasant truths and facing them. For humans, these truths are the inevitability of death, and the competitiveness and rapaciousness of our untempered nature. In the face of these, religion and its apologists have made a cowardly stand for pleasant but corrupting stories that hold us back. Why can’t we simply find the courage to face the truth of our history and existence? I don’t care how many times people say “that’s not nice.” It’s a stage we’re going to have to get through if we want to slog our way forward.

In the grand scheme of American politics, the gay marriage issue seems like it should really be a footnote. It affects so few people, how could it be so important?

The question is simple enough, right? Either you think same-sex marriage is a symbol of plummeting morality and the decline of Western Civilization, or you see it as a fundamental human right. Like abortion or gun control, it’s not a subject that lends itself to much middle ground.

And with 10.2% unemployment, a war raging in Afghanistan, and the worst mass-murder on a military base in US history having just occurred, it might seem trivial to discuss it. And if you’re not gay, why should you care?

Well, a few days ago, voters in Maine shamefully denied same-sex marriage rights, as they have done in all 31 states where the question has made it to the ballot. This completely mocks the idea of equal protection under the law, and exposes the tyranny of the majority–what my sister called the “fly in the soup” of democracy. And I will demonstrate that this is no empty metaphor.

To put it in perspective, let’s start with something that should send a chill up the spine of every American–even in “red” states: Opposition to gay marriage is what gave George W. Bush a second term. And the second Bush term is what plunged us into the “Great Recession.” Lest you think I’m overstating the case, Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in 2008 in this report:

The turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into early 2007. (emphasis added)

Most of this gross malfeasance took place under the second Bush term. And it cost Republicans dearly in the 2008 election. It’s also a well-known political fact that John Kerry lost the state of Ohio in 2004 because of aggressive pastoral support for the Ohio Marriage Amendment. While other factors may have played some role in the outcome, both academics and Catholics acknowledged that the marriage amendment is what gave Bush the edge.

From The Religion Card: Evangelicals, Catholics, and Gay Marriage in the 2004 Presidential Election, Notre Dame University, Brigham Young University:

Does George W. Bush owe his re-election to the groundswell of opposition to gay marriage? We find that while gay marriage was not necessarily the most important factor overall and did not matter equally for every voter, it did matter to white evangelical Christians and Catholics. Specifically, evangelicals and Catholics were more likely to turn out to vote in states with a gay marriage ban on the ballot.

Catholic News Service article:

But when it was all said and done, 22 percent of all voters across the United States picked “moral values” as the most important issue facing the nation, followed by the economy and jobs (20 percent) and the war on terrorism (19 percent). Eighty percent of those who saw moral values as the most important issue voted for Bush, according to post-election data released by the National Election Pool.

Eleven state ballots included measures similar to the Federal Marriage Amendment, revising state constitutions to limit marriage to its traditional definition. The measure was approved in all 11 states, including Ohio, where a Bush win secured his victory in the Electoral College, (emphasis added) and eight other states won by Bush.

“Clearly the supporters of traditional marriage helped President Bush down the aisle to a second term,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

Why can’t they just have civil unions? What’s the big deal about calling themselves “married?”

In the runup to California’s infamous Prop. 8, someone I once greatly respected asked me this question in a disparaging manner. I lost my respect for them in a big hurry. It’s amazing how similar this sentiment is to labeling African-Americans “uppity” for wanting full equality. “Separate but equal” doctrines were struck down by Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Still it took until 1964 for full equality under the law to take effect with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

1964 was the year of my birth, which means it’s been my entire lifetime since this issue was legally settled. Yet Americans still quibble over whether gay people are worthy of having their rights protected. Slightly over half of voters in at least 31 states feel they are not.

On the same day Maine decided to scrap its marriage law, Washington voters narrowly approved a separate-but-equal version, granting all domestic partners the same rights and obligations as married couples. I’m happy about the historic passage of Washington R-71, but even though it marks the first time recognition of gay unions has ever succeeded at the ballot box, it’s bittersweet. Gays can now have ‘weddings’ legally in Washington, but they still can’t drink from the same champagne fountain.

“He is entitled to his opinion”

The young son of a friend of mine posted his opposition to gay marriage on a Facebook poll. I took issue with it, told him he was homophobic, and ended up hearing back from the father: “He assures me that he is not homophobic.  He simply opposes granting special status to gay unions by legalizing them as marriages.” And that “there is plenty of reason for well-meaning people to differ on this one.  He is entitled to his opinions and, at fourteen, I would expect him to evolve as he grows up.”

I hope so. But in this case, it’s pretty damn clear that the young man had been influenced not only by his peers and locale (a strong red state), but also by the attitudes of his parents. And I’m not sure I agree at all with the idea that “well-meaning people” can differ. I think being opposed to gay marriage entirely excludes a person from the category of “well-meaning.” Exactly what “well-meaning” or humanitarian goal is being served by denying an entire class of Americans the right to join one of civilization’s most important legally-defined subgroups? How does such a “well-meaning person” sleep better at night knowing they’ve seriously degraded someone else’s quality of life–a state of affairs they could reverse at zero cost to their own well being?

Just as blacks were once considered by many Americans to be sub-human, so are gay people today. And this exclusionary attitude should be treated by all “well-meaning people” with utter contempt. The fiction that such opinions are within the range of acceptable dialog serves only to reinforce and prolong bigotry.

What about the children?

In an article about the Maine vote, political consultant Frank Schubert (who was also instrumental in passing California’s Prop. 8 ) said he discovered a deep vein of fear and disgust while conducting focus groups on the issue.

Schubert said he had an ah-ha moment in California when a focus group watched a campaign commercial featuring a Massachusetts couple who described how their 7-year-old son came home from school and explained that a man can marry another man, something he learned in a children’s book.

One of the members of the focus group shook his head, and Schubert asked the moderator to inquire. The participant said he would be angry if something like that that happened to his kids.

“So that was sort of a light-bulb moment, that this education issue was really going to be a powerful one for us,” said Schubert, who with Flint was named the “public affairs team of the year” for 2009 by the American Association of Political Consultants.

I talked about this on Facebook, and one friend of mine–who has four delightful kids–wrote “Kids should be taught about sex - period! Enough with the lies and denial, kids are aware of sex and if you put fairy wings on everything they will think that sex is a shameful thing.” I replied with the following comment:

I agree. Careful surveys (or eavesdropping) should be done to figure out at what age kids are already talking amongst themselves about sex. Then schools and parents should pre-empt them slightly with better information. But that would be using logic.

Never happen in a million years. Parents seem to experience an epidemic of prudishness when their kids are young. And that’s a trait that crosses the liberal-conservative divide.

Parents, if you don’t like being seen that way, then do something about it!

There’s an interesting herd phenomenon in social psychology that people act as if the group is more prudish than they are. To avoid being viewed as crass or amoral, they profess to be offended by something long before it actually offends them. They are more concerned with having the “correct” response to something that is seen as controversial than about authentically expressing their own opinion, particularly when it involves a risque topic.

And all it takes is one person to ratchet up the prude factor in a group of parents. It’s far easier to provoke a group shaming response than one of acceptance. We all know this, know it’s a problem, but there seems to be no way to fix it. “For the children” seems to be the most prominent thought-stopping tactic in politics.

So the end result is that anything about expanding sex education or reducing the age at which it is offered is political kryptonite.

Standing for Liberty and Freedom

We Americans seem pretty pleased with ourselves, as if we were some kind of bastion of liberty and freedom–a beacon to the world. Horseshit. We must recognize that the greatness of our society is measured specifically in how we treat our pariahs–gays, Muslims, atheists, and illegal immigrants. We must learn to be very disturbed as long as any American minority is committing suicide at several times the rate of other citizens (as gays do). Lives are literally at stake. And that’s not all.

There once was a Republican Unity Coalition, way back in 2001, dedicated to making sexual orientation a “non-issue” in the GOP. It was chaired by Alan Simpson, joined by former President Gerald Ford, and counted such prominent members as John Danforth, Mary Matalin and Diane Ravitch. But that was before–before the religious right devoured the soul of the former party of Lincoln and Eisenhower. The “Log Cabin Republicans” have likely never seen a worse time in the party’s history. Why can’t today’s arch-conservatives remember the words of President Ford?

I think they ought to be treated equally, Period. I have always believed in an inclusive policy, in welcoming gays and others into the party. I think the party has to have an umbrella philosophy if it expects to win elections.

But Ford did not forsee the rise of the exact inverse strategy: today’s relentless wedge politics. The story of how the radicals stole the party from the moderates is outlined in Max Blumenthal’s horrifying book Republican Gomorrah. Ford couldn’t have grasped the towering ideological collapse of a party which could so quickly be seduced by the scent of raw power into straying so far from its principles of limited government and individual rights.

But we had better learn to understand why and how they are succeeding. First and foremost, we’d better come up with a better rejoinder to help American parents get rid of their squeamishness over their children learning about gay marriage and gay sex. Whether it’s actually taught in schools or not is irrelevant. Many parents have bought into the idea (or fear) that it will be. If we can’t beat them on this messaging challenge, the radical Tea Party Republicans will milk this issue again and again and again to put their people in power and roll back progress on everything we hold dear: health care, the climate, renewable energy, corporate accountability and a host of other vital issues.

I’ve never been a huge Michael Moore fan. Still, his latest documentary Capitalism: A Love Story is powerful and entertaining. Variety’s review is on the nose, and I won’t repeat it here.

The film builds its case well, which is that modern American capitalism has taken over the government, and turned the economy into something akin to an organized-crime racket. And in some ways Moore is right. Financial deregulation that began under the Reagan administration and continued with the destruction of even more laws under George W. Bush encouraged the flagrantly fraudulent sales of sub-prime mortgages and their derivatives. When the taxpayers bailed out Wall Street in 2008 instead of Main Street, it became the mother of all swindles. To this day, no one has a proper accounting of how the $700 billion was spent.

Having said that, my biggest problem with Moore is his tendency toward oversimplification and sentimentality. He substitutes outrage for analysis. And he lets American borrowers and consumers completely off the hook. Sad as it may be to see someone getting tossed out of their home, no one forced them to take out a bad mortgage. Moore’s lurid populism strip-mines the “poor me” attitude of people who were only too happy to spend other people’s money without reading the fine print. Sadly we all had to be reminded that we don’t get something for nothing.

But this is picking nits. There is a larger problem with populist anti-capitalism: it ignores the realities of power and competition. Moore and other economic liberals love to disparage “greed.”  Why can’t people just be satisfied with “enough,” they ask. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Humans were shaped by evolution to be opportunists. And it’s not just about living “happily ever after.” Humanity has conflicting drives for cooperation and dominance.

And “dominance” can mean exactly that: slaughtering the neighboring tribe, stealing their women, sowing their fields with salt. Sure, we are “civilized” now, which means dominance is expressed through deception and arcane financial instruments. It means a person, family, or tribe can fall into a trap in which their dignity is completely stolen. Instead of being slaughtered, they’re still walking around wondering what the hell happened. It’s no less brutal–as Moore showed in a powerful scene when a family was paid $1,000 in a “cash-for-keys” scheme that required them to clean and prep their own foreclosed home for its next owner.

Moore took issue with another corporate practice known as “dead peasant” insurance: A company takes out life-insurance policies on all its employees and collects the benefits when they die. It’s sad, of course, to see the bereaved talking about how much they miss their husband or wife. But blaming the corporation for their pain is disingenuous. Moore isn’t even claiming that the corporation killed them, but he’s implying it.

I object to this because it creates fake outrage, and it’s manipulative. The reality of the financial crisis is bad enough without having to manufacture new issues. People are free to take out their own life insurance policies if they want, and many do. This corporate practice feels unsavory, to be sure. But that’s not the same thing as it being illegal or even necessarily unethical, although new rules have been passed in the last few years. It’s basically placing an impartial “side-bet” on employee life expectancy. If they did it for just one person, it would be creepy. But doing it across the board for thousands of employees is little different than a corporation trading options. And this is my issue with Moore. He confuses being “nice” with following the law. We all wish people would be “nicer.” But relying on it is a recipe for disappointment. And there are countless business practices that are not “nice” but make economic sense.

And this is not the fault of capitalism. Regardless of economic or political system, people are always going to try to take advantage of others’ misfortune. It’s how power works. Its even necessary as evolution and counter-evolution make people and companies stronger and more efficient. The debate then is not between capitalism and some other economic system, it’s finding out how to design a world that works well in spite of or even because of the rapaciousness of human nature.

One answer to the dilemma Moore presents is improved voluntary cooperation. To the extent that people can come together and unite around common goals, they can subordinate and temporarily sublimate their competitive drives. I support this wholeheartedly. Moore showed two examples of companies which ran as co-operatives. To me, this was the best and most hopeful part of his film. Still, all the voluntary cooperation in the world won’t get rid of cheaters and slackers. Nor will it get rid of the vultures, who occupy an important evolutionary niche.

The failures of American capitalism can also be largely chalked up to continued governmental indifference to externalities (costs and benefits accruing to non-participants in an economic transaction). It’s easy to focus on inequality and growing disparities between super-rich and everyone else. But this does nothing to solve the underlying problem: Systemic unpaid externalities that benefit the top 1%.

We should be far more concerned with externalities than with indiscriminately raising taxes on the rich. Taxing the rich punishes all wealth, whether it was acquired ethically or not. Taxing externalities targets specific bad behavior. This one concept has the capacity to transform the debate about everything from health care to green energy. Put another way, we won’t solve these problems until corporate profits are calculated based on their full long-term impact on society. It’s a conversation no one really wants to have, because it requires we face structural abuses and get our act together. (Even consumers don’t want to talk about externalities, because doing so might raise prices in the short-term.)

Finally, Moore presents a false dichotomy as the climax and summation to his film. He contrasts capitalism with his preferred alternative, “democracy.” Obviously, democracy is a political, not economic system, and it can co-exist with a wide range of economic methods. But Moore continues to muddle the two by showing a stirring clip from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about a second bill of economic rights.

I agree with many of FDR’s “rights” on a humanitarian basis. But you can never guarantee such positive outcomes. Churn and loss are an essential part of social and economic evolution. When better ways of doing things come along, some people will inevitably suffer temporary pain. I’m all for government safety nets, and I’m all for a more egalitarian society. Unfortunately, I don’t think Moore’s liberal populism will get us there any faster than Glenn Beck’s “know-nothing” conservative populism.

Human rights only survive when backed by superior force. The opportunism of corporations and bankers will only be brought under control when the common people become smarter and even more ruthless in the wielding of their own political strength. The rape of the planet which many blame on “capitalism” will only be stopped by capitalism when the people demand full financial accountability on corporate balance sheets of every form of externality.

But clearly such policy details have little to do with the art of documentary filmmaking–which is finding an emotional connection with your audience. This Moore accomplishes. Audiences will find his sentimentality and japery far more satisfying than the cold, dry prospect of improved policymaking.

Moore theatrically declared that “you cannot regulate evil,” but this is exactly what we must do. The first step is to stop demonizing it. Such black and white rhetoric is no different than what we were hearing from John McCain when he said: “How do you deal with evil? Defeat it.” Fail.

The truth is a lot subtler, and we are all a part of the problem. Human “greed” is simply the fulfillment of evolutionary conflicts and metabolic needs. Without smart regulation, any attempt at reducing consumption will simply lower commodity prices and make it cheaper for others to consume. So we need to stop the hand-wringing about our immutable nature. We need to legally compel everyone to pay the true costs of what they buy. And we need to incentivize good corporate citizenship.  Then, and only then, can we achieve a society that is fully functional.

It’s almost as if some people wish the Cold War had never ended. There was something attractive about the US-Soviet bipolar world. Kind of like the religious black-and-white thinking of absolute good and absolute evil. All you had to do is choose sides and keep score. So recent changes on the planned US “missile shield” in Europe comes with a bit that old thunder-on-the-right you might have heard in 1956 or 1968 when the Soviets rolled tanks into Budapest or Prague. Drudge couldn’t resist noting it was the “70th anniversary of…” something awful Russia once did.

Except it’s nearly 2010, the Soviet Union doesn’t exist, and the country brutally suppressing demonstrations is not Russia. And the “betrayal” is a strategic change initiated by the Obama administration responding to developments in the budding nuclear state of Iran. Not to mention the fact that the non-existent missile interceptors were planned to be the wrong type. As Newsweek commented:

The Czechs and the Poles, who had hoped that the system would somehow protect them against Russian aggression, were appalled. (The Polish prime minister refused to take a call from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informing him of the decision.)Conservative Americans, who counted on the missile shield to contain Iranian missiles, decried Obama’s move as dangerous, or even treasonous. Only Russia, which believed that the system would somehow impair their ability to use their own nuclear missiles, was delighted. The real question, though, isn’t whether Obama is right or wrong about the system’s efficacy. (He’s obviously right.) The real question why everybody cares so much. How did a piece of technology years from reality work its way to the center of so many diplomatic crises?

To begin with, it’s important to remember that while plenty of missile defense systems capable of hitting short- and medium-range missiles exist (remember Patriots and Scuds?), none are yet capable of knocking out long-range ballistic missiles. So far, that is a theory that looked good on network-news computer graphics but that never actually existed. The idea was for radar stations in the Czech Republic to monitor missile launches from the Middle East, and for interceptor rockets in Poland to shoot them down en route to their targets. The interceptor rockets, though, don’t even work; after years of trials and billions of dollars of research, a prototype tested in Alaska still can’t reliably tell real missiles from decoys or kill missiles that change course midflight, as truly sophisticated weapons can. Not that it would have mattered: no country in the Middle East actually possesses the kind of missiles that could reach the United States, or even Northern Europe. No, what ultimately killed off missile defense was the news that Iran has nothing like the kind of long-range, Soviet-style ballistic missiles that the system was supposed to stop.

So why the fuss? Simple: a missile-defense system is a great symbol—far more potent than any practical weaponry could ever be. Among Eastern Europeans, it became a totem for American protection against a resurgent Russia, even though the system was never designed to guard against Russian missiles. The basic point is that, by design (and remember we’re talking about something that never got beyond the drawing board), the system was designed to intercept ballistic missiles in the stratosphere and low orbit. A simple glance at the map shows that such intercontinental ballistic missiles are not what Russia would fire at Poland, just a few hundred miles away.

Symbolism. Rah-rah chest beating. That’s what all the fuss is about. With deployment many years away, now is the time to tweak strategy, not after billions have been spent. Now is the time to recognize that with military weapons, unlike the cartoon fun house of tabloid news, truth does matter. When it comes to the physics of blasting missiles out of the sky, paranoia, patriotism and faux outrage won’t get the job done.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Some critics worry that Washington is “appeasing” Russia, encouraging more bullying from this bear. But the United States isn’t abandoning its European friends under pressure from Russia. Washington still wants to involve Eastern Europe – specifically the Poles and Czechs – in an antimissile shield directed at Iran. It just wants to do it later, and with more up-to-date equipment.

The Bush plan had called for an antimissile shield in those two countries that was aimed at detecting and knocking out long-range Iranian nuclear missiles that might threaten the US and Europe. The installations were expected to be ready in 2017 or 2018.

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates explained today, however, intelligence shows that Tehran is developing short- and medium-range missiles much more rapidly than the long-range missiles for which the Eastern European shield was intended. At the same time, technological advances in the US military’s ability to shoot down short- and medium-range missiles has vastly improved.

That argues for the more flexible, two-phased approach of the Pentagon: sea-borne interceptors first, land-based by around 2015, all the while continuing to work on the trickier technology of intercepting long-range nuclear missiles.

None of this nuance is likely to blunt the furor. It’s funny how on the issues that matter, like climate change and strategic politics, Eastern European governments and media are as crazy as Glenn Beck. I’m glad our President isn’t being swayed by any of it.

America’s got to end its deadly devotion to democracy

via Christian Science Monitor

Democracy is a messy business, even in wealthy countries. One look at the Tea Party demonstrations proves that. But a new book called Democracy Kills by Humphrey Hawksley posits that democracy actually increases violence if forcibly implemented (irony alert) in countries with under $2,700 per capita GDP. I would add that a sound public educational system is also an essential prerequisite. Most Americans can’t articulate a coherent political philosophy–understanding how a set of principles leads to one’s choice of candidate. If we can’t do it, how can we expect it of those who are far less educated? This sounds elitist and condescending, no doubt. But isn’t it something worse than elitist to impose a system that we know, for sure, will cause an increase in violent death? In which country are we doing this–right now?

St. Andrews, Scotland – Usama Rehda is a photographer who lives in Baghdad. Crossing his city to ply his trade means running a gantlet of bandits, extortionists, and snipers, not to mention suicide bombers. While he once despised Saddam Hussein, he admits that life was easier under the dictator. “You know what they say,” he remarked to a colleague bitterly. “Be nice to the Americans or they’ll punish you with democracy.”

America needs to rid itself of the hopelessly naive attitude that all nations are capable of becoming sustainable democracies.

“What’s so good about having the vote?” veteran BBC foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley asks in his new book, “Democracy Kills.” In Britain, Japan, and the United States, the answer is easy. In the developing world, however, identifying the benefits of democracy can be anything but.

In the Ivory Coast, for instance, democracy and its sidekick – free market economics – have brought political instability and economic ruin. Cocoa producers are paid the same for a kilo of beans as 30 years ago, even though the price of a chocolate bar has risen fourfold. Adults have the vote, but their children are essentially slaves.

Mr. Hawksley’s book is a chronicle of how economic despair leads to political alienation and often violence. There’s nothing new to that story, but what is surprising – uncomfortably so – is this: Evidence shows that attempts to democratize the developed world have made internal tensions much worse. Often, as in Iraq, voting actually offers a new forum for acting out ancient animosities.

During the cold war, the US supported brutal dictators overseas in the interest of political stability. In contrast, since 1989, Americans have tried to stabilize developing nations by creating governments similar to their own. Ballots have become a substitute for aid, a policy the foreign correspondent Misha Glenny calls “kumbaya politics.” The theory seems noble, but the practice often facilitates poverty, disease, exploitation, and murder.

When democracy mixes with poverty the result is often explosive – literally. The Oxford academic Paul Collier proposed in “Wars, Guns and Votes” a formula to explain this volatile chemistry. He believes that the critical point lies at a per capita income of $2,700 per year. Below that level, democracy has a difficult time taking root.

I knew my article on immigration would get some attention, but I didn’t realize it would be such a textbook example of the hatred and bigotry I was talking about. It’s depressingly predictable:

You are a complete idiot on the issue of illegal aliens from Mexico invading the U.S. They spread filth, disease, crime, drugs and gangs. Why is that OK with you?

The women drop an anchor baby every nine months at American taxpayer expense. Illegal aliens are responsible for the health care crisis because THEY NEVER PAY! WE PAY FOR THEM IN HIGHER PREMIUMS AND HIGHER COSTS.

Their filthy children over crowd our schools and spread lice, scabies and SWINE FLU to American children.

Mexico exports its human garbage for us to take care of.

I say deport all of them back to Mexico and let the Mexican government take care of its own people.

American taxpayers take care of Americans, but we are not going to continue to take care of illegal alien invaders from Mexico!

You are the one who should be ashamed for being so STUPID!

I responded:

They won’t pay taxes–because we won’t let them pay taxes. All most of them want to do is get a social security number so they can work legally and support their families.

Have you seen “Gangs of New York”? Every immigrant group starts out with a high criminal element. And it’s not like we don’t have plenty of US citizens involved in gangs. I’ll go along with getting rid of the Mexican criminals if you’ll agree to deport US citizens who commit the same crimes.

Take a look in the mirror. Your rhetoric is hateful, racist, and bigoted, and you don’t even seem to care. You had nothing to do with choosing the land of your birth, it was a happy (for you) accident. So stop lording over the privileges you were so lucky to be afforded because your parents happened to conceive and give birth to you in this country.

You had nothing to do with it!

“Human garbage.” Listen to yourself. What makes you think you’re not the garbage? Our country was founded on “all men are created equal.” That doesn’t mean just Americans. What happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? Or does that not count for immigrants either? I’m a white American, and you make me ashamed to share your country or your race. You’re probably religious, too. Where’s the Christian love?? Human garbage? What would Jesus say about that level of hatred?

You blame Swine flu on the Mexicans? Diseases know no borders. And then there’s diseases of the mind, like the one you have, that makes you think you’re so special. Sick shit, lady, and I’m using the term “lady” very, very loosely.

If you want the facts, read the economic analysis of illegal immigration I linked to at the end of my article. Or just keep the blinders on and keep going to your Tea Parties and hating the President and everyone who’s not like you. The world is mostly black and brown and getting more so. The days of white American privilege are over. Soon we will be the minority in the good old US of A. So get used to it. Your date with the clue-by-four of the new reality is coming.

I can’t even believe narrow-minded atavistic people like you still exist…whoa.

Apparently emboldened by the success of Prop. 8, it seems California religious nutters are now gathering signatures to put an initiative to ban divorce on the ballot in 2010. I still can’t figure out if it’s supposed to be a piece of political theater. But CNN covered it in a serious way–and they’ve filed the necessary paperwork–so…?

If serious, it’s a similar approach to the evangelical “covenant marriage,” another last-ditch attempt to keep the bible relevant as some kind of source of morality, or worse, law.

I’m not particularly worried about this. With tens of millions of dollars spent on Prop. 8, it was an extremely close race (52-47). This time, they’ve struck right at the heart of the freedom of the heterosexual majority. I don’t think all the Catholic and Mormon money in the world could get this through in CA. But the fact that they’re trying should once again make people think twice about the abuse of the initiative process to pass some truly onerous laws.

On the other hand, maybe this is a brilliantly subversive Onion-style prank by John Marcotte. The website is suspiciously tongue-in-cheek. But it’s nowhere near April 1. What do you think?

Coal Industry Still Poisoning America’s Water

via New York Times

…and they’re getting away with it. Even Obama’s EPA can’t seem to get a handle on the corruption, bullying and intimidation that keeps the sludge flowing into America’s groundwater. And many people in coal mining states are paying the price with terrible health problems. It’s a sad commentary that our appetite for cheap energy is so non-negotiable that even when the good guys are in charge, money still means more than human life.

When people talk about cheap energy, what they really mean is that the think the lives of people in coal states are expendable. And they won’t pay a few more cents per kilowatt-hour for solar or wind that would end this dumping entirely. Who said humans were the smartest mammals? We can’t even figure out how to stop poisoning our own–even when it’s completely unnecessary.

Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va. In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water. Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.

Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.

She and her husband, Charles, do not live in some remote corner of Appalachia. Charleston, the state capital, is less than 17 miles from her home.

“How is this still happening today?” she asked.

When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals — the same pollutants that flowed from residents’ taps.

But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws.

This pattern is not limited to West Virginia. Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found.

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.

However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.

“You lie!” shouted Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) at President Obama, in what Bill Maher compared to an episode of Tourette syndrome. Wilson’s unprecedented breach of legislative decorum concerned the President’s statement to a joint session of Congress that illegal aliens would not receive free health care under reform legislation. Why should the mere suspicion of a compassionate stance toward aliens stir such a display of outrage?

Xenophobia

Like crime-scene evidence–whether a telltale stain or the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh–Wilson’s outburst was testimony to America’s mouldering xenophobia. This oozing pustule of tribal hostility erupts from unseen depths of the paleoconservative psyche. It’s a visceral reflex that operates far below the radar of intellectual argument about immigration, legal or otherwise. As such, it is of little value here to discuss those arguments, which can’t even break the surface tension of the radical Right’s cauldron of resentment. They’re so worried that a Democratic president would extend benefits to ‘non-Americans’ they forget it was their hero Ronald Reagan who recognized the simple truth that it was un-American to have illegal aliens dying in our streets. It was the paragon of modern conservatism who signed the law requiring universal no-questions-asked emergency-room treatment.

Civilized ethics can be boiled down to two broad questions: Do you think in terms of short-term or long-term self-interest? How large is your “in-group,” or circle of concern? The right-wing mindset is typefied by incredibly short-term thinking and an extremely tiny and fragmented circle of concern. Therefore right-wingers can’t seem to manage much empathy, and they find any excuse to marginalize and dehumanize broad segments of Earth’s population. It’s especially easy when those “others” speak a different language, have a different culture or religion, or most importantly have a scrappy work ethic that threatens to upend the unearned privileges many Americans enjoy through the simple accident of having been born into the world’s dominant empire.

Meritocracy, a “Conservative” Value

It’s a fool’s errand to demand equality of capabilities, or to demand equal outcomes. Only the most idealistic anarcho-communists or new-age dilettantes cling to the fantasy of eliminating money, hierarchy, or private property. The rest of the world realizes there will always be haves and have-nots (or have-lesses), and the haves will always attempt to consolidate their advantages regardless of the sociopolitical system. But it is still profoundly unethical to deny equality of opportunity as a foundational principle of our society.

Whatever the reality on the ground, we should at least aspire to the idea that equality under the law and equal opportunity for advancement are worthy goals. And we must admit it’s extremely hypocritical in a ‘meritocracy’ to deny people the right to work wherever their skills are in demand. Free competition–and that includes the right to sell your labor–is the hallmark of free enterprise. Many conservatives rail against the minimum wage for this very reason, yet when a whole group of hardworking Central and South Americans tries to work for sub-minimum wages, the Right would just as soon arrest them, deport them, or worse.

American paleoconservatives also claim to respect our founding documents, the spirit and letter of which they routinely ignore. For example, the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” Setting aside the obvious problems of this phrase–being poorly worded, creationist, and gender exclusive–it has also been roundly mocked: Not only by a grossly unequal American society, but even in the Orwellian doublespeak of Animal Farm, articulating the bankrupt right-wing attitude that “some are more equal than others.”

That’s felony-level hypocrisy, and conservatives definitely know better.

Otherness

But the faulty rationale of anti-immigration-pro-free enterprise demagogues is irrelevant to those who cultivate and feed off the bottomless pit of America’s primal fear of “otherness.” The scoundrels who slobber at this trough could care less about intellectual integrity. And it’s not just fear. Before you can foment fear, you have to fully demonize the out-group.

Let’s try to analyze this set of attitudes, by starting with the just plain “wrongness” of the above road sign. American drivers hit about 1.5 million deer every year. But we don’t consider it to be the deer’s fault. We built roads through their habitat, and they’re not smart enough to get out of the way. We may feel a slight twinge of sadness when a deer dies, but we’re far more concerned about damage to our cars and human fatalities. But in this instance, the silhouetted hazard looks more like a typical American middle-class family late to a baseball game than desperate Mexicans running for their lives. The woman is wearing a skirt, the daughter has a pony-tail. If it weren’t a highway sign, it would be totally Norman Rockwell. What’s incongruous and what horrifies me most about this little tableau is that a family of flesh-and-blood human beings have been morally reduced to a road-hazard. Compare that to the far more dignified universal pedestrian symbol: Unhurried, walking between the lines, belonging.

Beyond the unfortunate roadside symbolism, it is the disparity of circumstances that is most galling. Being apprehended or struck by an automobile are the least of an illegal immigrant’s worries. They are also separated from their families for years–not crossing the road hand-in-hand. They often pay thousands of dollars to “coyotes” who get them across the US border and desert at risk of starvation, dehydration or violence. Once here, it often takes a long time to pay off their passage, so going home to see their families is out of the question.

Slamming shut the “golden door”

I’ve talked to recent immigrants from Europe who hate illegal aliens almost as much as American paleoconservatives. Few things are more shocking to me. Sure, it’s tough to go through the process–my wife’s doing it right now. But empathy makes me want to liberalize and streamline the process–not make it worse. Why should anyone else suffer needlessly? But the resentment that someone else is perceived to have taken a shortcut turns some lucky legal immigrants into frothing neo-fascists. And we’re not even talking about a real shortcut. The life of an illegal alien is nightmarish by any standard. To be brutally honest, it’s a life on the lam. Who would take that deal if they had any choice at all?

Like American paleoconservatism, I think we can chalk up these bad European attitudes to unearned privilege. People in the first-world just can’t imagine the levels of desperation that consume the lives of the bottom billions. Nor the value system of someone who would risk their life to clean toilets for $5.00 an hour. Europeans have also benefited from America’s liberal immigration policies toward friendly countries, and the “visa waiver program” that allows people from those countries with clean police records to simply buy a ticket and arrive.

But there’s something else about Europe that might be causing this bad attitude: They have an immigration problem of their own. And they’re not handling it well. Instead of requiring their immigrants assimilate into European society, they’re allowing them to import their culture and build mosques and enclaves where people are encouraged to defy the rule of secular law. And they have not strengthened their constitutions against the onslaught of these Muslim immigrants who would undo the long European tradition of separation of church and state to implement sharia. If they don’t fix this loophole, democracy will collapse in on itself once Muslims have become a majority–and Europe will become a very different place than it is today.

An informal case study

Recently, I befriended an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. He cleans the bathrooms at night on every floor of a building in Los Angeles where I work from time to time. He works as a carpenter during the day–six or seven days every week. He’s the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, loves America, has learned pretty good English. He’s been here for seven years and he has a nine-year-old daughter he hasn’t seen since she was two. He also has a wife and five-year-old daughter in the US. He owns a relatively new pickup truck he bought on credit and pays $500/month, contributing to our economy. He sends money home regularly, but dreams of being able to get his green card and bring his daughter to the US, or even to visit her one time.  But it won’t happen. By being here illegally for more than one year, this man has triggered an automatic ten-year ban on legal immigration. Under current law, his case is hopeless. He is permanently separated from one daughter, and he is only a traffic stop away from being deported and separated from his wife and his other daughter. With immigration reform, this man and millions like him could become tax-paying citizens of the United States. They could contribute to our health-care system instead of draining it. Most importantly, they could be treated like the human beings that they are.

But allowing such an obvious solution would require logic and an open mind. And red-meat Republicans are not interested in either. Their goal is to preserve American exceptionalism, narrow ideas of tradition, and the privileges of the patriarchy. We therefore have twelve million hard working illegals who live in this limbo, who are suffering through every day as official “non-persons”  in the desperate American gulag of illegal immigration–a cesspool of utterly pointless human misery. Why? So they can clean our toilets, mow our lawns, pick our lettuce, and otherwise make our society work. The way we have treated these hard-working people is disgusting, immoral, despicable and outrageous. They are accorded little more respect than slaves. It’s especially hypocritical, since most of the ‘patriots’ who oppose immigration reform claim to subscribe to individualism, a strong work-ethic, and religious notions of morality which hold precepts like “be your brother’s keeper,” and “if you’ve done it unto the least of these my brethren, you’ve done it unto me.”

I urge all Americans to reconsider their opposition to immigration reform. Let’s keep our golden door open. Let’s acknowledge the valuable contribution made to our country and our economy by all immigrants, legal and otherwise. I don’t advocate this out of some sentimental notion of morality or charity–but rather because it is in our long-term national self-interest.

A few weeks back a friend of mine on Facebook asked me to fill out a questionnaire of “50 things about me.” Though the list included many interesting personal details, I really didn’t feel like it covered the most important aspects of who I am. So I didn’t fill it out.

What you believe, focus on, and accept philosphically says more about who you are than what your favorite sports team is, or what films you like to watch. Over the course of writing the thousand or so articles on BSJ during the past eight years, I’ve had to think carefully about a lot of big questions. Most of these questions have sparked endless debates and flame wars which will never, ever be resolved. And there’s a reason for that. These types of discussions go to the heart of who we are as human beings. Many of the conclusions I’ve reached involve direct challenges to feel-good conventional wisdom. But that doesn’t really concern me. The only question that matters to me (and should matter to anyone) is:

“Is it true?”

If you know me at all, one thing you might understand is that I believe ideas are far more important than people. Everyone alive today will be gone in 200 years. That’s an eyeblink in cosmic time. But the ideas we discuss today will live on forever. Ideas can lubricate society and promote progress, or they can steer the world down centuries-long blind alleys. Ideas also have the potential to destroy the world completely.

As long as intelligent life exists in our corner of the universe, the stakes in this “war of ideas” will continue to increase.

Three very bad ones dominated the 20th century:

1. Economic growth based on unsustainable methods.
2. Militarism and world wars.
3. Repressive communist and fascist dictatorships.

Imagine what life might be like today if someone had intellectually defeated those bad ideas circa 1900.

Many progressive ideas and structures also expanded during the 20th century:

1. Tolerance and political equality for minorities, women’s suffrage, Civil Rights Act.
2. Environmentalism and sustainability.
3. Democracy and personal freedom.
4. International organizations such as the UN, IMF, WHO, WTO.
5. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders.

It’s nearly 2010. My question is, can’t we finally grow up, stop being our own worst enemy, face the misconceptions we’ve held about ourselves, and get on with it?

Column 1 is a list (in no particular order) of ideas I think will stand the test of time. Column 2 is a list of fallacies I hear nearly every day, which I think are seriously holding back human progress.

Marketing as Seduction

We assume marketing relies on a certain amount of hype, and consumers willing to suspend their disbelief. But does it? No one readily admits to believing any product will provide them with ultimate happiness or inner peace. But every good marketer knows that the key is a pitch that speaks to our emotions, which at least pretends to fulfill some primal need. And consumers seem eager to cooperate.

It’s a bit like romance. Everyone wants it. But make it too obvious or crass, and it’s a turn-off. Too passive or indirect, that’s unattractive too. But just the right message at just the right intensity will seduce the target consumer into a sale. A seduced and happy customer will be grateful to the marketer for providing a bridge to an improved life experience. And such a happy customer will come back for more, developing brand loyalty, the holy grail of marketing.

People spread their entertainment dollars widely– religion is only one venue. Churches have a bit tougher job than–say–theme parks, since what they provide is both less and more. Less tangible yet more socially immersive. Watching a film, for example, the price of admission is declared in advance. The marketing is over once the trailers end and the opening credits begin. The film is the product, an end in itself. You are free to leave.

At church, the cost and experience can vary widely, depending both on the denomination and on the personality of the preacher.  When the service starts, the marketing is just beginning. Savvy pastors never stop selling. And they’re deadly earnest–it’s no mere entertainment. And they weave guilt and redemption into a sort of ballet. They ask their congregations to “dig deep.” And the appeals can be wide ranging–from fund drives for church expansion to poverty initiatives. And they expect you to come early and often and stay until the end.

In a casino, the customer responds to a changing emotional landscape of winning and losing with impulsive spending decisions. In church, a similar emotional process applies. Customers may try to purchase salvation or assuage their guilt, spending far more than they might have expected. And it’s up to the preacher to ratchet up that pressure, dwelling on “sins” that people might have committed that very week. Or simply the sin of having been born.

We see that this is how religions have adapted. They began as authorities. As their power has waned, they’ve resented having to accommodate a consumer-friendly environment: Authorities dictate, marketers persuade. Authorities threaten, marketers run focus groups. Authorities have subjects, marketers have customers. Customers demand, marketers obey.

From Seduction to Fear

But there’s more than one type of marketing, and religions have realized that seduction is not the only road to a sale. There’s also fear, handmaid of authority. Religions’ trick has been to convince people they are naturally deficient. It’s a similar sell to life insurance. “You may think you’re a good provider, but we all die someday. Will your family be protected when you’re gone?” No one with any kind of concern for their loved ones can resist the logic. Fear sells up a storm. So life insurance companies have become some of the wealthiest organizations in the world. And churches are in the same business. They actually sell Eternal Life Insurance. Some even have the blind audacity to call it that.

Life Insurance:

1. “You love your family.”
2. “You never know when you might die. Everyone dies.” (deficient provider)
3. “You would do anything for your kids wouldn’t you.” (guilt)
4. “If you want us to provide for your family when you’re gone, you must pay the premiums.” (If you want peace of mind, pay us.)
5. “Let us help you decide how much protection you need.” (We’ll debit the premium right out of your bank account.)

Eternal Life Insurance:

1. “God loves you.”
2. “Everyone is a sinner.” (deficient soul)
3. “Jesus would do anything for you, he died to pay for your sins.” (guilt)
4. “You must pay the price for your sins, unless you accept that Jesus paid it for you.” (And if you want a clear conscience, pay Jesus.)
5. “Pray and recieve Jesus Christ as your savior.” (Donate generously, or anything could happen.)

There’s one important difference between the life insurance product and the Eternal Life Insurance ‘product.’ Though you might personally never see a penny from your life insurance policy, by law someone gets paid.

With Eternal Life Insurance, no one seems to worry about the “company” delivering on its promise. Even the mafia was never this slick. The Constitution blocks any government regulation of the industry. Pundits bristle at the slightest notion of disrespect.  And that, my friends, is how thousands of Eternal Life agents all over these great United States continue to get away with collecting tax-exempt premiums every day for a non-existent product.

And why should they stop? It’s working brilliantly. And people who’ve invested their hard-earned dollars into Eternal Life Insurance give eternal brand loyalty. So sign up at your local branch or at Faith Baptist Church today. Pastor Tim Rasmussen is standing by in Canoga Park, California to serve your Eternal Life Insurance needs.

Do you know for sure that you are on your way to heaven…?

My wife just mentioned a term I hadn’t heard before: Glurge. But I’ve certainly experienced it. Now you can, too…   You’re welcome. The image below is exactly how this came to me.

I struggle to comprehend the utter desperation of this writer. I don’t even care if the incident described happened in Kingston, Tennessee. It’s probably fabricated. My sense of it is that a public school principal who gave such a speech would lose their job–quickly. But perhaps not in the South.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. What’s important is to observe what happens when a majority develops a persecution complex. How absurd. There are churches on nearly every street corner in the South. Christians are literally overwhelmed with places to pray. From what I understand, workplaces are pretty religious, too. First thing you’re asked by co-workers is what church you attend.

So it’s a good thing the law provides that place of refuge, where you just can’t lead public prayers where people of other faiths or of no faith might be present. The Constitution requires we recognize the public space as neutral territory.

(Thank you Thomas Jefferson and the rest!)

But that’s not good enough. These loons aren’t happy unless everyone is praying to the Christian god.  And persuasion has completely failed to bring this about. The legal system has ‘let them down’ by refusing to enforce it. So now it’s all about shouting to friends and family in 36-point colored italic script, trying to guilt them into further spreading their demands. Because God’s law trumps man’s law, of course.

More on Human Nature, and the Free-Rider Problem

“Why are people such assholes?” Someone asked me the other day.

I replied, “Because that’s what we do.” They were talking to me about having witnessed the ‘inhuman’ and ghastly behavior of some powerful friends–friends who were so far up the ladder in the financial industry they didn’t even flinch at the economic crisis. The game changed slightly for them, of course. Things reconfigured, but they continued to accomplish their goal: to extract as much loot as possible from the common folk, and keep the good times rolling for themselves. Monarchy has never gone away, and these financial ‘wizards’ are the new royalty. Like Madoff, some of them get deposed. Others are just more careful and manage to keep their crowns no matter who’s in the White House or at Downing Street.

Whole industries are closing, hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off every month. And  ”nobody cares,” my friend said. “Aren’t we better than that?” In a word, no. Can’t we learn to be better than that? No.

We must look at biological systems the same way we look at all systems. We ask ourselves, what are the inputs and what are the outputs? How does the system behave, and what goals does it try to accomplish? If we are talking about life, there is one primary goal: metabolism. Consume resources, extract value, excrete waste. Reproduction is also a part of evolving systems, but it’s secondary. You can’t reproduce if you don’t eat. Metabolism forces food-seeking behavior. As soon as that imperative is introduced into any evolving and self-directed system–biological or mechanical–competition and deception ensue (even for robots). Examine human history. What’s the primary driver? Access to resources. When the planet was large and humanity small, waste disposal was not an issue.

Today that has changed. The most important current global political issue is climate chaos, which is being driven by disposal of the products of human, animal and machine metabolism into our most important commons, the atmosphere and the oceans. And what are many people doing about it? Lying to themselves and others to promote the idea that the problem doesn’t exist. The goal? To keep consuming resources and excreting waste products without paying the price.

This terrible misanthropic behavior–which is supported not only by the fossil fuel conglomerates but also their customers (and we are all still customers)–delays us from devloping and evolving smarter ways of living. Just as organisms compete for food, they also compete to avoid expending scarce resources–in this case money to mitigate global warming pollution and rebuild our energy infrastructure. It appears to be a no-win situation. Though it’s possible from a technical standpoint to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, the changes we must make might be too large for politicians to accomplish in time. And they would not be made at all under any form of anarchy, which relies on voluntary cooperation and abhors regulation.

Under our current system, campaigns are short, and politicians need to win elections. In the short-term, what’s good for the individual (and thus politicians) is bad for the planet. What’s good for the planet is bad for the individual, and horrible for political campaigns (”you want to raise our energy prices–in a recession?“). Humans evolved to mostly weigh these short-term costs. With abysmally short life-expectancies (35-40 years before the modern era), the goal of human life has been violent competition for highly localized resources and breeding rights, with a window of 20 years (give or take) between puberty and ‘old age’ to get it all done. So thinking on longer time frames and with global concern is just not something we humans do very well.

In the long term, it is in everyone’s interest to protect the commons and become more efficient about how we use energy. Why can’t we cooperate? Because short-term competitive thinking dominates. It got the best results in our evolutionary history, so many people just instinctively go with it.

What is it about our vast consumption and waste disposal that has evolutionary support? Comfort, wealth and security lead to greater feelings of well-being. And we are all addicted to the brain’s chemical reward system, which essentially drives us from birth to continually seek food, sex, social value, self-actualization, and dominance. The more we get, the more we seem to want. There is secondary evolutionary support for community-building behavior, but it is a means to an end. The transactional “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” becomes the strategic “I’ll scratch your back today–because I’m gambling that it will increase the chance that you’ll be there later when mine needs scratching.”

Disagree? Stop helping your friends out, and see how quickly you will lose them. And every lasting formal or informal community punishes or expels free-riders. Or it would be bled to death.

If we are willing to lie to ourselves so blatantly about something as threatening as climate change, how can we learn to care about others’ lesser concerns? The unfortunate answer is, I don’t think we can. People insist they “care about others” but how practical is that, really? How many people can you truly include in your circle of concern, and how do you effectively prioritze? Start asking yourself those tough questions, and you’ll find–if you’re brutally honest–that you’re a selfish bastard like the rest of us. And a limited cooperator, too. The mirror neurons which give us empathy for others provide a signal that’s far weaker than the one we experience when we are in pain. There is no realistic choice. Absent external motivation, we value our own pleasure and avoidance of pain far more than the success or comfort of others. And it will always be so.

And how. Here’s a simple question: Would you give up your TV remote if it would completely solve climate change? Most Americans would not. Here’s another example: Smart-grid management might require homes to slightly reduce their air-conditioning use on hot days, by bumping the thermostat up a few degrees. This would reduce the use of existing natural-gas peaking power plants, and might allow the delay or cancellation of new power plants. What’s the response? Do you expect any less from ‘cooperative’ humanity? People say “Hell no, no one’s fucking with my thermostat.” We will need to offer people a financial incentive–if we want them to sign up for such programs.

Let’s take a look at the internet. Up to this point, I’ve been talking in generalized terms about human nature. Here’s where I’ve been going: The internet is the closest thing we have right now to anarchy. The open-source movement is the closest example we have of mutualism. And it works pretty well, right?

Maybe for the very narrow goal of open-source software development. But even Wikipedia has moderators. It works as well as it does because there are competent authorities who have absolute power. Otherwise it would degenerate into a mess of “edit wars,” vandalism, and PR hacking as various coalitions vied to promote their info-interests. Just look at how many controversial articles receive “protected” status.

And what about spam? Why hasn’t that problem been solved? It would be in everyone’s interest to crack down. No one wants it, but it just keeps coming. The free-riders of the internet adapt to every spam filter almost immediately. They increase their volumes exponentially every year. They establish vast bot-nets so that many of us may be actually participating in their theft of bandwidth, time, and attention. It’s hideous. Where’s the mutualist solution to this problem? There isn’t one. If governments got serious and started throwing spammers in jail and treating the issue as the global security problem that it is, this would quickly change. Anarchy fail.

Let’s take another example: The game EVE online was suffering from a huge performance issue because people were using the in-game currency for real-world speculation–in gross violation of the terms of service. Sysadmins estimated that the added load on each computer CPU caused by the free-riders was an astounding 30%! So they came up with a scheme to identify the abusers by their currency trading patterns, and decisively shut them down. That’s the RPG version of a government crackdown. And that’s what was needed and appropriate. And you can’t lay the initial trading problem at the feet of capitalism. It’s a fantasy game. Sure, game currency could be traded for the real thing. But trading objects of value is the basis of all human relationships, and has been since before we became homo sapiens sapiens. Some anarchists assert that we should eliminate money entirely.

If only…

The vulnerability was an open system, defenseless against the unfettered avarice and opportunism of one group of users against the EVE ‘community.’ Anarchy fail.