Oops! Atlas Shrugged.

From TPM:

The producers of the film version of “Atlas Shrugged: Part One” apologized for an “embarrassing” error on the DVD cover that described the theme of their adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel as one of “self-sacrifice.” As disciples of Rand, one of libertarianism’s heroes, are supposed to know, Atlas Shrugged is actually all about “rational self-interest.” ...

Harmon Kaslow, CEO of Atlas Productions and the film’s producer, added: “As we all well know, the ideas brought to life in Atlas Shrugged are entirely antithetical to the idea of ‘self-sacrifice’ as a virtue. Atlas is quite literally a story about the dangers of self-sacrifice.”

“Atlas Shrugged” was released in April to paltry box office returns and terrible reviews (including TPM’s review here). The movie was independently financed and distributed by a conservative businessman, and was promoted by tea party groups like Freedomworks who see Rand’s themes as a natural extension of Tea Party principles.

Funny, huh? Atlas Shrugged exalts selfishness, not self-sacrifice. The idea that you should give up anything yourself - including paying taxes - just to help other people, or even society in general, is anathema to libertarians.

Really, I thought this was hilarious. Of course, I'm no fan of libertarianism or of Ayn Rand, despite her vigorous atheism (something that's conveniently forgotten by most of her followers).

And no, that's no problem for me. We atheists don't all agree on other issues. We don't have a dogma. We don't have leaders, not those appointed or elected to the task. We don't even necessarily agree about atheism, except in general terms.

You think that might be the same way with libertarians? Maybe. But from what I can tell, libertarians pretty well worship Ayn Rand. It really is a cult following. And my big problem with libertarians in general is that they go to extremes, following their beloved philosophy to its most absurd conclusions.

But then, as I say, I'm not a libertarian. And I'm rational enough not to tell other people what they think. No doubt libertarians are as diverse as the rest of us, huh? But it's still a crazy philosophy. :)

Western black rhino declared extinct

From the BBC:

No wild black rhinos remain in West Africa, according to the latest global assessment of threatened species.

The Red List, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has declared the subspecies extinct.

A subspecies of white rhino in central Africa is also listed as possibly extinct, the organisation says.

The annual update of the Red List now records more threatened species than ever before.

The IUCN reports that despite conservation efforts, 25% of the world's mammals are at risk of extinction.

Note that these are just the big, showy animals. I blogged about the hirola, an African antelope, just last week. But what about the countless species which aren't as glamorous? We're losing them, too.

We're also destroying our oceans, something which is out of sight, out of mind for most of us. Well, when we won't even accept the science behind climate change, because we prefer to stick our heads in the sand, who's going to bother about destruction happening under water?

In grade school, I was taught about the mistakes of the past - the wholesale slaughter of buffalo and whales, the killing of egrets and whooping cranes for their feathers, the death of the last passenger pigeon, tasmanian tiger, and dodo. The implication was that we'd learned from those mistakes.

But we didn't learn anything, did we?

Corporations don't want simple regulations

Here's a great column by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. In fact, it's so good I can't find anything to cut, so I'm going to post the whole thing:

The "Volcker rule" is a simple thing. Basically, it says that if you're a bank that takes deposits and benefits from federal deposit insurance, you can't also make risky trades that might blow up your bank and cost the taxpayers a bundle. Wall Street never liked the rule, because banks make a lot of their money these days trading for their own accounts and didn't want their trading profits cut off. They fought the idea in Congress, but in the end, the Dodd-Frank bill that passed in 2010 included a version of the Volcker rule in its final draft.

Was this a victory for common sense? Hardly. Last month regulators unveiled their first take on the actual implementation of the Volcker rule, and it had become a monster. "Only in today's regulatory climate could such a simple idea become so complex, generating a rule whose preamble alone is 215 pages, with 381 footnotes to boot," complained American Bankers Association Chief Executive Frank Keating.

Poor banks! But step back for a moment. How did Paul Volcker's baby get so bloated? Keating's crocodile tears aside, the answer is: banks. When it comes to financial regulation, fighting against new laws is merely their first line of defense. When they lose, as they did in the Dodd-Frank battle, the action simply moves to the regulatory agency charged with implementing the law. James Stewart explains what happened next:

When the proposed regulations for the Volcker Rule finally emerged for public comment, the text had swelled to 298 pages and was accompanied by more than 1,300 questions about 400 topics.

…"Here's the key word in the rules: 'exemption,'" former Senator Ted Kaufman, Democrat of Delaware, told me. "Let me tell you, as soon as you see that, it's pronounced 'loophole.' That's what it means in English." Mr. Kaufman, now teaching at Duke University School of Law, earlier proposed a tougher version of the Volcker Rule, which was voted down in the Senate. "We've been through this before," he said. "I know these folks, these Wall Street guys. I went to school with them. They're smart as hell. You give them the smallest little hole, and they'll run through it."

This is probably the biggest reason that no one should take too seriously Republican complaints about burdensome regulations strangling the economy. The truth is that most reformers prefer fairly simple rules. In the tax world, they'd prefer to simply tax all income. In the environmental world, they'd prefer to set firm limits for pollutants. In the financial world, they'd prefer blunt rules that cut off risky activity at its knees.

But businesses don't like simple rules, because simple rules are hard to evade. So they lobby endlessly for exemptions both big and small. This is why we end up with tax subsidies for bow-and-arrow makers. It's why we end up with environmental rules that treat a hundred different industries a hundred different ways. It's why financial regulators don't enact simple leverage rules or place firm asset caps on firm size. Those would be hard to get around and might genuinely eat into bank profits. Complex rules, conversely, are the meat and drink of $500-per-hour lawyers and whiz kid engineers. If the rules are complicated enough, smart lawyers can always find ways around them. And American corporations employ lots of smart lawyers.

Keep this firmly in mind the next time you hear someone from the Chamber of Commerce complaining about how many thousands of pages of regulations they have to comply with. Some of that is inevitable: We live in a complex world, and that means the rules are sometimes complex too. But they don't have to be anywhere near as complex as they end up being. We could have a simple tax code, simple environment rules, and blunt financial regulations. We could probably cut the size of agency regulations by 10 times if we wanted to.

But businesses don't want to. Sure, they'd prefer no regulation at all, but they know that's not in the cards. So in public they bemoan complexity, but in private they fight endlessly for more of it. To their lawyers, every single extra page is an extra opportunity to make more money.

I think Drum has the right take on this. It's certainly something to think about. Corporations employ lots of smart lawyers to get around complex rules, so they also employ lots of smart lobbyists to make sure the rules aren't simple and easy to understand.

And then they employ lots of smart PR flacks, political pundits, and politicians to push their case about how terrible government regulations are. Well, we could have simple rules, in many cases, but simple rules are hard to get around.

Note that this can harm small businesses, since they can't afford the high-powered lawyers of the big corporations. But even then, you must take their complaints with a grain of salt. Quite often, small businesses are exempt from these regulations.

Of course, corporations don't want regulations. Who would? Regulations prevent them from doing whatever they want to do. And complying with regulations eats into corporate profits. Of course it does. So we shouldn't have regulations we don't need. We really should be smart about it.

But don't be too gullible, either. There are good reasons why we have regulations - because we've seen what happens without them. You don't even have to go back to the 1930s. We've just had another hard reminder. Do we really need another?

And if corporations, with their armies of lobbyists, really wanted simple regulations, we'd have them. Corporations pretty well run Congress, especially now that the Supreme Court considers them to be just people, too.

I couldn't see anything with this bucket on my head

OK, the loving depiction of stabbing a woman to death is a bit much, but otherwise, I thought this was funny. Murder? What murder? I couldn't see anything.

Apparently, seeing his sister lying in a pool of blood on the tavern floor doesn't bother this innkeeper one bit, provided he doesn't actually see it happen. And if you put a bucket on his head, he just leaves it there until you remove it again?

This is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which was just released yesterday. I loved the other Elder Scrolls games, but I won't be in a big hurry to get this one. I tend to think that they're dumbing down the series, and from what I hear, this one is very definitely designed as a console game, with the PC port being an afterthought, at best.

But other reviews claim that this is the best Elder Scrolls game yet. So I don't know. Personally, I think that Bethesda has been going in the wrong direction since Daggerfall, but even Oblivion was fun. But I guess I'm not in a big hurry to play this one. I get my Elder Scrolls fix just by jumping back into Morrowind occasionally.

Speaking of the other games, here's an interesting article at PC Gamer (complete with screenshots):

The first game, Arena, started out as a gladiatorial combat hack-and-slash about a team of mercenary types fighting their way through fantasy tournament bouts with the aim of ultimately taking down an evil wizard. During development, what had been intended as side-quests ended up becoming the game’s core; a game that featured no magic items called The Elder Scrolls, nor any fighting in an arena. The first bit was added to the title more or less for the hell of it, the second handwaved by the idea that the land of Tamriel was so dangerous, so chaotic, simply living in it was like living in… uh… an arena, that “Arena” had been adopted as its nickname.

If that sounds tenuous to the point that it could be represented by a piece of Juicy Fruit gum stretched from the North Pole to Saturn… you’re right! Allegedly, the only reason was that the adverts and boxes had already been printed… though all the boxes I’ve ever seen have had the Elder Scrolls tag on them, so that bit may be one of those apocryphal tales that’d taste better with pinch of salt.

Neither of the first two games are particularly obscure, though with the first coming out in 1994 and its sequel, Daggerfall, landing in 1996, but let’s take a quick look at them just to set the scene. They’re pretty weird games, starting by dropping the player in some of the biggest gameworlds ever and ending with conclusive proof that bigger isn’t necessarily better – especially in a primitive 3D engine. Daggerfall remains one of the standard worlds that gets trotted out as a comparison whenever someone claims their world has 15 square km or space or whatever, boasting as it does no less than 487,000 of the randomly generated buggers. That’s twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns, cities, and villages. Or so it says on Wikipedia. If you’d like to go count them for yourself, feel free to correct it.

Don’t let the graphics fool you. For the time, this was impressive 3D, and a reasonably deep RPG. It wasn’t the narrative based joy of something like Ultima, but if you just wanted a sandpit, the only thing in your way was one of the most brutal welcoming committees ever. Arena especially came out swinging. You know how Oblivion and Skyrim start with tutorial dungeons? This game starts with a fuck you dungeon. It’s big, sprawling, and will kick your ass, but that’s only the start of the pain. Dare to sleep in the wrong place, and it actually spawns extra-tough monsters to punish you for it. How bad are we talking? The lead designer – repeat – the lead designer of Morrowind/Oblivion claims to have fired it up around 20 times since it came out, and only finished it once. Not the game. The first dungeon.

And once you’re out of it? It gets worse. You emerge battered and bruised in the middle of an entire continent, with about six million square kilometres of terrain to explore. How many hand-crafted dungeons are there in that, holding plot relevant things? Seventeen.

I have very fond memories of Arena, but I positively loved Daggerfall, despite the bugs, despite everything. I don't remember the starter dungeon being that hard, either. (Or is he talking about Arena? I enjoyed that starter dungeon, too.) But the battles were short, and if you lost one, it was simple enough to reload the game.

Well, if you're interested, here's my take on both games. I loved Daggerfall so much that I was actually a bit disappointed when I got Morrowind. But only a bit, and only in parts. I do think that Bethesda turned away from the real promise of Daggerfall, but Morrowind was still a great, great game - flawed, like all of these, but great.

Oblivion went further down the wrong path, to my mind. But I enjoyed it, too. So I imagine that Skyrim will be fun, when I finally decide to get it (assuming that my old computer can run it). But it won't be for awhile. Heck, I just now picked up Fallout 3, when it went on sale for $4.99. Heh, heh. I couldn't pass that up!

That's another one where I loved the first two games, but which Bethesda took down the wrong path in the sequel. In fact, I was just playing the original Fallout. It's still very playable and still great fun. (Pick up both of them at GOG.com - cheap - for a really great time.)

Ah, too many games, too little time. :)

The Republican Party marketing itself to women

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I have no idea if Herman Cain sexually harassed these women, and neither do you. But the National Restaurant Association thought enough of the allegations to pay $80,000 to make two of these claims go away. That's a lot of money if they thought there was nothing there.

And this was long before Cain even thought of running for president, or any political office at all. Whatever those first two claims were about, it wasn't politics. (You can argue differently for the others, if you want, but certainly not for those two.)

You've seen how Republicans have treated these women. Obviously, these critics don't know any more than you or I do about the merits of their allegations. They weren't there! (Well, women aren't usually sexually harassed where there's an audience, are they?)

But after seeing the treatment of these women on national TV, would you be likely to claim sexual harassment? This is why these things don't usually get reported.

Well, as I say, I don't know, either. But getting back to the politics of it, is this how the Republican Party markets itself to women? Or are they just relying on single-issue anti-abortion voters, and to hell with anything else? Whatever works, huh?

There's a reason why women tend to vote Democratic, just as there's a reason why African Americans tend to vote Democratic and why Latinos tend to vote Democratic. And in all of these cases, it's not because they're lazy and they want to get a handout from the government (another way the GOP markets itself to minorities).

Coach Paterno's religious playbook

(The Atheist Camel)

You know the sad story at Penn State, where clear evidence of child rape was kept secret, allowing it to continue, rather than being promptly reported to the police. (Yeah, this is remarkably similar to the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, isn't it?)

Well, famed coach Joe Paterno lost his job over that one, which is only right. And I probably wouldn't have posted anything here - what more could I say? - until I read this from The Atheist Camel:

When it really mattered Paterno fumbled, and fumbled beyond forgiveness.

His termination by Penn State was right and proper, and that would have been the end of it save any legal actions that might befall him as a result of his inaction. I’d have had nothing to comment upon, no further ax to grind with him. But then he said this:

"As you know, the kids that were the victims, I think we ought to say a prayer for them,"

And there, in that one sentence is the very heart of the grotesqueness of religion, the very core of what I have raged about, fought against, and endeavored to put a face on for these many years all summed up nice and tidy by a disgraced coach.

PRAYER?? Say a PRAYER for the child victims? You self righteous sanctimonious jerk... some of those kids are victims partially because you failed as a man. You relinquished your responsibility as a human being. Your hubris and self interest over shadowed those victims interest. But, now, NOW you’ll implore us to mumble words to a nonexistent thing in the sky as though that will fix things? As though those kids’ lives will be repaired by words to a deity when your own misbehavior, self-serving actions, or apathy was a causal factor for their pain?

No Joe, the only thing that can help these kids now is years of therapy by trained child psychologists. Your call to prayer to millions of your fans and followers won’t do a damn thing for those kids, it never has and it never will. Thanks anyway. And as a Hail Mary play to repair your image- forget it, that’s been tried by fools, frauds, and tyrants for eons. It’s the hall mark of disgraced religionists to drop back into supernatural mode and punt, the better to distract from their failed humanity and inability to carry it across the line. [my emphasis]

Yes, this is absolutely typical, isn't it?

Do believers see why this enrages us so? First, theists always claim the moral high ground. Yeah, you can't be good without God, huh?

And then they do something that puts my whole species to shame, like covering up child rape (and that's far from the only scandal we've seen, from the Catholic Church stealing and selling babies to the countless televangelists who've tearfully apologized for their sins).

And what then? Well, it's inevitable. They fall back on Jeebus! Prayer is magically going to make it all better. It's not a matter of too much god-worship, but too little. And their god, of course - whichever invisible being they worship - is always happy to forgive and forget, to help them move past this, er, unfortunate incident.

And at the last, how does this always end up? You guessed it. We loop around to the beginning again, with the solemn assurance that religion is the basis of all morality and that you just can't be good without God. Let us pray...

Coach Paterno didn't invent this play. It's from the long-established playbook of theists everywhere. But whether it's Ted Haggard or David Vitter or Jimmy Swaggart or the entire leadership of the Catholic Church, it's disingenuous and disgusting.

If I had evidence of child rape, I'd call the police. I don't need a god to tell me that or, more often, to give me absolution for not doing it.

11 women warriors of World War II

Here's a fascinating account of eleven women, from many different nations, who served the Allies bravely in World War II.

One of them, Nancy Wake (pictured above), died just this past August. Others did not survive the war. But every story is fascinating - and admirable.

Nudged by the police

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I don't know the full story on the Berkeley protests. I'll admit that. But this doesn't look good. Look at that video clip. There doesn't seem to be any provocation for that, not at all.

And "nudging"? Nudging? Really? I'm not going to blame the whole police force because of the actions of a few, no more than I'd blame all of Occupy Wall Street for the actions of a few, either.

But what kind of journalism is it to call this kind of thing "nudging with batons"?

The "oops" heard round the world

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Yeah, you've already seen Rick Perry's "oops," haven't you? Of course you have! Here's CNN:

It's been dubbed the "'Oops' heard around the world," and now there's YouTube evidence to back that up.

According to the video share site, the 53-second clip of Perry's stumble during Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate was the top-rising search that night and was the most-viewed YouTube video in the U.S. on Thursday morning.

But I thought I'd post this, anyway. For one thing, we should never forget how crazy these other candidates are.

(Note that Herman Cain is becoming even more popular with the Republican base, now that those sexual harassment payoffs in the 1990s have become well-known. And his "Princess Nancy" line pretty well confirms his opinion of women - and theirs - don't you think?)

But the other thing is that Jon Stewart is having so much fun with this. And he continued that fun with the sequel, Joy Boners.

Yes, Sarah Palin has been ignored (to her chagrin) since she decided not to run for president. And Michele Bachmann has kept a low profile lately. But apparently, the Republican Party has a never-ending supply of these people, their full-employment policy for comedians.

Andy Rooney 1919-2011

Since Andy Rooney died last week, I thought I'd post this. It's funny - or maybe not - but there's an email going around, supposedly written by Rooney, in support of prayer in public schools.

Of course, it wasn't written by Andy Rooney (nor by Paul Harvey, which I've also seen). Here's Snopes.com on the matter: "...most of it is the work of Nick Gholson, a sports writer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas."

Apparently, the person who added Andy Rooney's name to it didn't realize that Rooney was an atheist. In fact, he'd been awarded the 2001 Emperor Has No Clothes Award by the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

CBS commentator Andy Rooney has frequently made irreverent comments in his "60 Minutes" commentaries, columns and books. In November 2000, he reminded readers: "The obituaries in the newspapers and on television [of Steve Allen] were well done but none mentioned what ended up being an obsession with Steve. He was a student of the Bible and a dedicated atheist intent on proving the Bible was a seriously flawed book that many people who profess to live by it, don't know or understand."

In his 1999 book Sincerely, Andy Rooney, he included a final section called "Faith in Reason." In it he reprints a thorough letter about his agnosticism and freethought views. Sample quotes:

"I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural."

"We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins."

"I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true."

"Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout."

"I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does."

What's the point of lying about this stuff? If you agree with someone about school prayer, why attribute it to someone else who's a bigger celebrity? Does the end justify the means? Is that what these people are thinking?

But then, why would an omniscient, omnipotent god need some random Christian to lie for him? If he can do everything, by definition, he can surely make people believe in him, if he wants.

Oh, well. I don't know much about Andy Rooney, but I doubt if he needs me to stick up for him, even now that he's dead. But I don't like lies, and I especially don't like lies about other people.

And after all, once people are dead, they can't stick up for themselves.

Hitchslap #27 - the smiley face of religion

I must admit that this is my opinion of liberal religion, too:

Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face ingratiating way, because it's had to give so much ground and because we know so much more. But you've no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.

It's not just the morality of religion, either. As our knowledge of science has advanced, as our knowledge of history has grown, religion has had to retreat on the reality of it, too - stubbornly, slowly, dragging its feet every step of the way, but retreat nonetheless.

Now conservative believers, the real fundamentalists, simply close their eyes and their minds to all that. Liberal believers, on the other hand, tend to accept what they have to accept. But no more than that. They'll retreat, but only as much as they're forced to retreat.

I don't understand that. When will liberal believers understand the fallacy that's the very basis of religious belief? Faith is simply not a valid way to believe anything. It's not so much what you believe as how you believe it.

True, you're a lot easier to get along with than the fundamentalists, and I do appreciate that. I will gladly work with you in those areas where we agree. But,... you are just like the fundies when it comes to how you come up with your beliefs. You can't really argue that one of you is wrong and the other is right when you both believe for the exact same reason, faith.

Why can't you just accept evidence-based thinking? Why cling so stubbornly to your faith? I've never understood that. But then, I've never believed, not that I can remember. I've never understood religious faith. I can understand why you'd want to believe, but not how you can believe.

Entire mammal genus on brink of extinction

(Photograph by John Warburton-Lee, Alamy)

From National Geographic:

For the first time in 75 years, an entire genus of mammal may go the way of the dodo—unless a new conservation effort shepherded by Somalian herders succeeds.

The hirola, a large African antelope known for its striking, goggle-like eye markings, is the only remaining species in the genus Beatragus—and its numbers are dwindling fast, conservationists say.

The last mammal genus to blink out was Thylacinus, in 1936, with the death of the last Tasmanian tiger. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family.

Considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the hirola has seen its numbers fall by as much as 90 percent since 1980. The latest survey, in February, found about 245 animals in fragmented pockets of northeastern Kenya and southwestern Somalia, according to the Nature Conservancy.

In all, conservationists estimate there are fewer than 400 hirolas scattered throughout the species' historic range of East Africa.

A range of factors, including climate change-related drought; unregulated hunting; habitat destruction; and more recently, predation have slashed populations.

Coincidentally - or not - the world population of human beings has just reached 7 billion! That's double the number of people living on Earth in the 1960s. That's almost four and a half times as many people as existed at the start of the 20th Century.

We are squeezing out other species of animals - all of them our relatives, in fact - because we just won't limit our own numbers. We're also destroying our own environment as we destroy theirs. Where's the intelligence in that? Are we just going to breed and breed until our environment collapses? Are we like lemmings, then? Or rats?

I remember as a grade school kid learning about the Tasmanian tiger, about the dodo, about the passenger pigeon. I remember learning about the close calls, too - the whooping crane, the buffalo, the whales. In school, the implication was that we'd made terrible mistakes, but that we'd learned our lesson.

Guess what? We haven't learned anything.

Bully pulpit

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Yeah, bullying is OK if it's done for religious reasons or for "moral convictions." Well, is there any bullying that couldn't be justified that way?

I'm not saying that bullying is actually done for those reasons. That's not why bullies do what they do. But after the fact, is any bully dumb enough not to claim he did it for religious reasons or moral convictions? Heck, he might even believe that, himself.

Political whiplash

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What did we Americans expect, that Republicans wouldn't do all the crazy things they promised they would?

Then again, pretty much the first thing they tried to do, after last year's election, was to try to end Medicare. And that was after campaigning on defending Medicare from the Democrats!

Still, our problem seems to be ignorant, ill-informed - misinformed - voters who vote only their unhappiness, when they can be bothered to vote at all. Yes, in a democracy, we get the kind of government we deserve.

Well, that would be just fine, except that we're all in this together. We're stuck with each other, so we get the kind of government, we get the kind of society, we collectively deserve.

There's no way around that. Democracy may not be great, but it's the best form of government we've yet discovered. But please, please don't bring me down. Pay attention, use evidence and reason to make your decisions, and vote!

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

(Image from Wired)

Today is Carl Sagan's birthday. Last year, I posted a YouTube video and a list of my favorite Sagan quotes.

This year, I thought I'd post Sagan's "The Dragon in My Garage" from his book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. (I own the book - it's a great one - but I got this text from the Atheists of Silicon Valley.)

The Dragon In My Garage

by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Tonight I'm frakking you

Heh, heh. Isn't that just about the geekiest thing you've ever seen?

Well, I'm too old to be a nerd. But luckily, I'm not too old to enjoy these parody videos:

Coffee and climate change

OK, now things are getting serious! From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Climate change is threatening coffee crops in virtually every major coffee producing region of the world.

Higher temperatures, long droughts punctuated by intense rainfall, more resilient pests and plant diseases—all of which are associated with climate change—have reduced coffee supplies dramatically in recent years.

Because coffee varieties have adapted to specific climate zones, a temperature rise of even half a degree can make a big difference. A long-term increase in the number of extreme and unseasonal rainfall events has contributed to lower crop yields that are threatening the livelihood of coffee growers. For example, between 2002 and 2011, Indian coffee production declined by nearly 30 percent.

Additionally, warming has expanded the habitat and thus the range and damage of the coffee berry borer, a grazing predator of coffee plants. This pest is placing additional stresses on all coffee crops, as is coffee rust, a devastating fungus that previously did not survive the cool mountain weather. Costa Rica, India, and Ethiopia, three of the top fifteen coffee-producing nations in the world, have all seen a dramatic decline in yields.

Hey, starvation, floods, hurricanes - not my problem.* And Texas can burn up completely, for all I care. But don't get between me and my coffee!

* Yeah, I'm kidding. I do care about starvation. After all, I need something to eat while I'm drinking my coffee, right? :)

When dogs attack

Puppies and kittens? Am I getting sappy here, or what? :)

Herman Cain as performance art

This explains so much, don't you think? :)

Hitchslapped

Browse YouTube and you'll find tons of video clips of Christopher Hitchens. Debates, interviews, speeches - they're all good, and I've already posted a number of them here.

But I was really interested to find this playlist of short video clips because it distills what can be a long debate down into just a few minutes. The result is just the essence of Hitchens, the "hitchslap," as it's called here.

Now I haven't watched all of them. Heck, there are 66 video clips, so far! And the ones I have watched vary in effectiveness and in video quality. (The early ones, in particular, tend to skip around a bit too much.)

Nevertheless, there's some good stuff here, and I thought maybe I'd post some of them. Not all today, of course. Right now, I'm not even sure how often I'll post them. Maybe every day, maybe at much longer intervals than that. I'm really not going to worry about it.

In this clip, Hitchslap #11, Christopher Hitchens quite reasonably asks if scapegoating is moral. Can punishing someone else absolve your sin? Vicarious redemption by human sacrifice - how could that ever be moral?

Furthermore, is it moral to blame us today for something our ancestor supposedly did. Are you going to punish a child for his father's crimes? Even if Adam did eat forbidden fruit, why punish his descendants? Even if some people did nail Jesus to a cross, I had nothing to do with it. I couldn't have had anything to do with it, because I wasn't even born then!

Forget the fact that all this is just mythology. Even if it were true, every bit of it, how could you possibly think that it was justified? How could you possibly think that it was moral? This is the same kind of thinking which considers killing random people in floods, and destroying the property of countless others, to be appropriate punishment for their society in general tolerating homosexuality.

Even if you give them their premise, the result is pure insanity. It's just ridiculous, don't you think?

PS. These brief video clips seem to be taken from much longer videos on YouTube. So if you want to hear the context of these remarks, if you want to hear both sides of these debates - and I highly recommend them - it's easy enough to find the longer versions of most of these.

But I'll leave that to you. If this just whets your appetite, there's plenty more out there. Meanwhile, I'll be posting more of these, probably quite frequently.