Sunday, April 30, 2006

ACCORDING TO LEXUS
According to Lexus, this is the sort of guy who drives their cars. In fact, I knew him well back in the good old school days. His name is Yorick, Duke of Diddly and Lord of Inanity. He was, literally, a bone head. He'd walk down the hallway at old PS 95 and we'd bet on whether or not he'd trip on his untied shoelaces. But he was a friendly guy. Often he'd walk up to the crowd of us in the hallway outside of Miss Wow's room, where we camped out, and say, "Duh!" or, if he was having a better day, he'd tell us what he thought his name was. A few times he got it right. That was before he was declared legally an idiot. After that, they took him away and made him a cap with bells on it. He was never the same. I don't think he can legally drive, actually. So what do you make of his being a poster—bored for Lexus? I don't know. Maybe, it's justice.

Friday, April 28, 2006

THE LITTLE RED WAGON OF SPOKANE
DOW JONES? WHY?

Allan Sloan of NEWSWEEK says forget the Dow: “The S&P and the Wilshire are much more important, broad based indexes that are keyed to the stock market’s overall value.”

As for me, this blogger, because my company offered a 401k, I dove into the stock market for the first time in my life in my fifties. It’s been okay, but, now every time I do something with my stocks, it costs me hundreds of dollars. These kinds of expenses are okay for millionaires, but they aren’t fair to little investors like me. I’ve not done the necessary work to check and see if CDs are not just as good after I subtract the expenses involved with moving stocks around to invest in newer ventures. I can’t understand why people get to charge me so much to take my money and use it for their own gain. I know that I can go “C” stocks versus “A” stocks and etcetera, but then you have to hold them for longer. Only millionaires can afford to play the stock market if you ask me.

NETROOT? WHAZZAT?

“Netroots are the crazy political junkies who hang out in blogs.” —Markus Moulitsas Zuniga interviewed by NEWSWEEK, Jan. 9, 2006

SCIENCE MARCHES ON. . .

Stem cells embedded in futuristic materials may heal decades-old spinal cord injuries and rescue patients from paralysis, if recent experiments in rodents can be replicated in humans.
Update: You can't go to "Go Here To Read More". The page is gone. So why link to things which will be disappeared? Why not just scan in the whole article and credit it. If people don't want us to use their material verbatim, they should keep their links active for those of us who'd like to link to their home sites and merely reference the original.

UNLESS BUSH WANTS TO SILENCE THE FACTS

“The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

“The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.” —From a New York Times article two months ago

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

LOTT OF SNEAKY BUSH WHAT NOT

What Not

A man and his wife are dining at a table in a plush restaurant, and the husband keeps staring at a drunken lady swigging her gin as she sits alone at a nearby table.

The wife asks, "Do you know her?"

Yes," sighs the husband, "She's my ex-wife. She took to drinking right after we divorced seven years ago, and I hear she hasn't been sober since."

My God!" says the wife, "Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long."


Sneaky

I don't trust this Bushman one bit. His goal is to destroy everything that's made the average citizen feel safe growing up in America. We always had something to depend on and Social Security lifted millions of people out of poverty. He's destroyed the mentally ill. Next it's the elderly. The man has no conscience at all. Do you think it has something to do with his being a Christian?

“However you cut it, though, there's no question that one of Bush's biggest new budget initiatives—if not the biggest—is private Social Security accounts. You'd be able to put in 4 percent of your wages covered by Social Security (up to $1,100 a year), starting in 2010. The cost would total $712 billion through 2016, and would be covered by Social Security tax payments. Think about it. Last year Bush stressed Social Security privatization but didn't put the costs in his budget (though they were in last July's midyear budget update). This year, when he didn't mention privatization, it's in the budget. Go figure.

“What do the numbers tell us? That Bush may be serious about his competitiveness initiative, but he's really serious about privatizing Social Security. That's not an applause line. But it sure is the bottom line.” —Allen Sloan, Newsweek (Feb. 20, 2006, p. 18)

Lott-a-nonsense

"We're going to cut meals to $20 a meal. Where are they going to eat? McDonald's?" Sen. Trent Lott, sneering at some reform proposals capping the price of lobbyist-paid lunches.

Monday, April 24, 2006

DEFINITION OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY &
DISCOVERING A DUMMY (Explains Itself)

Here’s a whole section, ‘Evolutionary Psychology’, from the opening chapter, “Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology” of the HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, edited by David Buss.

The brain’s a computer. I wouldn’t dare try to make a synopsis of this particular section. These details are important and will give you a good look at the field of evolutionary psychology. Nearly 2000 words.

[OPEN QUOTE] Evolutionary Psychology

Like cognitive scientists, when evolutionary psychologists refer to the mind, they mean the set of information processing devices, embodied in neural tissue, that is responsible for all conscious and nonconscious mental activity, that generates all behavior, and that regulates the body. Like other psychologists, evolutionary psychologists test hypotheses about the design of these computational devices using methods from, for example, cognitive psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, experimental economics, cognitive neuroscience, genetics, physiological psychology, and cross-cultural field work.

The primary tool that allows evolutionary psychologists to go beyond traditional psychologists in studying the mind is that they take full advantage in their research of an overlooked reality: The programs comprising the human mind were designed by natural selection to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors—problems such as finding a mate, cooperating with others, hunting, gathering, protecting children, navigating, avoiding predators, avoiding exploitation, and so on. Knowing this allows evolutionary psychologists to approach the study of the mind like an engineer. You start by carefully specifying an adaptive information processing problem; then you do a task analysis of that problem. A task analysis consists of identifying what properties a program would have to have to solve that problem well. This approach allows you to generate hypotheses about the structure of the programs that comprise the mind, which can then be tested.

From this point of view, there are precise causal connections that link the four developments discussed earlier into a coherent framework for thinking about human nature and society (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992):

C-1: Each organ in the body evolved to serve a function: The intestines digest, the heart pumps blood, and the liver detoxifies poisons. The brain's evolved function is to extract information from the environment and use that information to generate behavior and regulate physiology. Hence, the brain is not just like a computer. It is a computer—that is, a physical system that was designed to process information (Advance 1). Its programs were designed not by an engineer, but by natural selection, a causal process that retains and discards design features based on how well they solved adaptive problems in past environments (Advance 4).

The fact that the brain processes information is not an accidental side effect of some metabolic process. The brain was designed by natural selection to be a computer. Therefore, if you want to describe its operation in a way that captures its evolved function, you need to think of it as composed of programs that process information. The question then becomes: What programs are to be found in the human brain? What are the reliably developing, species-typical programs that, taken together, comprise the human mind?

C-2: Individual behavior is generated by this evolved computer, in response to information that it extracts from the internal and external environment (including the social environment, Advance 1). To understand an individual's behavior, therefore, you need to know both the information that the person registered and the structure of the programs that generated his or her behavior.

C-3: The programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended (Advances 2 and 4). Each evolved program exists because it produced behavior that promoted the survival and reproduction of our ancestors better than alternative programs that arose during human evolutionary history. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize hunter-gatherer life because the evolutionary process is slow—it takes thousands of generations to build a program of any complexity. The industrial revolution—even the agricultural revolution—is too brief a period to have selected for complex new cognitive programs (4).

C-4: Although the behavior our evolved programs generate would, on average, have been adaptive (reproduction promoting) in ancestral environments, there is no guarantee that it will be so now. Modern environments differ importantly from ancestral ones, particularly when it comes to social behavior. We no longer live in small, face-to-face societies, in seminomadic bands of 20 to 100 people, many of whom were close relatives. Yet, our cognitive programs were designed for that social world.

C-5: Perhaps most importantly, natural selection will ensure that the brain is composed of many different programs, many (or all) of which will be specialized for solving their own corresponding adaptive problems. That is, the evolutionary process will not produce a predominantly general-purpose, equipotential, domain-general architecture (Advance 3).

In fact, this is a ubiquitous engineering outcome. The existence of recurrent computational problems leads to functionally specialized application software. For example, the demand for effective word processing and good digital music playback led to different application programs because many of the design features that make a program an effective word processing program are different from those that make a program a good digital music player. Indeed, the greater the number of functionally specialized programs (or subroutines) your computer has installed, the more intelligent your computer is, and the more things it can accomplish. The same is true for organisms. Armed with this insight, we can lay to rest the myth that the more evolved organization the human mind has, the more inflexible its response. Interpreting the emotional expressions of others, seeing beauty, learning language, loving your child—all these enhancements to human mental life are made possible by specialized neural programs built by natural selection.

To survive and reproduce reliably as a hunter-gatherer required the solution of a large and diverse array of adaptive information-processing problems. These ranged from predator vigilance and prey stalking to plant gathering, mate selection, childbirth, parental care, coalition formation, and disease avoidance. Design features that make a program good at choosing nutritious foods, for example, are ill suited for finding a fertile mate or recognizing free riders. Some sets of problems would have required differentiated computational solutions.

The demand for diverse computational designs can be clearly seen when results from evolutionary theory (Advance 4) are combined with data about ancestral environments (Advance 2) to model different ancestral computational problems. The design features necessary for solving one problem are usually markedly different from the features required to construct programs capable of solving another adaptive problem. For example, game theoretic analyses of conditional helping show that programs designed for logical reasoning would be poorly designed for detecting cheaters in social exchange and vice versa; this incommensurability selected for programs that are functionally specialized for reasoning about reciprocity or exchange (Cosmides & Tooby, Chapter 20, this volume).

C-6: Finally, descriptions of the computational architecture of our evolved mechanisms allows a systematic understanding of cultural and social phenomena. The mind is not like a video camera, passively recording the world but imparting no content of its own. Domain-specific programs organize our experiences, create our inferences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, give us our passions, and provide cross-culturally universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. They invite us to think certain kinds of thoughts; they make certain ideas, feelings, and reactions seem reasonable, interesting, and memorable. Consequently, they play a key role in determining which ideas and customs will easily spread from mind to mind and which will not (Boyer, 2001; Sperber, 1994, 1996; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). That is, they play a crucial role in shaping human culture.

Instincts are often thought of as the opposite of reasoning, decision making, and learning. But the reasoning, decision-making, and learning programs that evolutionary psychologists have been discovering (1) are complexly specialized for solving an adaptive problem, (2) reliably develop in all normal human beings, (3) develop without any conscious effort and in the absence of formal instruction, (4) are applied without any awareness of their underlying logic, and (5) are distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. In other words, they have all the hallmarks of what we usually think of as instinct (Pinker, 1994). In fact, we can think of these specialized circuits as instincts: reasoning instincts, decision instincts, motivational instincts, and learning instincts. They make certain kinds of inferences and decisions just as easy, effortless, and natural to us as humans as catching flies is to a frog or burrowing is to a mole.

Consider this example from the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (1995). Like adults, normal 4-year-olds easily and automatically note eye direction in others, and use it to make inferences about the mental states of the gazer. For example, 4 year-olds, like adults, infer that when presented with an array of candy, the gazer wants the particular candy he or she is looking at. Children with autism do not make this inference. Although children with this developmental disorder can compute eye direction correctly, they cannot use that information to infer what someone wants. Normal individuals know, spontaneously and with no mental effort, that the person wants the candy he or she is looking at. This is so obvious to us that it hardly seems to require an inference at all. It is just common sense. But "common sense" is caused: It is produced by cognitive mechanisms. To infer a mental state (wanting) from information about eye direction requires a computation. There is an inference circuit—a reasoning instinct—that produces this inference. When the circuit that does this computation is broken or fails to develop, the inference cannot be made. Those with autism fail this task because they lack this reasoning instinct, even though they often acquire very sophisticated competences of other sorts. If the mind consisted of a domain-general knowledge acquisition system, narrow impairments of this kind would not be possible.

Instincts are invisible to our intuitions, even as they generate them. They are no more accessible to consciousness than our retinal cells and line detectors but are just as important in manufacturing our perceptions of the world. As a species, we have been blind to the existence of these instincts, not because we lack them but precisely because they work so well. Because they process information so effortlessly and automatically, their operation disappears unnoticed into the background. Moreover, these instincts structure our thought and experience so powerfully we mistake their products for features of the external world: Color, beauty, status, friendship, charm—all are computed by the mind and then experienced as if they were objective properties of the objects they are attributed to. These mechanisms limit our sense of behavioral possibility to choices people commonly make, shielding us from seeing how complex and regulated the mechanics of choice is. Indeed, these mechanisms make it difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. As a result, we take normal behavior for granted: We do not realize that normal behavior needs to be explained at all.

As behavioral scientists, we need corrective lenses to overcome our instinct blindness. The brain is fantastically complex, packed with programs, most of which are currently unknown to science. Theories of adaptive function can serve as corrective lenses for psychologists, allowing us to see computational problems that are invisible to human intuition. When carefully thought out, these functional theories can lead us to look for programs in the brain that no one had previously suspected.
_______________________________________________________

Footnote (4) Unidimensional traits, caused by quantitative genetic variation (e.g., taller, shorter), can be adjusted in less time; see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990b.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

NO RELIGIOUS TEST FOR AMERICAN PRESIDENCY???????????

As I watch even Mr. John McCain and all other potential Republican candidates kowtow to the religious right in America, I know that our Constitution is trembling like a bad high rise in an Osaka earthquake. Our Constitution specifically states that there will be no religious qualification for one to run for the presidency of the United States but that does not stop religious folk from forcing their candidates to conform to a religious test. Any person who requires a candidate and any candidate who seeks to qualify on a religious basis should be disqualified from voting or running for president because they are supposed to swear to protect the Constitution when they reach office, and if they can easily ignore any one of the stipulations in the Constitution, then they are not protecting but destroying it. So even honest John McCain proves himself to be unworthy to hold the office.

COMEDY CENTRAL ON THE INSIDER!

Did anyone see the feature on "The Insider" which showed people being exorcised? What a comic act that was. Where did they get such good actors to put on such a wonderful comedy show? We better hope it was a comedy show because if it was real, then we must fear for America if such gullible and easily suggestible citizens are among us on the religious right. Psychology tells us that some of us are more easily hypnotized and open to suggestion than others, and the folk on that show just went to show us how gullible the religious right is. Do you think that easily believing in god is another sign that the religious are not in touch with reality?

I HAVE A SWEATER WHICH FEATURES THE LOGO "FCUK".

It stands for 'French Connection, "United Kingdom" and is a British Company. The reason I own this sweater (beside that fact that it's 100% wool and extremely stylish) is because certain religious conservatives, ever watchful to protect freedom of speech and capitalism, went to the trouble of forcing Federated Department Stores in America to remove this line of products from its shelves, so I went onto the Internet and ordered one from there. Only a dirty mind would think that fcuk spelled fuck.

Friday, April 21, 2006

WHAT ALL PATRIOTS SHOULD BE DRIVING


REAL PRESIDENTS



One of the books I’m reading is David Brinkley’s Memoir. In 1961 Brinkley and thirteen other newsmen were asked to contribute essays to a small book which would be called The Kennedy Circle. I was struck by what Kennedy had to say about his inability to get out to know what the people were thinking and also, his comments bear on the reason that he wanted a wide variety of input into his thinking. He was no arrogant Bushman who only wants yes-men around him. Kennedy’s attitude stands in sharp contrast to the current holder of the White House. If you’re old enough to remember, don’t you miss the man who held the office so very briefly in the early 1960s? What a come down to this clown who’s in office now:

"One of the problems of any President," he [Kennedy] said, "is that his sources of information are limited. I sit in the White House and what I read in the newspapers and magazines and memoranda and things I see—like you and Huntley—is the sum total of what I hear and learn. So the more people I can see, the wider I can be exposed to different ideas, the more effective I can be as President. So, therefore, it is a mistake to have one person working on one subject because then you don't get any clash of ideas and therefore have no opportunity for choice."

HERE’S ONE MORE BENEFIT OF BUSH’S REGIME

“But at least consumers with health plans get to ration their care themselves. The working poor, on Medicaid, face rationing that's growing more severe. The Center for Studying Health System Change has been studying 12 metro areas since 1995. Its 2005 report concluded that, for the unprivileged, "access to basic care is worsening." Because of cutbacks to Medicaid payments to providers, more docs are shutting their doors to the working poor. State-of-the-art hospitals and clinics are opening in affluent suburbs, not downtown. States are paring their Medicaid rolls—and if you're uninsured, you're less than half as likely as the insured to get any medical care. Brutal cutbacks in services for the mentally ill are adding to homelessness-raising costs for shelters, jails and emergency rooms. Fewer specialists are even serving emergency rooms, let alone offering follow-up care.

We like to tell ourselves that, in America, everyone gets health care if it's really needed. But except for certified emergencies, such as a broken bone, doctors and hospitals may turn you away unless you can pay up front. You don't want to lose your health insurance-even the high-deductible kind. Our lottery system of health care is sicker than you think.”

—Jane Bryant Quinn in Newsweek (Feb 27, 2006) p. 47





Wednesday, April 19, 2006

MY IDYLL

This is the woman, Mertie, who walks side by side with me through life, sitting in our smallish but, I think, stylishly colorful living room with a book which of course she has always ready to hand and some of the art we have bought. The kick boxers on the right are a drawing I made back when I was indulging in some drawing classes at the senior center.
HARDWIRING MORALITY TO THE PENIS or
COMPUTING THE ODDS YOU’LL GET LAID or
BIRTH OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY from
HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

I hit pay dirt when through interlibrary loan I got hold of this thick, heavy volume, HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, from the University of Idaho. I’ll never finish it in the three weeks I have, But this book is a text full of the details of the exciting new field of “evolutionary psychology”. Here’s where the future of knowledge is which is most important for human progress. It’s edited by David Buss, full of basic essays about the field, and is foreworded by Steven Pinker. At the time of this blog entry, I’ve now bought a copy of the book for myself on Amazon for $75 bucks and, now, as I make this posting, it's gone up to $79.99. This entry's a long one, folks, but it’s fascinating and detailed:

[OPEN QUOTE] For those eager to leap directly from theories of selection pressures to predictions of fitness maximization, there remains a missing level of causation and explanation: the informational or computational level. This level cannot be avoided if the application of Darwin's theory to humans is ever to achieve the necessary level of scientific precision. Natural selection does not operate on behavior per se; it operates on a systematically caused relationship between information and behavior. Running—a behavior—is neither good nor bad. Running away from a lion can promote survival and reproduction; running toward a lion will curtail both. To be adaptive, behavioral regulation needs to be functionally contingent on information; for example,flee when you see a stalking lion. But a systematic relationship between information and a behavioral response cannot occur unless some reliably developing piece of organic machinery causes it. These causal relations between information and behavior are created by neural circuits in the brain, which function as programs that process information. By altering the neural circuitry that develops, mutations can alter the information processing properties of these programs, creating alternative information-behavior relationships. Selection should retain or discard alternative circuit designs from a species' neural architecture on the basis of how well the information-behavior relationships they produce promote the propagation of the genetic bases of their designs. Those circuit designs that promote their own proliferation will be retained and spread, eventually becoming species-typical (or stably frequency-dependent); those that do not will eventually disappear from the population. The idea that the evolutionary causation of behavior would lead to rigid, inflexible behavior is the opposite of the truth: Evolved neural architectures are specifications of richly contingent systems for generating responses to informational inputs.

As a result of selection acting on information-behavior relationships, the human brain is predicted to be densely packed with programs that cause intricate relationships between information and behavior, including functionally specialized learning systems, domain-specialized rules of inference, default preferences that are adjusted by experience, complex decision rules, concepts that organize our experiences and databases of knowledge, and vast databases of acquired information stored in specialized memory systems—remembered episodes from our lives, encyclopedias of plant life and animal behavior, banks of information about other people's proclivities and preferences, and so on. All of these programs and the databases they create can be called on in different combinations to elicit a dazzling variety of behavioral responses. These responses are themselves information, subsequently ingested by the same evolved programs, in endless cycles that produce complex eddies, currents, and even singularities in cultural life. To get a genuine purchase on human behavior and society, researchers need to know the architecture of these evolved programs. Knowing the selection pressures will not be enough. Our behavior is not a direct response to selection pressures or to a "need" to increase our reproduction.

Hence, one of several reasons why evolutionary psychology is distinct from human sociobiology and other similar approaches lies in its rejection of fitness maximization as an explanation for behavior (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Symons, 1987, 1989, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a, 1992). The relative degree of fitness promotion under ancestral conditions is simply the design criterion by which alternative mutant designs were sorted in the evolutionary past. (The causal role fitness plays in the present is in glacially changing the relative frequencies of alternative designs with respect to future generations.) Although organisms sometimes appear to be pursuing fitness on behalf of their genes, in reality they are executing the evolved circuit logic built into their neural programs, whether this corresponds to current fitness maximization or not. Organisms are adaptation executers, not fitness pursuers. Mapping the computational architecture of the mechanisms will give a precise theory of behavior, while relying on predictions derived from fitness maximization will give a very impoverished and unreliable set of predictions about behavioral dynamics.

To summarize, evolutionary psychology's focus on psychological mechanisms as evolved programs was motivated by new developments from a series of different fields:

Advance 1: The cognitive revolution was providing, for the first time in human history, a precise language for describing mental mechanisms as programs that process information. Galileo's discovery that mathematics provided a precise language for expressing the mechanical and physical relationships enabled the birth of modern physics. Analogously, cognitive scientists' discovery that computational-informational formalisms provide a precise language for describing the design, properties, regulatory architecture, and operation of psychological mechanisms enables a modern science of mind (and its physical basis). Computational language is not just a convenience for modeling anything with complex dynamics. The brain's evolved function is computational—to use information to adaptively regulate the body and behavior—so computational and informational formalisms are by their nature the most appropriate to capture the functional design of behavior regulation.

Advance 2: Advances in paleoanthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and primatology were providing data about the adaptive problems our ancestors had to solve to survive and reproduce and the environments in which they did so.

Advance 3: Research in animal behavior, linguistics, and neuropsychology was showing that the mind is not a blank slate, passively recording the world. Organisms come "factory-equipped" with knowledge about the world, which allows them to learn some relationships easily and others only with great effort, if at all. Skinner's hypothesis—that there is one simple learning process governed by reward and punishment—was wrong.

Advance 4: Evolutionary biology was revolutionized by being placed on a more rigorous, formal foundation of replicator dynamics, leading to the derivation of a diversity of powerful selectionist theories, and the analytic tools to recognize and differentiate adaptations, from by-products and stochastically generated evolutionary noise (Williams, 1966). [CLOSE QUOTE]

— David Buss—

Monday, April 17, 2006

AND, NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT: BLACK COLLAR CRIME

If you're lucky enough to be a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, you'll receive the kind of news in the 6 times a year newspaper that I'm passing on for your attention below. Crime amongst the clergy is as active as in any other profession, and, if you ask me, sexual crimes are more prevalent within the clergy than without it. That's because of the peculiarly repressive attitude in churches toward sex. Not only that, their code of silence means that children are protected from the sort of information that might save them from predators. Thus predators like church congregations and have an easy time of it in houses of worship and within naive congregations. Not only that—most sexual attacks come from people known to the child. Where else but in friendly, close congregations can predators have such easy access to naive children. There's so much unwarranted trust within congregations.

It's a shame, I suppose, that childish innocence must be shattered, but how else do you protect children from predators? If they see only Disney movies, designed for kids and adults who are still like children, then they'll be vulnerable when confronted with danger, nor will their erstwhile protectors be any more likely to see through a predator's sweetness.

Also remember that the list of crimes below does not count the other lists in the paper such as "convicted and sentenced" and "civil suits settled" and cases under investigation. Not only that, the list below only scratches the surface since it is only people aware of the FFRF publication who will send these in, and that will be such a small percentage of Americans that you can imagine how long these lists would be if everyone contributed local news to this national paper.

Arrested/Charged

• Rev. Eugene Marriott, Fort Washington, MD: raping & beating a woman in Fairfax, VA. The minister for men at Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church was accused of attacking and raping the woman in his car. Her body showed signs of having been hit with a belt & fists. Marriott told police that the attack was a form of role-playing. Sources: United Press InternationaI 3/8/06, wtopnews.com 3/8/06

• Michael Willis Heard, 27, & Gregory Railey Jr., 26, Canton, OH: 4 counts of theft by deception. Heard is founder & chief executive officer of Xzuberant Faith Basketball Association, a Christian-based basketball league. Railey is chief operating officer. The league scammed at least $60,000 from hundreds of people, by promising that nobody would be refused pro contracts as long as they paid registration fees. Sources: The Repository [OH] 3/5/06, 2/11/06

• Rev. Terry Hornbuckle, 44, Arlington, TX: failing to stay in custody long enough to be fitted with an electronic monitoring device. The pastor of the Agape Christian Fellowship Church has been in & out of jail since March last year. He was initially arrested for drug abuse & sexual assault, then arrested three more times for violating the terms of his bail. He was ordered to pay the costs of his twice-weekly drug tests & monthly bond supervision. He cannot consume alcohol or drugs unless prescribed by his doctor & pre-approved by the court. Source: Dallas Morning News 3/3/06

• Rev. Elidio Tapia-Renteria, 45, Owatonna, MN: 4th-degree criminal sexual conduct. The preacher at Calvary Church in Owatonna & Rios De Agua Viva in Faribault was charged with molesting his assistant several times over a 7 month period. He reportedly told the woman she was doing God's work by helping him to liberate himself, & threatened that something bad would happen to her & her family spiritually if she refused. Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press 3/1/06

• Rev. George Silva, 73, Raton, NM: 4 counts of sexual misconduct involving a minor. The Catholic priest was arrested by FBI agents on charges including transporting a boy under age 16 from New Mexico to France & Portugal for criminal sexual activity. He is on administrative leave pending an internal church investigation. Source: Santa Fe New Mexican 2/24/06

• Rev. Morales Saintilus, Long Island, NY: 4 counts of incest, 2 counts of endangering the welfare of a child, & 2 counts of sexual abuse. The pastor & owner of the Ebonizer Baptist Church, attended by Haitian Americans, was charged with raping at least 3 female family members under age 17, some as young as 12. One teen said she was raped nearly twice a week for 4 years. Saintilus is a fire-&-brimstone preacher who often speaks about atoning for one's sins. Source: WABC- TV 2/9/06

• Rev. Kevin Thompson, 48, Bay Area, CA: illegally catching & selling 465 juvenile leopard sharks. The pastor of the Bay Area Family Church & 5 other people were charged with harvesting leopard sharks that were too small for commercial distribution & therefore protected under state law. Source: San Francisco Examiner 2/9/06

• Rev. Vincent Kohn, Springfield, FL: abandonment & cruelty to animals with unnecessary suffering. The pastor of The Anointed Church of God was arrested after a witness saw him throw several puppies into the woods from a pickup truck, leaving them to die. Police who went to Kohn's house found more puppies & their mother, all malnourished and/or with no food or water. Source: local6.com 2/7/06

• Rev. Michael Peters, 36, Denver, CO: 2 counts of sexual assault of a child by a person in a position of trust. The minister at New Hope Baptist Church was charged with sexually assaulting a girl, 17, in 2003. He was then pastor, choir director, & counselor at the 2nd Baptist Church in Boulder. The girl was in the church choir & had come to him for counseling after being a victim of a previous sexual assault. Source: Denver Post 2/7/06, 9news.com 2/7/06

• Rev. Jimmy McCants, 54, Chicago, IL: misdemeanor criminal trespassing. The pastor was arrested in the middle of his sermon at the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church. The church's board of directors told police they had fired McCants in December, & a woman affiliated with the church had signed a complaint against him for trespassing on church property. Source: AP 2/7/06

• Msgr. Bernard Prince, 71, Ontario, Canada: 2 charges of sexual assault. He was accused of abusing an altar boy, 12, when he was a parish priest in the 1960s. Now retired & living in Rome, he was once secretary general for the Vatican's Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith, & was close to the late Pope John Paul II. Source: AP 2/3/06

• Rev. Charles V. Shifflett, 54, Culpeper, VA: taking indecent liberties with a child. This is the 3rd time he was arrested in just over the same week. The pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, who resigned last November, was charged with an incident occurring in March 1998. He was previously charged with 2 counts of child endangerment in incidents occurring in 1992-93, & taking indecent liberties with a child between 1991-93. He was a leader at Calvary Baptist Academy, a church-run private school. Source: Free Lance-Star 1/27/06

• Timothy Robert Frahm, 40, San Antonio, TX: indecency with a child by contact. The religion, literature, & physical education teacher at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church School was charged with molesting a female student, 12. He has since resigned. Source: San Antonio Express-News 1/26/06

• Rev. Lorenzo Dixon, 40, Arcadia, FL: simple battery & improper exhibition of a firearm. The pastor of Assembly of Praise Church was arrested at the Fairfax Tabernacle Church in Jacksonville for being involved in a fight with another man. During the argument, Dixon wielded a handgun. Source: local6.com 12/28/05

• Rev. Galen Ermil Peckham, 71, Waterloo, IA: indecent exposure, assault with intent to commit sexual abuse, & 2 counts of simple assault. The visiting minister at First United Methodist Church resigned after being arrested for molesting an elderly woman at a care facility. Peckham was also told to refrain from active ministry pending the investigation. Source: Waterloo Cedar-Falls Courier 12/22/05

• Rev. Joseph Briceno, Phoenix, AZ: 8 counts of sex crimes involving 2 minors. The fugitive priest was arrested near the Mexican border. Source: AZ Daily Star 12/17/05

Compiled by Lynn Lau

If you’ve got a clip about ministerial crime send it to:
Attn: Black Collar FFRF, Inc.,
PO Box 750 Madison WI 53701 blackcollar@ffrf.org
Remember to include newspaper & date.

Friday, April 14, 2006

CURRENT READING

It’s very diverse. Woody Allen’s Side Effects, an early collection of his writing, The Two Lives of Errol Flynn. Also David Brinkley’s Memoir and, of course, still plowing through and enjoying the heavy but informative reading in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. If anyone’s interested. I believe I’ll be reading the Handbook far into next year—more than a thousand pages of very detailed information.


THE ENTRY TO THE RIGHT IS SELF EXPLANATORY>>>

I got it from the newspaper the Freedom From Religion Foundation publishes. CLICK ON IT TO ENLARGE.










Wednesday, April 12, 2006

AUTISM

“According to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 166 children have some form of autism. These cases range from mild to severe, and the prevalence of the disorder among the population has been on the rise since the 1980s.”
By Candace Lombardi
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: April 4, 2006, 12:20 PM PDT


HERE’S A QUESTION FROM GEO TO YOU: Why do you think autism is on the rise? Is it genetic or cultural? Comment if you please at the end of this post. . . .


SECOND QUESTION: Is this man autistic?


CHECKING INTO MYSPACE

I’ve got a Myspace, you know, but I haven’t done anything with it. Here’s what’s strange. You know. . . ? You go over there and you see people toting up their lists of friends.

Now what is that—when someone claims to have 62 friends or some musician, trying to sell you his songs, claims to have a million friends, claims you to be his friend in order to sell you something? What does that mean? As far as I can tell from my longish life, if a man has a handful of real friends, he’s got all he’ll ever need. What kind of a friend is a blog friend anyway? What do you really know about someone you haven’t sat down over coffee with, across a narrow table, looked in the eye and revealed yourself. I find it infinitely easier to reveal myself on a blog than one on one. Just look at my other blog, Bottoms Up: the autobiography of a nobody. That’s a tell-all, though still less than a third finished, book. Easy to do so far.

Then—isn’t there something awfully sophomoric about collecting friends, adding them up, like kids seeking out cliques in school to belong to? Frankly, I wasn’t much of a belonger in school anyhow and damn proud of it. I’m softer now and like to have friends about me, people I can hug when the conversations over for the day. There is something real sad about people adding up and displaying lists of strangers as friends, isn’t there?

Monday, April 10, 2006

TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

I just made an awesome discovery. I used my Blogspot feature that allows me to get lists of people who list the same profile items as mine. So I went through the list that "Sands of Iwo Jima" came up with and through the list that "La Dolce Vita" came up with. There's the two worlds right there, and I've got a foot smack dab in each of them. The split is hurting my crotch. Is that because I've aged in just the right way, like Limberger cheese?
I CAN FLY. WHO’LL JUMP OFF THIS BUILDING WITH ME?

Kurt Scudder sent this to me. We were having a discussion. His covering comment explains. It's a long one, but well worth your read.

[Hi George,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you after the last Spokane FFRF meeting. We talked about whether truth had selective advantage. I argued that, at least in one narrow sense, it did not. I've attached an HTML copy of a ten-year-old article from Skeptical Inquirer called "The Belief Engine". Give it a read, and let's discuss the idea further.

Best Regards --Kurt Scudder]

The Belief Engine

Our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, a system that evolved to assure not truth, logic, and reason, but survival. The belief engine has seven major components.

The following beliefs are strongly held by large numbers of people. Each of them has been hotly disputed by others:

Through hypnosis, one can access past lives.

Horoscopes provide useful information about the future.

Spiritual healing sometimes succeeds where conventional medicine fails.

A widespread, transgenerational Satanic conspiracy is afoot in society.

Certain gifted people have been able to use their psychic powers to help police solve crimes.

We can sometimes communicate with others via mental telepathy.

Some people have been abducted by UFOs and then returned to earth.

Elvis lives.

Vitamin C can ward off or cure the common cold.

Immigrants are stealing our jobs.

Certain racial groups are intellectually inferior.

Certain racial groups are athletically superior, at least in some specific sports.

Crime and violence are linked to the breakdown of the traditional family.

North Korea's developing nuclear capability poses a threat to world peace.

Despite high confidence on the part of both believers and disbelievers, in most instances, neither side has much—if any—objective evidence to back its position. Some of these beliefs, such as telepathy and astrology, stand in contradiction to the current scientific worldview and are therefore considered by many scientists to be "irrational." Others are not at all inconsistent with science, and whether or not they are based in fact, no one would consider them to be irrational.

Nineteenth-century rationalists predicted that superstition and irrationality would be defeated by universal education. However, this has not happened. High literacy rates and universal education have done little to decrease such belief, and poll after poll indicates that a large majority of the public believe in the reality of "occult" or "paranormal" or "supernatural" phenomena. Why should this be so? Why is it that in this highly scientific and technological age superstition and irrationality abound?

It is because our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, an engine that produces beliefs without any particular respect for what is real or true and what is not. This belief engine selects information from the environment, shapes it, combines it with information from memory, and produces beliefs that are generally consistent with beliefs already held. This system is as capable of generating fallacious beliefs as it is of generating beliefs that are in line with truth. These beliefs guide future actions and, whether correct or erroneous, they may prove functional for the individual who holds them. Whether or not there is really a Heaven for worthy souls does nothing to detract from the usefulness of such a belief for people who are searching for meaning in life.

Nothing is fundamentally different about what we might think of as "irrational" beliefs—they are generated in the same manner as are other beliefs. We may not have an evidential basis for belief in irrational concepts, but neither do we have such a basis for most of our beliefs. For example, you probably believe that brushing your teeth is good for you, but it is unlikely that you have any evidence to back up this belief, unless you are a dentist. You have been taught this, it makes some sense, and you have never been led to question it.

If we were to conceptualize the brain and nervous system as a belief engine, it would need to comprise several components, each reflecting some basic aspect of belief generation. Among the components, the following units figure importantly:

The Learning Unit

The learning unit is the key to understanding the belief engine. It is tied to the physical architecture of the brain and nervous system; and by its very nature, we are condemned to a virtually automatic process of magical thinking. "Magical thinking" is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link. For example, if you believe that crossing your fingers brought you good fortune, you have associated the act of finger-crossing with the subsequent welcome event and imputed a causal link between the two.

Our brain and nervous system have evolved over millions of years. It is important to recognize that natural selection does not select directly on the basis of reason or truth; it selects for reproductive success. Nothing in our cerebral apparatus gives any particular status to truth. Consider a rabbit in the tall grass, and grant for a moment a modicum of conscious and logical intellect to it. It detects a rustling in the tall grass, and having in the past learned that this occasionally signals the presence of a hungry fox, the rabbit wonders if there really is a fox this time or if a gust of wind caused the grass to rustle. It awaits more conclusive evidence. Although motivated by a search for truth, that rabbit does not live long. Compare the late rabbit to the rabbit that responds to the rustle with a strong autonomic nervous-system reaction and runs away as fast as it can. It is more likely to live and reproduce. So, seeking truth does not always promote survival, and fleeing on the basis of erroneous belief is not always such a bad thing to do. However, while this avoidance strategy may succeed in the forest, it may be quite dangerous to pursue in the nuclear age.

The learning unit is set up in such a way as to learn very quickly from the association of two significant events—such as touching a hot stove and feeling pain. It is set up so that significant pairings produce a lasting effect, while nonpairings of the same two events are not nearly so influential. If a child were to touch a stove once and be burned, then if the child were to touch it again without being burned, the association between pain and stove would not automatically be unlearned. This basic asymmetry—pairing of two stimuli has an important effect, while presenting the stimuli unpaired (that is, individually) has a much lesser effect—is important for survival.

This asymmetry in learning also underlies much of the error that colors our thinking about events that occur together from time to time. Humans are very poor at accurately judging the relationship between events that only sometimes co-occur. For example, if we think of Uncle Harry, and then he telephones us a few minutes later, this might seem to demand some explanation in terms of telepathy or precognition. However, we can only properly evaluate the co-occurrence of these two events if we also consider the number of times that we thought of Harry and he did not call, or we did not think of him but he called anyway. These latter circumstances—these nonpairings—have little impact on our learning system. Because we are overly influenced by pairings of significant events, we can come to infer an association, and even a causal one, between two events even if there is none. Thus, dreams may correspond with subsequent events only every so often by chance, and yet this pairing may have a dramatic effect on belief. Or we feel a cold coming on, take vitamin C, and then when the cold does not get to be too bad we infer a causal link. The world around us abounds with coincidental occurrences, some of which are meaningful but the vast majority of which are not. This provides a fertile ground for the growth of fallacious beliefs. We readily learn that associations exist between events, even when they do not. We are often led by co-occurring events to infer that the one that occurred first somehow caused the one that succeeded it.

We are all even more prone to error when rare or emotionally laden events are involved. We are always looking for causal explanations, and we tend to infer causality even when none exists. You might be puzzled or even distressed if you heard a loud noise in your living room but could find no source for it.

The Critical-Thinking Unit
The critical-thinking unit is the second component of the belief engine, and it is acquired -- acquired through experience and explicit education. Because of the nervous-system architecture that I have described, we are born to magical thinking. The infant who smiles just before a breeze causes a mobile above her head to move will smile again and again, as though the smile had magically caused the desired motion of the mobile. We have to labor to overcome such magical predisposition, and we never do so entirely. It is through experience and direct teaching that we come to understand the limits of our immediate magical intuitive interpretations. We are taught common logic by parents and teachers, and since it often serves us well, we use it where it seems appropriate. Indeed, the cultural parallel of this developmental process is the development of the formal method of logic and scientific inquiry. We come to realize that we cannot trust our automatic inferences about co-occurrence and causality.

We learn to use simple tests of reason to evaluate events around us, but we also learn that certain classes of events are not to be subjected to reason but should be accepted on faith. Every society teaches about transcendental things—ghosts, gods, bogeymen, and so on; and here we are often explicitly taught to ignore logic and accept such things on faith or on the basis of other people's experiences. By the time we are adults, we can respond to an event in either a logical, critical mode or in an experiential, intuitive mode. The events themselves often determine which way we will respond. If I were to tell you that I went home last night and found a cow in my living room, you would be more likely to laugh than to believe me, even though there is certainly nothing impossible about such an event. If, on the other hand, I were to tell you that I went into my living room and was startled by an eerie glow over my late grandfather's armchair, and that the room went cold, you may be less likely to disbelieve and more likely to perk up your ears and listen to the details, possibly suspending the critical acumen that you would bring to the cow story. Sometimes strong emotion interferes with the application of critical thought. Other times we are cleverly gulled.

Rationality is often at a disadvantage to intuitive thought. The late psychologist Graham Reed spoke of the example of the gambler's fallacy: Suppose you are observing a roulette wheel. It has come up black ten times in a row, and a powerful intuitive feeling is growing in you that it must soon come up red. It cannot keep coming up black forever. Yet your rational mind tells you that the wheel has no memory, that each outcome is independent of those that preceded. In such a case, the struggle between intuition and rationality is not always won by rationality.

Note that we can switch this critical thinking unit on or off. As I noted earlier, we may switch it off entirely if dealing with religious or other transcendental matters. Sometimes, we deliberately switch it on: "Hold it a minute, let me think this out," we might say to ourselves when someone tries to extract money from us for an apparently worthy cause.

The Yearning Unit
Learning does not occur in a vacuum. We are not passive receivers of information. We actively seek out information to satisfy our many needs. We may yearn to find meaning in life. We may yearn for a sense of identity. We may yearn for recovery from disease. We may yearn to be in touch with deceased loved ones.

In general we yearn to reduce anxiety. Beliefs, be they correct or false, can assuage these yearnings. Often beliefs that might be categorized as irrational by scientists are the most efficient at reducing these yearnings. Rationality and scientific truth have little to offer for most people as remedies for existential anxiety. However, belief in reincarnation, supernatural intervention, and everlasting life can overcome such anxiety to some extent.

When we are yearning most, when we are in the greatest need, we are even more vulnerable to fallacious beliefs that can serve to satisfy those yearnings.

The Input Unit
Information enters the belief engine sometimes in the form of raw sensory experience and other times in the form of organized, codified information presented through word of mouth, books, or films. We are wonderful pattern detectors, but not all the patterns we detect are meaningful ones. Our perceptual processes work in such a way as to make sense of the environment around us, but they do make sense—perception is not a passive gathering of information but, rather, an active construction of a representation of what is going on in our sensory world. Our perceptual apparatus selects and organizes information from the environment, and this process is subject to many well-known biases that can lead to distorted beliefs. Indeed, we are less likely to be influenced by incoming information if it does not already correspond to deeply held beliefs. Thus, the very spiritual Christian may be quite prepared to see the Virgin Mary; information or perceptual experience that suggests that she has appeared may be more easily accepted without critical scrutiny than it would be by someone who is an atheist. It is similar with regard to experiences that might be considered paranormal in nature.

The Emotional Response Unit
Experiences accompanied by strong emotion may leave an unshakable belief in whatever explanation appealed to the individual at the time. If one is overwhelmed by an apparent case of telepathy, or an ostensible UFO, then later thinking may well be dominated by the awareness that the emotional reaction was intense, leading to the conclusion that something unusual really did happen. And emotion in turn may directly influence both perception and learning. Something may be interpreted as bizarre or unusual because of the emotional responses triggered.

Evidence is accumulating that our emotional responses may be triggered by information from the outside world even before we are consciously aware that something has happened. Take this example, provided by LeDoux (1994) in his recent article in Scientific American (1994, 270, pp. 50-57):

An individual is walking through the woods when she picks up information—either auditory, such as rustling leaves, or visual, such as the sight of a slender curved object on the ground— which triggers a fear response. This information, even before it reaches the cortex, is processed in the amygdala, which arouses the body to an alarm footing. Somewhat later, when the cortex has had enough time to decide whether or not the object really is a snake, this cognitive information processing will either augment the fear response and corresponding evasive behaviour, or will serve to bring that response to a halt.

This is relevant to our understanding of paranormal experience, for very often an emotional experience accompanies the putatively paranormal. A strong coincidence may produce an emotional "zing" that points us toward a paranormal explanation, because normal events would not be expected to produce such emotion.

Our brains are also capable of generating wonderful and fantastic perceptual experiences for which we are rarely prepared. Out-of-body experiences (OBEs), hallucinations, near-death experiences (NDEs), peak experiences—these are all likely to be based, not in some external transcendental reality, but rather in the brain itself. We are not always able to distinguish material originating in the brain from material from the outside world, and thus we can falsely attribute to the external world perceptions and experiences that are created within the brain. We have little training with regard to such experience. As children, we do learn to distrust, for the most part, dreams and nightmares. Our parents and our culture tell us that they are products of our own brains. We are not prepared for more arcane experiences, such as OBEs or hallucinations or NDEs or peak experiences, and may be so unprepared that we are overwhelmed by the emotion and come to see such experience as deeply significant and "real" whether or not it is.

Ray Hyman has always cautioned skeptics not to be surprised should they one day have a very strong emotional experience that seems to cry out for paranormal explanation. Given the ways our brains work, we would expect such experiences from time to time. Unprepared for them, they could become conversion experiences that lead to strong belief. When I was a graduate student, another graduate student who shared my office, and who was equally as skeptical as I was about the paranormal, came to school one day overwhelmed by the realism and clarity of a dream he had had the night before. In it, his uncle in Connecticut had died. It had been a very emotional dream, and was so striking that Jack told me that if his uncle died anytime soon, he would no longer be able to maintain his skepticism about precognition—the dream experience was that powerful. Ten years later, his uncle was still alive, and Jack's skepticism had survived intact.

The Memory Unit
Through our own experience, we come to believe in the reliability of our memories and in our ability to judge whether a given memory is reliable or not. However, memory is a constructive process rather than a literal rendering of past experience, and memories are subject to serious biases and distortions.

Not only does memory involve itself in the processing of incoming information and the shaping of beliefs; it is itself influenced strongly by current perceptions and beliefs. Yet it is very difficult for an individual to reject the products of his or her own memory process, for memory can seem to be so "real."

The Environmental Feedback Unit
Beliefs help us to function. They guide our actions and increase or reduce our anxieties. If we operate on the basis of a belief, and if it "works" for us, even though faulty, why would we be inclined to change it? Feedback from the external world reinforces or weakens our beliefs, but since the beliefs themselves influence how that feedback is perceived, beliefs can become very resistant to contrary information and experience. If you really believe that alien abductions occur, then any evidence against that belief can be rationalized away—in terms of conspiracy theories, other people's ignorance, or whatever.

As mentioned earlier, fallacious beliefs can often be even more functional than those based in truth. For example, Shelley Taylor, in her book Positive Illusions, reports research showing that mildly depressed people are often more realistic about the world than are happy people. Emotionally healthy people live to some extent by erecting false beliefs—illusions—that reduce anxiety and aid well-being, whereas depressed individuals to some degree see the world more accurately. Happy people may underestimate the likelihood of getting cancer or being killed, and may avoid thinking about the ultimate reality of death, while depressed people may be much more accurate with regard to such concerns.

An important way in which to run reality checks on our perceptions and beliefs is to compare them with those of others. If I am the only one who interpreted a strange glow as an apparition, I am more likely to reconsider this interpretation than if several others share the same view. We often seek out people who agree with us, or selectively choose literature supporting our belief. If the majority doubts us, then even if only part of a minority we can collectively work to dispel doubt and find certainty. We can invoke conspiracies and coverups to explain an absence of confirmatory evidence. We may work to inculcate our beliefs in others, especially children. Shared beliefs can promote social solidarity and even a sense of importance for the individual and group.

In Conclusion
Beliefs are generated by the belief engine without any automatic concern for truth. Concern for truth is a higher order acquired cognitive orientation that reflects an underlying philosophy which presupposes an objective reality that is not always perceived by our senses.

The belief engine chugs away, strengthening old beliefs, spewing out new ones, rarely discarding any. We can sometimes see the error or foolishness in other people's beliefs. It is very difficult to see the same in our own. We believe in all sorts of things, abstract and concrete -- in the existence of the solar system, atoms, pizza, and five-star restaurants in Paris. Such beliefs are no different in principle from beliefs in fairies at the end of the garden, in ghosts in some deserted abbey, in werewolves, in satanic conspiracies, in miraculous cures, and so on. Such beliefs are all similar in form, all products of the same process, even though they vary widely in content. They may, however, involve greater or lesser involvement of the critical-thinking and emotional-response units.

Critical thinking, logic, reason, science—these are all terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. The true critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept—that one cannot routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality. Through teaching and encouraging critical thought our society will move away from irrationality, but we will never succeed in completely abandoning irrational tendencies, again because of the basic nature of the belief engine.

Experience is often a poor guide to reality. Skepticism helps us to question our experience and to avoid being too readily led to believe what is not so. We should try to remember the words of the late P. J. Bailey (in Festus: A Country Town): "Where doubt, there truth is—'tis her shadow."

—James Alcock

Sunday, April 09, 2006

LOST IN SPACE

Lately, I've tried to sign up and get a web page with Myspace, the hottest thing going on the American scene. Also, I've been using my profile page on Blogspot to search for people who like the same books, movies, ideas and etcetera that I do.

Here's my conclusion. All this blather and information on the internet will be the death of meaningful language. It's worse than the time I realized that there were thousands of writers vying for spots in the publishing market, that I was just a little blob mixed in the larger blob. On the internet it's even more frustrating. So many people blathering stuff into the internetair. Many useful things, but who has time to stop and read while one is so busy searching a "library" which is chaotically organized and a phone book so full of people one might find.

I came across essays by the famous dead and essays by living nobodies and references to music I ought to hear—on and on ad nauseam. Then, I realized, as I tried to read an essay by John Sturt Mill that someone had pasted onto his blogsite, that I didn't, at the moment, have the patience to stop and read that essay because I had to hurry up and find the next spot, the next interesting picture, the next facile comment, the next, the next, the next . . . . It's addictive in here and the grass in the backyard needs mowing, but I've got to get on with blogging and searching websites and blogging some more and, and and an a ?
HARRY TAYLOR: HERO

This is the guy who confronted Bush at one of Bush's usually scripted performances. He gave his message in concise, telling language, and he got it right, from the transcripts I've come across. He was booed by the audience for what he said, but he continued anyway. Also think of what recently happened at the press conference of Democrat Nick Lampson who's running to replace Tom Delay in Texas. His press conference was attacked and disrupted by Delay partisans. These Christian conservative thugs are just like the Brownshirts in Hitler's Germany, disrupting meetings and brutalizing opponents. Then people try to say that the Nazi's were atheists. You can be a Christian and a thug too. PS: Look at the lady down to the left of the picture. "Whooooboy!" she's saying.


NO CIVIL WAR, SAYS OUR SIDE, BUT. . .


[OPEN QUOTE] Despite the violence, U.S. officials have discounted talk of civil war. However, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday that an "undeclared civil war" had already been raging for more than a year.

"Is there a civil war? Yes, there is an undeclared civil war that has been there for a year or more," Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal told The Associated Press. "All these bodies that are discovered in Baghdad, the slaughter of pilgrims heading to holy sites, the explosions, the destruction, the attacks against the mosques are all part of this."

His comments were echoed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

"Civil war has almost started among Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and those who are coming from Asia. The situation is uneasy and I don't know how would Iraq be brought together," Mubarak said in an interview broadcast Saturday on Al-Arabiya satellite television. [CLOSE QUOTE] Read more.

Friday, April 07, 2006

MORNING BECOMES ELECTRIC LAWNMOWER

It's a beautiful April morning and I look outside my window beside the computer I type upon, and, lo and behold, the lawn needs mowing. Seems only yesterday there was snow out there. PS: I cheated the caption of this entry. I really don't have an electric mower.



SOME PEOPLE
NEVER LEARN


And they've had all of history to learn the lesson that when science and religion clash, religion is always proven wrong.















SPEAKING OF FISH: Fossil Called Missing Link From Sea to Land Animals

[OPEN QUOTE] Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land. . . .

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods. . . .

It was not until July 2004, Dr. Shubin said, that "we hit the jackpot." They found several of the fishes in a quarry, their skeletons largely intact and in three dimensions. The large skull had the sharp teeth of a predator. It was attached to a neck, which allowed the fish the unfishlike ability to swivel its head.

If the animal spent any time out of water, said Dr. Jenkins, of Harvard, it needed a true neck that allowed the head to move independently on the body. [CLOSE QUOTE]

Read all By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published in New York Times: April 6, 2006

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

A NICE LITTLE PLACE IN SPOKANE

I could imagine Jack Kerouac stopping here while he was blowing around the country with Neal Cassidy and Ginsburg. Inside, it's deep and narrow with a coffee counter to the left. . . and here's a buddy inside the Satellite passing out fliers for our local progressive radio station, Thin Air Radio 92.3 on your dial.








VIETNAM, VIETNAM, VIETNAM, VIETNAM, VIETNAM.... QUAGMIRE, QUAGMIRE, QUAGMIRE, QUAGMIRE.... CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN.... OIY! MY HEAD HURTS WITH DEJA VU


". . . few members of Congress return from visits to Iraq buoyant about the likelihood of ending the insurgency any time soon without a massive infusion of additional American troops that, according to [Congressman] Murtha, would require the reinstitution of the draft. 'I saw how discouraged these commanders were,' the congressman told Newsweek. 'They say what the White House wants them to say, but they don't have enough troops to secure the border.' " —Newsweek, Nov. 28, p.33

And since this article, the situation has only gotten worse.

UNCERTAINTY'S A GOOD THING, SPECIALLY IF YOU CAN QUANTIFY IT

"There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure it's magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it." —Richard Dawkins

A BIG IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

Awhile back, the local Inlander weekly asked readers to suggest big ideas for the Inland Northwest. I knew this is not what they were looking for, but I sent it off in hopes I might interest them, but....

Subject: A big idea whose time has come....
Date: Friday, January 28, 2005 4:38 PM
From: George Thomas
To: Inlander

Dear Ed.,

Here’s a BIG IDEA not just for the Inland Empire but for all mankind in all places and in future times. This idea is not just a suggestion; it’s an inevitability and just needs the “brights” here and everywhere to get on the bandwagon to get humanity to acceptance of the new reality as quickly as possible:

The course of evolving human nature is irreversibly toward freedom.

We now know that in the distant past human precursors had no language or consciousness and, hence, nothing remotely like “free will”. Slowly, adaptation by adaptation, language and consciousness emerged and, later, cultural adaptation, until human consciousness now begins to wrestle with its more superficial animalistic behaviors.

In early hunter/gatherer groups each individual’s consciousness (what there was of it) was harnessed to group needs. Then came theocratic city-states and medieval kingdoms in which individual freedom was extremely limited by station in religious and royal hierarchies. Prelates, kings, lords and princes were most free. (Many humans are still trapped in those evolutionary, vertical power structures, unable to surrender belief in imaginary heavenly kingdoms and princes. They still unconsciously bow to animal pecking orders.) Eventually, democracies arose in which citizens exercised still more “conscious choice”.

A future of complete human freedom is upon us in the consciousness of atheism which understands that humans can someday be completely free and must accept full responsibility to deal with their animal history. True freedom requires the courage to lay down our eternal lives and pick up our human burden of mortality, consciousness and responsibility, to step out of the darkness of superstition and into the light of consciousness.

That’s a BIG idea!

Sincerely,

Geo


Monday, April 03, 2006

DESIGN AND SELECTION:
BOTH PROGRESS STEP BY STEP

Why didn't the Wright Brothers, in my home town of Dayton, Ohio, just go ahead a design a Concorde rather than the rickety, barely able to fly, flying thing they did design? Dawkins has an answer for that too in The Ancestor's Tale, pages 601-603.

[OPEN QUOTE] And now for an important point. The evolution of any complex designoid organ in an arms race must have come about in a large number of steps of progressive evolution. Such evolution qualifies as progressive by our definition because each change tends to continue the direction of its predecessors. How do we know there are many steps rather than just one or two? By elementary probability theory. The parts of a complex machine, such as a bat's ear, could be rearranged at random in a million ways before you hit another arrangement that could hear as well as the real thing. It is statistically improbable, not just in the boring sense that any particular arrangement of parts is as improbable, with hindsight, as any other. Very few permutations of atoms are precision auditory instruments. A real bat's ear is one in a million. It works. Something so statistically improbable cannot sensibly be explained as the result of a single stroke of luck. It has to be generated by some sort of improbability-generating process, ratcheted up by what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls a crane' (as opposed to a 'skyhook': the analogy is to the man-made lifting machine, not the bird). The only cranes known to science (and I would bet the only cranes there have ever been, or ever will be, in the universe) are design and selection. Design explains the efficient complexity of microphones. Natural selection explains the efficient complexity of bat ears. Ultimately, selection explains microphones and everything designed too because the designers of microphones are themselves evolved engineers generated by natural selection. Ultimately, design cannot explain anything because there is an inevitable regression to the problem of the origin of the designer.

Design and natural selection are both processes of gradual, step-by-step, progressive improvement. Natural selection, at least, could not be anything else. In the case of design it may or may not be a matter of principle, but it is an observed fact. The Wright brothers did not have a blinding flash of inspiration and promptly build a Concorde or a Stealth bomber. They built a creaking, rickety crate that barely lifted off the ground and lurched into a neighboring field. From Kitty Hawk to Cape Canaveral, every step of the way was built on its predecessors. Improvement is gradual, step by step in the same continued direction, fulfilling our definition of progressive. We could, with difficulty, conceive of a Victorian genius designing a sidewinder missile fully formed within his Zeusian, side-whiskered head. The notion defies all common sense and all history, but it does not instantly fall foul of the laws of probability in the way we would have to say of the spontaneous evolution of a flying, echolocating, modern bat.

A single macro-mutational leap from ground-dwelling ancestral shrew to flying, echolocating bat is ruled out just as safely as we can rule out luck when a conjuror successfully guesses the complete order of a shuffled pack of cards. Luck is not literally impossible in either case. But no good scientist would advance such prodigious luck as an explanation. The card-guessing feat has to be a trick—we've all seen tricks that appear just as baffling to the uninitiated. Nature does not set out to fool us, as a conjuror does. But we can still rule out luck, and it was the genius of Darwin to rumble nature's sleight of hand. The echo-ranging bat is the result of an inching series of minor improvements, each adding cumulatively to its predecessors as it propels the evolutionary trend on in the same direction. That is progress, by definition. The argument applies to all complex biological objects that project the illusion of design and are therefore statistically improbable in a specified direction. All must have evolved progressively. [CLOSE QUOTE]

Saturday, April 01, 2006

"APRIL FOOL", GOD SAYS

NEW YORK (AP) -- In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery.

In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.


Researchers emphasized their work does not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said.

They also said they had no explanation for the higher complication rate in patients who knew they were being prayed for, in comparison to patients who only knew it was possible prayers were being said for them.

The work, which followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers, was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. It will appear in the American Heart Journal.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren't prayed for but were told it was a possibility.

The researchers did not ask patients or their families and friends to alter any plans they had for prayer, saying such a step would have been unethical and impractical.

The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who did not take part in the study, said the results did not surprise him.

"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said.

Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."

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