I have an opinion on the use of the Quran as a target for weapons practice by US personnel in Baghdad.

I was wondering what you other skeptics and/or atheists think.

I’ve found blogs that pretty much agree with the following, which is my opinion.

I view the Quaran as “just another influential book”. Why should I feel any differently about somebody shooting at it as opposed to, say, a Betty Crocker Cookbook? The difference as I see it, is that I highly doubt somebody just picked a random book - which happened to be the Quran - to shoot.

I suspect, that just like burning a flag is very often a political and philosophical statement, rather than a matter of practical expediency (i.e. keeping warm) or random happenstance, so is any non-random shooting or burning the Quran. I firmly support the right of free speech, even to the point where a citizen is entitled to burn a flag, fly a flag of choice, burn or shoot any book he may choose. On the other hand, I propose that when an official representative (e.g. a soldier, or other government agent) makes a political statement, it is sometimes difficult to separate the person from the role and thus may be easily misconstrued as an official statement. I cannot help but think it was intentionally inflamatory.

It also occurs to me that some may be inclined to shoot a Quran, a Bible, a Kitαb-i-Aqdas, a Mencius etc. as a general statement of antipathy toward religion in general. But in selecting to assault only one holy book, one’s intention could be easily (mis?)construed as making a specific statement against a particular religion, and implicitly in support of some other religion. Due to this easy interpretation, it is logical for an observer to infer the protester supports some kind of deep antipathy toward a particular religion commensurate perhaps even with the disposition toward religious war.

Finally, I hold that the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter) is a secular war against the secular impacts of an autocratic and malicious regime and ideology, which regime may (or may not) be motivated by religious philosophy. It is in keeping with the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, including religious liberty, for the actions and policies of our occupation forces to completely ignore religious issues until and unless they create deleterious secular or practical impacts, and then to selectively address those issues. To cast the struggle as being generally against a particular religion is antithetical to the best ideals of respect, tolerance and liberty humanity has ever conceived.

Here’s a brief summary of topics I believe need further development with regards to the way scholars and professionals think about and approach International Relations.

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Just when I was beginning to despair about the lack of substantive debate in government chambers, we have a reprise of the fracas between Griswold and Lyon.  It’s not at the national level, but we can at least hope passion is not dead in government.

I would like to point out that in both instances, the instigator of physical violence was a conservative (e.g. Federalist / Republican).

South Carolina has this nifty idea to cut the term of prison sentences for inmates who donate organs.

Can you imagine the plea deals, “OK, I plead guilty to manslaughter and give you a kidney and half a spleen for three years plus ten probation…”

“Cruel and Unusual” anybody? Maybe trafficking in organs? Perhaps somebody simply saw Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” too often…

I suspect this will be quickly struck down as unconstitutional (if it ever gets to the point of being contested) - if not, we have a zany Supreme Court.

As Communism showed dramatically, whenever government services (or means of production) constitute a monopoly, several things happen:

1) The quality of the end-product/service deteriorates

2) Motivations tend toward maintaining the status-quo than toward innovation (CYA is more important than R&D)

3) Practitioners/workers view their roles as being entitlements rather than earned

4) The impediments to spending “other people’s money” are few.

5) Protectionist technocrats (e.g. department heads, bureau  chiefs, etc.)  develop policies (e.g. red-tape) to obscure their actions, discourage critical analysis, obliterate competition and expand their domain.

As various political science studies have determined, and as is likely clear by paying attention to the way citizens talk and behave, people tend to view government pockets as arbitrarily deep.  Thus “waste” and “deficit” are perceived more as idealogical issues than as practically important.  In most cases, a vocal minority of people will fight for the practical and tangible benefits they receive from government, while those of us who pay for such benefits view it as a trivial issue (the still kicking  bridge to nowhere, anybody?).

To rely on a solution of “competent managers” is to rely on virtuous and selfless human nature.  People who exhibit such characteristics, who behave with prudence, ethics, restraint, wisdom and selfless stewardship are rare.  I suggest they are in fact so rare, that it is unrealistic to suppose a such a virtuous horde of selfless technocrats (not to mention elected officials) will ever be found.

Competition, which lies at the heart of capitalism, is a fantastic means for motivating innovative, efficient, results-oriented processes and services.  Government, being often a monopoly, falls prey to the lethargy, lack of focus and poor results which are endemic to such entities.

True progress toward diminishing government waste will require stiff penalties, accountability, outsourcing competition to multiple providers, and perhaps inter-agency competition for project/program governance.

A classmate of mine asked an interesting question recently, and it inspired my response which follows. At root, this notion is a framework for combating the tendency of scale-free networks to coalesce into very “clumpy” distributions. Such networks, as exemplified by a completely open free-market have been shown to lead to Pareto-like distributions of wealth. Scale-free networks also characterize the growth of urban population centers.

Alternatively, this article may be viewed as proposing a way to facilitate prosperity while strongly discouraging excessive and profligate waste and over-use of natural resources.

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This is a test post from MS-Word 2007. It includes a picture from my Minnesota 2006 vacation.

The idea of the Earth’s Carrying Capacity necessarily involving more than just the amount of food we can produce can lead to some pretty depressing thoughts. I shall ramble about them a trifle.I wish people (at least a majority in democratic countries) would gain the sophisticated insight and breadth of consideration to be able to make decisions favoring sustainability. But I also recognize that most people behave in a short-term and selfish manner (and always have - there’s a surprisingly insightful book about the greed of America’s founding “Freedom Just Around the Corner“).

This idea lies at the heart of many of my current notions about government and its appropriate role: I believe a significant majority of people are kind, earnest, generous and hopeful, fully entitled to life, liberty and their pursuit of happiness. I also believe (like Hamilton, for whom I have a profound affection), that human institutions which govern by consistently supporting the free actions of the majority court peril when such majorities are energized by passion, focused only on self-interest, or bereft of wisdom.

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There’s a fun freethinker / humanist blog which collects some nice information about public policy in the U.S. as it relates to rationalism, scientific integrity and humanism.

Although I have some niggling concerns about humanism (almost identical to those expressed here), I find myself agreeing with most humanists most of the time.

In any case… Nanovirus is fun and informative.

The Internet is an impartial tool with which we can support our delusions of reality, or conversely build an objective and valid world-view.  The tendency is toward the former, it takes intention and education to pursue the latter course…

I’ve been reading “The Varieties of Scientific Experience” by the late Carl Sagan. I love Sagan’s publicly available writings, and I agree whole-heartedly with every bit of his thinking I’ve come across regarding skepticism, reason, agnosticism, scientific investigation and his recommendations for social agendas. In fact, I agree so vehemently that I wonder why I should bother reading his book. It is essentially mental masturbation; an opportunity for pounding my fist, clapping my hands and exclaiming “YEAH!!”. From my personal perspective the book is mostly bereft of new material which might persuade or inform me. But I love Carl, and the book contains some interesting anecdotes which were otherwise unknown to me. I find myself feeling guilty about “wasting time” while reading it though, since it does not really move my mind into new territory.

I often attend meetings of the Kendall County Democrats, where I am able to join folks with some similar opinions about politics, policy and candidates. So far, we have never discussed policy, theory, position or strategy. In any case, there has never been any debate which challenges me, or causes me to question my preexisting conclusions. Again, I wonder if the benefit of my attendance is limited due to the homogeneity of the experience.

My favorite websites include those which convey information about current scientific discoveries, pragmatic and rational political theory, scientifically-augmented positions on economic and social policy and environmentally sustainable conservation. I never visit sites with active dialogues about the Christian Rapture, anti-abortion, theories of politics or policy viewed as divinely sanctioned, anti-minority rants, those with unscientifically supportable contentions about global warming or the environment, theories regarding mystical “energy”, homeopathy, pseudoscience, or any of a million other perspective which are anathema to my personal preference for pragmatic, scientific and compassionate philosophies of life. I like learning new things and discovering alternative perspectives, but a vast number of my fundamental views are never likely to change - and I don’t seek to do so.

The Internet is a fantastic tool for finding information. One can find an arbitrarily large amount of argumentation, “data”, pithy quotes, personal claims and opinions and passionately held positions on pretty much anything one wishes to investigate. Certainly a similar statement can be made regarding other media - whether print, television, radio or special-interest clubs; but the Internet brings the largest quantity of information, it brings it for a trivially low price, and it can bring it to you in private.

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The recent ruling by the FDA specifying that warning labels are not required on cloned beef has caused angst among some people who don’t understand the process or results of cloning. 

When a plant or animal cell reproduces, a process called “mitosis“, elaborate bio- and micro-chemical processes occur which (far more often than not) lead to the double-helix of the original DNA splitting into two identical halves.  These halves, as they are being ”unzipped” from the helix, are each copied perfectly by enzymes in the cell body.  The result is two flawless copies of the original DNA double helix molecule - each containing half of the original DNA molecule.  Other intracellular “machinery” then facilitates the splitting of remaining cellular components, including the “energy factory” mitochondrea organelles and eventually the “goop” (cytoplasm) in which cellular structures and molecules swim and the cell boundary itself.  When all components have been duplicated and/or split apart, the result is two identical cells. 

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Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates has a ski-resort.  It also has winter daytime temperatures in the 80’s.
It takes a huge amount of energy to cool an indoor ski resort in the Dubai “winter”.  The resort stays open in the summer, demanding a correspondingly more vast supply of cooling energy.  Dubai is not an oil-rich nation (though they had a spurt of it in the 60’s and 70’s); it is essentially a small kingdom on the shores of the Persian Gulf, with little in the way of natural resources.  Today, oil accounts for only 10% of Dubai’s economy.
This tiny nation, essentially a city-state, has a diverse economy and a very liberal society. The literacy rate is about 80%, women hold high positions in corporate and national governance, and religious social conflict is slight.  Dubai is currently (2007) building the tallest building in the world (at least until the next claimant comes along).
It takes a huge amount of energy to turn a patch of dessert into a modern paradise, replete with gardens, higways, posh residential islands, high-end shopping, luxury hotels, a ski resort and a thriving trading port (artificially dredged).  It also takes a huge amount of highly educated citizens to keep the capitalism, the engineering and the innovation racing into a self-determined bright future.

It also takes a huge amount of cheap and relatively unskilled labor, some of it coming from people stuck in effective slavery or surfdom.  Most of these laborers come from other contries, and exist as indentured servants to those who sent, or brought them.

I propose that Dubai is an almost perfect microcosm from which we can all learn important lessons about what makes a nation-state viable, prosperous and progressive.  Many of these lessons have been touched on previously, but Dubai provides a fantastic context in which to reiterate, delineate and summarize them.  To wit: Continue reading »

I wrote this in response to the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon also mentioned here.  The Carl Sagan Tribute site is wonderful as well.

When I was a young teen in 1980 there were three televisions in the house: One was in the small family room, and was typically shared by my parents. Another was in their bedroom - used primarily by my father to watch Kansas City Chiefs football games on crisp fall weekends. In my own inner sanctum - my bedroom, I had a little 13-inch GE black-and-white set, which I mostly used for watching PBS and Star Trek. It was on my little television that I learned about the coming premiere of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Cosmos so intrigued me that I was motivated to leave the electronics and Lego and book-strewn confines of my own bedroom in search of a color television. I knew I needed to see stars and galaxies, nebulae and molecules in vivid color. I persuaded my parents to let me use their bedroom color television to watch the series, no small task given their dubious view of science-fiction, their abhorrence of evolution and general mystification regarding science. I eventually won the argument with assurances of the series’ educational value and reassurance of “non-sinful” content. Every week, I’d find myself plopped on my parents white king-sized comforter, propped-chin-in-hands, waiting for the next astonishing (my favorite Cosmos word) installment to propel my mind far from my pedestrian Ozarks home. Continue reading »

The next two years will see the Federal government locked in a logjam of procedure and ideology as significant initiatives get hung up on the ego of President Bush. For all his politically expedient talk of brotherly love and non-partisan progress subsequent to the recent congressional Democratic switch, the man in the Oval Office remains a calamitous ego-maniac with a voluminous track-record of stubborn, ill-informed, ill-conceived and ill-executed policies - regardless of any political platitudes he might occasionally mumble to try and placate (or anesthetize) those with a more rational or practical world-view.

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Join a Junto in Oswego, IL

Several friends and I love having discussions regarding philosophy, political science, natural science, sociology and other similarly meaty topics. We emphatically do not all agree, neither do we come from the same starting points nor share identical (or occasionally even similar) views. We do tend to have a common tendency away from unscientific “new-age” views, and abhor polarized unrealistic politics (far right and far left). If you are afflicted with rampant curiosity, prone to philisophical musings and deeply in love with your community, nation and/or the human race we’d like to add the richness of your mind to our community.

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The war of 1812 was a remarkable act of chutzpah for the infant United States. Britain was ceaselessly bullying American global commercial enterprises, markets and shipping. In addition to this economic strife, British mariners had pressed into service many British-born naturalized American citizens. Our nascent nation, being deeply angered by the British bullying, finally declared war in 1812 under the presidency of James Madison.

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One of the low points in the level of appreciation I have for our Congress came February 12, 1999 when the Senate voted on the impeachment of then President Bill Clinton. The most disturbing thing was neither the proceedings nor the ultimate decision; the most disturbing thing was the distribution of votes. I watched the vote live on television, and remember my growing anger as virtually every Republican (except 5) voted “guilty” and every single Democrat voting “not guilty”.

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Introduction

From the first embers of the first fires, to the lasers, rockets and televisions of the modern world, our eyes have been alight with the delights of discovery. Each progress in human culture has been born of accumulating insight and a wiser manipulation of our physical world and interpersonal society. Better machines, better processes, better politics and better economies. Each discovery has led to increasing the specialization and complexity of society, which has in turn introduced the new opportunities, tools, toys and technology which drive cultural progress.

Indispensable to this progress has been the apprehension, comprehension and application of information. Information, interestingly enough has quite a lot to do with entropy, which cannot be discussed without considering energy – and both of these concepts are indispensable to understanding economics, as was discussed previously.

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Last night I dragged out the old 7.8″ Konus telescope while it was still daylight. I had just received my laser collumnator (or collimator) from the Santa-like UPS man, who shows up at my door now and then with fun new books and toys.

After figuring out how to turn on the gizmo (the collumnator, not the telescope), I proceeded to nearly burn my eye out with the attendant laser-beam. Seems the mirrors in the telescope do indeed reflect light - even laser light! I lept away from the ramshackle raygun and regrouped…

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Introduction

Economists say that economic transactions are not “zero-sum”. Zero sum transactions have a winner and a loser such that the benefits of the winner are exactly offset by the detriments to the loser. Many folks don’t understand economics well enough to know that economic development and transactions are not zero sum; in fact, too many mistakenly believe that for every winner and advancement, others must loose. A nice treatment of this topic by Warren Meyer on his Coyote Blog. My intention is to discover exactly why economic growth can be positive or net-sum. This line of thinking may not be new, but it was so fun to think through that I wanted to share it:

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