CNN.com - Bush backs Dubai port deal, vows veto - Feb 21, 2006

Wow. It’s mind boggling the extent to which the Bush administration’s arrogance and self-righteousness goes.

In short, the British company that used to manage some of the administrative operations of some American ports has been bought out by a company in the United Arab Emirates. Congress want to put a hold on the transfer of ownership until it can be more heavily scrutinized, and Bush is saying it’s all been looked at, everything is fine.

Here’s the thing: It’s not so much that a couple of the 9/11 terrorists came from the UAE. Terrorists can have any nationality. The problem is that the UAE was one of three countries that recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, and has in the past been supportive of terrorist activities, as a government. That’s a problem. And it’s ironic that a year after the Bush administration admonishes the American port security, they turn ownership of ports over to a company in a country that is argueably more supportive of terrorism and absolutely more supportive of alQueda than Iraq ever has been.

The Bush admin’ is saying “Oh it’s OK, everything’s been checked out. Security is not an issue.” On who’s word? And here is the biggest problem of the Bush administration–they want whatever they say to go, right or wrong. They have absolutely no respect for the “people’s branch” of government, even to the point where a lot of Republican congresspersons are saying “Now hold on a second. We need to check things out ourselves. You can’t go willynilly making deals like this without our backing.”

The Bush/Cheney arrogance and self-righteousness and belief they are above the law and do not have to be answerable to neither citizen nor the press (which is supposed to server as the eyes and ears of the people,) is out of control. From something as debatably small as Cheney’s avoidance of the press in explaining what happened with the hunting accident to the much bigger issues of secret meetings with oil companies right before rolling out energy agendas which favor the oil companies. From methods of gaining and assesing the value of intelligence that took us to war with Iraq to rebuffing scrutiny of security leaks. Time and time again this administration has shown utter contempt for the American people that THEY are employees of! They work for us and they act like we’re they’re royal subjects, and they’re not answerable for what they do to our country.

Maybe the port sale is on the level. Maybe it in no way unduely benefits the Bush/Cheney families who are practically married to Arabian royal families. Maybe there is no security risk, and everything is fine. But congress needs to investigate it for themselves. Bush is not king or emperor no matter what he thinks. Things like this need to be investigated by representitives of the American people. Is that too much to ask of this president?

CNN.com - Bikers roll to military funerals to oppose anti-gay protests - Feb 21, 2006

Oh my God. I read this just out of curiosity and was quite surprised to read something like:

They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals.

Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs — explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.

Phelps is a disgusting, hate-mongering, vile, waste of human life who has made it his sole purpose in life to spread hate far and wide. I’d followed his hate-mongering some years ago when he was in the news for his anti-gay/AIDS appreciation comments, and the anger he filled in me at him and his “cause” at that time… gah! He’s won again. His hate-spreading has yet again spawned more hate AT him and has peretuated the cycle.

What kind of misguided, horrible monster of a human being whackjob targets funerals of brave soldiers doing their brave job and their grieving family because of some anti-gay agenda? That’s sick. That man and his followers have some serious mental issues.

Yeah, I think the war is wrong and immoral. We’re there because of the Bush administration’s lies and greed and self-righteous arrogance, but I have the utmost respect for the soldiers over there putting their lives on the line because of honor and duty and loyalty. And to target them and their family in their time of grief over some absurd belief of gay harboring nation… celebrating their deaths and thanking the IED’s… God I’m dizzy from the hate for this man he inspires in me.

Good for the Patriot Guard! Good for them, and I hope they really make a difference in counteracting the efforts of Phelps and his legion of sick fucks.

Bad Astronomy Blog � Blog Archive � AAAS Report #5: Science Under Attack

Ah Phil Plait! Quickly becoming the new (if more sarcastic) Carl Sagan. I hate that he’s in St. Louis this last weekend for that conference and I didn’t get a chance to go meet him.

Oh well. In this blog entry of his, he discusses the incongruity of how people rely on science, believe our lives are better for it, but still not “believe” some of the fundamental aspects of science that is as hard proven as the effectiveness of antibiotics they use. He discusses the hypocricy of the administration in their supposed support for science, then undercutting it by removing funding (and I should add, blind refusal to endorse stem cell research and promotion of pseudo-science such as Intelligent Design.)

He ends with the closing of a speech he gave where he challenges the scientific community to communicate not just the facts, but the joy they feel in what they do, teachers to teach the awe and wonder of science and not just the numbers, and the media to stop trying to be so absurd in their attempt to be “balanced” by giving both side equal time when there is no valid other side!

CNN.com - Scientists enlist clergy in evolution battle - Feb 20, 2006

I liked this quote in the article

“The intelligent design movement belittles God. It makes God a designer, an engineer,” said Vatican Observatory Director George Coyne, an astrophysicist who is also ordained. “The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me.”

Came across this passage today, and I thought I’d pass it on.
Carl Sagan from the program “Who Speaks for Earth”:

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of this small planet Earth. But up there in the cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent, fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. There are not yet obvious signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably headlong into self-destruction. I dream about it. And sometimes they’re bad dreams.

Carl Sagan is my rabbi.

Phil Plait of BadAstronomy.com has been keeping track of a story regarding NASA and Bush appointees within the organization that have been supressing information on global warming and attempting to insert religious slant into educational materials.

As if that’s not bad enough, one of the Bush appointees was a member of the Bush election campaign, recently resigned over the fact it was revealed that he didn’t actually graduate from Texas A&M as he claimed in his resume. (Seems to be a lot of resume lying in the Bush administration.)

Was reminded yesterday of how when Joe Alba took over as head of FEMA, he gutted most of the employees and replaced them with former workers and interns from the Bush election campaign. That is before he then quit to leave Brown in charge (who lied on his resume) to become a lobbyist, directing federal contracts to various private companies that are connected to Bush and Cheney.

The insane illegality and corruption and cronieism in the administration aside, I really wanted to focus on the REALLY bad astronomy that the White House is trying to put out, ironic to the impress they’ve been trying to make as being a progressive and space interested administration. Yeah.

First read Phil’s blog entry from a couple of days ago giving some background to this NASA issue:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/02/04/outrage-at-attacks-on-nasa-science/

Then check out the latest followup on some of the activity going on inside NASA:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/02/10/people-at-nasa-must-be-breathing-a-sigh-of-relief/

It makes me literally sad and depressed at how much the Bush administration is trying to turn this country into a Dark Ages empire controlled by rich, hypocritically religious power mad liars and crooks who think we are all subjects of their regime as opposed to the fact that THEY work for US! We are their employers. But they don’t get that.

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….

US Declaration of Indepenence

(By the way, did you notice that it said the government’s power is derived from the people, NOT from God?)

CNN.com - White House defends handling of Cheney shooting - Feb 13, 2006

God, I’m not looking forward to listening to “Air America” on my XM after work tonight. I’m sure it’s going to be filled with all kinds of joking and liberal gun-hate and Cheney hate comments about this.

Oh God knows I hate Cheney! But no one should be joking about a hunting accident. (Not that anyone is! I don’t know yet if they are… I’m just expecting it, is all.)

Those left-wing ultraliberals tend to find the smallest things to sling mud about, and the accidental non-partisan things like a shooting accident, to twist into some political vitriol. And I hate when they do that, because it minimizes the authentic criticisms of real problems and crimes within the Bush administration.

Anyway, I hope the guy shot is OK. And this doesn’t change my belief in gun rights and ownership.

I’m still peeved at a new podcast I listened to today, of a couple who are secular humanists (yeah!) who discuss issues of family in a humanist worldview, and they spent half the podcast I listened to riling against concealed carry laws and the NRA and gun rights. really teed me off. =/

Listening to today’s Skepticality Podcast I found out about “Evolution Sunday”. Yesterday being the birthday of Darwin, a lot of mainstream and liberal congregations are, er… did something in recognition of the acceptance of science and religion. (But I would bet my in-law’s Southern Baptist church, if they had any recognition, would have been a huge dogmatic and absurd refutation of evolution.)

I went to our neaby United Methodist Church yesterday, and unfortunately nothing was mentioned, but then, yesterday’s service was devoted to the Upward organization. (Kids basketball and cheerleading organized through churches. My wife’s a cheerleading coach on my daughter’s squad.)

Anyway, one such effort has been the “Clergy Letter Project”.
An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science.
A great open letter that I can really appreciate, which in my opinion reasonably merges scientific and religion thought.
Here’s the letter:

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

The End of the Internet?
A story describing the possibility and even probability of coporate ownership of the Internet, all with heavy activity tracking and charging for various types of usage.

Is this possible? Well, I’m skeptical. I think the backlash would be too much for the corps to handle. People are too used to free Internet (well, mostly free. Aside from your DSL or Cable or AOL or basic ISP charge… although with wi-fi and various Internet cafes and libraries, totally free is possible.) And certainly people would NOT want to pay per e-mail, and hopefully people will despise the idea of having their Internet usage heavily tracked and recorded. Hopefully.

Then there’s the hacker backlash. The entire foundation of the Internet is about free and open access to information. And black-hat hackers will go out en masse to tear down or make as much trouble for the companies as possible. In fact, I’m sure a lot of white-hat hackers will turn sides at such a paradigm shift.

And other countries would have to cooperate, otherwise that’d be one huge hole in the plan. They’d have to track and capture the traffic of connections from the US going out of the country to use Internet infrastructure there. And there’s probably a lot of international legal issues there.

And finally, as we’re seeing right now, a whole new Internet foundation is being built from the ground up and is already in use in a lot of universities, just the the original Internet back in the late 60’s and 70’s.

The Internet will evolve, and likely, hopefully, beyond the reach of corporate control.

Unfortunately, corporate control has a pretty tenacious and pernicious reach. Where money is involved, they’ll try to find a way.

CNN.com - Deadly cartoon riot near U.S. base - Feb 8, 2006

The absurdity of this is surreal. People killed, bases rioted upon, world leaders calling for peace–all sparked by a couple of cartoons depicting a religious prophet.

It would be an appropriate end to the world if it blew up due to religious zealotism over a comic strip. Some poetic justice there.

CNN.com - U.N. staff flee Afghan cartoon riots - Feb 7, 2006
This is insanity. It’s unbelieveable. If someone wrote this in a novel, that thousands of people would riot in the streets, people would die, embassies burned, U.N. evacuations, over a couple of newspaper cartoons, it would be dismissed as rediculous and impossible.

This is the power of religion. It compells parents to refuse life-saving medical treatments for prayer; it instigates murderous Crusades robbing entire cultures of their land, murdering and pillaging along the way; it sends thousands of innocents to be burned and hanged and drowned for being accused of heresy or witchcraft; it causes thousands to riot and burn buildings over a cartoon.

I’m not naive enough to say mass tragedies at the hands of humans are all the result of religion. They’re the result of human fear, greed, hatred, intolarance–but all given license and justification through religious certainty, arrogance, and self-righteousness.

Without religion, would humans find other reasons to kill each other? Sure. But I think the justifications would be a lot harder to come by.

I was listening to a “Point of Inquiry” podcast today, and during a promo to join the Center for Inquiry, a statement was made regarding helping to protect what a Bush official dismisses as “reality-based thinking.”
Being a skeptical person, I had to look this assertion up to see how out of context it may be.
Unfortunately, not very!

The story behind this statement can be found in this NY Times article: “Without a Doubt” by Ron Suskind. In it, he talks about the stark and frightening disconnect Bush and his administration have with reality, and the reality they want to create based on emperialism, faith, and a dogmatic and arrogant belief in their own “rightness.”

Here’s the excerpt in question:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This is frighteningly close to the mindset of the fascist state in “1984″. Horrifically close.
Haven’t read the book, and want a taste? Here’s what George Orwell wrote in 1948, describing the future totalatarian regieme, their party slogan:
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”