I walked back to the convention center with the sixteen year old. The rest of the posse went a different direction. He seemed keen to persuade me of the absurdity of attributing consciousness to the purely physical properties of the brain. The most interesting part of this conversation was his complete confidence that animals, not even chimpanzees, are not conscious. “That's what it means to say we are created in God's image,” he informed me.
Doctors don’t study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no ‘professors of evolution’ in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools. No Nobel prize in medicine has ever been awarded for work in evolutionary biology. [Therefore, evolutionary] biology isn’t important to modern medicine. (Quotes are excerpted.)
Just a quick medical anecdote to develop this point further- I train fellows in neuromuscular disease, a subspecialty of neurology. They are already fully trained neurologists and are now spending a year focusing on this one area. About half way through the year fellows often realize that, prior to their fellowship, they thought they understood neuromuscular disease, but now that they studied it in more detail they realize how much they didn’t know. That’s when I tell them that they have to extrapolate this experience to the rest of their medical knowledge (and beyond). There is just as much that they don’t know in all the other subspecialties that they are not doing fellowships in. It’s a humbling experience. Detailed knowledge in one area should make us appreciate the potential depth of knowledge (and therefore our own ignorance) in other areas. Dr. Egnor, apparently, never learned this lesson.
The other point I want to discuss is illustrative of what I am saying above. The primary scientific point of discussion is that of information theory. ID’ers like to claim that information theory disproves evolution, and they further claim that evolutionists cannot answer fundamental questions about the increase of genetic information over evolutionary time and so they avoid the topic. What rot! Again – answers are all over the internet.
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But there is enough complexity in all of this that if someone smart and eloquent – like ID’ers Behe or Demski – want to create confusion they easily can. They pull an intellectual three card monte and the evolutionary rubes buy it.
Now I don’t blame the rank and file for not having read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on evolution. But I do blame them for thinking they deserve to have an opinion if they haven’t – an opinion not borrowed from the scientific consensus, which would be reasonable, but one which assumes that the scientific consensus is not only wrong but stupid. The reason for such outrageous hubris is ideology.
Dr. Egnor has given us yet another example of how when ideology trumps science and reason the result is not pretty. Combine that with a touch of arrogance and you create an embarrassment. But so far Dr. Egnor seems not to grasp the folly of his situation. He has said that if someone proves him wrong (talking about his claim that there is no evidence that evolution can increase the amount of genetic information over time) he will acquiesce. Well, he has been proven wrong. We’re waiting.
Arguing is one of those activities most people do but few people do well. Many do not understand what a logical argument even is or how to do it correctly. Yet arguing is an essential skill of critical thinking. How we argue reflects how we think, how we evaluate our own conclusions, and how we challenge the beliefs of others.
The ID folks put on one of their dog and pony shows in Knoxville, TN this weekend. My curiosity piqued, I decided to check it out.
At this point Strobel and Meyer left the stage. The room grew dark, and a video came on the large screen to my left. It was an excerpt from the The Privileged Planet, based on the book of the same title. The book was written by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and theologian Jay Richards, and represented yet another gloss on the fine-tuning argument.
Stephen Meyer was next up. Strobel and Richards played their parts well, but, let's face it, the conference thus far had mostly been amateur hour. Strobel stepped in it every time he mentioned something vaguely scientific, but he's not exactly thrust forward as one of the major intellects of the ID movement. Richards presented his goofy argument with sufficient eloquence, but there was too little of substance in his presentation to make him worth too much emotional energy.
So I'm standing on line at Subway, contemplating the very long wait between me and my turkey on wheat, when I happen to overhear part of the conversation going on among the people immediately in front of me. There were four people, an older woman and three teenagers. At this point I thought the woman was the mother of the three teens, but later I would learn they were not related.
"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party's conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.
In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."
"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."
I have to marvel at that. Suddenly, the ranks of the un-Christians have swollen immeasurably; a lot of the people I honestly like who go to church but aren't jerks about their religion, i.e., they don't proselytize, have been excommunicated by Pope Dobson, and are on my side in the War Against Religion. I have suddenly learned that none of the members of my family are Christians anymore — they may be a bit shocked to hear that, since they still go to church...
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Any of you readers who are not true Christians in the eyes of Dobson might as well give it up now and join me in total godlessness. When the Republic of Gilead is established and the Dobsonites run the country, you're going to be up against the wall with the rest of us heretics, anyway.
A Frankensteinesque contraption of glass bulbs and crackling electrodes has produced yet another revelation about the origin of life. The results suggest that Earth's early atmosphere could have produced chemicals necessary for life—contradicting the view that life's building blocks had to come from comets and meteors.
Bada discovered that the reactions were producing chemicals called nitrites, which destroy amino acids as quickly as they form. They were also turning the water acidic—which prevents amino acids from forming. Yet primitive Earth would have contained iron and carbonate minerals that neutralized nitrites and acids. So Bada added chemicals to the experiment to duplicate these functions. When he reran it, he still got the same watery liquid as Miller did in 1983, but this time it was chock-full of amino acids.
I checked with General Petraeus' people overnight and they said he never goes out in anything less than an up armored Humvee. You also told Bill Bennett on his radio program on Monday..you said there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhood today, yet retired General Barry McCaffrey said no Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat reporter could walk the streets of Baghdad without heavily armed protection.
Bush administration officials throughout the government have engaged in White House-directed efforts to stifle, delay or dampen the release of climate change research that casts the White House or its policies in a bad light, says a new report that purports to be the most comprehensive assessment to date of the subject.
Researchers for the non-profit watchdog Government Accountability Project reviewed thousands of e-mails, memos and other documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and from government whistle-blowers and conducted dozens of interviews with public affairs staff, scientists, reporters and others.
The group says it has identified hundreds of instances where White House-appointed officials interfered with government scientists' efforts to convey their research findings to the public, at the behest of top administration officials.
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"The evidence suggests that incidents of interference are often top-down reactions to science that has negative policy or public relations implications for the administration," the group says in its report.
Some of the alleged interference -- including restricting scientists' ability to talk with the press and Congress -- may have violated federal laws protecting their right to speak, the group concludes.
"Directives and signals" from White House offices, like the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget, are handed down to political appointees and politically-aligned civil servants through off-the-record conversations, the report says. Frequently, those giving the direction have little or no scientific background, according to the report.
The alleged interference took the form of "delaying, monitoring, screening, and denying interviews" between government scientists and media outlets, as well as delaying, denying or "inappropriate[ly] editing" press releases conveying scientific findings to the public.
Political appointees also suppressed, delayed and inappropriately edited reports produced by government scientists for Congress and the public, the Washington, D.C.-based group concluded.
In some cases, the policies and practices the group says were enacted to squelch damaging scientific information "constitute constitutional and statutory infringements of the federal climate science employees' free speech and whistle-blower rights," the report finds.
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Tarek Maassarani, the report's author, cautioned that he did not see evidence of a single coordinated White House effort to block credible climate research. Instead, he believed officials acted only when a piece of research or particular issue showed up on their political radar. "They're reacting to situations most of the time," Maassarani told ABC News.
When Andrew informed Ramode that he is gay, and believed that the DADT policy was wrong, the two engaged in a three-day email exchange that included statements by Ramode, in her official capacity as a recruiter, that boggle the mind. (Jersey Journal):"GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE."– U.S. Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode, using her military email address to respond to
Jersey City resident Corey Andrew, after Ramode learned Andrew was gay.
I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we
should not condone immoral acts.
This week marks the four-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. Here's what we're celebrating: Four years of bloody occupation. Four years of military incompetence. Four years of barbaric savagery. Four years of torture. Four years of U.S. crimes against humanity. Four years of Orwellian insanity.
Twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War) Vietnamese officials informed former Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara that they would have fought us until the end of time if necessary, as we were invaders to their beloved homeland.
Ask yourself this:
If you were a young patriotic Iraqi, wouldn't you be part of the so-called insurgency? Wouldn't you fight an occupying army in your own country? If so, for how long? Until you saw the light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps?
Today there is very little light at the end of the Iraq tunnel. Maybe that limited light should be used to read this riveting work of non-fiction.
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Bill Mahr, on Real Time, is the latest to come to notice these Purity Balls...man, that name.I, [daughter's name]'s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.
The event shares all the hallmarks of a wedding: Vows are exchanged, a white cake is served and there is even a first dance. But at the beginning of the event instead of fathers giving away their daughters' hand, they're holding on tight.
The event's purpose is to celebrate father-daughter bonding, but the main focus of the evening is for the fathers and daughters to exchange pledges in an elaborate ceremony. Fathers vow to protect the girls' chastity until they marry, and the daughters promise to remain abstinent.
"[In] today's day and age, if the daughters are sexually active before they're married that ceremony really is meaningless because the father's not giving anyone away," says Angela's father, Bret Merkle.
"I'm going to stay pure until I'm married and I'm not going to date or kiss a boy," says 12-year-old Sarah Merkle.
"I saw so many young girls get hurt by the whole dating process," her father explains. "People are just chasing after instinct, chasing after their pleasures and desires and that's going to sting in the end."
Young women and some young men sign virginity pledges at churches, rallies or programs sponsored by groups such as True Love Waits, and the movement is growing. This is partly fueled by government support. The current Bush administration's annual funding for abstinence initiatives has more than doubled to around $200 million.
But critics say if these girls are only learning abstinence, they're not being taught important information about STDs and condoms.
"I could see it winding up in more teenage pregnancies and that type of thing because they don't know everything that they need to know," comments Deanne Keegan, a South Dakota mother who counsels youth at her local church.
The study examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents and found teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who don't pledge abstinence.
But some fathers discount the studies, and think their relationship with their daughters will help them stay strong.
"We don't want them to be weird or to stand out in a bad way, but we believe with the right beliefs and attitudes … they can be different," Brett Merkle said. "There's lots of temptations in life and we're trying to teach our girls to be strong against those temptations and meet them with the appropriate behavior."
May you peeve the right people off for another 66 years.
American conservatives think laws that require STD vaccinations would endorse premarital sex. Why are cowardly lawmakers starting to agree?
Ever wonder how abstinence-only “education”, which is only “education” if you thinking lying to someone and refusing to educate them about the facts is “education”, got any traction with voters at all?
Here’s a hint: It’s probably because people think the only other alternative is having the radical sexual mafia telling kids to go out and fuck immediately. Where do they get this impression? From the so-called liberal media. Check out this headline from the Cincinnati Enquirer, in a story that’s about Ted Strickland’s entirely reasonable rollback of education that doesn’t educate.
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Why they didn’t just title this piece “Democratic Governor Wants Some Grubby Kid To Penetrate Your Daughter”, I don’t know.
That was the question I was asked: how would you prove to a blind man, that photography exists?
I knew what he was getting at. We had been discussing psychics. He was a firm believer in psychic powers, had had psychic experiences, and regularly visited a psychic. His point was, since I had not experienced psychic powers, I would never be able to believe in what he “knew” to be true. You could never prove to a blind man that photography exists, and likewise no one would ever be able to demonstrate to me that psychic powers were real.
Wouldn’t the blind man say to all this, “why can’t you just tell me how many fingers I’m holding up?”
Mitt Romney will be delivering a commencement address at Pat's Regent University.
Rudy Giuliani will stop by Regent to pay homage to Pat. He will be the featured speaker at the University's Executive Leadership Series on April 17.
John McCain sucks up to Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network on The Straight Talk Express bus, bleating about his need to garner the evangelical vote, and his courting of the fringe right. ("I have had meetings with [Southern Baptist Convention President] Dr. Richard Land. I have met with Reverend Jerry Falwell. I have had good conversations with [Evangelical leader] Reverend [John] Hagee. There are many others.")
Sam Brownback turned to CBN to accuse Mitt Romney not a genuine social conservative.
Speaking of cranks, all of the recent fuss over Al Gore's testimony to Congress on the subject of global warming has seen the revival of statistician Bjorn Lomborg. You might remember him as the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, the book that was going to set us all straight on the subject of environmentalism. According to Lomborg, everything is much better than we've been led to believe.
I only made it through about half of Lomborg's book before conking out. I was not really in a position to assess a lot of his claims. There were some crank warning signs, like the conversion story about how he used to be an environmentlaist until he took a sober look at the evidence, and the sweeping commentaries contradicting the conventional wisdom in scientific disciplines different from his own. But these were inconclusive.
I read many of the hostile reviews of the book. Some of them were incisive and compelling, but others were far longer on invective than they were on substance. So I left it as an open question whether or not Lomborg was a crank.
As he did in the New York Sun last month, Lomborg played a savage game of scientific apples-and-oranges, accusing Gore of “wild exaggeration” in the process. The UN said sea levels might rise one foot--but Gore said twenty feet, Lomborg railed!
Of course, as we've noted, Gore was talking about what will happen if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets break away. By contrast, the UN report was predicting future sea levels if the ice sheets don't break off. (For the record, the UN report said that sea levels may rise by as much as 23 inches if the ice sheets remain intact.) Lomborg's presentation is baldly deceptive--a bald-faced scam on the American public. And no, it really doesn't make sense to think Lomborg doesn't know this.
So there was Lomborg, committing a crime against your nation's voters. But our sense of disturbance really took shape in the moments after his latest deception. Although the groaning problem with Lomborg's claim has been discussed at an array of web sites, Alan Colmes made no attempt to contradict his grossly misleading statement. Ditto Jon Coifman (the Natural Resources Defense Council), who was there to provide fairness-and-balance. (We'll post their “responses” tomorrow.)
Indeed, Lomborg's bald deception now rules discussion of this topic. In early February, he presented his utterly bogus claim in the pages of the New York Sun, where it would have done minimal damage. But last week, the New York Times' William Broad made a fateful decision; he wanted this nonsense in his paper too. So Broad used Lomborg's apples-for-oranges in his “Science Times” report about Gore. By yesterday, the Dane's poisoned fruit was being cited all over your struggling nation.
[This] Saturday, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Mike Gravel, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Sen. Barack Obama, and Gov. Bill Richardson will be joining us for a special, live forum on health care. Please join us in this historic conversation.
Captioned: "It's not the insults that these vermin pass off as flirtation. That's not what set her off. ... It's a man. That's what set her off. A single, solitary man. A man that's got her thinking all different. A man she's never even met."
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Liam: "What's gone and gotten into your head, sweetheart?"
Canary: "... Batman."
A bill approved in the South Carolina House this week would force women to see a fetal ultrasound before they have abortions.After three hours of passionate debate, the House voted 91-23 to require women to sign a statement swearing they had seen an ultrasound image of their fetus before getting an abortion.
A half-dozen other states offer ultrasound images to abortion patients, legislative staffers said. But those states do not require abortion patients view them.
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And if you had any doubt that this law was about punishing women, and somehow making them “face” their transgression, check this out:Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, railed against Republicans for opposing his amendment to exempt victims of rape and incest from the required ultrasound viewing.
This logic goes to show that this isn’t about making sure women are informed—it’s about punishing them. So women who were raped shouldn’t have to have their noses rubbed in their pregnancies and be punished any further--that’s just for the “bad” women who wanted to have sex. Ugh.
Missouri Republican Governor Matt Blunt recently announced he's slashing funding for Planned Parenthood clinics that provide free cervical cancer and other health screenings to poor women in the state."Patients should not have to go to an abortion clinic to access lifesaving tests," Blunt said in a written statement.
Except for the fact that the affected clinics don't even provide abortions. They do, however, provide cervical and breast cancer screenings -- about 1,500 a year -- paid for under the Show Me Healthy Women program. This just drives home the point that, even though anti-choicers love to characterize Planned Parenthood as an abortion provider only, their clinics primarily provide other types of reproductive and women's health care."Gov. Blunt's sudden decision to cut a 15-year partnership to prevent cancer in southwest Missouri is a shocking, misguided act driven by political ideology rather than sound health care delivery," [Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kellie] Rohrbaugh said in a written statement.
Blunt's timing is awful. Missouri is one of several states considering a bill to make the HPV vaccine (which prevents some types of cervical cancer) a school-entry requirement. If the bill manages to make it through the legislature and lands on Blunt's desk, he's going to face a lot of pressure from his conservative base to veto it.
Here's an idea for Blunt and other conservative governors: If they want to defuse some of the tension over the HPV vaccine, they should seriously step up the public funding for cervical cancer screenings and regular reproductive health care for low-income women. Not that screenings are a substitute for vaccination, but it would go a long way toward showing they aren't totally deaf to women's health concerns.
A German judge has stirred a storm of protest here by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman’s request for a fast-track divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.
...the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, said that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which she said it was common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse.
News of the ruling brought swift and sharp condemnation from politicians, legal experts, and Muslim leaders in Germany, many of whom said they were confounded that a German judge would put 7th-century Islamic religious teaching ahead of modern German law in deciding a case involving domestic violence.
The woman’s lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk, said she decided to publicize the ruling, which was issued in January, after the court refused her request for a new judge. On Wednesday, the court in Frankfurt abruptly removed Judge Datz-Winter from the case, saying it could not justify her reasoning.
“It was terrible for my client,” Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said of the ruling. “This man beat her seriously from the beginning of their marriage. After they separated, he called her and threatened to kill her.”
The 26-year-old woman in this case, whose name has not been disclosed, was not so fortunate. Born in Germany to a Moroccan family, the woman was married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in Germany and had two children.
In May 2006, the police were summoned to the couple’s home after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 50 meters (164 feet) away from the home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.
Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October, and requested that it be granted without waiting for the usual year of separation, since her husband’s threats and beatings constituted an “unreasonable hardship,” the requirement for waiving the delay.
“We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife,” Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.
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In January, the judge turned down the wife’s request for a speedy divorce, saying that the husband’s behavior was not an unreasonable hardship because they were both Moroccan. “In this cultural background,” she wrote, “it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife.”
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In a statement defending her ruling, Judge Datz-Winter noted that she had ordered the man to move out and had imposed a restraining order on him. But she also cited the verse in the Koran that speaks of a husband’s prerogatives in disciplining his wife. And she suggested that the wife’s Western lifestyle would give her husband grounds to claim that his honor had been compromised.
The woman, her lawyer said, does not wear a headscarf. She has been a German citizen for eight years.
Judge Datz-Winter declined to comment for this article. But a spokesman for the court, Bernhard Olp, said the judge did not intend to suggest that violence in a marriage is acceptable or that the Koran supersedes German law. “The ruling is not justifiable, but the judge herself cannot explain it at this moment,” he said.
Judge Datz-Winter narrowly avoided being killed 10 years ago in a case involving a man and woman whose relationship had come apart. The man emptied a gun in her courtroom — killing his former partner and wounding her lawyer. The judge survived by diving under her desk.
German newspapers have speculated that the ordeal may have affected her judgment in this case, a suggestion that the court spokesman denied.
A new judge will be assigned to the case, but Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said her client would probably nonetheless have to wait until May for her divorce, since the paperwork for a fast-track divorce would take several months in any event.
For some, the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses. There have been a string of so-called honor killings here, in which Turkish Muslim men have murdered women.
“For Muslim men, this is like putting oil on water, that a German judge thinks it is O.K. for them to hit their wives,” said Michaela Sulaika Kaiser, the head of a group that counsels Muslim women.
The nonstop barrage of attacks on Al Gore from the far-right tells me one thing: they're terrified of the former Vice President and the influence he continues to wield. Last night on Scarborough Country, Republican strategist Terry Holt advanced for the umpteenth time the right's favorite Al Gore smear — that he claimed to have invented the interent. This juvenile nonsense has been debunked time and time again, but since these hacks continue to employ it, here we go again.
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It all started when the wingnuts seized on this statement Al Gore made to Wolf Blitzer in 1999. Since the right is so devoid of substance and couldn't challenge Gore on a policy basis, they took this phrase and attacked Al Gore (with the help of the media who dutifully recited the attack) as a pompous liar and serial exaggerator; something that continues to this day.
Why don't we ask Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, two men who could really claim to have "invented the internet," what they think about Al Gore:[T]here is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.
While his phrasing was clumsy and somewhat self-serving, the fact is, as Senator, Al Gore did take the legislative initiative and help pave the way for the internet as we know it today. Instead of acknowledging this, the wingnuts twist his words and attack his character. By now you think they would have grown up a little bit. Unfortunately, they never cease to amaze.
The Breast Cancer Prevention Institute. Sounds innocuous enough, I know. But these assholes are just using breast cancer and health rhetoric to push their anti-choice agenda.
In a 2-1 decision, the Court of Criminal Appeal erased the criminal record of a man who twice had sex with a woman in his car.
A jury had found him guilty of having forced intercourse but ruled an earlier act of fellatio was consensual.
The appeals court, however, ruled last week that the verdict was "illogical" and "unacceptable" and quashed his conviction.
WOW! That's disturbing.Opposition legal affairs spokeswoman Isobel Redmond warned the new laws may interfere in people's private lives.
"When reading the legislation, one gets the feeling even married couples will need to sign a contract before they have sex," she said.
"You reach a point where you're trying to legislate for every human behaviour.
They MAY charge him! Huh? Maybe I should have added the Florida police above. But I may just be misreading that.A woman was walking down the street, and chose to ignore the catcalls some asshole was yelling at her as he drove past. Apparently he thought he was so entitled to her attention that he turned the truck around and ran her over. In other words, "that's what you get for ignoring me, bitch." Hard to hollaback from underneath your harasser/assaulter's vehicle.
The woman was taken to the hospital and is in serious condition. The driver of the truck is still at large. If he's ever found, police say they may charge him with attempted murder.
We have no intention of cowering in a corner.
Early in the morning on Thursday, before dawn, some 200 Sunni Arab guerrillas in Muqdadiya (Diyala Province) stormed a jail and freed 33 prisoners, many of them guerrillas. I can't think of another recent operation that involved a company-sized fighting force. Thirty persons died in the fighting. One wire service reported, "Insurgents battled Iraqi and US reinforcements, set fire to the police station, courthouse and 20 police vehicles before making their escape." If they accomplished all that after US reinforcements arrived, imagine what they could have accomplished if no US and Iraqi troops had come out to confront them.
Yesterday, GOP Senator Kit Bond attacked Al Gore for being concerned about global warming. Bond's argument was that Al Gore doesn't care about little young match girls who are going to freeze to death because their poor parents can't afford to heat heir homes in the winter because of people like Al Gore (i.e., if we have to trouble ourselves with global warming, it might make energy costs go up).
Putting aside the question of whether it's worse for this girl to put on two sweaters or swim to school every day, it's people like Senator Bond who are stopping little girls from having heat in the winter. Bond has repeatedly voted against the LIHEAP program, a program that helps pay the winter heating bills (and summer cooling bills) or low-income and elderly families. And it wasn't the only time that Senator Bond voted to freeze little girls to death because he's too cheap.
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.
Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.
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"We're freezing the time for a minute. I want to talk to you [Inhofe] for a minute, please.
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...you don't make the rules anymore...You used to when you did this. [Holds up chairperson's gavel.] You don't do this anymore. Elections have consequences."
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In many ways having a character go amoral – have sex is an easy way to go (Read LAZY – on my mental list of the ways comic writers choose to go the lazy route on potentially interesting ideas).
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[In] Superman III, he does go amoral. He hits on women. But the way to show he is “bad” is that he becomes gunky and grimy. Look at the video on the alter ego link for a look at him at the end. He is unkempt in a way that is almost comical. In comics they do the shaded eyes and grim look and hulking presence, with menacing stance (and, perhaps, the cape is frayed...from combat). That says BAD.
For Supergirl, she needs to show MORE FLESH. Get a bit lesbian. Is that bad?
This is the big problem. The guys can be shown as getting kinky. But also, getting loose. Getting mean. Getting harsh.
With the femmes, not so much.
I remember working with a character and trying to work out a story of an alternate world, with the evil version of the female heroine (I spend so much time imagining, I never actually write.). The way I saw her, she was in darker outfit, a common symbolism. But it wasn’t revealing, or provocative, didn’t make sense. It was more militant and utilitarian. As to her style of acting, she was tougher, more than willing to use force, knock down building, kill, and put her perceived better goals above societies.
She was evil. And it really never occurred to me that she should be preoccupied with sex or boys. Maybe it was because the character was so close to me, that I had invested in it, that I was interested in taking the character in a way that wasn’t a walking…sashaying…slinkering cliché. And that, I think, is a problem for many writers and editors today. They really have a so-so connection to their characters.
It is just lazy.
Superman has gone bad a number of times over the years. Not that long ago he tried to take over the world with the superman bots. I wasn't really reading that closely at the time, but that sounds intimidating, Supes alone is a scary thought. ANY Kryptonian should be!
When he goes bad it is usually dark figure with cataclysmic results.
When you look at Supergirl, she usually sheds so clothes (though the new costume makes that all, but impossible), strikes poses, and can be scary. Why not just let her be a small, silent, deadly and scary ass evil, and just skip kinky ONCE?
Evil Maxwell Lord is scarier than evil Supergirl. That is so wrong. ;)
And it is not, as if this is a genre flaw. IT IS THE WRITERS and EDITOR MANDATES!
Over at Am I a woman scientist? I ran across this post discussing crying in the workplace. I'd never given much consideration to the issue previously, but there are several thought-provoking posts and articles on the topic.
First, let me take a step back to a post Am I a woman scientist? linked to, here at A Natural Scientist musing about crying as a sign of weakness in women. From there, a link goes back to this Chronicle story describing the aftermath of a miscarriage, and the author's inability to discuss it with anyone at work for fear of breaking down and crying.
Some interesting themes emerged from these posts.
10. Refusing to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when his incompetence and maliciousness became apparent in the growing guerrilla war and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
9. Declining to intervene in the collapsed economy or help put Iraqi state industries back on a good footing, on the grounds that the "market" would magically produce prosperity effortlessly.
8. Invading and destroying the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah in November, 2004, thus pushing the Sunni Arabs into the arms of the insurgency in protest and ensuring that they would boycott the January, 2005, parliamentary elections, a boycott that excluded them from power and from a significant voice in crafting the new constitution, which they then rejected.
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Well, we’ve done just about every variation on the theme by now, so let’s go back to the basics: Black on black, a full cover shot of Batman’s ass. Add in the utility belt for colour – give it that Sin City look. Show me thick, powerful legs under that latex or whatever the hell he wears. Clenched butt muscles. Make it obvious this is no BatGIRL we’re talking about.
