It could be my Jewish heritage, but I think that it is better to start a celebration with a reading than with a mere saying. I plan to read the following:
Let us read justice to the men and women whom we thank this evening. In the words of Ayn Rand: "Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. ... Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. ... Throughout centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road was new, the vision unborrowed. ... The creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered, and they paid. But they won." This is the celebration of their victories, and of our own.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
The Prosecutors and the Astrologer
I have not had much time to post, but this is so outlandish that I'll just do with less sleep later.
The Associated Press reports,
And this is the payback of Kantian philosophy: reality is not knowable; the best that Justice can do is trial by combat, and in combat nothing counts except the result. Other countries, such as Switzerland, do have justice systems based on the Enlightenment notion of objective fact. We Americans have trial by combat, as was done in the Dark Ages, guided by supernatural forces, only hacking at each other with lawyers instead of halberds. And when the stars or the Gods have spoken, innocent men who have had the better part of their lives taken from them may have no recourse at all.
The Associated Press reports,
The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed worried that allowing people to sue prosecutors who fabricate evidence to win convictions might chill other prosecutions... The case in front of the high court involves two former Pottawattamie County, Iowa, prosecutors, Attorney Dave Richter and his assistant Joseph Hrvol. They are being sued by Curtis W. McGhee Jr., and Terry Harrington, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for the death of retired police officer John Schweer. The men were released from prison after 25 years.Or, in short: All the evidence pointed to Charles Gates as the murderer. The prosecutors consulted an astrologer, who told them that CG was innocent. The prosecutors believed that what the astrologer told them was supernaturally true, trumping over any actual evidence. So they hid the real evidence, and used fabricated, fake "evidence" to deprive two innocent men of nearly the entire span of those innocent men's adult lives. But the two prosecutors have a fireproof defense from any criminal charge: they acted "in good faith," sincerely believing in Astrology and its truth. And now the victims of those two publicly employed swindlers may be deprived of even the right to sue those malefactors for civil justice - out of fear that holding future prosecutors accountable will hold them back from doing "their job" in judicial combat against future defendants.
Evidence showed the prosecutors had failed to share evidence that pointed to another man, Charles Gates, as a possible suspect in Schweer's slaying.
They later on denied that Gates was even a suspect, even though witnesses placed him near the scene of the crime and his name appeared in several police reports. He also was administered and failed a polygraph test and the prosecutors themselves even consulted an astrologer about their suspicions of Gates.
McGhee and Harrington filed lawsuits against the former prosecutors, saying as prosecutors Richter and Hrvol had them arrested without probable cause, coerced and coached witnesses, fabricated evidence against them and concealed evidence that could have cleared them.
And this is the payback of Kantian philosophy: reality is not knowable; the best that Justice can do is trial by combat, and in combat nothing counts except the result. Other countries, such as Switzerland, do have justice systems based on the Enlightenment notion of objective fact. We Americans have trial by combat, as was done in the Dark Ages, guided by supernatural forces, only hacking at each other with lawyers instead of halberds. And when the stars or the Gods have spoken, innocent men who have had the better part of their lives taken from them may have no recourse at all.
Life on the Edge of Implosion of Democracy
Back when I left Bell Labs, and decided to switch coasts to live with Yoon, I made a risky choice. Tenure-track jobs at universities where I would be able to teach advanced courses were few, and fewer within a comfortable commuting distance from Yoon's home. I took the job at Cal State LA with full knowledge of its moral and existential hazards. But damn it, I didn't expect the implosion of California Democracy to hit just 9 years after I took the job.
I'm posting this because the sudden silence from my end of the wire may have made some readers of this blog uncomfortable, and I don't want anyone to think that I have a problem beyond serious overwork. With a 12-unit per quarter teaching load, overwork was a given from the start. That would have been true even in classics, or in medieval history, where the content of courses in unlikely to change much from decade to decade. Teaching 12 units of advanced technical courses in Information Systems, with a 3-year technology half-life and 20% of everything in the typical course becoming obsolete each year, was always Serious Overwork. With research, and with enough hands-on experimentation with new technologies to keeps ahead of the graduate students (some of them already CIOs) in my evening classes, the better part of my waking hours were accounted for. And then, this year, came the (financial) crisis of California Democracy.
How does a busy urban school deal with a 16-million-dollar hole in its budget? First, it does not renew the contracts of part-time adjunct faculty. Simultaneously, there is a flow of incoming students whose 529s shrank enough that they can no longer afford private universities, or even the UC. The remaining faculty's advanced courses are cut, and we are assigned to teach the Business School's required Intro to IS and the like. Since there are fewer courses and fewer sections and more students, class sizes tripled, from an average of 12 to an average of 33. I spend most of my class time dealing with e-mailed questions from students; just reading and organizing and preparing to answer those questions, without which I can have no assurance that I'm doing a responsible job, takes three times as long as it used to.
Two of my three 4-unit courses this term (4 units because they cover the content of a 3-unit semester course in one academic quarter) are Intros. And there are NO adequate textbooks for Intros out there. So, following John Drake, I'm teaching my Intro sections with books that were never meant to be textbooks. I have nothing that otherwise would have come from the textbook's Instructor Site: no prepared homework assignments, no presentation PowerPoints, no test question pools (I had no idea how much time such conveniences saved.) And this on top of getting the Intro students (two-thirds of them coming from Pragmatist schools where they never had to do this before) to think in concepts instead of shopping lists.
My one remaining combined Senior-Graduate advanced technical course is up to the same numbers, because so many other courses were canceled. From 100% students who were taking a difficult technical course because they were burning with enthusiasm for its content, I'm down to 33%, the rest there because they had to take something; some of them signed up without the lower-division prerequisites. And the old textbook was 4 years old and obsolete; I switched to a brand new one for which I'm receiving the still-rough supporting materials by e-mail, sometimes in the morning before the evening's class.
The budget for graduate assistants and graders also is gone. I'm typing this as an otherwise-I-would-go-insane break from grading 100 midterm exams.
And we were just advised of an even larger hole next year. So I am lucky, in that I still have a job...
I'm posting this because the sudden silence from my end of the wire may have made some readers of this blog uncomfortable, and I don't want anyone to think that I have a problem beyond serious overwork. With a 12-unit per quarter teaching load, overwork was a given from the start. That would have been true even in classics, or in medieval history, where the content of courses in unlikely to change much from decade to decade. Teaching 12 units of advanced technical courses in Information Systems, with a 3-year technology half-life and 20% of everything in the typical course becoming obsolete each year, was always Serious Overwork. With research, and with enough hands-on experimentation with new technologies to keeps ahead of the graduate students (some of them already CIOs) in my evening classes, the better part of my waking hours were accounted for. And then, this year, came the (financial) crisis of California Democracy.
How does a busy urban school deal with a 16-million-dollar hole in its budget? First, it does not renew the contracts of part-time adjunct faculty. Simultaneously, there is a flow of incoming students whose 529s shrank enough that they can no longer afford private universities, or even the UC. The remaining faculty's advanced courses are cut, and we are assigned to teach the Business School's required Intro to IS and the like. Since there are fewer courses and fewer sections and more students, class sizes tripled, from an average of 12 to an average of 33. I spend most of my class time dealing with e-mailed questions from students; just reading and organizing and preparing to answer those questions, without which I can have no assurance that I'm doing a responsible job, takes three times as long as it used to.
Two of my three 4-unit courses this term (4 units because they cover the content of a 3-unit semester course in one academic quarter) are Intros. And there are NO adequate textbooks for Intros out there. So, following John Drake, I'm teaching my Intro sections with books that were never meant to be textbooks. I have nothing that otherwise would have come from the textbook's Instructor Site: no prepared homework assignments, no presentation PowerPoints, no test question pools (I had no idea how much time such conveniences saved.) And this on top of getting the Intro students (two-thirds of them coming from Pragmatist schools where they never had to do this before) to think in concepts instead of shopping lists.
My one remaining combined Senior-Graduate advanced technical course is up to the same numbers, because so many other courses were canceled. From 100% students who were taking a difficult technical course because they were burning with enthusiasm for its content, I'm down to 33%, the rest there because they had to take something; some of them signed up without the lower-division prerequisites. And the old textbook was 4 years old and obsolete; I switched to a brand new one for which I'm receiving the still-rough supporting materials by e-mail, sometimes in the morning before the evening's class.
The budget for graduate assistants and graders also is gone. I'm typing this as an otherwise-I-would-go-insane break from grading 100 midterm exams.
And we were just advised of an even larger hole next year. So I am lucky, in that I still have a job...
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Is Christianity More Benign Than Islam?
We really need a site about Christianity to parallel Little Green Footballs. Just think what LGF would say if Moslems did what the Christian Churches have been documented doing ("Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches") by the LA Times - click the title for details.
Friday, October 16, 2009
In other news
Faf (Fafner?) of fafblog.blogspot.com seems a bit of a Libertarian flako, but this is brilliant:
".... In other news, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a man who set fire to a library and then promised to write a book about it."
(H.T.: Natailya Petrova on Facebook.)
".... In other news, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a man who set fire to a library and then promised to write a book about it."
(H.T.: Natailya Petrova on Facebook.)
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Three Democides by False Morality: Part III, The Ban On Cloning
(This is the third part of a three-part article. Part I is here; Part II is here.)
The third democide by false morality differs from the Stalin and Carson democides in that, unlike its precursors, it was not a simple consequence of a false morality held my millions. Stalin headed a totalitarian regime whose main claim to popular legitimacy was enforcement of the traditional, originally Christian altruist false morality of Russia and Europe. Carson spawned a new, equally anti-human ideology and false morality that did not begin its toll of democide until after it had gained millions of adherents.
The third of the modern democides by false morality started out without a constituency and without anything resembling ideological conviction. It was - and is - mass murder of tens of millions of individuals, originating not from enforcement of false principles but from a false embrace of pseudo-principles, driven not by conviction, but by simple (and simple-minded) opportunism in the service of political power-seeking.
Dick Armey's world-wide de-facto prohibition against medical research into cloning-based organ replacement technology is not a case of political power in the service of false morality, but of false morality in the service of one politician's otherwise unprincipled pursuit of political power.
The first successful organ transplant, a kidney transplant between identical twins, was performed in 1954. It was successful because there is no immune rejection between genetically identical twins. Transplants between individuals who are not genetically identical always relied, and still rely, on chemical suppression of the recipient's immune system, leaving the patient at severe risk of premature death from diseases that someone with a healthy immune would have been protected against.
Genetically compatible replacement organs can be grown artificially, in a decorticated fetus created by replacing the nucleus of a newly fertilized human egg with the nucleus of a somatic cell from the patient. Once the first mammal, a mouse, was cloned in 1986, the combination of somatic cell nuclear transfer with subsequent organ transplantation has been the obvious least-effort technology whose development would essentially end the threat of organ failure as a cause of death in the developed world. Fetal transplantation technology has been routinely used, since at least 2004, in replacement of small organs such as the retina of the eye. All that remains for the complete organ replacement technology to become practical, is experience with growing an actual decorticated fetus cloned from a prospective patient. There are no objective ethical or scientific obstacles to the development of this technology - only political ones.
The moral aspects of cloning have been sufficiently addressed in several articles by Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, especially his "Cloning is Moral," which specifically addressed the characterization of this technology as "growing human beings for spare body parts." To supplement the moral perspective, here is a rough estimate of the number of avoidable deaths that result from each year of delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technology:
In 2002 - the most recent year for which government statistics were available when I first wrote on this topic - 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths.
Given its obvious usefulness for saving millions of lives, the prospect of cloning-based organ replacement technology was something that Americans who understood its potential, including American Christians, generally favored, from the first mouse cloning of 1986 onward. Cloning is an important - and generally benevolent - part of the projected technological context of the future society envisioned by J. Neil Schulman, a recent convert to Christianity, in "The Rainbow Cadenza," his 1986 futuristic novel on the theme of Original Sin. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist is trying to have her mother, in stasis as a result of organ failure, revived by cloning. It is the protagonist's sister, Judge Vera, the most cruel and generally evil character in the book, who then voices the book's only objection to cloning: "I was supposed to cut out a baby's brain to bring her back?" Tellingly, the perversely anti-technology Judge Vera is a Wiccan. The book's Christians, the author's proxies, have no problem with restoring failed and amputated organs with cloning-based technology. Indeed, until Dick Armey's anti-cloning campaign in the late 1990s, no American would have associated opposition to cloning-based technologies with anyone other than the American Left's marginal anti-technology, anti-Western-Civilization fringe.
Dick Armey, an economics professor at North Texas State University, was elected to Congress in 1984, eventually becoming the leader of so-called "Economic Conservatives" in the Republican Party. In 1994 he collaborated with Newt Gingrich, the leader of the "Social Conservative" faction, in drafting the "Contract with America," which was credited with bringing about the Republican victory in that year's elections. In 1995 Gingrich became Speaker and Armey Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.
After the election, the Social Conservative faction expected the Republican majority in Congress to "deliver" on its key issues: immigration, abortion, and homosexuals. Until that time, Armey, himself a Bible Christian and a congregant of a Bible Church, had counted on, and had received, the support of Social Conservatives in his district. But that district also had many voters with friends and relatives among legal and illegal immigrants, and a university town with predictably libertarian attitudes on abortion and on the rights of Gays and Lesbians. Moreover, as an empirical social scientist of some competence, Armey understood that the three top issues of the Social Conservatives had no traction with the electorate. A genuine effort on those issues would cost him his seat, and could well lead to the loss of a Republican majority in Congress.
This left Armey in search of issues on which he could "deliver" to the Social Conservatives and the Religious right, without alienating his district's voters from his own candidacy, or the national electorate from the Republican party. Back in 1989, Armey thought that he had found one such issue in National Endowment for the Arts grants to Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, but the NEA backed down without a fight. In 1995 Armey was at a loss. And then came 1996, the year of Dolly the sheep.
Dolly was the first large mammal - not a mere mouse - cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer. The path to a cloned human fetus was clear. The anti-technology left, including some among Armey's university town constituents, were on fire. Interestingly, now that medical cloning had come closer to imminent reality, its compatibility with Christian morals started to be debated. A part of that debate was an editorial by one Gino Concetti in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, calling for a ban on human cloning: "A person has the right to be born in a human way and not in the laboratory." Concetti was a working journalist and an ordinary priest, not a philosopher or a theologian or a member of the Curia, and a newspaper editorial was far from an authoritative statement of Catholic Doctrine. But the Washington Post, noting the "semiofficial" reputation of the paper that Concetti's editorial appeared in, headlined a story in its February 27, 1997 edition "Vatican Calls For Ban on Human Cloning."
Dick Armey had his issue.
Contemporary Religious Right Protestants in America are mostly Pragmatist and anti-intellectual. When they need doctrine, they turn to the Catholic Church; the Religious Right's men on the Supreme Court are, to a man, Catholics. Concetti's editorial gave Armey a cause on which, through collaboration with the anti-technology Left in Congress and in both district and national electorates, he had a pragmatic chance to win ("deliver") on an issue that, he may have thought, the Religious Right would care about.
From his position as House Majority Leader, Armey led the formation of a formidable anti-cloning lobby. It was the first lasting political coalition between the theocratic "Right" of James Dobson and the anti-technology Left of Jeremy Rifkin, whose followers and allies came to dominate Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. By March 1997, political pressure from this unprecedented coalition led President Clinton to sign an executive order banning research on medical cloning in any institution receiving US federal funds, or any organization or enterprise working under contracts with the US government. Clinton's ban effectively terminated any possibility of cloning research at any formal institution, from colleges that enroll students with government-guaranteed education loans, to medical practices treating Medicaid or Medicare patients, to medical drug and technology companies with Medicare contracts. This effectively outflanked Armey, who was left to legislate a more formal legal ban against something that in practice could not take place in America any more.
Armey went ahead, and in January 1998 submitted to the House a permanent ban on cloning humans in the United States. Armey's bill was announced at a news conference with representatives of the Christian Coalition, Dobson's Family Research Council and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Jeremy Rifkin simultaneously announced a symmetrical anti-cloning initiative from the Left, at first informal but eventually, when Armey's initiative stalled, producing a statement signed by "64 of the nation's leading progressive policy leaders, academics and activists" in support of Armey's legislation. Under the Senate version of Armey's bill, introduced by Senator Bill Frist, a scientist convicted of human cloning would face up to 10 years in prison.
And then things began to fall apart for Armey. Congressional Democrats, seeing Armey's legislation as a blatant attempt to wrest credit for a cloning ban away from President Clinton, whose executive order had already produced an effective ban, did not go along. Armey, on the strength of Jeremy Rifkin's support, had counted on the support of Congressional "progressives." He didn't get it. And in the Senate, Senator McCain, who saw in biotechnology, including medical cloning, a hope for reversing the disabilities he had suffered from North Vietnamese torture, organized enough resistance to stop Frist's bill. And thus Armey's hope of "delivering" a legislative result to Dobson and the Theocratic Right, a hope for which he was willing to kill millions - some 3.8 million per year of delay in the development of medical cloning - came to naught.
Armey continued to re-introduce his legislation banning all human cloning after each congressional election. After 2001, when Jeremy Rifkin's Foundation on Economic Trends published a statement from 64 prominent anti-technology Leftists in support of Armey's legislation, anti-technology congressional leftists rallied to Armey's bill, which passed twice in the House of Representatives, only to be blocked by McCain's efforts in the Senate. Given the threat that such legislation could pass at any time, thus wiping out all previous investment in cloning-based technologies, private investment predictably stopped. Some work on cloning was included in State-level stem cell initiatives, but the State-level legislation authorizing these initiatives mandated that any cloned embryos be used only to extract stem cells, and in any case destroyed within 10 days, thus eliminating the possibility of developing organ-replacement procedures.
With the election of a Republican president in 2000, Armey's effort acquired a world-wide dimension. George W. Bush aligned his presidency with the theocratic wing of the Republican Party, and while the Constitution limited how far his theocratic agenda could be taken inside the country, as President he felt entitled to conduct the foreign policy of the United States pretty much as he pleased. The legislatures of countries striving to maintain friendly relations with the United States found themselves under pressure to enact their versions of Armey's bill domestically, and to join Bush's push for an international treaty to ban cloning worldwide, even while in the United States a formal ban of this kind was replaced with comprehensive funding restrictions, regulatory directives, and, to back it up and intimidate potential private investors, the threat of Armey's legislation.
The reader is invited to refer to a lengthy scholarly article by Thomas Banchoff for a detailed study of the great theocratic power grab for a global ban on medical cloning. In brief, there was no consensus among the various Christian and Islamic sects about the morality of cloning; Jewish religious authorities were unanimously, even among the most Orthodox, supportive of cloning, declaring it to be no less than a religious obligation when done to save a fully developed human life (while also mandating early decortication of fetuses cloned for medical applications, "ensuring that the embryos used in this research are not brought to a point which constitutes human-hood.")
Countries with tax-supported, politically influential Catholic and Evangelical churches (such as Costa Rica and Germany) were, as would be expected, among the first to ban all human cloning in their national legislation, and to advocate a global ban through a UN-sponsored international treaty. Such countries, however, represented only a small fraction of the population of the world, and they would not have stepped forward to urge such a global treaty without the initiative of a trio of unusual allies: The United States (actually the administration of President George W. Bush,) the Vatican, and Saudi Arabia.
For the Vatican cloning was always a minor issue, minuscule in comparison with abortion, or with equal marriage for same-sex couples. But was also, as it was for Dick Armey, an issue with which they hoped to score deliverables. If a global treaty to ban cloning were successful, it would also establish a global precedent for an international regime based on religious rules rather than purported concern for the national interests of participating countries. Such a precedent would open the door to global bans on other supposedly "immoral" human action; abortion or equal marriage could then be next.
As for Saudi Arabia, its advocacy for a cloning ban was expected to be particularly effective in the Islamic world, as Saudi Arabia was both the site of Islam's two most holy pilgrimage destinations, and the model of strict enforcement of Islamic religious law. Saudi Arabia was an absolute monarchy, its royal family having close business, political and personal ties with President Bush, and more-or-less completely dependent on the United States commercially, politically and militarily. Kuwait, politically and militarily dependent on the United States for defense against Iraq, joined Saudi Arabia on Bush's side.
The Bush administration deployed every instrument of pressure it could to create an anti-cloning majority at the UN. That majority was largely composed of small countries that depended for their existence on military, political or economic support of the United States. This majority also included those Islamic countries that depended on Saudi Arabia or Kuwait for cheap oil and handouts. It also included Israel. Israelis, whether religious or secular, held (and still hold) an unusually positive view of science, technology, and especially of medical technologies, such as cloning, that promise to be useful in the defense of human life. In medical research and invention Israel was already a world leader, on par with the United States and Switzerland. But Israel's political leaders were (and still are) in the grasp of an expensive national-collectivist ideology that made them abjectly dependent on American appropriations, which could only originate in the US House of Representatives, which was firmly under the control of Dick Armey. And so Israel passed domestic anti-cloning legislation, and joined the US-Vatican-Saudi-led anti-cloning side at the United Nations.
On the opposite side was an equally ad hoc alliance of independent countries with secular majorities or secular constitutions, such as Great Britain, Turkey, and South Korea; the more secular countries of Europe; and countries determined to spite President Bush: China, Russia, and of course Iran. It was the ultimate inversion of sense: United States and Israel on the side of theocratic mass murder; Iran on the side of technology and of the freedom of science.
Ultimately, the world was saved from the prospect of a global ban on cloning bythe fact that even the most abject of diplomats is not without some concern forthe continuation of his own life. And so the ban was changed into a non-binding resolution that called on member states "to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life." They agreed to disagree, of course, on the exact meaning of "inasmuch" in that declaration. But the chilling effects of Bush's and Armey's efforts on investment in cloning technologies continues, and so do the regulatory barriers that stand in the way of research on medical cloning in the United States, and legislated barriers abroad.
As of 2009, medical research into cloning-based organ-replacement technologies has been at a standstill since 1998. With 3.8 million avoidable deaths for every year of delay in the development of these technologies, the death toll to dateis close to 42 million, rivaling the number of victims of Rachel Carson, and close to the number murdered by Stalin and Hitler together. And what good did this exercise in mass murder do for Dick Armey?
James Dobson, who sponsored the press conference that announced Armey's legislation to the world, wanted a visible triumph of Faith. With both a legislative ban in the United States having no hope of becoming law, and a global anti-cloning treaty demoted to a non-binding declaration, a mere chilling effect was not the triumph of Faith that Dobson wanted, even if it was still killing 3.8 million people a year. And with only peripheral action in Congress on Dobson's big issues - on abortion and on equal marriage for Gays - the public perception of Dobson having enough Washington pull to be worth paying off was vanishing. As Armey was to write later, "As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to 'deliver' for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so."
Offended or not, Armey practically conceded that Dobson had the power to "take Armey's job back" by resigning from Congress in 2002. Having sat on the fence between Republican Theocrats and Republican Pragmatists through his tenure in Congress, in retirement Armey began to identify explicitly with the Pragmatists. The name of Armey's political organization, "FreedomWorks," is an explicit riff on the Pragmatist anti-principle, "whatever works." Armed with the anti-principle of having no principles of his own, Armey has been known to talk about "separation of Church and State" as though he had not been theocracy's standard bearer when he advocated his cloning ban, and murdered some 40 million people by the threat of this ban, only a few years before.
A Personal Postscript
As recently as 1997, I had a reasonable hope of living long enough for cloning-based organ-replacement technology to become available - and then of going on tolive practically forever. After 11 years of delay, and the prospect of more delay to come, that hope is no longer reasonable. Like the millions of Ukrainians who lost their lives because Stalin's false morality prohibited trade in food, and like the millions of Africans who lost their lives because Rachel Carson's false morality prohibited spraying mosquito swamps with DDT, I am one of millions who are losing our lives because Dick Armey's false morality barred the imminent development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies.
Of course Dick Armey, like Joe Stalin and Rachel Carson, didn't do it alone. Dick Armey's unique contribution was to yoke together an unprecedented (and unlikely) coalition of anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-technology activists spanning the spectrum from James Dobson to Jeremy Rifkin. Armey eventually lost the support of some of his former collaborators, but he is still in the coalition business. Armey's new coalition - the Tea Party movement, sponsored and organizedby Armey's FreedomWorks - embraces everyone who despises the Obama program. It is of course preposterous to think that Objectivists, who oppose ObamaCare because it would enslave the providers of health care, and Theocrats, who oppose it because insurance companies that provide coverage for abortion would not be excluded from selling policies under the proposed Federal mandate, have something (or anything) in common. Dick Armey is counting on his new coalition to take him to the White House in 2012. The good news is that by 2012 Armey will be older than any first-time presidential candidate in history. And by then, he may well be dead of organ failure. Or, more accurately, of suicide by false morality - and by lack of principle.
The third democide by false morality differs from the Stalin and Carson democides in that, unlike its precursors, it was not a simple consequence of a false morality held my millions. Stalin headed a totalitarian regime whose main claim to popular legitimacy was enforcement of the traditional, originally Christian altruist false morality of Russia and Europe. Carson spawned a new, equally anti-human ideology and false morality that did not begin its toll of democide until after it had gained millions of adherents.
The third of the modern democides by false morality started out without a constituency and without anything resembling ideological conviction. It was - and is - mass murder of tens of millions of individuals, originating not from enforcement of false principles but from a false embrace of pseudo-principles, driven not by conviction, but by simple (and simple-minded) opportunism in the service of political power-seeking.
Dick Armey's world-wide de-facto prohibition against medical research into cloning-based organ replacement technology is not a case of political power in the service of false morality, but of false morality in the service of one politician's otherwise unprincipled pursuit of political power.
The first successful organ transplant, a kidney transplant between identical twins, was performed in 1954. It was successful because there is no immune rejection between genetically identical twins. Transplants between individuals who are not genetically identical always relied, and still rely, on chemical suppression of the recipient's immune system, leaving the patient at severe risk of premature death from diseases that someone with a healthy immune would have been protected against.
Genetically compatible replacement organs can be grown artificially, in a decorticated fetus created by replacing the nucleus of a newly fertilized human egg with the nucleus of a somatic cell from the patient. Once the first mammal, a mouse, was cloned in 1986, the combination of somatic cell nuclear transfer with subsequent organ transplantation has been the obvious least-effort technology whose development would essentially end the threat of organ failure as a cause of death in the developed world. Fetal transplantation technology has been routinely used, since at least 2004, in replacement of small organs such as the retina of the eye. All that remains for the complete organ replacement technology to become practical, is experience with growing an actual decorticated fetus cloned from a prospective patient. There are no objective ethical or scientific obstacles to the development of this technology - only political ones.
The moral aspects of cloning have been sufficiently addressed in several articles by Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, especially his "Cloning is Moral," which specifically addressed the characterization of this technology as "growing human beings for spare body parts." To supplement the moral perspective, here is a rough estimate of the number of avoidable deaths that result from each year of delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technology:
In 2002 - the most recent year for which government statistics were available when I first wrote on this topic - 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths.
Given its obvious usefulness for saving millions of lives, the prospect of cloning-based organ replacement technology was something that Americans who understood its potential, including American Christians, generally favored, from the first mouse cloning of 1986 onward. Cloning is an important - and generally benevolent - part of the projected technological context of the future society envisioned by J. Neil Schulman, a recent convert to Christianity, in "The Rainbow Cadenza," his 1986 futuristic novel on the theme of Original Sin. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist is trying to have her mother, in stasis as a result of organ failure, revived by cloning. It is the protagonist's sister, Judge Vera, the most cruel and generally evil character in the book, who then voices the book's only objection to cloning: "I was supposed to cut out a baby's brain to bring her back?" Tellingly, the perversely anti-technology Judge Vera is a Wiccan. The book's Christians, the author's proxies, have no problem with restoring failed and amputated organs with cloning-based technology. Indeed, until Dick Armey's anti-cloning campaign in the late 1990s, no American would have associated opposition to cloning-based technologies with anyone other than the American Left's marginal anti-technology, anti-Western-Civilization fringe.
Dick Armey, an economics professor at North Texas State University, was elected to Congress in 1984, eventually becoming the leader of so-called "Economic Conservatives" in the Republican Party. In 1994 he collaborated with Newt Gingrich, the leader of the "Social Conservative" faction, in drafting the "Contract with America," which was credited with bringing about the Republican victory in that year's elections. In 1995 Gingrich became Speaker and Armey Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.
After the election, the Social Conservative faction expected the Republican majority in Congress to "deliver" on its key issues: immigration, abortion, and homosexuals. Until that time, Armey, himself a Bible Christian and a congregant of a Bible Church, had counted on, and had received, the support of Social Conservatives in his district. But that district also had many voters with friends and relatives among legal and illegal immigrants, and a university town with predictably libertarian attitudes on abortion and on the rights of Gays and Lesbians. Moreover, as an empirical social scientist of some competence, Armey understood that the three top issues of the Social Conservatives had no traction with the electorate. A genuine effort on those issues would cost him his seat, and could well lead to the loss of a Republican majority in Congress.
This left Armey in search of issues on which he could "deliver" to the Social Conservatives and the Religious right, without alienating his district's voters from his own candidacy, or the national electorate from the Republican party. Back in 1989, Armey thought that he had found one such issue in National Endowment for the Arts grants to Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, but the NEA backed down without a fight. In 1995 Armey was at a loss. And then came 1996, the year of Dolly the sheep.
Dolly was the first large mammal - not a mere mouse - cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer. The path to a cloned human fetus was clear. The anti-technology left, including some among Armey's university town constituents, were on fire. Interestingly, now that medical cloning had come closer to imminent reality, its compatibility with Christian morals started to be debated. A part of that debate was an editorial by one Gino Concetti in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, calling for a ban on human cloning: "A person has the right to be born in a human way and not in the laboratory." Concetti was a working journalist and an ordinary priest, not a philosopher or a theologian or a member of the Curia, and a newspaper editorial was far from an authoritative statement of Catholic Doctrine. But the Washington Post, noting the "semiofficial" reputation of the paper that Concetti's editorial appeared in, headlined a story in its February 27, 1997 edition "Vatican Calls For Ban on Human Cloning."
Dick Armey had his issue.
Contemporary Religious Right Protestants in America are mostly Pragmatist and anti-intellectual. When they need doctrine, they turn to the Catholic Church; the Religious Right's men on the Supreme Court are, to a man, Catholics. Concetti's editorial gave Armey a cause on which, through collaboration with the anti-technology Left in Congress and in both district and national electorates, he had a pragmatic chance to win ("deliver") on an issue that, he may have thought, the Religious Right would care about.
From his position as House Majority Leader, Armey led the formation of a formidable anti-cloning lobby. It was the first lasting political coalition between the theocratic "Right" of James Dobson and the anti-technology Left of Jeremy Rifkin, whose followers and allies came to dominate Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. By March 1997, political pressure from this unprecedented coalition led President Clinton to sign an executive order banning research on medical cloning in any institution receiving US federal funds, or any organization or enterprise working under contracts with the US government. Clinton's ban effectively terminated any possibility of cloning research at any formal institution, from colleges that enroll students with government-guaranteed education loans, to medical practices treating Medicaid or Medicare patients, to medical drug and technology companies with Medicare contracts. This effectively outflanked Armey, who was left to legislate a more formal legal ban against something that in practice could not take place in America any more.
Armey went ahead, and in January 1998 submitted to the House a permanent ban on cloning humans in the United States. Armey's bill was announced at a news conference with representatives of the Christian Coalition, Dobson's Family Research Council and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Jeremy Rifkin simultaneously announced a symmetrical anti-cloning initiative from the Left, at first informal but eventually, when Armey's initiative stalled, producing a statement signed by "64 of the nation's leading progressive policy leaders, academics and activists" in support of Armey's legislation. Under the Senate version of Armey's bill, introduced by Senator Bill Frist, a scientist convicted of human cloning would face up to 10 years in prison.
And then things began to fall apart for Armey. Congressional Democrats, seeing Armey's legislation as a blatant attempt to wrest credit for a cloning ban away from President Clinton, whose executive order had already produced an effective ban, did not go along. Armey, on the strength of Jeremy Rifkin's support, had counted on the support of Congressional "progressives." He didn't get it. And in the Senate, Senator McCain, who saw in biotechnology, including medical cloning, a hope for reversing the disabilities he had suffered from North Vietnamese torture, organized enough resistance to stop Frist's bill. And thus Armey's hope of "delivering" a legislative result to Dobson and the Theocratic Right, a hope for which he was willing to kill millions - some 3.8 million per year of delay in the development of medical cloning - came to naught.
Armey continued to re-introduce his legislation banning all human cloning after each congressional election. After 2001, when Jeremy Rifkin's Foundation on Economic Trends published a statement from 64 prominent anti-technology Leftists in support of Armey's legislation, anti-technology congressional leftists rallied to Armey's bill, which passed twice in the House of Representatives, only to be blocked by McCain's efforts in the Senate. Given the threat that such legislation could pass at any time, thus wiping out all previous investment in cloning-based technologies, private investment predictably stopped. Some work on cloning was included in State-level stem cell initiatives, but the State-level legislation authorizing these initiatives mandated that any cloned embryos be used only to extract stem cells, and in any case destroyed within 10 days, thus eliminating the possibility of developing organ-replacement procedures.
With the election of a Republican president in 2000, Armey's effort acquired a world-wide dimension. George W. Bush aligned his presidency with the theocratic wing of the Republican Party, and while the Constitution limited how far his theocratic agenda could be taken inside the country, as President he felt entitled to conduct the foreign policy of the United States pretty much as he pleased. The legislatures of countries striving to maintain friendly relations with the United States found themselves under pressure to enact their versions of Armey's bill domestically, and to join Bush's push for an international treaty to ban cloning worldwide, even while in the United States a formal ban of this kind was replaced with comprehensive funding restrictions, regulatory directives, and, to back it up and intimidate potential private investors, the threat of Armey's legislation.
The reader is invited to refer to a lengthy scholarly article by Thomas Banchoff for a detailed study of the great theocratic power grab for a global ban on medical cloning. In brief, there was no consensus among the various Christian and Islamic sects about the morality of cloning; Jewish religious authorities were unanimously, even among the most Orthodox, supportive of cloning, declaring it to be no less than a religious obligation when done to save a fully developed human life (while also mandating early decortication of fetuses cloned for medical applications, "ensuring that the embryos used in this research are not brought to a point which constitutes human-hood.")
Countries with tax-supported, politically influential Catholic and Evangelical churches (such as Costa Rica and Germany) were, as would be expected, among the first to ban all human cloning in their national legislation, and to advocate a global ban through a UN-sponsored international treaty. Such countries, however, represented only a small fraction of the population of the world, and they would not have stepped forward to urge such a global treaty without the initiative of a trio of unusual allies: The United States (actually the administration of President George W. Bush,) the Vatican, and Saudi Arabia.
For the Vatican cloning was always a minor issue, minuscule in comparison with abortion, or with equal marriage for same-sex couples. But was also, as it was for Dick Armey, an issue with which they hoped to score deliverables. If a global treaty to ban cloning were successful, it would also establish a global precedent for an international regime based on religious rules rather than purported concern for the national interests of participating countries. Such a precedent would open the door to global bans on other supposedly "immoral" human action; abortion or equal marriage could then be next.
As for Saudi Arabia, its advocacy for a cloning ban was expected to be particularly effective in the Islamic world, as Saudi Arabia was both the site of Islam's two most holy pilgrimage destinations, and the model of strict enforcement of Islamic religious law. Saudi Arabia was an absolute monarchy, its royal family having close business, political and personal ties with President Bush, and more-or-less completely dependent on the United States commercially, politically and militarily. Kuwait, politically and militarily dependent on the United States for defense against Iraq, joined Saudi Arabia on Bush's side.
The Bush administration deployed every instrument of pressure it could to create an anti-cloning majority at the UN. That majority was largely composed of small countries that depended for their existence on military, political or economic support of the United States. This majority also included those Islamic countries that depended on Saudi Arabia or Kuwait for cheap oil and handouts. It also included Israel. Israelis, whether religious or secular, held (and still hold) an unusually positive view of science, technology, and especially of medical technologies, such as cloning, that promise to be useful in the defense of human life. In medical research and invention Israel was already a world leader, on par with the United States and Switzerland. But Israel's political leaders were (and still are) in the grasp of an expensive national-collectivist ideology that made them abjectly dependent on American appropriations, which could only originate in the US House of Representatives, which was firmly under the control of Dick Armey. And so Israel passed domestic anti-cloning legislation, and joined the US-Vatican-Saudi-led anti-cloning side at the United Nations.
On the opposite side was an equally ad hoc alliance of independent countries with secular majorities or secular constitutions, such as Great Britain, Turkey, and South Korea; the more secular countries of Europe; and countries determined to spite President Bush: China, Russia, and of course Iran. It was the ultimate inversion of sense: United States and Israel on the side of theocratic mass murder; Iran on the side of technology and of the freedom of science.
Ultimately, the world was saved from the prospect of a global ban on cloning bythe fact that even the most abject of diplomats is not without some concern forthe continuation of his own life. And so the ban was changed into a non-binding resolution that called on member states "to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life." They agreed to disagree, of course, on the exact meaning of "inasmuch" in that declaration. But the chilling effects of Bush's and Armey's efforts on investment in cloning technologies continues, and so do the regulatory barriers that stand in the way of research on medical cloning in the United States, and legislated barriers abroad.
As of 2009, medical research into cloning-based organ-replacement technologies has been at a standstill since 1998. With 3.8 million avoidable deaths for every year of delay in the development of these technologies, the death toll to dateis close to 42 million, rivaling the number of victims of Rachel Carson, and close to the number murdered by Stalin and Hitler together. And what good did this exercise in mass murder do for Dick Armey?
James Dobson, who sponsored the press conference that announced Armey's legislation to the world, wanted a visible triumph of Faith. With both a legislative ban in the United States having no hope of becoming law, and a global anti-cloning treaty demoted to a non-binding declaration, a mere chilling effect was not the triumph of Faith that Dobson wanted, even if it was still killing 3.8 million people a year. And with only peripheral action in Congress on Dobson's big issues - on abortion and on equal marriage for Gays - the public perception of Dobson having enough Washington pull to be worth paying off was vanishing. As Armey was to write later, "As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to 'deliver' for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so."
Offended or not, Armey practically conceded that Dobson had the power to "take Armey's job back" by resigning from Congress in 2002. Having sat on the fence between Republican Theocrats and Republican Pragmatists through his tenure in Congress, in retirement Armey began to identify explicitly with the Pragmatists. The name of Armey's political organization, "FreedomWorks," is an explicit riff on the Pragmatist anti-principle, "whatever works." Armed with the anti-principle of having no principles of his own, Armey has been known to talk about "separation of Church and State" as though he had not been theocracy's standard bearer when he advocated his cloning ban, and murdered some 40 million people by the threat of this ban, only a few years before.
A Personal Postscript
As recently as 1997, I had a reasonable hope of living long enough for cloning-based organ-replacement technology to become available - and then of going on tolive practically forever. After 11 years of delay, and the prospect of more delay to come, that hope is no longer reasonable. Like the millions of Ukrainians who lost their lives because Stalin's false morality prohibited trade in food, and like the millions of Africans who lost their lives because Rachel Carson's false morality prohibited spraying mosquito swamps with DDT, I am one of millions who are losing our lives because Dick Armey's false morality barred the imminent development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies.
Of course Dick Armey, like Joe Stalin and Rachel Carson, didn't do it alone. Dick Armey's unique contribution was to yoke together an unprecedented (and unlikely) coalition of anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-technology activists spanning the spectrum from James Dobson to Jeremy Rifkin. Armey eventually lost the support of some of his former collaborators, but he is still in the coalition business. Armey's new coalition - the Tea Party movement, sponsored and organizedby Armey's FreedomWorks - embraces everyone who despises the Obama program. It is of course preposterous to think that Objectivists, who oppose ObamaCare because it would enslave the providers of health care, and Theocrats, who oppose it because insurance companies that provide coverage for abortion would not be excluded from selling policies under the proposed Federal mandate, have something (or anything) in common. Dick Armey is counting on his new coalition to take him to the White House in 2012. The good news is that by 2012 Armey will be older than any first-time presidential candidate in history. And by then, he may well be dead of organ failure. Or, more accurately, of suicide by false morality - and by lack of principle.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Opposite of Science
If you have a strong (and preferably empty) stomach, click on the title (above.)
Lord May, the president of the British Science Association, said religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past and it may be needed again.
Speaking on the eve of the association’s annual conference, the committed atheist said he was worried the world was on a “calamitous trajectory” brought on by its failure to co-ordinate measures against global warming.
He said that no country was prepared to take the lead and a “punisher” was needed to make sure the rules of co-operation were not broken.
The former Government chief scientific advisor said in the past that was God and it might be time again for religion to fill the gap.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Republicans Surrender
After everything that Republicans and Democrats agreed on before the last presidential election, there was only one real issue in President Obama's proposal to extend government control of health care financing in the United States, from nearly total to fully totalitarian: whether the transfer (at gunpoint) of the money used to pay for the care of those who did not obtain insurance before they got sick, will be done openly through the tax system, or covertly, by forcing health insurance companies (1) to "insure" those with pre-existing conditions, and (2) to tax their other customers for the cost. Once the alleged opponents of Obama's plan agree to hide the tax for "universal health care" in premiums paid for genuine health insurance, we know that they are scumbags peddling their alleged principles for pull, and that for them, any remaining "opposition" is just a matter of haggling over price.
And now, the official Republican response to Obama's proposal: "Here are four areas -- four important areas where we can agree, right now: One, all individuals should have access to coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. ..."
John David Lewis, in an article about Obama's plan in The Objective Standard (published the day after, but presumably written long before) put it like this: "If the Republicans compromise, (then) they will have once again capitulated to their opponents, abandoned liberty, and ruined the opportunity to redirect this nation toward its founding moral principle: individual rights, protected under a constitution in a free republic."
As of the previous evening this is no longer an "If..." The Republican Party has capitulated, much as I figured it would, but far more explicitly ("important areas where we can agree, right now") than I thought. After this, those former advocates of freedom who are still willing to pretend otherwise, and participate in "Tea Parties" and other Republican-sponsored events, can read what they are collaborating with - in black-on-white electronic ink. It remains to be seen how many will act the role of self-blinded stooges, of "useful idiots" playing mirror-image to "single payer" advocates at Obama rallies, even after having been explicitly told, by the Republicans themselves, what they are bearding for.
And now, the official Republican response to Obama's proposal: "Here are four areas -- four important areas where we can agree, right now: One, all individuals should have access to coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. ..."
John David Lewis, in an article about Obama's plan in The Objective Standard (published the day after, but presumably written long before) put it like this: "If the Republicans compromise, (then) they will have once again capitulated to their opponents, abandoned liberty, and ruined the opportunity to redirect this nation toward its founding moral principle: individual rights, protected under a constitution in a free republic."
As of the previous evening this is no longer an "If..." The Republican Party has capitulated, much as I figured it would, but far more explicitly ("important areas where we can agree, right now") than I thought. After this, those former advocates of freedom who are still willing to pretend otherwise, and participate in "Tea Parties" and other Republican-sponsored events, can read what they are collaborating with - in black-on-white electronic ink. It remains to be seen how many will act the role of self-blinded stooges, of "useful idiots" playing mirror-image to "single payer" advocates at Obama rallies, even after having been explicitly told, by the Republicans themselves, what they are bearding for.
Friday, September 04, 2009
(retrieved original) PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students
The original totalitarian version of the Department of Education guidance for President Obama's planned speech to primary school students has been systematically replaced - in every readily found repository on the Web, and of course on the Department of Education site linked to my previous blog post - with a new version in which the more totalitarian parts have been bowdlerized out of the text. Finally, an occasion to show that I can actually do what I teach: I located an html copy of the original in the Google indexer cache and copied it to my archive. The title, above, of THIS blog posting will take you to a true copy of the original - just in case you are one of the millions who have been left to wonder what the big fuss was about.
Of course, not only have the traces of the original official guidance document disappeared from the scene of the crime, but El Presidente now plans to deliver (a revised version, no doubt, of) his education speech on Monday before the start of school, for advance parental approval. To whomever is tempted to find out what Our Dear Leader originally planned to say to the kids, I remind you that breaking into the recycle folder of the President's computer is a Federal Felony. So please don't. I'm certain that The Onion will publish a reasonable facsimile.
Of course, not only have the traces of the original official guidance document disappeared from the scene of the crime, but El Presidente now plans to deliver (a revised version, no doubt, of) his education speech on Monday before the start of school, for advance parental approval. To whomever is tempted to find out what Our Dear Leader originally planned to say to the kids, I remind you that breaking into the recycle folder of the President's computer is a Federal Felony. So please don't. I'm certain that The Onion will publish a reasonable facsimile.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Johnny Can't Think
Leonard Peikoff's 1984 Ford Hall Forum lecture "Why Johnny Can't Think" was considered, by every non-Objectivist I ever discussed it with, an extreme exaggeration. Fast-forward to 2009.
The New York Times favors Obama's proposal for making government-managed health care mandatory for everyone, so it can hardly be accused of being uncharitable in describing a rally of supporters. Here is a not untypical excerpt (the rest is much the same, but I'm keeping the quote to a length permitted by fair use:)
The New York Times favors Obama's proposal for making government-managed health care mandatory for everyone, so it can hardly be accused of being uncharitable in describing a rally of supporters. Here is a not untypical excerpt (the rest is much the same, but I'm keeping the quote to a length permitted by fair use:)
Danielle Butler, for example, a graphic designer from Phoenix, said she received an e-mail message from Organizing for America inviting her to attend the rally, and came there to support the president even though health insurance has never been a big issue for her.The article reads like a museum of epistemic pathologies. The last instance is especially telling. The woman's grandson was killed by government health care - and she thinks that she will "help" other kids by making it mandatory for all Americans. Ayn Rand's diagnosis of this kind of pseudo-cognition - "Poison as food, poison as antidote" - was never more directly observable.
“I volunteered at his campaign and just really want to stand behind Obama’s initiatives,” said Ms. Butler, 29. “I support the changes that he wants to bring to our country,” she added. Ms. Butler said that when the rally was over, she felt charged up, but had not learned much new about health care.
Individual motives for attending were also diverse. At a rally at North High School in Denver that drew about 1,500 people, Martha Sullivan was struggling, and failing, to attach a sign that read “Single Payer,” to a chain-link fence in the parking lot. Ms. Sullivan said she was motivated by faith — the United Church of Christ where she worships has urged its members to support health care for all.
“I think people who have Christian beliefs should stand up and say, ‘This is what Jesus would have wanted,’ ” said Ms. Sullivan, 59.
Other people were stoked by personal causes that seemed in some cases only peripheral to a broader societal debate.
“I’m out here if it will help one more kid get medication,” said Johari Ade-Green, 58, of Denver, who was holding a sign with a picture of her grandson, Zumante Lucero, who died in July at age 9 from complications of asthma. Her grandson had insurance under Medicaid and Social Security, she said, but through a mix-up was denied medication.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama's Address to Students
Click the title for official instructions from the US Department of Education. Those parallels are getting more parallel every day....
Update: The document at the link above, on the official US Department of Education site, has been replaced with new version, with the totalitarian parts bowdlerized out of it. For the original version, please see my new blog posting, farther above.
Update: The document at the link above, on the official US Department of Education site, has been replaced with new version, with the totalitarian parts bowdlerized out of it. For the original version, please see my new blog posting, farther above.
"Don't you ever question my reality!" (Part 2)
Hope you didn't miss Part 1, posted August 21 (the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion.) The theater continues:
Lauren Stratford said of the decision to become a holocaust survivor without having actually suffered the holocaust, “I think only the individual can decide if he/she is a survivor.” .... Nobody shows a hint of doubt when a speaker by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stands before us (in 2009) to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Ain't America No More
Once upon a time, the ordinary people of America framed their Constitution on a principled, if still incomplete, understanding of individual rights.
Welcome to 2009.
Last month, a Harvard University professor was arrested for "disturbing the peace" with public criticism of a government official. Conservatives on the Web cheered for the arresting officer. The idea, that under the First Amendment it is unconstitutional to arrest a person, just because that person's public speech, criticizing a government official, irritates a police officer, never crossed the Conservatives' alleged minds.
Now, a month later, another police officer threatened to arrest - but did not actually arrest, making the incident somewhat less outrageous - another critic whose take on a government official irritated the police officer. And now, everyone who was on the side of the arresting officer in the Gates-Crowley case is outraged, outraged, that a demonstrator can be threatened by a police officer with arrest, merely for public criticism that outrages the officer.
Unfortunately, as the police officer in the linked video says, this "ain't America no more." The America where people - never mind police officers - had principles in their brains, rather than merely on their tongues and then only when pragmatically convenient, has been deliquescing for half a century now. After decades of "education" by the Comprachicos running the schools, ordinary Americans - the full range from Socialists to Conservatives - are no longer capable of inducing a principle, even when the concretes from which to induce the principle are staring them in the face. In the form of high-profile news stories.
Ominous Parallels, anyone?
Welcome to 2009.
Last month, a Harvard University professor was arrested for "disturbing the peace" with public criticism of a government official. Conservatives on the Web cheered for the arresting officer. The idea, that under the First Amendment it is unconstitutional to arrest a person, just because that person's public speech, criticizing a government official, irritates a police officer, never crossed the Conservatives' alleged minds.
Now, a month later, another police officer threatened to arrest - but did not actually arrest, making the incident somewhat less outrageous - another critic whose take on a government official irritated the police officer. And now, everyone who was on the side of the arresting officer in the Gates-Crowley case is outraged, outraged, that a demonstrator can be threatened by a police officer with arrest, merely for public criticism that outrages the officer.
Unfortunately, as the police officer in the linked video says, this "ain't America no more." The America where people - never mind police officers - had principles in their brains, rather than merely on their tongues and then only when pragmatically convenient, has been deliquescing for half a century now. After decades of "education" by the Comprachicos running the schools, ordinary Americans - the full range from Socialists to Conservatives - are no longer capable of inducing a principle, even when the concretes from which to induce the principle are staring them in the face. In the form of high-profile news stories.
Ominous Parallels, anyone?
Friday, August 21, 2009
"Don't you ever question my reality!"
Click on the title (above) for the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion. It is a reporter's account of a real event. I'd be rolling on the floor (laughing) if I'd only vacuumed my floor first....
Friday, August 14, 2009
Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press
An open letter from Cary Nelson, AAUP President, about Yale University Press' decision that "eliminated all visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s new book The Cartoons That Shook the World." Nelson writes,
"We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press...Click on the title, above, to see the letter.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Insider Tips as Currency for Political Extortion
I would not trade on an exchange that allows insider trading: I have no wish to sell a stock that's known (to the buyer but not to me) to be about to go up; or to buy one that is known, to the seller but not to me, to be about to go down. It turns out that I've been a chump: the US Congress legislated its members, and their cronies in the Executive branch, out of all provisions, legal and contractual, against insider trading.
Many of our federal legislators and officials supplement their already juicy salaries and benefits by extorting bribes. But there is the technicality that bribes in cash or equivalent are illegal, and a provision exempting legislators from laws against getting paid off in cash wouldn't fly with the voters. So instead, they gave themselves a loophole: they legislated that the insider trading laws that apply to businessmen, and other non-members of the aristocracy of pull, do NOT apply to members of Congress, congressional staffers, and appointed officials of the executive branch. Thus, members of the US Congress have made themselves legally free to extort at will, provided the payoffs are not in cash or stock or other valuables, but rather in the form of insider information that the Congresscritters, etc., can use to steal value (legally - they made it so) directly from the retirement funds and other investments of the rest of us.
The link comes, ironically, from an organization dedicated to radical expansion of government power - and thus, of government-as-an-extortion-racket in general - a position its members justify, in part, by a naive belief that everything would be all right if only such loopholes were closed. Their opponents, on the other hand, insist that there is nothing morally wrong in insider trading - even when insider information is being used as the currency in which bribes are extorted from American business by our political rulers. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain..."
Many of our federal legislators and officials supplement their already juicy salaries and benefits by extorting bribes. But there is the technicality that bribes in cash or equivalent are illegal, and a provision exempting legislators from laws against getting paid off in cash wouldn't fly with the voters. So instead, they gave themselves a loophole: they legislated that the insider trading laws that apply to businessmen, and other non-members of the aristocracy of pull, do NOT apply to members of Congress, congressional staffers, and appointed officials of the executive branch. Thus, members of the US Congress have made themselves legally free to extort at will, provided the payoffs are not in cash or stock or other valuables, but rather in the form of insider information that the Congresscritters, etc., can use to steal value (legally - they made it so) directly from the retirement funds and other investments of the rest of us.
The link comes, ironically, from an organization dedicated to radical expansion of government power - and thus, of government-as-an-extortion-racket in general - a position its members justify, in part, by a naive belief that everything would be all right if only such loopholes were closed. Their opponents, on the other hand, insist that there is nothing morally wrong in insider trading - even when insider information is being used as the currency in which bribes are extorted from American business by our political rulers. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain..."
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Yes, there should be a legitimate market in organs for transplantation
Click on the title, above, for a comment in the New York Times "Freakonomics" column by Stephen J. Dubner:
And please, fellow Objectivists, hold back on knee-jerk reactions to "regulated." I doubt that in this context it means anything beyond objectively necessary requirements for fully informed consent, and safeguards against fraud.
Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, was accused of enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000. Mr. Dwek pretended to be soliciting a kidney on behalf of someone and Mr. Rosenbaum said that he had been in business of buying organs for years, according to the complaint.
Remember this story the next time someone brings up the need for a legitimate, regulated market for human organs, as we’ve discussed here many times in the past. Many people’s objection to such a market is that poor people would suffer because a) they won’t be able to afford to buy organs; and b) they may be coerced into selling them. But with the current black market, poor people are already being excluded from getting organs (because there’s a scarcity of donated organs) and being lured into selling them - although in this case, it appears that a middleman got to pocket $150,000 while the “donors” got only $10,000.
And please, fellow Objectivists, hold back on knee-jerk reactions to "regulated." I doubt that in this context it means anything beyond objectively necessary requirements for fully informed consent, and safeguards against fraud.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Free Speech and "Disorderly Conduct"
I'm amazed at the paucity of principled comment about the recent (and unfortunate) arrest of African-American literateur (and Harvard professor) Gates, by Cambridge police officer Crawley, on charges of "disorderly conduct." Gates' "disorderly conduct" is described, on the charge sheet, as "loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" - the "public place" being the porch of Gates' home, and the "behavior" being loud verbal criticism, probably inaccurate, of a police officer.
Before the essentials, though, I need to say why I tend to think that Gates' criticism of the police officer as a "racist" was inaccurate. I once knew a Jewish gentleman from a country in Central Europe that back in the 1930s practiced its own kind of "Jim Crow" against Jews; anyone who so much as "looked Jewish" was excluded from the "better" places of commerce in that country well into the 1980s. Like many American immigrants from Central Europe, my friend favored shorts in the summer. And, looking for a good place to eat lunch, was often stopped at the door, and told that shorts were not considered acceptable attire in the restaurant that had caught his fancy. On those occasions he was certain that he had been stopped at the door because he "looked Jewish" - even though the same restaurant would welcome him with a smile in winter, when he wore slacks.
When dealing with people who had faced racism in the past, a competent police officer will take the context and effects of their experience into account. Gates, unfortunately, permitted his experience - his first faculty job was in a part of America where racism was common and assumed - to bias his judgment. He probably owes Officer Crowley an apology for inaccurate criticism - or would owe Officer Crowley an apology if Officer Crowley had not taken Gates' error as cause for arrest.
Of course there are, even by the most stringent standard of individual rights, contexts in which loud speech can be objectively criminal. But, outside the context of fraud, or of violations of intellectual property, any legitimate regulation of non-governmental speech must be strictly content-neutral. In a free society, there is only a small set of contexts in which non-governmental speech can be a cause for arrest:
1. The speaker uses a private platform belonging to someone else without the owner's consent. Gates spoke from the porch of his own home, so this is not relevant here.
2. The expression interferes with the process of justice. Gates was not in a courtroom during a trial, and in any case a policeman is not a judge. A policeman is a specialized emergency worker, trained to keep a cool head even in contingencies far more disturbing than loud and inaccurate verbal criticism from an unarmed and otherwise innocuous citizen. So this is not the case here either.
3. The expression invades the property of others and interferes with their other rights. For example, shouting loudly at night, when the noise would disturb the sleep of one's neighbors, might be criminal. But it was daytime, and no one (other than the arresting officer) was irritated by the noise. So again, no cause for arrest.
4. The delivery of a credible threat. Not the case here, and not even alleged.
5. The proverbial "shouting fire:" speech that, in context, can cause a crowd to panic and stampede; or perhaps the incitement of an unruly crowd to a lynching or a riot. But there was no crowd; the handful of non-police onlookers at the scene were outnumbered by uniformed police.
So what was it, about Gates' conduct, that could possibly have crossed the line into "disorderly," meaning "criminal," action? Objectively, nothing. Subjectively, the arresting officer may have perceived Gates' speech as repulsive and insulting. But this is hardly enough reason for a professional public servant, sworn to defend the rights of the people, including the free speech rights of Professor Gates, to arrest Professor Gates for nothing beyond loud and insulting verbal criticism of a government employee, even when that criticism was publicly delivered, on Professor Gates' porch, in that employee's face.
One mark of a Police State, is that one may not speak ill of a police officer without risking arrest. Where is the First Amendment when we need it?
Before the essentials, though, I need to say why I tend to think that Gates' criticism of the police officer as a "racist" was inaccurate. I once knew a Jewish gentleman from a country in Central Europe that back in the 1930s practiced its own kind of "Jim Crow" against Jews; anyone who so much as "looked Jewish" was excluded from the "better" places of commerce in that country well into the 1980s. Like many American immigrants from Central Europe, my friend favored shorts in the summer. And, looking for a good place to eat lunch, was often stopped at the door, and told that shorts were not considered acceptable attire in the restaurant that had caught his fancy. On those occasions he was certain that he had been stopped at the door because he "looked Jewish" - even though the same restaurant would welcome him with a smile in winter, when he wore slacks.
When dealing with people who had faced racism in the past, a competent police officer will take the context and effects of their experience into account. Gates, unfortunately, permitted his experience - his first faculty job was in a part of America where racism was common and assumed - to bias his judgment. He probably owes Officer Crowley an apology for inaccurate criticism - or would owe Officer Crowley an apology if Officer Crowley had not taken Gates' error as cause for arrest.
Of course there are, even by the most stringent standard of individual rights, contexts in which loud speech can be objectively criminal. But, outside the context of fraud, or of violations of intellectual property, any legitimate regulation of non-governmental speech must be strictly content-neutral. In a free society, there is only a small set of contexts in which non-governmental speech can be a cause for arrest:
1. The speaker uses a private platform belonging to someone else without the owner's consent. Gates spoke from the porch of his own home, so this is not relevant here.
2. The expression interferes with the process of justice. Gates was not in a courtroom during a trial, and in any case a policeman is not a judge. A policeman is a specialized emergency worker, trained to keep a cool head even in contingencies far more disturbing than loud and inaccurate verbal criticism from an unarmed and otherwise innocuous citizen. So this is not the case here either.
3. The expression invades the property of others and interferes with their other rights. For example, shouting loudly at night, when the noise would disturb the sleep of one's neighbors, might be criminal. But it was daytime, and no one (other than the arresting officer) was irritated by the noise. So again, no cause for arrest.
4. The delivery of a credible threat. Not the case here, and not even alleged.
5. The proverbial "shouting fire:" speech that, in context, can cause a crowd to panic and stampede; or perhaps the incitement of an unruly crowd to a lynching or a riot. But there was no crowd; the handful of non-police onlookers at the scene were outnumbered by uniformed police.
So what was it, about Gates' conduct, that could possibly have crossed the line into "disorderly," meaning "criminal," action? Objectively, nothing. Subjectively, the arresting officer may have perceived Gates' speech as repulsive and insulting. But this is hardly enough reason for a professional public servant, sworn to defend the rights of the people, including the free speech rights of Professor Gates, to arrest Professor Gates for nothing beyond loud and insulting verbal criticism of a government employee, even when that criticism was publicly delivered, on Professor Gates' porch, in that employee's face.
One mark of a Police State, is that one may not speak ill of a police officer without risking arrest. Where is the First Amendment when we need it?
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Economics as it can be and ought to be
What would Economics be like without the grossly false, yet somehow widely accepted, belief in the automatic and universal rationality of economic actors? MIT finance professor Andrew W. Lo, and Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson, are making progress in that direction. The title above this blog post is a link to a Niall Ferguson lecture about the complicated relationships between the application of genetic algorithms - "evolution" - in biology and in economics. Ferguson induces his concepts from the facts of reality that he studies as a business historian. Finally, an economist with an epistemology that an Objectivist can applaud. Having once read Ayn Rand's marginalia comments about how lousy the epistemology of Ludwig von Mises had been, economics was the last place where I'd have expected scientific work - with a sound, inductive, contextual epistemology - to emerge.
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