The issue, ultimately, is that we have a resource offering to reveal classified information because it’s important from a transparent good government standpoint that they do not hide from us. But the other side of the equation is that the leaker’s identity is kept anonymous, never actually known by WikiLeaks.

Frankly, I’m of two minds on the topic, which comes as no surprise to me. Being a computer nerd has taught me that just about any innovation we come up with will have its good side and its bad side. The internet, for example, gives us a tremendous access to knowledge and information that no generation has ever had so readily available, but also provides any number of negative services, from the easy dissemination of child pornography to the Americanization of the globe.

The US government, of course, is presenting the view that disseminating this information is an act of terrorism, and damn near an act of treason. It insists that it must have at least some air of secrecy in order to protect the people, like when Dad doesn’t tell you that he lost his job and the family’s coasting on fumes. And to a large degree, they’re right. Governments functioning on the international scale have got a different set of perspectives and priorities than you and I do. It’s the macro and the micro; the pressures, procedures, and implications of a global decision are completely different than those on a personal level.

As well, there’s the question of context. You get a document and you read it and interpret it, but you’re interpreting it based on your own knowledge, your own bias, and your own understanding of how it fits into the whole. This can be dangerous and entirely misleading. Most Americans find what happened at Abu Ghraib deplorable, yet they think Jack Bauer’s the best man in times of crisis. In the context of the show 24, they can totally understand his need to work outside the boundaries of common decency and law. Context is everything.

And then there’s the question of, for want of a better term, peer review. How can we ever be certain that the documents we are seeing are valid? One of the first things I always say to people when they present me with something for my consideration is that they must consider the source. WikiLeaks does not give us that capacity. What would prevent it from becoming a tool for disseminating misinformation?

However, those are the cons. The pros are powerful too. If you read the About Us page on WikiLeaks, you get an idea of what it is they are attempting to do. We know instinctively at this point that power corrupts, corruption festers, and for any of our countries to truly work for the people, we have to have checks and balances on the elected and appointed few who make the decisions. What WikiLeaks is doing is not new, just new technology. Exposing the corruption of governments and corporations is integral to being able to trust them to actually fulfill their roles. Believing they are being straight with us, or even that when they lie it’s for our own good is a dangerous ploy.

The media, once upon a time, actively filled the role of the fourth estate, but those days are long gone. Today’s media is tied inexorably to the teat of government and business. You may blame budget cuts all you like, I personally blame those who run the media. They no longer investigate, they wait like lapdogs at the foot of the throne for morsels from the king. They do not act with autonomy, and as such they have violated the trust of their position. In his book Watching The Watchdog: Bloogers As The Fifth Estate, Stephen D. Cooper argues that the role of bloggers as a means to apply those checks and balances to the media. WikiLeaks is, at least in some ways, an extension to that.

WikiLeaks is a good thing. We have this system of checks and balances strictly because we know that we cannot make the mistake of trusting governments implicitly. Someone has to keep the four estates honest. We cannot implicitly trust them any more than we can trust any other agency, but we need transparent government. We need to know what is being done in our name, and they just aren’t telling us.

Jim

It’s an incorrect statement, of course, as mathematically flawed as my absolute mathematical proof that I shall live forever. I take the total number of time I have died (0) and the total number of years I have been alive, and compare them in a ratio:
 
0 : 36

Now, the math behind ratios is simple. Whatever thou doest unto thine left side of thy ratio, thou shall doest unto thine right side. So if we quadruple the number, clearly the result is:
 
0 : 144

Let’s add an order of magnitude:
 
0 : 1440

Clearly, the math shows that no matter how old I get, I’ll never die. It is of course a joke of an equation and not meant to be taken seriously, but the same logical hiccup tells me that since I’ve weathered every storm in the past, clearly I’ll be fine to weather any present or future storms. There’s no relationship between each of these events, and it is entirely possible that I be presented with a storm I cannot hope to best.

I just read some writing on the Huffington Post web site by Dr. Serene Jones, the President of the Union Theological Seminary. Honestly, I was bored at work with a few minutes to kill, and I figured that HuffPo would result in much giggling on my end, and I was not let down. There is nothing wrong with Dr. Jones’ (hah! Get it? NO TIME FOR LOVE, DOCTOR JONES!) premise. She says that in tough times, such as the divorce that she went through, she knows that God’s love is the rock of her foundation that will keep her grounded and safe.

It’s a classic example, though, of that idea that we use faith to control the uncontrollable. More power to her, I say. I’ve been through a divorce, and mine was amicable enough, but still was an ordeal emotionally that I’d like to not have to experience again. I can relate with the frustration and the fear and the self-recrimination that goes hand in hand with a failed marriage. If that’s what gets her through the day (just as my belief in my ability to handle what life throws at me does for me) then that’s fantastic.

What’s interesting to me on the topic, though, is what my ex-wife went through spiritually during the divorce. She was a fairly evangelical Christian at the time, though now she has converted to Mormonism, and naturally chose to find comfort in her faith. What greeted her was no comfort to her. Malachi assures us that God bloody hates divorce (Malachi 2:16), Matthew tells of Jesus sounding rather surly about the idea of divorce (Matthew 19:8), and also explains that any woman who been divorced is an adulteress slut who can never again be touched by a man for fear of God’s eternal wrath (Matthew 5:32).

I guess I’m curious to know how God can be your rock and help you through a change that he so totally hates.

Jim

I was all set to write out a layman’s terms explanation of the experiment, but Allison Bond (the writer of this piece — duh!) already did that, so just go read the article. You won’t know just how totally dirty you are until you do!

Jim

Let’s do a little math, all of which was inspired by my grandfather.

Let’s say you live to be a hundred years old. You die on the day you were born one century before. Forgetting about leap years (because at night figuring out leap years is stupid) that means you’ve lived 36500 days. That’s a good long time.

Just for argument’s sake, let’s just erase the days from the age of 70 as being for most people a time when your body and mind start to deteriorate and you really aren’t living the life we all dream about. We’ll just erase those days and pretend they don’t count, shall we? That leaves us with 25550 days to work with.

And those first 24 years are really years we invest in becoming the person who we’re going to be for the rest of our lives, so let’s cut those ones out of the equation too. That leaves us with 16790 days to work with. Suddenly, that’s not so much.

Now let’s say that we are like most people and work too hard. Lots of times we come home tired, eat some dinner, crash in front of the tube and wait to go to bed. Let’s say we do that four days a week for the remaining years. That leaves us with 7222 days to work with.

Forget yard work. Forget helping a friend move. Forget shopping for vegetables. Forget taxes, dinner with the boss, and dinner at Great Aunt Ruth’s house. You’re down to just 20% of your life to actually enjoy yourself. And you won’t even use that. Chances are that the number of days the average person really enjoys themselves are far less than that.

So what in the screamy blue hell is wrong with us? Why do we spend so much of our life on really unimportant things? Why do we work overtime on a salary, in essence giving our lives away? Why do we invest time in relationships that don’t work? Why do we give our life away by the handful?

When I did that math, it really creeped me out, and it goes along with what I’ve been saying for a while now. Life is too bloody short to just shit away on the unnecessary bits. It’s why I do all the things I do. Life has to mean something, and if we’re ruling 80% of it as being wasted, developmental, or deterioration, that doesn’t leave us with a whole buttload to work with. Work that buttload, baby. Work it for all you’re worth.

Now today I’ve been for a few weeks mulling over my future and trying to get my head around what exactly I want to do and how I’m going to go about doing it. I have plans, but the process of them is daunting. This afternoon I read the following quotation from my friend Jerry Auld‘s book, Hooker & Browne. For the record, it’s a great book about a guy working as a trail guide in Athabasca and trying to come to grips with where his life is heading, and I highly recommend you read it. It even got nominated for the highly prized Boardman Tasker award! I’d give you mine, but Jerry autographed it, so just go order one from his web site. Anyways, the quote:

  “See, that’s the power of stories: warriors fight because someone convinces them with a tale. Most people are not motivated by some Valhalla or Elysian Fields anymore, now it’s retirement.”
 
I’ve got a real problem on my hands. I’m totally not motivated by retirement. Quite honestly, I don’t see myself ever retiring. I’m sure I will at some point, but the idea of retiring at 65 leaves me cold. At 65 I’m hopeful that I’ll have an abundance of knowledge and wisdom that would be a shame to waste on retirement. And what would I do with myself? I plan on living a good long life. My grandfather, mentioned in the long quotation above, died at the age of 99. It was only months before his death that he and his wife finally moved from their apartment to an assisted living facility; before that, they were both operating under their own steam. I cannot imagine what 35 years of living retired would be like. It just seems weird.

In the book, the main character comes up with an idea that we all have two peaks, two things that we strive for, and always one is greater than the other. For me, my peaks are knowledge and contentment. I think knowledge is the greater, but not by much. I have always had a thirst for knowledge, and that hasn’t changed. What has ultimately been making me think of this of late has been the fact that there’s so little knowledge at my present employment (at least in my current role) that I actually feel the desire to achieve. That’s not a knock on the company, they’re great to pay me (and keep me contented in many ways, thus helping with good ole’ peak number 2) but it’s clear that the other peak is just sitting there out of reach, smiling down at me. So it’s time.

I got into the realm of computers on a whim, not because I wanted to do it as a career, but because I knew that I would eventually figure out what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to be broke working lame jobs while I waited to figure it out. It took me more time than others, perhaps, but I feel that the direction I am going to embark in will constantly offer me adventures on my two peaks. It’ll take me a decade of schooling part time, maybe more, but that just means a good climb is ahead.

I don’t care about retirement and I don’t care about Valhalla. I care about climbing those mountains of mine. So what are your peaks?

Jim

In fact, there’s been some interesting research that Jerry Coyne has been discussing on his blog of late about the idea that our brains are so bloody awesome they may have ruled out free will . I don’t understand the science behind it, but according to recent tests, it appears that we make decisions at a brain chemistry level as much as seven seconds before we realize that we’ve made a decision. I’m no Johnny Von Brainsurgeon, so I honestly can’t weigh in on the topic except to say that if my conscious free will is an illusion, it’s an awfully powerful one.

And what about those olden-days jerks who would take their brains for granted so much? Attributing love as a function of the heart just seems laughable now, but once upon a time that was exactly where they thought our feelings came from. Of course, they also thought meat created maggots and that there was a God in Heaven watching down on us and controlling our every move (but any time we did something he didn’t like it was our fault, even if he was the one who controlled us), so maybe their opinions just aren’t that valuable at this point.

The brain is, in my opinion, the thing that modern day folk think of as the soul. Many of my contemporaries like to believe that there’s this thing inside all of us that contains our personality and our sense of history, and that when we die, that part continues on to whatever is next. I don’t buy that. It’s all the brain, and when the brain dies, we die with it. Of course, that’s opinion, but I’m pretty confident in it. The more we learn about how the personality and memories of a person are impacted by brain injury, the more we have to recognize that these are functions of the brain, not the ether.

I did mushrooms once. I know, killer segue. It was an experience to say the least. I was astounded to come to grips with how fragile my grasp of reality actually was, and just how easily my brain could, with the right encouragement, convince me of the absolute validity of the fantasies it was presenting me. In retrospect, my experiences strike me as if my right brain took over, and every now and then my left brain, who was way out of his depth at trying to understand what the bejesus was happening, would chime in with stupidity, causing the right brain to react and come up with fantasies on top of fantasies to explain to the left that everything was as it should be.

Prior to the mushroom trip, I had a certain quiet disdain for the mentally ill. I had always thought that reason should win out; that you know deep down that there can’t really be an international government plot to get you to wear sneakers so that they can use the titanium oxide in the soles to spy into your thoughts. But mushrooms taught me that reason wasn’t quite as good as I thought it would be at safeguarding me from the ridiculous.

I picked up Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.’s book, My Stroke Of Insight and have been enjoying it quite a bit (though admittedly I have some disagreements with it), and one of the things she keeps saying that I never really think of is the idea that all of this stuff I see and feel and taste is all essentially not as I perceive it. My brain interprets light rays picked up through my eyes and creates a vivid, three dimensional world. My brain grabs the vibrations of the components of my ear and determines for me how the world should sound. Touch… Taste… Smell… They’re all reactions turned into signals from nerves through to the brain, and we have a habit of thinking that they are so much more than simple interpretations by our brain. What we see is what we know.

Celebrate your brain today. Buy it a beer, or maybe something that won’t cause it damage. At least take a moment to reflect on it, because your brain really is a magnificent thing, the product of billions of years of evolution and the thing that has most benefitted our species in it’s quest to survive. Of course, whatever you do for your brain today, you might have decided it seven seconds before you knew. There’s just no surprising your brain.

Jim

The examples of this intersecting are legion, but today I read an article and commentary on Pharyngula about a family who belong to the Followers of Christchurch in Oregan. Their baby has a hemangioma, which is not normally a particularly big deal, but the location is a critical factor in this case. “The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.”

Ew.

The family are absolutely certain that the only treatment she needs is prayer and anointing oils. They are, in short, perfectly prepared to permanently disfigure and possibly blind their daughter because it’s what God wants. The FoC church in Oregan apparently has an infant mortality rate 26 times that of the general population. Clearly, if God is their healer, he sucks at it.

This is hardly a new concept. The ridiculous body count of faith healers is well documented on sites like What’s The Harm, and I’d be hard pressed to imagine anyone who hadn’t heard heard of a similar story. Often the parents wind up in court, and as in the case of both this story and that of Daniel Hauser and many others, the parents have been legally removed from the equation. The right to life trumps the right to religious freedom.

Let me go on the record here. If you’re a grown adult and don’t want medical treatment for a condition, that’s fine. You’ve made a choice. It might not be an educated one, but if you aren’t able to make an educated choice by this point, you’re pretty much a waste of life anyway, so maybe it’s for the best. But your children cannot make that choice and deserve to have the best possible chance at survival. You should not and for the most part do not have the ability to let your child die or be grossly harmed by your negligence even if you believe your God would rather it be this way. That’s all there is to it. As a parent, your job is to protect and love your children. Refusing them medical attention fails at that job.

Now, I know that you’re thinking you’re protecting them in the next life. On that one we disagree, but I’m willing to concede that you’re an illogical tit with whom there is no winning. Fortunately, the way we win is by getting the courts involved. If you can’t do it, at least the state can look after your children and give them the attention they need. Your right to religious freedom means nothing to me the minute you are a threat to the health and welfare of another.

In fact, I’m tempted to set up a church who believe in my supreme right to murder whomever I choose. It’s my right to religious freedom, after all.

Jim

This article from The Guardian

There is nothing that can really be done to stop this practice. Superstitious people will go to great lengths to perform their remarkable rituals, and nobody answers “what is the purpose of your visit” with “destroying my daughter’s sexuality”. As well, I doubt there could be a charge of child abuse involved since the crime took place in a foreign (and presumably non-extradition) country. But I’m by no means an expert on international law, so that might be a mistake on my behalf.

If it’s happening in Britain, it’s happening everywhere. All I can really say about the topic is that it’s sick, and I hope really terrible things happen to the parents who arranged this and the monsters who make it their career to mutilate girls.

Female circumcision is just a polite way of saying genital mutilation. A circumcision, while not a pleasant process, is a million miles better than what is being done to women. And yes, there are a myriad of acts that lump under the female genital mutilation banner, but none are necessary, none are safe, and all result in a physically and emotionally destroyed woman. That’s not me sitting in my ivory tower of western culture and imagining that my world view is better than others; the act of disfiguring a child is despicable, and the total pre-scientific way that this ritual is performed is intrinsically dangerous and abhorrent.

Jim

Honestly, there was stuff there that was new and interesting for me, and I’m a huge nerd. So if you have a layman’s understanding of evolution, give this a read and enjoy finding out more about what is an exceptionally cool aspect of how we got here.

Jim

We know that the universe has certain laws that are true everywhere. Some of these we know already, others presumably are bigger or smaller than we can currently see. Nothing strays from these laws. Everything can be traced back to that Big Bang, but if that is the case then what is the point of faith? If God put every single ounce of truth that defines the universe into that initial explosion, somehow able to imagine how he could get from a big sack of nothing all the way to an entire universe full of things, allowing for all the amazing things that need to be in place in order for the earth to exist in a way that would sustain life, allowing for all the things on earth that need to be in place for humanity to appear, and allowing for all the things that took place in human history to lead to you and I having this conversation, then why do we assume that he has any capacity to change anything?

And what would be the point of creating a universe if you already knew what was going to happen within it? If he built the universe based entirely on the absolute certainty of his plan, and nothing can deviate from that plan (or he wouldn’t be omnipotent), why bother? The logic of doing that escapes me entirely. Does God have free will? If he doesn’t, then what drives him? And if he does, then why did he bother?

Once upon a time, they believed that the world was 6000 years old. Now we know the world is billions of years old. Once upon a time we thought that the sky was a firmament, and now we know that it is an atmosphere, and beyond that the nearly infinite unknown of the universe. Once upon a time we believed that God spoke directly to people, but now we know that this doesn’t happen. Once upon a time we believed that God directly created every single species of living thing, but now we know that the process of evolution took us from single-celled organisms to the complicated creatures we are today. Why is it that every time we learn something, God seems to receed further and further away from us, always hiding just outside our reach? He used to live just above the earth, and now he lives somewhere we cannot fathom outside our universe. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Every new insight moves God farther and farther away, and takes more and more of his power away from him, yet you continue to think of him as an all-powerful creator who is active in your life?

You say that he has always been there, driving forward with his plans. Was that necessary? More and more, we are learning that our decisions are are the result not of free will, but of the way we have evolved and the impacts that the world around us causes us to become exposed to. All of these things operate given the constraints set out at the moment of creation, so why would he need to direct anything? If evolution is a natural process controlled by the laws he instantiated at the origin of everything, then nothing could stray from those rules. And nothing does. At no point do we see crockaducks or life forming out of peanut butter. Evolution follows strict guidelines with absolute adherance. So where is God in that?

If he created everything in that instant, all the rules that would lead to you and I having this conversation, then he would have had to have specifically designed all of the pain, suffering, misery, starvation, pestilence, death, and depravity that ever was. Forget a loving God, he would have had to have purposely thought up the genocide of the Jews. Does that seem sensible to you?

If it is as you say, God has a plan, that plan was realized the instant he started the ball rolling, or else we would see evidence of his direct impact intervening and counteracting the rules he set out. If nothing fails to live up to those rules, and everything has a plan, and the plan has to go off perfectly because God is without flaw, then why can he judge us? According to your logic, we are the products of his rules, so if anyone needs to be punished for our actions, it would be him for setting out rules that would require us to behave badly.

I guess what I’m trying to ask you is how any of this makes a lick of sense, and if you answer with him working in mysterious ways, I’m going to punch you in the cock.

Jim

I had never heard of this practice, but I saw a post on Pharyngula today entitled What fresh torment can we perpetrate on young girls? and it included an incredible and awful video about the practice. All I can say is that there seems to be no amount of torment we will spare our children if the mood takes us.

It’s funny, because I hear all the time about kids who say their parents are abusive to them because they give them spankings or force them to do chores when they don’t want to. There are so many more horrible things that could happen to them. Kind of makes a spanking and getting sent to your room to clean it seem minor in contrast.

Jim