Obama Supports Net Neutrality

From the Huffington Post:

“I am a strong supporter of net neutrality,” said Obama. “What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says [Internet providers] should be able to be gatekeepers and able to charge different rates to different websites…so you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you’d be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites. And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet — which is that there is this incredible equality there…as president I’m going to make sure that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward.”

I would be interested to hear the positions of all of the candidates (both Dem. and Rep.) on this issue.

The Bigoted Brain

From Salon.com:

For me, real bigotry begins with the hubris and arrogance of those like Bill O’Reilly who insist that their assessment of others is purely based upon reason and conscious deliberation, as opposed to being colored by involuntary and unrecognized elements of prejudice. For us to treat others with real trust, we must begin by acknowledging our biases and consciously doing the hard mental work to overcome them. We may not be able to prevent biased opinions from arising, but we do retain the veto power over whether to believe in and act on them.

We are left with two options. We can pretend we are free of bias, and avoid thinking about how to deal with our own deeply ingrained tendency to discriminate. Or we can take a lesson from neuroscience, and even from dumb computer agents, which can switch from noncooperation to cooperation if they learn that it is in their best interests.

The article deals with new evidence supporting the idea that there is a biological process behind bigotry.  I would say that it is sensationalistic to put it like that – there is in fact a biological process behind recognition of differences – that doesn’t translate necessarily to hate.  Today, hate is primarily a result of nurture, not nature.

California Burns . . . Cheney Naps

From CBS:

A news crew was taping a cabinet meeting at the White House as the president was giving a briefing on the California wildfires.

The news crew caught Cheney as he appeared to be nodding off.

Follow the link above to see the video.  Apparently he had had a late night Halo 3 session.

Obama’s Ex-Gay Friend

From The Hill:

The nation’s biggest gay rights group is trying to force Sen. Barrack Obama (D-Ill.) to cancel presidential campaign event with a controversial preacher who claims he was homosexual but has been cured.

The Human Rights Campaign has expressed its strong reservations to Obama over his campaign-sponsored tour that features gospel singer Donnie McClurkin.

Obama issued a statment(also a great op-ed from Earl Ofari Hutchinson) that didn’t directly address his tour with Donnie McClurkin, but did reaffirm his stance on gay rights:

“I have clearly stated my belief that gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens. I have consistently spoken directly to African-American religious leaders about the need to overcome the homophobia that persists in some parts of our community so that we can confront issues like HIV/AIDS and broaden the reach of equal rights in this country.

I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin’s views and will continue to fight for these rights as President of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division.”

Ideally he would toss McClurkin out to the curb.  Well, ideally he wouldn’t have scheduled anything with him in the first place.

But this is not the best of all possible places in the best of all possible times.  As long as Obama is clear on where he stands on the issue I’m not sure that he should throw out McClurkin.  Admittedly, I’m not familiar with McClurkin or how important he is to the voting public – but if he can help Obama get elected and Obama makes it clear that he does not in any way support McClurkin’s reported gay bashing – then let them speak together.

You can appear at the same event as someone without endorsing their beliefs. 

Comcast and BitTorrent; a Complicated Relationship

From wetmachine:

So, in the short term, Comcast’s efforts to control its “quality of service” merely make life miserable for its users. Longer term, it also shifts the problem of moving large files around to every other network, trashes a legal delivery system that content providers have started to embrace, boomerangs back on Comcast, and sets the stage for either an extraction of monopoly rents or a standards war that imposes massive costs and inefficiencies on the internet economy as a whole. And that’s accepting Comcast at its word that it is merely trying to manage network traffic (without engaging in those pesky and expensive network upgrades) and that it is not (yet) trying to force users to stop using BitTorrent so they will buy video programming through its rival Video on Demand (VoD) system.

I offer up this article as a follow up to my post about Comcast blocking some internet traffic, including BitTorrent.  The article does a great job at looking at the implications of Comcast’s move – and they’re not good.

Search Terms

Here’s a sample of some of the terms people typed in search engines yesterday and that lead them to this site.

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Can’t go wrong when you’re getting traffic from both “aristotle on ignorance” and “black men suck dick”.

Circumcision and the Barbarous Bris

This weekend I was lucky enough to attend a bris.  According to http://www.circumcision.net/,

It is written in the Torah: “This is My covenant that you shall observe between Me and you and your children after you, to circumcise your every male. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall become the sign of a covenant between Me and you”

I’ll forgo the ‘why is god so interested in your penis’ jokes.  The bris gave me a good opportunity to consider something that I honestly hadn’t spent much time considering.  To cut, or not to cut?  I was born in a generation where it was standard to circumcise due partly to bad science and partly to cultural pressures.  Today however, the medical benefits of circumcision are seen as non existent – and many even find that there are medical benefits to leaving the penis intact.

The Platform of the Fetus and Newborn Committee of the Canadian Paediatric Society (the PFNCCPS) calls into question the belief that intact males are more likely to develop penis cancer, and notes that the financial and emotional costs of complications arising from circumcision make it advisable to not circumcise.

Ultimately I think that performing non-necessary surgery on new-borns demonstrates not our devoutness but rather our barbarousness.  Cosmetic surgery should be the decision of the boy and should not therefore be made until he is old enough to make the decision for himself.

This issue is not one of life and death (in most cases).  Therefore I attended the bris and was respectful.  The boy will grow up and be fine.  But watching a grown man in white robes suck the foreskin off of an eight day old baby didn’t do much to make me change my mind about religion in general. 

 That being said if circumcision were to stop we would be deprived the websites of such organizations such as the National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males (NO HARM). 

I would also point the reader to these websites:

The Lost List - part of the “intactivism” movement

Natural Family Online- which has two useful charts on the pros and cons of circumcision.

The Circumcision Reference Library – which has fun “Genital Integrity” graphs

Jewish Circumcision Resource Center- for a Jewish perspective, duh.

UPDATE:

I’ll have to correct myself – there is some evidence that removal of the foreskin cuts the risk of infection of HIV.  I should know, I blogged about it <a href=”http://fearofignorance.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/foreskin-anyone/” rel=”nofollow”>here</a>.

 UPDATE II:

There’s a follow-up post to this one, which you can read here.

Quote of the Day – Thomas Paine

[The Bible] is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

-Thomas Paine

Comcast Blocks Internet Traffic

Evidently not supporters of Net Neutrality, the AP is reportingthat Comcast’s

technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

As a comcast subscriber, and a BitTorrent user, and a supporter of Net Neutrality, this news is very disturbing indeed.  This is also disturbing from the viewpoint of a consumer – I don’t pay (well, I guess I now do) comcast to limit my usage of the internet, to decide what I can and can’t do.

  ComcastWatch

The customers need to fight back.  Too often we let the companies we buy services from take advantage of us.

Congress Clears Telecoms of Wrong-Doing

Salon.com has a great piece written by Glenn Greenwald about the telecommunications industry buying immunity.

Let’s just describe very factually and dispassionately what has happened here. Congress — led by Senators, such as Jay Rockefeller, who have received huge payments from the telecom industry, and by privatized intelligence pioneer Mike McConnell, former Chairman of the secretive intelligence industry association that has been demanding telecom amnesty — is going to intervene directly in the pending lawsuits against AT&T and other telecoms and declare them the winners on the ground that they did nothing wrong. Because of their vast ties to the telecoms, neither Rockefeller nor McConnell could ever appropriately serve as an actual judge in those lawsuits.

In fact, the telecom industry already lost in federal court (it’s under appeal now).

Just read what Bush-41-appointed Federal Judge Vaughn Walker — operating out in the open, in an actual court of law, with both sides present and in accordance with due process — ruled when rejecting AT&T’s argument that they are entitled to have the case dismissed because they operated in “good faith” [Decision(.pdf) at p. 68]:

(AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.)

I agree that judiciating should be left to the judiciary.  Once again we see how the current administration is more corrupt than any reasonable person could possibly imagine.

Quote of the Day – Aristotle

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.

-Aristotle

Quote of the Day – Galileo Galilei

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

- Galileo Galilei

The Material Brain

Salon.com has a great interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein in which they discuss, among other things, the idea of consciousness going beyond the physical mechanics of the brain.

Virtually all religious believers think the mind cannot be reduced to the physical mechanics of the brain. Of course, many believe the mind is what communicates with God. Would you agree that the mind-brain question is one of the key issues in the “science and religion” debate?

PINKER: I think so. It’s a very deep intuition that people are more than their bodies and their brains, that when someone dies, their consciousness doesn’t go out of existence, that some part of us can be up and about in the world while our body stays in one place, that we can’t just be a bunch of molecules in motion. It’s one that naturally taps into religious beliefs. And the challenge to that deep-seated belief from neuroscience, evolutionary biology and cognitive science has put religion and science on the public stage. I think it’s one of the reasons you have a renewed assault on religious beliefs from people like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

The neuroscientific worldview — the idea that the mind is what the brain does — has kicked away one of the intuitive supports of religion. So even if you accepted all of the previous scientific challenges to religion — the earth revolving around the sun, animals evolving and so on — the immaterial soul was always one last thing that you could keep as being in the province of religion. With the advance of neuroscience, that idea has been challenged.

This question has always been fascinating to me, partly because I know a lot of progressive people who see the hypocrisy of religion, and the brilliance of scientific thinking, and yet have such a hard time with the idea that everything you think and feel can be reduced down to material mechanisms in the brain.  Some are even offended by the notion that feelings such as love don’t have some sort of extra-physical existence.

To me, complexity does not mean that we need to step out of the realm of the physical to attempt to explain something.  The brain is truly a remarkable organ, and every day we learn more and more how remarkable it is.  People have always turned to religion, to spirituality, to explain what they could not understand – and the workings of the brain are perhaps the last refuge for these people.  It’s the last pillar of religious belief to fall.

Romney Speaks out Against Pot

From RGJ.com:

Asked whether he would call off the Drug Enforcement Agency from raids in states that have approved medical marijuana use, Romney responded loudly: “No.”“I believe marijuana is the gateway to drug use that is a plague to our children and a plague to our country,” he said. “Medical marijuana is a Trojan horse for getting marijuana legalized. That is the last thing America needs. We do not need more drugs in our school and homes.”

Once again we have the problem of a politician thinking what they think they should think, not thinking what the evidence and research would lead any-other reasonable person to think.

That’s five ‘think’s in one sentence, in case you were counting.

From a Rand Study:

We’ve shown that the marijuana gateway effect is not the best explanation for the link between marijuana use and the use of harder drugs,” said Andrew Morral, associate director of RAND’s Public Safety and Justice unit and lead author of the study. “An alternative, simpler and more compelling explanation accounts for the pattern of drug use you see in this country, without resort to any gateway effects. While the gateway theory has enjoyed popular acceptance, scientists have always had their doubts. Our study shows that these doubts are justified.”

The study demonstrates that associations between marijuana and hard drug use could be expected even if marijuana use has no gateway effect. Instead, the associations can result from known differences in the ages at which youths have opportunities to use marijuana and hard drugs, and known variations in individuals’ willingness to try any drugs, researchers found.

While this is far from being Mitt Romney’s biggest problem, it is an example of a more general, conservative problem.  And that is that for the most part (there are exceptions to every rule) the republican party takes the same positions on issues year after year, decade after decade, regardless of what has changed in either our understanding of an issue, or in society.  This stubborn close-mindedness is perhaps my major issue with the party – and I’d like to be able to say that the country would never allow anyone who displayed this trait take public office.  But then I look at Bush, and once again, find myself beating my head on my desk.

Creation Museum is Killing our Country

This picture was taken inside the Creation Museum.  I shit you not.

Honestly, how do we tolerate this kind of ignorance?  How do we tolerate people who are not only ignorant, but damn proud of it?

There are bigger problems in this country than illegal immigrants and campaign finance reform.