Correcting the record

Jay Richards claims that no Republican has ever implied or currently believes:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life.

The quote comes from Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, after the crash of 1929. Robert Reich claims that the current Republican mindset is of a Mellon-like opinion, and Richards claims that they aren't.

Does Sharon Angle count as a Republican? "The truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does." How about Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshir): "You're undermining the economy if you provide unemployment benefits to people who would otherwise be out looking for work." How about John Boehner? "Keeping workers on unemployment plans is not a responsible way to foster jobs growth."

There's a weasel word in Richard's argument, of course: "prominent." I would argue that Gregg and Boehner, and even Angle, are prominent. Contrary to all the evidence that extending unemployment insurance does not discourange people from work, and that unemployment insurance is the most straightforward and successful stimulus the government can offer (it is, after all, spent immediately on consumer items), the Republican attitude toward unemployment insurance is very obviously one in which there is "rottenness" in the system and it needs to be "purged."

We are on the road to serfdom, indeed, and it ain't the liberals who are leading the parade.

Two super-duper new geek posts!

In case anyone ever needs them, I've put up two new posts:

Auto-generating iCalendar ICS files from Django-Events-Calendar.

Auto-generating Google Calender publishing URLs from Django-Events-Calendar.

Yeah, you can probably sense a theme.

Is, or Is Not. There is no Why.

You know, normally, Francis Collins isn't that bad a guy. He's the original head of the Human Genome Project, and that's got to be for something. But he's also a committed Christian, who has spent a lot of his time trying to reconcile science and Christianity. He's even written a book, The Language of God : A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, in which he admits he was convinced by C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and by the "remarkable strength" faith had given his dying patients, and by the entire "beauty of nature" argument.

I think it's a load of bull, myself. Of course, given a choice between existential horror and a mythological promise of bliss, only those actually earnestly commited to reality will reject the premised promise. Of course we find some aspects of nature beautiful; nature is beautiful when it's aligned, or seems to be aligned, with our evolutionarily instilled goals of survival, sustenance, and reproduction. That's mostly what beauty is: it's an emotional reaction to the perception of furthered well-being.

Collins has an interview at BigThink, a sort of theistically-oriented version of Butterflies & Wheels (or so my limited experienced has led me to believe), and Francis goes off into the typical shallow reeds when he leads off by saying that faith is important because it asks "a different set of questions:"

Why are we all here? Why is there something instead of nothing? You either have to say, well those are inappropriate questions and we can’t discuss them or you have to say, we need something besides science to pursue some of the things that humans are curious about.

But I have to disagree with Collin's line of argument; his very premises are tragically flawed. When he asks, "Why are we all here?" the answer is, well, because in this tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the universe, conditions exist such that complex biochemical processes that support conscious thought can continue. A better question to ask would be, "What conditions would lead to a superior support structure for conscious thought?" and "What context, what supra-universe, has to exist such that the conditions for supporting biochemistry in our universe came about? Does that context support a vast probalistic array of universes, or is ours the only one?" Until and unless that last question can be answered, to lay down and start talking about the probabilities of life emerging are pointless. Even in our own universe, there is such a diversity of possible niches that our emergence is unremarkable. We are not privileged; we are simply the outcome of a universe that is, for the most part, utterly hostile to our existence. To claim that such persistence in the face of anything other than probability-- to ascribe it to the work of a loving god-- is to descend into a kind of narcissistic madness in which the rest of the universe, the other 99.999999999999999% of it, cold, irradiated, vaccuum-ridden, and so distant as to be almost unfathomable, exists just for your viewing pleasure.

Francis Collins is a shallow puddle, pleasantly surprised to discover he fits the hole in which he finds himself, and sure that somehow, somehow, the fit is the deliberate act of a conscious being, and not merely the accidental result of natural forces.