elfs | This week's reads.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an editorial in which writer David P. Barash wheels out the boring and ancient complaint that teaching "You and me baby, we ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel" will wreck civilization. He starts by proposing that teachers of evolutionary psychology are "corrupting our youth" and recall that the last time a great teacher was convicted of that charge he was executed. He goes on to whine that evolution teaches that "biology teaches us that the goal of life is to endlessly joust with each other."

No, it doesn't. It also tells us that social creatures are meant to endlessly support one another. Yes, we want to succeed one another, but we also need one another in order to succeed. There are so many flaws in Barash's premise that I just loathe straggling in and trying to drain this swamp once again. Suffice it to say that the question is never which ideas are prettiest, but which ideas are most congruent with observed reality. (Whether or not most evolutionary psychology is congruent with observed reality is very up for debate, but that's a different debate.)

Steve Ballmer says, "Nice Operating System You Got Dere, Be A Shame If Anything Happened To It," by repeating the claim that Linux uses MS "patents" and that MS is now licensing some people to use those patents through Novell.

If SCO couldn't pull it off by proxy, Microsoft is going after Linus directly. Is Microsoft bluffing? Is IBM really willing to pull the trigger of Mutual Assured Patent Destruction? Stay tuned!

The most interesting article in religion this week was a study of the Essene's toilet practices. The Essenes gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, but they were also notoriously short-lived despite having recruitment requirements that demanded strong, strapping young lads. Their latrine was two hundred paces away from the camp, and they buried their waste, then returned for an immersion bath for "cleanliness." This was all very Old Testament stuff-- and it worked when you had fertile land and running water.

But the Essenes were in the desert and dependent upon rain collection. Their latrine practice preserved the microorganisms, and after many years the grounds were so contaminated their bare feet would collect disease, and the stangant "bathing pool" would then distribute it to everyone else in the camp. It's a terribly sad story about blind devotion to the dictates of one's religion, even when the circumstances are drastically different.

In another corner of the religion universe, however, phyicists point out that the Strong Anthropic Principle, which says that the universe is so fine-tuned that it shows signs of "intelligent design," is bunk. Three different papers show that the assumption is based upon the possibility of a universe that is both complex and vibrant, and that these assumptions can still stand even if the various constants of physics are wildly different from the supposed "fine tuned" levels they are at now. Greg Egan said this in his fictional book Schild's Ladder, ending with the statement, "It's not a miracle that the universe next door can have so much life; it's a miracle that our universe, which is so cold and empty, has any at all."

Rich Lowry is an editor at the Republican (they aren't "conservative") mouthpiece National Review. This week I read a great quote from him: "Liberals cannot count on conservatives being associated with corruption, incompetence or an unpopular war forever."

I love that passive voice. It just kinda happened to conservatives. It's nothing we did to ourselves, really. Quick, someone inform Lowry: you did do it to yourselves! Conservatives associated with the corrupt and incompetent, became corrupt and incompetent through their failure to disassociate themselves, and gave birth to and warmly embraced the tar baby war in Iraq rather than finishing the fucking job in Afghanistan like they should have.

In a state-level kookier-than-thou Worldnet Daily wannabe, a writer is outraged, outraged!, that the Muslim Congressman from Minnesota will give his oath of office on a Koran, and not a Bible. Jan Markell asks,

So now the Bible is equivalent to the Koran in the halls of Congress? Doesn't this then mean he is pledging allegiance to Islamic Law (Sharia) rather than our Constitution? Where is the outrage here?

Maybe her audience should be outraged at the stupidity.

In the bizarrely named website "Jews For Morality", writer Pinchas HaCohen rules that a violent knife attack at a Gay Pride rally last week in Jerusalem was not the fault the "quiet Talmudic scholar and father of five with no police record" who wielded the knife and maimed three attendees, but the fault of the gays themselves and those who granted a permit to the rally.

Indeed, God works in mysterious ways.

The utterly insane Rabbi Lazer Brody writes approvingly of Jews For Morality and their editor, and claims that Hezbollah's war with Israel was "God's wrath" for allowing gays to have a voice, any voice, in Jerusalem.

By now, you've all heard about the young man with the bad luck to have had Middle Eastern parents who was tasered by rent-a-cops last week for failing to show ID in a public place. My favorite anarchists, The Center for a Stateless Society,, have an interesting take on the issue:

Let's pierce the veil of mystification and see this case as what it is: a small group of ordinary people attacking another ordinary person while a much larger group of ordinary people stands "helplessly" by. The profession of the attackers is irrelevant; providers of police services don't need to be organised as an agency with superior authority -- a "government" -- in order to do their jobs. We don't believe in kings and emperors any more. Isn't it time to outgrow the idea of government as such?

And a comic captures my philosophy of life perfectly. Hey, I found squirrels!.