Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 4

Obama to Blame for Hurricanes, Disease – and Everything Else

Rudy Giuliani is blaming President Obama for the murder of two NYPD officers. Says Rudy, “We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police. I don’t care how you want to describe it — that’s what those protests are all about.”

Rudy claims specifically that the propaganda against the police started with the president. Yet at no time has the president ever said anything about hating the police. Instead, he urged calm and peace. What he said immediately after police tear-gassed protestors in St. Louis: “We’ve got to make sure that we are able to distinguish between peaceful protesters who may have some legitimate grievances and maybe long-standing grievances, and those who are using this tragic death as an excuse to engage in criminal behavior.”

Here is what Obama said to protestors in Ferguson bent on punishing the police: “That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. That won’t be done by using this as an excuse to vandalize property. And it certainly won’t be done by hurting anybody.”

Read Obama’s actual words; and then Giuliani’s accusation. I challenge anybody to say that what Rudy claims is simply not ridiculous. Where did Obama imply he hated police or that others should? Yet this is a pattern set over the past 8 years: the right wing has blamed Obama for everything bad, no matter how far removed from Obama in reality; and given him credit for nothing good, independent of how directly his actions led to that good. No leap of logic or time or reason is too great for them to link Obama with something unpleasant; and no cause and effect no matter how obvious or self-evident is too strong for them to dismiss, reject or ignore. This political strategy is tiresome, childish, insular and counter to the interests of the American people. And frankly my dear, I’m damn tired of it. Let us set the record straight.

The Economy

If you believe that a president’s ability to impact the economy is limited, that is fine, but it works for all presidents and for when the economy is doing well and declining. You can’t reasonably claim that a president you like is responsible for good economic news, but dismiss such news for a president you don’t by falling back differentially on the idea that a president’s influence is limited. Similarly, you can’t on this same argument of limited influence rationally dismiss bad news under a president you support but blame a president you oppose. Yet the GOP embraces this horribly hypocritical path, as we will see below.

For all of those who think Democrats in general or Obama in particular is a big spender: the deficit at the end of Bush’s term was a whopping 9.8% of our GDP, while under Obama it is now 2.8%. Obama inherited a shrinking economy in freefall, a banking system near collapse, a housing market imploding, the auto industry in disarray, and the world at the precipice of a catastrophic global depression. All sectors of the economy have recovered from that nightmare. Our economy is now growing at a positive rate of 3.9%. Examine the positive outlook for 2015 and 2016 from mainstream economists, for example Kiplinger’s: “Hiring is on the rise, job openings are at a near-record level, and layoffs are scarce (indicated by a very low rate of initial unemployment claims since May).”

But we hear no praise for Obama for any of this, even though Republicans fought his every move, going so far as to shut down the government in protest of the very policies that brought us back from the brink of disaster. He saved the auto industry in the midst of howls of conservative remonstration. These advances are the direct consequence of Obama’s policies in spite of rabid GOP opposition. Yet we only hear that he is to blame for the murder of NYPD officers.

And let us not forget the insane Republican scare-mongering about hyperinflation. Remember that? Here is Paul Ryan: “Unless we change course, we will have a debt crisis. Pressed for cash, the government will take the easy way out: It will crank up the printing presses. The final stage of this intergenerational theft will be the debasement of our currency. Government will cheat us of our just rewards. Our finances will collapse. The economy will stall. The safety net will unravel. And the most vulnerable will suffer.”

So the GOP is free to make the weirdest, craziest, most insane accusations and predictions, but bears no responsibility when said utterances prove to be ridiculous. No apology or mea culpa for being an idiot. So with jaw-dropping, surreal, outrageous, unbelievable hypocrisy probably never before matched in scope and breadth, by the first week of March 2009, just over one month into the Obama presidency, Republicans were blaming Obama for the dire economic news. For eight years under Bush any bad news was Clinton’s fault; just one month into Obama’s presidency, Bush was innocent of all blame. And now Obama gets no credit for any of the good economic news after seven years in office; blame him before he even takes office, but give him no credit after nearly two terms. We do not have a vocabulary that can capture the deep absurdity of this assault on reason. In my lifetime this claim of relative responsibility between Obama and Bush for the failing economy when Obama took office is unmatched in raw cynicism and total detachment from reality.

Unemployment

Here is the report from the Department of Labor: “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 288,000, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 6.3 percent in April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment gains were widespread, led by job growth in professional and business services, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and construction.”

When Obama took office, unemployment was at 7.8%, and climbing rapidly. The economy was losing 700,000 jobs per month. Unemployment now is 5.8%, and the economy is growing. This is real growth: in September, 44% of Americans rated the economy as good, the highest mark since 2007. In November, companies hired 321,000 more workers, the largest one-month gain in nearly three years. Gains were widespread across nearly all industries.

But wait: remember the embarrassing episode when prominent Republicans, the right wing press and the nut wing echo chamber accused Obama of manipulating unemployment numbers prior to the election when unemployment rates fell below 8 percent? This stuff is cringe-worthy; and where are they now; now that unemployment is in the 6 percent range? Obama was to blame for the high numbers (but oddly was able to manipulate them); but he is given zero credit for the healthy employment figures now. Is this not tiring? How can conservatives face themselves in the mirror?

Stock Market

The DJIA was at 3310 on Bill Clinton’s first inaugural day. The market was 6813 when he was next inaugurated. At the end of Clinton’s second term, on the day Bush took office, the DJIA was at 10,578; that is the market Bush inherited from Clinton. When Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, the Dow was at 7,949, a decline of 25% over the eight years Bush was president. By March the DJIA had completed its tumble to bottom out with a 12-year low at just over 6500. Republicans blamed Obama for the continuing decline from 7,900 to 6,500 during his first month in office, but not Bush for the loss from 10,600 to 7,900 in eight years as president. A year later, Dow hit 11,000. The stock market doubled in value during Obama’s first 14 months in office; it is now well into the 17,000s. Republicans no longer mention talk about the stock market.

Republican statements about Obama in early March 2009 are stunning in their duplicity. Obama is to blame after five weeks but George Bush is free of any responsibility after eight years. Let’s take a quick look at right wing publication headlines at as the new Administration settles in:

• Bloomberg.com (March 6): “Obama Bear Market Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps.” In this article the claim is further advanced with, “President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bear market.”

• Wall Street Journal (March 6): “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow.” Author Michael Boskin prognosticates that, “It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.”

Let’s look at the headlines about Obama as Dow hits 17,000: Bloomberg.com: nothing; Wall Street Journal: nada; Drudge report: zilch.

Listen to the loud roar of silence. Cup your ears and you will hear nothing about the DJIA more than doubling from its low from early 2009; no screaming headlines that say, “This is the Obama stock market” when it hit 17,000. Obama was blamed for a declining stock market before he even assumed office; but now that he has been president for seven years, Obama gets no credit. All aboard! All aboard the crazy train.

Gas Prices

Remember high gas prices? Well the far right wants you forget, and forget what they said about their cause. Mitt Romney said that “Obama is to blame for high gas prices.” To bolster his point, Romney noted that Obama does not allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR), and his refusal to build the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas. Romney said of Obama, “His policies are responsible for not having America using the energy that we have in this country.” Romney is not alone; I have documented dozens of Republican leaders on record saying Obama is specifically and personally to blame for high gas prices.

So what happened when the price of gas fell? What now that the price has declined into the low $2 range? Silence. Total, complete, deafening, maddening, huge, gaping, mind-bending silence. Where was Obama’s commitment to making prices higher? Where were the impacts of Obama’s failed energy policies? Where were the disastrous consequences of delaying the Keystone pipeline? Where were the catastrophic energy shortages due to overzealous EPA regulations? Yet not a single word from the right praising Obama for lower energy prices. He was responsible for them going up, but not coming down. Everything prominent Republicans and wing-nut pundits said about gas prices and Obama’s policies proved to be wrong.

And then the Republicans finally broke their silence, with the claim that “Obama deserves no credit for fall in gas prices.” This is absolute proof of my thesis; Republicans blatantly admit it. Read this logic and weep for our country: Representative Allen West (R-FL) said, “If you’re the chief executive officer of the United States of America, you should take responsibility for anything that’s occurring in this country, and you should not want to seek to get praise. This is what the military taught me: Leaders don’t take credit, leaders take responsibility.” Um, OK. So, you blame Obama for rising gas prices; but then give him no credit for falling prices because it is unseemly for a leader to accept credit for effective policies — the very policies you were blaming for failure earlier. My head hurts. My heart aches for this great land.

War on Terror

During George Bush’s re-election campaign, a constant refrain was that we should “not change horses mid-stream” during a war or in times of peril. We will for now ignore the fact that the most horrendous terrorist attack on our soil happened under George Bush. We heard that after all, following 9/11, we had no more terrorist attacks, and that was due to George Bush and his team protecting us. We had to re-elect him to keep us safe. Funny how we do not now hear that same argument from the right in support of Obama and the Democrats after nearly two terms of domestic security.

Even a clear victory like killing bin laden has to be given GOP spin to diminish Obama. At best, conservatives could offer only faint praise to Obama for killing Osama bin Laden while taking some credit for the task. Cheney said killing bin laden was the result of a “continuum” spanning three administrations.

Obama managed to remove all or nearly all weapons of mass destruction from Syria without the loss of a single American life. The GOP pummeled him for his actions there, but now gives him no credit for the result they said would never happen.

The GOP’s twisted logic goes even further down the road of insanity. Not only do they ignore Obama’s accomplishments and claim his successes as their own, they ignore completely their own tragic failures. Let us remember what our fearless conservative leaders said about Iraq as we prepared for what turned out to be the longest most expensive war in US history:

Donald Rumsfeld (Nov 2002): “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” Could any one person be more wrong about so much?

Dick Cheney (Mar 2003): My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Dick, tell that to every American soldier wounded and killed there. No, go ahead.

Bill Kristol (Mar 2003): George Bush is not fighting this like Vietnam…it’s not going to happen… this is going to be a two-month war, not a ten-year war.” It was a ten year war. Of course Kristol has been wrong about everything of importance: he said Sarah Palin would pave the way to the White House; that Obama would not beat Hillary Clinton in a single primary; and incorrectly predicted Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court. And people still listen to this guy. If I was that wrong about that many things I’d just stay in bed.

So let us review: the GOP was spectacularly, outrageously wrong about war in Iraq; failed to kill bin Laden, did nothing to stop the nuclear program in Iran, and allowed Syria to continue to mass WMDs. Bush and team undermined our own values by torturing prisoners (and from that got no actionable intelligence), some of whom were later proved to be innocent of any crime at all.

How does this record compare to Obama’s? Obama in contrast ended the war in Iraq, drew down troops in Afghanistan, killed bin laden, toppled Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, reversed Bush’s policy on torture, increased support for veterans, and tightened sanctions on Iran (while leaving open the door to prevent Iran form going nuclear without military intervention). But after all these significant successes after nearly two terms in office, all we hear from the right about Obama is that he is responsible for the death of two policemen.

Health Care

In spite of the intense, unyielding, never-ending opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, nobody can deny that Obama has tackled the problem of health care costs growing out of control when nobody before him would. And all the early signs point to success: Health care spending grew at 3.9% in the last three years, the lowest growth rate in 50 years. “Although the economic downturn contributed to that slow growth, ACA provisions that incentivize providers to be more efficient while improving the quality of care, such as Accountable Care Organizations, medical homes and value-based purchasing, are helping to drive these encouraging trends, too. Some cost savings are even higher than expected. Before the ACA, Medicare spending was expected to grow 6.8% over the next 10 years, but new projections show a dramatic slowdown in spending growth to 4.8%. That 2% drop in spending will result in cost savings of $751 billion over the ACA’s first 10 years.”

But Republican and Democrats alike ran away from Obamacare during the mid-term elections; nobody gave him any credit at all. And he alone has stood firm in his support of real health care reform, even when his own party abandoned him.

Consequences

When half of our country accepts the huge steaming pile of feces from the GOP that Obama deserves credit for nothing, our future does not look bright. But make no mistake: Democrats are also to blame for this bleak outlook. They deserved to lose the Senate and House because they ran away from Obamacare and the president’s amazing record of success; instead of embracing his policies they distanced themselves as fast as their pathetic legs could run. Democrats have fully ceded the territory of reality to Republican fantasy. Need a specific example? The media not long ago touted the story of “Obama’s dropping approval ratings” noting that his “approval ratings have plunged to record lows” and have “plummeted” and are “sinking to historic lows.” Only one problem with this narrative: it is factually and demonstrably false. Here is the verifiable truth: from January 1, 2014 to October 30, 2014, Obama’s approval rating fell from 42.6 percent to 42 percent. The year’s peak was 44 percent, and the low of the year was 41 percent. A drop of about one-half of one percent does not constitute numbers that are “plummeting” or “sinking” or even “dropping.” Yet the Democrats sit by and let this nonsense flow forth with no fight. And so it goes.

This inability or unwillingness on the part of the Democrats to demand that our political debate be based on fact and reason has given the GOP the odd ability to deny Obama’s many and significant successes, or more perversely, take credit for them when they cannot be denied. Our political landscape has been permanently altered by this pull away from reality.

If the Democrats fought, if they supported Obamacare, if they rallied behind the president and his outstanding record of success, if they had demanded reason over false despair, they would likely still control the Senate. But instead they bought into the bogus narrative of the GOP in which Obama is to blame for all our ills and is responsible for none of our gains. I am confident history will treat Obama well; but we should not have had to wait for that verdict when the obvious is right before our very eyes.

Soul Search: Why Pope Francis is Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Pope Francis has opened the Pearly Gates to Blue Heelers. The Pope said that “all creatures…will be vested with the joy and love of God, without limits.” He quoted Pope Paul VI saying that “Paradise is open to all creatures.” However, little Rover should not yet get too excited about a supply of perpetual dog treats and slow postal workers in shorts. There seems to be some papal problems with this pronouncement, some disagreements among the papal powers. Previous church leaders, like Pope Benedict, formally denied animal entry to heaven with the pronouncement that, “For other creatures, who are not called to eternity, death just means the end of existence on Earth.” Benedict forever condemned his beloved cats to something less than eternal bliss. But Pope Paul VI before him implied otherwise, claiming that “one day we will see our animals in the eternity of Christ.” God is sending a mixed signal to his primary spokesmen.

The Menagerie

In spite of the confusion from above, let us assume for the moment that the pro-animal contingent of the papacy is right. Who among life’s menagerie will be admitted to heaven? I suspect the Pope did not think this through. For example, what exactly is meant by “all creatures” and “our animals”? Those two descriptors mean very different things; “creatures” is all inclusive, while “animals” excludes the other major life forms of plants, fungi, archaebacterial and bacteria. But even if we restrict ourselves to the animal kingdom, we cut a wide swatch through life. Are we restricting ourselves to mammals? If so, are we including naked mole rates? Are Rhinos going to heaven? And by what rationale would we even restrict ourselves to mammals since they are only a small subset of animals? We should not forget alligators or birds. Why stop there; what about insects and spiders, which of course are animals. Tarantulas are pretty smart. We certainly have no reason to exclude sponges, which are defined as sessile animals. And why just animals; how about bacteria and viruses? How heavenly is heaven going to be if you have to worry about catching Ebola? Each and every one of these beings is one of “god’s creatures.” I can see no reason to send a German Shepherd off to the angels but deny that same ride to a platypus or groundhog. Even within primate there exists a huge variety of behaviors and intelligence: does the diminutive lemur get a raw deal while the great apes get a coupon to heaven?

Pope Francis is trying to weasel out of a problem that cannot be solved using sleight of hand and questionable biology. However clever Francis may want to be about this, nothing is mentioned in the bible about Fido having a soul that ascends to heaven. His religious teachings as traditionally interpreted do not accommodate the obvious – that creatures other than humans are sentient beings. Which brings up the self-evident question why would only humans go to heaven? No matter what the answer or how it is justified, religious doctrine is clear: only humans are made in god’s image, only humans can know god.

Soul Search

The sense we have that a dog might qualify for heaven but a jumping spider might not mainly comes down to the difference we assign to their brain power. Delving a little deeper, we would have greater expectations and hopes for eternal bliss for animals that are intelligent enough to be self-conscience and self-aware. So in order to begin addressing the question of soul, we need to be more precise in our thinking about intelligence, self- consciousness, and self-awareness. Without this distinction we would soon be talking about plants going to that great garden in the sky. Face it; we all know that viruses, bacteria, plants and some animals like sponges are not going to heaven. And we know that because of our instinct for what it means to be intelligent, self-conscience and self-aware. But because those concepts are so critical to understanding what animals make the cut, let’s define them more formally. A rough hierarchy exits among these concepts, so we’ll take them in order.

Intelligence

One must be intelligent to be self-conscious, and in turn, one must be self-conscious to be self-aware. Finally, self-awareness must be present to feel empathy. So we begin with intelligence, which can be thought of as the ability to learn from experience (acquire and retain new knowledge), and to subsequently apply that new knowledge with flexibility to manipulate or adapt to a changing environment. Or we can view intelligence as the ability to create abstract thought, beyond instinct or responses to sensory input.

We need to recognize that smarts are situationally dependent. You would be severely challenged to teach a porpoise to climb a tree. You may well be able to solve math problems, but your dog will learn more quickly and more effectively than you ever could to sniff out the drugs in your colleague’s suitcase, and to notify you of the contraband. An animal’s intelligence, or more precisely, its ability to manifest its intelligence, is tightly correlated with its natural environment, and its evolutionary adaptations. That reality complicates our soul search.

Self-consciousness

The definition of self-consciousness can be distilled to: understanding that you as an individual are distinct from the external environment, and at the same time recognizing that others are similarly aware of you as an individual. I can only recognize Ralph as a unique person if I first understand that I too am an individual.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is a further refinement of the concept of self-consciousness in that you not only recognize yourself as an individual relative to others and the physical environment, but you are aware of your own mental state, including your own internal thoughts independent of the external world. Your thoughts are unavailable to anybody but you until you decide to expose them to the external world either through behavior or some type of communication. Self-awareness depends on no other creature but you. You would be self-aware even if you were the last person on earth, with no other sentient being to recognize your presence. Self-awareness is your brain acknowledging its own existence.

Dualism and the Center of the Universe

We have now in our hand the minimum requirements for heaven; but being smart is not enough. In publishing his seminal work, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in 1670, Baruch Spinoza established himself as the first modern philosopher, and therefore an early target of Christian wrath. The Church quickly denounced Tractatus as “the most vile and sacrilegious book the world has ever seen.” His biggest crime? Spinoza believed the bible to be nothing but a tale told by man, and that the soul dies with the body; that there is no afterlife. This has implications for all other Church teachings. So enjoined the battle that rages today. (For this full story and references, see Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World). But unlike in years past, science now has something to say about this matter.

Until recently, most scientists treated any study of intelligence or self-awareness as the third rail of academics – touch it and die. That attitude has changed over the past decade, however. Neuroscience (the field in which I have my Ph.D.) is moving beyond the old and false dualist arguments that posit that the mental and physical are different in kind, or that understanding the brain will not lead to an understanding of the mind. Dualism (separating mind and brain) arises from the deep human need to offer an explanation for what is not yet understood. We have difficulty just saying, “we don’t yet know” while searching for the answer. From the ancients trying to explain the rising and setting sun to modern efforts to understand the beginning of the universe, humans simply make up comforting explanations when nothing more is available, with little regard to objective truth. What could be more comforting than knowing that the earth is the center of the universe, around which everything revolves? This geocentric (“earth-centric”) view was taught as an absolute truth for almost 1500 years until Copernicus and Galileo proved instead that the earth revolves around the sun. We don’t yet know the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness, so we make up the notion that it is somehow a mysterious entity separate from the brain. Dualism is nothing more than the neurobiological equivalent of geocentrism – a false doctrine created out of a deep need to understand something that is not yet understood. Instead of admitting we don’t know we make up a comforting but answer false answer that the mind is separate from the brain.

And now we come to the crux of the matter. Dualism also contributes to the persistent idea that humans have souls, something beyond the body, just as the mind is something beyond the brain. By rejecting dualism, the notion of a soul becomes equally insupportable. So the question of who goes to heaven is mute. We no longer have to go through the tortuous exercise of counting the number of angels on a pin head.

Why Humans?

For the sake of continued argument, let’s say that the concept of soul is valid. In spite of what Francis said the Catholic Church, and in fact most of Christianity, still teaches today that only humans have souls. In 1990 Pope John Paul II was perhaps the first church leader to concede that “animals possess a soul” and are the “fruit of the creative action of the Holy Spirit and merit respect.” While these are kind words, they are but a few in the face of 2000 years of contrary history; and the idea was contradicted by subsequent popes. Moreover, his words conflict directly with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states:

Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator.” He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,” and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity. (CCC #356)

Would a chimpanzee sharing 97% of our genome not have a soul? Does this mean that the soul, and the entirety of our human dignity, resides in the differential 3%? Would a chimpanzee have a soul, but not an elephant because their genome is less human?

We have this conundrum of who has a soul and who goes to heaven because the basic premise on the question is rather absurd. The concept of a soul is fatally flawed, just as is the idea of dualism. We avoid this silly debate entirely by admitting that nobody has a soul and nobody is going to heaven. But Francis can’t have it both ways: if all creatures can go to heaven, it trivializes the very idea of a soul (really, bacteria have a soul?); if Benedict is right, then we can’t allow an exception for dogs or other animals we deem worthy based on squishy logic. In the world of biology, intelligence, self-consciousness and self-awareness are on a continuum; and our ability to assess these characteristics is limited by an animal’s ability to manifest them in the right environment. There simply is no way pick and choose who goes and who stays other than to admit the choices are completely arbitrary, hardly worthy of god’s work.

Pope Benedict almost got it right when he said, “For other creatures, who are not called to eternity, death just means the end of existence on Earth.” He just needed to include one more species, humans, and he would be absolutely correct.

The Tortured Logic of Bush and Cheney

After much anticipation, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a long-awaited report on the CIA’s torture program following the terrorist attacks of September 11. Now we know unambiguously that by our own definitions and historic actions, George Bush and Dick Cheney should be tried as war criminals. There is not much subtlety here: the report summary states that the Bush Administration initiated a torture program that was “in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations and our values.”

Criminals of World War II and the War on Terror

Compare the Senate’s report and what happened after we defeated Japan and Germany is clear. At the end of World War II, the Allies convened the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), better known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. From those trials we have victim testimony the torture; he is one example:

A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.

In modern vernacular, this is called waterboarding (referenced as “water treatment” by the tribunal). Whatever its designation, between 1946-1948, the IMTFE convicted 25 Japanese leaders for crimes against humanity, specifically including torture by waterboarding.

The Senate report documents numerous examples of waterboarding under the Bush Administration. In one case, a detainee was waterboarded 83 times. Nobody denies that such waterboarding took place or that this form of torture was known to and condoned by Bush and Cheney. Bush openly admitted he authorized torture. Bush and Cheney remain unapologetic for the alleged (but openly acknowledged) crimes for which we have convicted and put to death our enemies following the end of the Second World War. So here we must ask a simple, straightforward question: By what rationale would we not try Bush and Cheney for the same crimes we convicted the Japanese? I challenge anybody to answer that question other than with the inevitable conclusion that we should indeed try Bush Administration officials for war crimes. No, really, go ahead and explain why we should not try Bush and Cheney as war criminals.

Tortured Logic

But let’s take a step back from the alleged criminality of the Bush Administration. Let’s ask why. Why did we conduct these horrible operations? Why did we violate our most basic values? The rationale was always that torture was essential to prevent another terrorist attack; that torture saved lives. This rationale has become a mantra from those involved: CIA Director John Brennan, who was a senior CIA officer during a time secrete prisons were being established, still claims that “The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.” Brennan goes on to claim that torture “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” Dick Cheney insists today that the torture program was “absolutely, totally justified.” Cheney insists that “torture works.”

The Senate report lays waste to those claims. The very first conclusion from the report: “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”

In addition, the Senate study finds that the information acquired proved irrelevant to stopping terror threats. In others, the use of the techniques resulted in detainees providing fabricated or inaccurate information, and in still other cases, the information obtained through interrogating the detainees had already been acquired through other techniques. Bush and Cheney condoned torture for nothing. Their arguments for torture are bogus, unsupported by history, negate our core values, and have the perverse effects of undermining our security. We have known this long before the Senate report was published.

Three Critical Flaws

The Bush Administration’s line of reasoning was then and is now deeply flawed for three critical reasons: 1) abundant evidence, supported by the Senate report, and which we will examine in detail, demonstrates that torture is not an ineffective means of gathering actionable intelligence, 2) defining if some action “works” is arbitrary and therefore subject to abuse and manipulation as a metric to measure viability, and 3) torture is immoral, even if the technique were proven to be effective (and they are not).

Any one of the three points would undermine the argument supporting torture, but all three are true and, combined, provide overwhelming support for those opposed to the practice.

After the Obama Administration killed Bin Laden, Cheney and gang claimed that torture led to information that eventually led to Bin Laden. Such a claim is nothing but an absurd and desperate attempt to cover up past criminality and incompetence. The primary source from which we learned the name of Bin Laden’s most important courier (eventually leading to Bin Laden himself) came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But not when he was waterboarded repeatedly in 2003, during which he claimed consistently he did not know the name of the courier. No, Khalid gave up the name sometime between 2004-2005 long after his enhanced interrogation sessions ended. Jose Rodriguez, who was in charge of the Counterterrorism Center, makes a contorted effort to claim torture led to useful information from Khalid. But listening to his tortured justification is itself torture, a cringe-worthy explanation that reeks of desperation.

Torture is ineffective

Cheney never served his country in the military, and he has no experience in the world of intelligence. Yet he claims he knows more about interrogation than those in the field directly involved.

Experts close to the issue largely agree, as does the Senate Report, that Cheney is simply wrong, that torture is ineffective. The experience with Khalid supports this conclusion. Opponents of torture cannot be painted as liberal sympathizers; indeed they are mainly conservative stalwarts.

• Former FBI Director Robert Meuller said in a December 2008 Vanity Fair interview that he knew of not one single planned attack that was prevented by information obtained through torture.

• FBI Agent Ali Soufan has written that: “There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah [the first al-Qaeda suspect subjected to waterboarding and other harsh tactics] that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.”

• FBI Agent Jack Cloonan says, “I think that any agent who walked into a room and saw a subject as has been described – crawled up in the fetal position, either deprived of water or subjected to unusually warm temperatures, pulling his hair out, people on hunger strikes, and so on – understand that that person is no good to you from an intelligence perspective.”

• Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq, has concluded that torture does not work, particularly in the “ticking time bomb” scenario so often quoted by those who support torture.

• The current U.S. Army Field Manual while not prohibiting enhanced interrogation recognizes that “torture and inhumane treatment is ineffective.”

• Brigadier General David R. Irvine as written a series of articles and given multiple presentations providing a list of reasons “why torture doesn’t work.” What are his qualifications to draw that conclusion? He is a retired strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation techniques and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School. He and a group of three dozen highly decorated generals, not exactly a cabal of liberals, wrote a letter to Senator McCain in 2005 urging that the United States heed the warning in the Army Field manual that torture is ineffective.

• Former CIA Operative Robert Baer has said, in support of Obama’s release of memos that detail the agency’s interrogation techniques, that “nobody…has presented evidence that torture works and I just don’t see it.” He later went on to say that information from torture is “useless.”

Or rather than taking the word of these people directly involved, you can believe Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who with no operational experience claims with zero supporting evidence that waterboarding caused Khalid to cough up the information. You choose who has the greater credibility on this issue.

Efficacy is no argument for legitimacy

The Bush Administration’s logic used to support torture means by extension that any illegal or immoral action, no matter how heinous, can be justified if such actions “work.” Even ignoring the obvious ethical dilemma inherent to such views, consider how internally inconsistent his argument is at the most basic level. If torture can be justified on the basis of national security, and is a necessity to prevent an imminent attack, why stop at waterboarding? Why not apply electrodes to testicles, cut off fingers and ears, burn skin, poke out eyes, pull out fingernails, or do anything that must be done to prevent harm to the country? If Bush and his cohorts believe that enhanced interrogation is justified to protect the United States, then why stop at techniques that do not leave permanent scars? That arbitrary limit makes no sense if the goal is to protect America at any cost. Stopping just before the point of permanent harm undermines their primary argument that they condoned waterboarding as a necessary means of gathering critical intelligence that would save us from another attack. If that was the goal, and enhanced interrogation works, then he would have to support chopping off fingers or hands if that would yield the intelligence necessary to prevent an attack.

The only refuge from this inconsistency is to claim that waterboarding is in fact not torture. If simulated drowning is not torture, then proponents avoid stepping on the slippery slope to fingernail pulling and eye gouging. But waterboarding is torture, which is made abundantly clear in the Senate report. The technique dates back to the Spanish Inquisition, and is universally recognized to be torture. And of course Japanese were tried as war criminals for waterboarding American and British POWs.

So where does that leave those who support torture? Quivering on a bed of moral quicksand and a pile of inconsistencies. If waterboarding works, and if that effectiveness is sufficient justification for its use, then surely the threat of permanent physical harm or death would be even more effective, and even more justified. The only honest position those who support torture can take is that they would support those more aggressive forms of torture if such actions protected the United States. If they claim otherwise, they would have to admit that there are limits to how far they would go to protect the country from attack. But if they have no limits to how far they are willing to go, they would agree in principle with those who oppose torture. The only remaining argument is whether waterboarding is torture, and we answered that when we executed the Japanese for the practice. The pro-torture position is untenable.

Torture undermines our national security

With torture we get the worst of both worlds: we gather no useful intelligence and we undermine our reputation as a democratic government of principles. Our claim to world leadership, and the export of democracy, rests solely on the idea that the United States is inarguably qualified to champion universal ideas of freedom. That claim becomes hollow if we sanction torture. We lead most effectively by example, but our ability to do so becomes limited if we abandon our most cherished values. Our policies and practices become the most effective recruiting tool our enemies could ever hope for, and we do not gain a commensurate advantage to offset that advance on the other side.

Torture is immoral

Newt Gingrich condemned torture in 1997 when he said, “…there is no place for abuse in what must be considered the family of man. There is no place for torture or arbitrary detention.”

Assume for the moment that torture is effective. Assume that torture has saved American lives. Even taking those falsehoods for truth for the sake of argument, we are still left with the inevitable conclusion that torture is inherently immoral, and therefore unacceptable. By sanctioning torture, we adopt the moral code of the very enemies we seek to destroy. We become them. That we are even discussing torture as U.S. policy is proof that we lost our way. Our only salvation is to openly confess to the criminal acts of the preceding Administration, condemn them, and vow never again. The Senate report is a start, but only that. There exists no ethics of torture; certain acts are wrong with no further explanation needed, just as certain rights are inalienable. Our founders did not feel obligated to define those rights other than in the broadest of terms because they are self-evident. So is the immorality of torture.

Only appeal to moral relativism can be used to justify waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques. Torture is said to be acceptable as the lesser of two evils – making morality a relative measure. But moral relativism fails completely in every significant way. To a relativist, no moral code can be criticized because whatever a society deems morally right is so by definition, and cannot be condemned by another society. But that raises some questions that, when answered, prove the fallacy of relativism. Does morality within a society get determined by majority rule? What if torture is approved by 51% of the population one year, and 49% the next? That would mean torture is moral one year and immoral the next, clearly an untenable position. And what constitutes the unit called “society” that approves of a given moral code? Is a society defined by nationality or ethnicity? Is the United States one society, or is it made up of multiple societies of Hispanics, gays, Wall Street bankers and bikers? If so, does each of those societies have a unique moral code? Could each independently determine if torture was moral? How would conflict between them be resolved? Any reasonable answer to any of these questions dictates that ethical relativism must be false as a theory. Torturing children for fun would be universally condemned, regardless of how right a particular society found that practice. Relativism fails completely, which means that some elements of morality must be basic to humanity across time and across cultures. Torture can never be explained away in any culture, or any reason.

Bush and Cheney are blights on our history; they failed us when we needed leadership. They appealed to our worst instincts. They undermined our most cherished values. They justified heinous actions as necessary to protect us when in fact such actions undermine our security. The Senate report brings to light the dark ages of the Bush Administration. Good riddance, and may we never repeat the horror from that time of demagoguery and brutality.

A War on Reason, Not on Christmas

With the same predictability and inevitability of a House vote to abolish Obamacare, Bill O’Reilly yet again has declared his false war on the faux war on Christmas. He has little new to add to his odd diatribe. Even his graphics are tired; the same old poorly drawn tree this time has a few more presents stuffed underneath compared to last year‘s effort, as if he can’t muster the energy to continue the ridiculous assault.

O’Reilly’s is not an acute bout of insanity, but instead the steady drip of crazy. Since about 2004, O’Reilly has been agitating about a war on Christmas, with an assist in 2005 from Fox News Host John Gibson, the author that year of, “The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought.” In this world view we are one “happy holiday” away from hordes of secularists forming angry mobs hell bent on going house to house to take down Christmas lights and burn down Christmas trees. Plastic snowmen, wire Rudolph and roof-perched Santas don’t stand a chance. For mocking this absurd idea, the Daily Show host Jon Stewart is going to hell, as decreed by Mr. O’Reilly in the latest skirmish of this fake war. Let’s take a step back and see if Jon has an appointment with the devil.

In spite of annual conservative cries to the contrary, there is no war. Christmas is everywhere, inescapable, omnipresent, a force so powerful that nothing can impede its pervasive influence. A Christian complaining that Christmas is under attack when submerged in that holiday’s ubiquitous presence is like a fish in the Pacific Ocean complaining that there is not enough water. A lone humanist swimming in the middle of that vast ocean would be hard pressed to agree that water was in insufficient supply.

Bully as Victim

According to a 2008 survey from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. Only 4% are self-proclaimed non-believers (broken into the survey categories of atheists at 1.6% and agnostics at 2.4%).

Yet in spite of these vast, massive, overwhelming, deeply embedded majorities, Christians often speak in the dialect of victimhood. O’Reilly taps into this sentiment. The idea of Christians as modern victims while enjoying an overwhelming supermajority is difficult to swallow. Envision that humanist floating in the middle of the Pacific. From the perspective of a tiny 4% minority, any claim by a group representing 78% of the population that the views of a few are a threat to the many is simply surreal. Nobody would take seriously a big brute of a bully who beat the daylights out of an innocent bystander, and then claimed he was victimized because he scraped his knuckles. Yet O’Reilly and his gang continue to gain traction by complaining about their sore knuckles.

The real problem, though, is not this fake war on Christmas, which could be easily dismissed as a far-right attention-getting gimmick. Much more is at stake: the real war is not against Christmas; no indeed. Instead, Christians like Bill O’Reilly have declared war on religious freedom itself, demanding that the United States convert to a Christian nation. Perversely, they do so under the banner of religious freedom while attempting to subvert such freedoms. They use the subterfuge of claiming religious persecution as they seek to dominate all other religions. Religious freedom to them means freedom for Christians to impose their will on all others. O’Reilly justifies this power grab by claiming that only Christians stand between innocent Americans and the onslaught of euthanasia, legalized narcotics, abortion at will and gay marriage. He believes that only Christian morality can save the day.

The Real War

So we now come to the real war, which has nothing to do with Christmas. The right claims that Christmas is under attack as a surrogate victim to promote a much broader agenda, one that goes beyond threatened holidays and the fear of moral decay. The barrier separating us is defined by the unbridgeable gulf between god and rationalism. This is not a culture war, but a battle between theism and rationalism.

Before imploding in the face of his sordid extramarital trysts, presidential candidate John Edwards based his campaign on the idea of two Americas, one rich the other poor. He was right about the idea that American is divided, but wrong about the nature of the division. The deeper and more important split is defined by religiosity, not riches.

The nearly even distribution of votes between conservatives and liberals in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 reveals clearly a lasting and deep chasm in American society. Heated rhetoric, vitriol, excessive passion and closely contested elections with hanging chad expose to light the existence of two societies with little in common, living side by side but miles apart. O’Reilly speaks to one half, Jon Stewart to the other.

The conflict between these two world views is made apparent in the details of our voting booth preferences. Religiosity alone is the most important, obvious and conclusive factor in determining voter behavior. Simply put, church goers tend to vote Republican. Those who instead go the hardware store on Sunday vote Democrat by wide margins. The closest election in American history (Bush and Gore) offers plenty of evidence for the religiosity divide. Of those voters who attend church more than once per week, 68% voted for Bush and 32% for Gore. Of those who never attend church, 35% went for Bush, 65% for Gore. The divide in our society is not between rich and poor, or Catholic and Protestant, or Christian and Muslim, but between those have faith and those who have reason. Forget not that 50 million Americans voted against Obama in both elections. Does anybody doubt that most of those voters count themselves among the faithful?

Rationalism and Theism

Those who accept the idea of god tend to divide the world into believers and atheists. Yet that is incorrect. Atheist means “without god” and one cannot be without something that does not exist. Atheism is really a pejorative term that defines one world view as the negative of another, as something not what something else is. The word atheist is analogous to the denigrating word “colored” to describe African Americans, which was meant to say they are colored relative to the pure “standard” of white. Atheism is similarly meant to describe rationalists against the pure “standard” of belief. Both terms are the result of ignorance and bias about what constitutes the baseline for comparison. Just as we thankfully no longer use the world colored, we should abandon the term atheist.

I do not need to prove god does not exist; believers must prove he does. I have no burden of proof at all. If we insist on defining one group as the negative of the other, then the world would better be divided into rationalists and “arationalists” meaning those with reason and those without. But a more reasonable and neutral description of the two world views would be theists and rationalists (or humanists, take your pick).

The Moral Divide

Perhaps the clearest distinction between theists and rationalists is found in the perception of which group best defines and protects our moral values.

The association between morality and religion has been established so firmly over the past 2000 years that the link largely goes unquestioned. Churchgoers tend to believe that they have a leg up on moral behavior relative to humanists, or worse that rationalists are a threat to morality. In that environment of religious fervor, any attempt to shift to a strictly secular model of morality strikes many as heretical even today, on par with Galileo’s transgression so long ago.

But cold statistics prove the association between religion and morality wrong. A paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology concluded that societies with the lowest measures of dysfunction are the most secular. How did the author, Gregory S. Paul, arrive at this conclusion? He analyzed 25 indicators of “social dysfunction” including rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STDs, unemployment and poverty. He compared those rates to religiosity as measured by self-professed beliefs and frequency of church attendance within each country studied. The two most religious countries, the United States and Portugal, turn out also to be the most socially dysfunctional measured against those 25 indicators. His conclusions have been challenged by some skeptics who claim the results are a consequence of “selection bias” in what data are collected and analyzed. There is likely some truth to that since social and behavioral studies can only rarely completely eliminate the bias of self reporting. Paul’s conclusions though are fairly robust in spite of the study’s flaws. Society has the association of morality with religion inverted. Humanism is the guardian of morality, not its greatest threat.

Secular and Religious Morality

Traits that we view as moral are deeply embedded in the human psyche. Honesty, fidelity, trustworthiness, kindness to others, and reciprocity are primeval characteristics that helped our ancestors survive. In a world of dangerous predators, early man could thrive only in cooperative groups. Good behavior strengthened the tribal bonds that were essential to survival. What we now call morality is really a suite of behaviors favored by natural selection in an animal weak alone but strong in numbers. Morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development, not a gift from god.

Mr. O’Reilly, your moral high ground is nothing but sand being washed away with the tide; your indignation nothing but the result of a world view so insular that you can see only your own hate.

Our inherent good, to which O’Reilly is so blind, has been corrupted by the false morality of religion that has manipulated us with divine carrots and sticks. If we misbehave, we are threatened with the hot flames of hell. If we please god, we are promised the comforting embrace of eternal bliss. Under the burden of religion, morality has become nothing but a response to bribery and fear, and a cynical tool of manipulation for ministers and gurus. We have forsaken our biological heritage in exchange for coupons to heaven. That more secular countries suffer less social dysfunction is not only unsurprising but fully expected. O’Reilly fears moral decay if Christianity fails to dominate; he instead should fear the false morality of religion scalped on Ticketmaster.

Human Hubris

Religious morality is fundamentally flawed, resting precariously on the false notion of human superiority. For millennia, peoples of nearly all cultures have been taught that humans are special in the eyes of their god or gods, and that the world is made for their benefit and use. This is revealed clearly in Genesis, which gives humankind the mandate to fill, rule over and subdue the earth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator.” He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,” and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity. (CCC #356)

Blinded by this deeply engrained religious bias we keep forgetting that our highly developed cerebral cortex does not confer upon us any special status among our living cousins. People easily embrace the idea that humanity is set apart from all other animals. But nothing could be further from the truth. Humans are nothing but a short-lived biological aberration, with no claim to superiority. If evolution had a pinnacle, bacteria would rest on top. When the human species is a distant memory, bacteria will be dividing merrily away, oblivious to the odd bipedal mammal that once roamed the earth for such a brief moment in time. Our self-promotion to the image of god is simply embarrassing in the face of the biological reality on the ground. There is a loss of credibility when you choose yourself for an award.

This hubris and conceit of human superiority as the only creature close to god is not benign, leading to catastrophic consequences for humanity. The species-centric arrogance of religion cultivates a dangerous attitude about our relationship with the environment and the resources that sustain us. Humanists tend to view sustainability as a moral imperative while theists often view environmental concerns as liberal interference with god’s will. Conservative resistance to accepting the reality of climate change is just one example, and another point at which religious and secular morality diverge, as the world swelters.

There is no war on Christmas; the idea is absurd at every level. Those who object to being forced to celebrate another’s religion are drowning in Christmas in a sea of Christianity dominating all aspects of social life. An 80% majority can claim victimhood only with an extraordinary flight from reality. You are probably being deafened by a rendition of Jingle Bells right now. No, there is no war on Christmas, but make no mistake: the Christian right is waging a war against reason. And they are winning. O’Reilly is riding the gale force winds of crazy, and his sails are full.

The Price of Failure and Rise of Extremism: How Democrats Blew It

Politicians of all stripes since the dawn of time have perfected the art of feigned regret and false outrage in the face of opposition, while embracing blind indifference to their own failures. Standard fare for the left and right. But the depth, intensity, and institutionalized hypocrisy of the political right has taken our country on a new course; conservatives are writing a new chapter if not a new book on cynicism, deceit and delusion. As we contemplate our world dominated by Republicans controlling the House and Senate, we must therefore consider life in the face of deep hypocrisy.

Mitch McConnell, with a straight and no apparent appreciation for irony, said that voters should install a Republican majority in the Senate because his party would “be able to bring the current legislative gridlock to a merciful end.” This really reaches new heights of absurdity. The Filibuster King, the Guru of Gridlock himself, says that in order to end gridlock we need to elect the people who are responsible for bringing us Olympian records of obstruction. McConnell’s Republican army in the Senate has led more filibusters than any previous Congress in our nation’s history, attempting to thwart any progress on a gleeful spree of “no.” This is the McConnell who made obstruction his publicly announced number one goal when Obama was elected to his first term. But now McConnell wants to say yes, to have you vote for him because he is the one to rid us of the scourge of the gridlock he created. Give him a majority and voila he will make sure gridlock is a distant memory. This means of course that he expects the newly-made minority to simply go along with his agenda; you know, like he went along with the Democrats when they had the majority. Sigh. It is enough to make one’s head explode.

No Show

This story highlights the major failure of the left. Democrats have not defined the agenda or narrated the story. This capitulation creates a void of reason such that absurdities like McConnell’s claim can take hold without everybody doubling over in laughter. Like frightened children Democrats run from Obama’s record, as defined by the right, rather than championing his amazing successes as defined by fact. Much to the credit of the Republican political machine, and with equal same to the Democrats, the far right has been able to convince the public that everything bad is Obama’s fault, but that Obama is responsible for nothing that is good. When that does not work, they create the illusion that what is good is bad; health care comes to mind.

Democrats have ceded the territory of reality to Republican fantasy. Need a specific example? The media of late have been touting the story of “Obama’s dropping approval ratings” noting that his “approval ratings have plunged to record lows” and have “plummeted” and are “sinking to historic lows.” Only one problem with this narrative: it is factually and demonstrably false. Here is the verifiable truth: from January 1, 2014 to October 30, 2014, Obama’s approval rating fell from 42.6 percent to 42 percent. The year’s peak was 44 percent, and the low of the year was 41 percent. A drop of about one-half of one percent does not constitute numbers that are “plummeting” or “sinking” or even “dropping.” Yet the Democrats sit by and let this nonsense flow forth with no fight.

We can do the same analysis for past GOP claims about unemployment, the war in Iraq, saving the auto industry, bailing out Wall Street and the banks, instituting meaningful health care reform… just about anything major issue that has improved significantly over the past 7 or 8 years. You remember when unemployment exceeded 10 percent; that was Obama’s fault. There was a daily drumbeat denouncing the president. But with unemployment now under 6 percent, Obama gets no credit, or the positive statistic is dismissed as unimportant (the same statistics with the same numerators and denominators that were critical when the numbers looked bad for Obama). Obama is responsible for all of our ills and deserves credit for none of our successes. This is a childish, bogus outlook, yet remains central to everything conservative. This lack of depth and nuance, and the absence of the art of compromise (actually praising Obama for something), is precisely what led to the extremism of shutting down our government and threatening default on our debt. This lopsided, one-sided, one-dimensional world view is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Hating Obama should not be an effective political organizing strategy, but is indeed in the absence of any effective Democratic backbone to counter right wing absurdities. Democrats deserve their losses; they ceded the battle before it began. Hoping for failure has become the right’s most effective political platform; creating the appearance of failure in the face of Democratic success is now a Republican sport played to victory by default because the opposing team never showed.

What Goes Up…

I was driving along the other day in the face of the mid-term elections, considering how Democrats who ran from Obama’s record deserved to lose. Then I passed by a service station and noted the price of gas was in the mid-range of two dollars. And the thought immediately struck; Republicans have done it again – somehow, expensive gas was Obama’s fault, but low prices deserve no mention, and certainly no credit. The absence of debate during the elections is all the more astonishing given that the price of gas today is the same as what we were paying nearly ten years ago, and far from historic highs.

So… gas prices, so easily quantified, offer us the ideal case study to demonstrate that hypocrisy is truly the core foundation of right wing thought and the basis for Republican politics. I challenge anybody to provide the equivalent of what you see below for the Democrats.

Below we will see in black and white that the GOP vocally, loudly and undeniably blamed Obama for expensive gas as prices climbed toward $4 per gallon. The right openly blamed the president not only for pursuing a bad energy policy but for actively seeking higher prices. Here are just a few examples:

Mitt Romney: Obama to Blame for High Gas Prices

Romney said on Fox News (where else?) that he believes “absolutely” that Obama is responsible for high gas prices. To bolster his point, Romney noted that Obama does not allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR), and his refusal to build the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas. Romney said of Obama, “His policies are responsible for not having America using the energy that we have in this country.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)

“The president holds the key to addressing the pain Ohioans are feeling at the gas pump and moving our nation away from its reliance on foreign energy. My question for the president is: what are you waiting for?” Getting more specific, Boehner claimed that, “The president’s own policies to date have made matters worse and driven up gas prices.”

Senator John Barrasso: Obama Fully Responsible for High Gas Prices

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) claimed “The president has been a complete obstructionist on that, and his energy policy, if you want to even call it a policy, has in my opinion actually contributed if not caused the pain at the pump, and he should be held fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline.”

Representative Cory Gardner (R-CO): Obama Policies to Blame for High Gas Prices

Cory Gardner jumped on the bandwagon, complaining that, “The longer we let politicians like President Obama continue to block responsible American energy production, the longer our nation will continue to suffer with high gas prices and limited energy security.”

National Review: Report Finds Obama Policies to Blame for High Energy Prices

“What President Obama failed to accomplish through the so-called ‘cap and trade’ program, his administration is attempting to accomplish through regulatory roadblocks, energy tax increases, and other targeted efforts to prohibit development of domestic energy resources.”

Rush Limbaugh: Obama Wants Higher Gas Prices

Oddly, in his rant against Obama, Rush asks, “Will the media ignoring the rise in gas prices be able to keep that from becoming a major factor in people’s minds over the economy and Obama’s role in it?” Funny given the torrent of news coverage on higher gas prices, and the GOP’s consistent drum beat blaming Obama.

High Gas Prices are President Obama’s Fault

In this article, the author claims that “The Obama administration’s energy plan all along was based upon the rise in energy costs in order to force Americans to be ‘greener.’” The piece goes on to say that “President Obama wants Americans to believe that he is powerless to stop the high rise of gasoline prices yet it is his (in)actions that have created the crisis… What the president fails to realize is that there is no one to blame for rising energy costs other than himself.”

Billboard Blames Obama for High Gas Prices

In this case, a conservative businessman by the name of Bret Eulberg posted for all to see the message: “Gas $1.85. Obama took office. Tight drilling regulations. No Pipeline. Obama- Higher Gas.

Need I go on? Can any reader, of any political persuasion, even those who only watch Fox News, claim that the GOP did not openly, blatantly, consistently blame Obama for high gas prices? Conservatives blamed Obama for high gas prices. Can we be any clearer about that? You simply cannot deny this fact.

Deficit of Reason

So what happened when the price of gas fell? What now that the price has declined into the $2 range? Silence. Total, complete, deafening, maddening, huge, gaping, mind-bending silence. Where was Obama’s commitment to making prices higher? Where were the impacts of Obama’s failed energy policies? Where were the disastrous consequences of delaying the Keystone pipeline? Where were the catastrophic energy shortages due to overzealous EPA regulations? Yet not a single word from the right praising Obama for lower energy prices. He was responsible for them going up, but not coming down. Everything prominent Republicans and wing-nut pundits said about gas prices and Obama’s policies proved to be wrong.

What happened when Obama cracked down on oil speculation (an activity much supported by free-market zealots in the GOP), driving down the price of gas by 12 cents at the pump? Not a peep from the right. What happened when gas prices fell to a two-year low, with expectations that the price will continue to decline? Nothing on Fox News about that.

Everything that the GOP claimed caused high gas prices are still in place, as we watch prices decline. There is no Keystone pipeline, drilling levels are virtually the same as when prices were increasing, and EPA regulations are still in place. Those “causes” of high prices are now simply ignored by the right in the face of declining prices at the pump, no longer offered as proof of Obama’s incompetence.

And then the Republicans finally broke their silence, with the claim that “Obama deserves no credit for fall in gas prices.” This is absolute proof of my thesis; Republicans blatantly admit it. Read this logic and weep for our country: Representative Allen West (R-FL) said, “If you’re the chief executive officer of the United States of America, you should take responsibility for anything that’s occurring in this country, and you should not want to seek to get praise. This is what the military taught me: Leaders don’t take credit, leaders take responsibility.” Um, OK. So, you blame Obama for rising gas prices; but then give him no credit for falling prices because it is unseemly for a leader to accept credit for effective policies – the very policies you were blaming for failure earlier. My head hurts. My heart aches for this great land.

Perhaps one day we will once again we reject the bizarre extremism of the far right and realize the fruits of effective governance through dialogue and compromise. We will know we are on our way when we can give our political opponents credit where credit is due- and that includes praise for policies we earlier opposed when those policies prove well founded. Extremism and absolutism have no place in America; we can only hope that what we are witnessing today is an aberration much like McCarthyism. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years we’ll shake our heads at this folly and wonder how the likes of Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin ever made it to national politics. We can always hope.

Vaccinations: An Epidemic of Misinformation

Would you have your plumber perform brain surgery on your wife?  Or have an accomplished Shakespearean actor with no flight training pilot the Boeing 747 you are taking across the Pacific?  How about hiring a shark biologist to design and build your house?  These suggestions are absurd because we all know that being qualified and competent in one area of expertise does not transfer to all others.  But we seem to routinely forget this simple truth.

That is why those who oppose climate change become authorities in meteorology and climatology, suddenly endowed with more expertise than a scientist who has devoted her life to the subjects.  The deniers magically know more than thousands of qualified scientists from nearly 200 countries.  This faux-expertise brings with it a deep irony as well.  Many doubters cite the Earth’s past cycles of glaciation and warming to discount what we are seeing today as nothing but natural variation.  How do the skeptics know of that climate history?  From the very scientists whose conclusions they now doubt!  As if the scientists themselves are unaware of their own conclusions about the earth’s past, or if they are aware, did not take that history into account.  Deniers preferentially believe one set of facts from those scientists but dismiss other facts as liberal nonsense.  I could not make this stuff up.

False claim to expertise is why actors feel qualified as authorities on various matters unrelated to the film industry.  Standing in front of a camera does not confer any special expertise on anything other than reading lines, but that stops few from venturing farther afield.  The problem with claiming expertise outside one’s true competency is that the ensuring claims are often ridiculous, misinformed, ignorant or downright dumb.

The latest eruption of star-studded stupidity comes from comedian Rob Schneider (whose comedy I much enjoy).  Schneider opposes mandatory vaccination, using the patently incorrect and absurd argument that “The efficacy of these shots has not been proven.”  He added that, “And the toxicity of these things — we’re having more and more side effects. We’re having more and more autism.”

I just want to scream in frustration.

These claims from Schneider are not the benign utterances of an imbecile; they are deadly in their impact.  Let us examine these two outrageously incorrect assertions.  First, the issue of efficacy: unlike the absurd claim made by Schneider, vaccines have proven beyond any and all doubt to be extraordinarily efficacious.  Vaccines are the most important, effective, and safest medical advance in all of human history.  Vaccinations have led to the eradication of smallpox and the near-eradication of polio.  Anytime you might have even a twinge of a thought against vaccinations, think of the millions of people who suffered terrible disability and death prior to the development of vaccines for these horrible diseases.  And the millions of people now free from those scourges because of vaccines.

Every year vaccines save 3 million lives among children younger than five years old every year by preventing diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles; if adults are included, vaccines save up to 6 million lives annually.  If you oppose vaccinations you are for the death of an additional 3 million children every year.  The Third Edition of the State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization reports that, “Between 2000 and 2007, the number of children dying from measles dropped by 74% worldwide, from an estimated 750,000 to an estimated 197,000 children. In addition, immunization prevents sickness as well as lifelong disability, including measles-related deafness, blindness, and mental disability.”

The study also states that, “In 1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries and paralyzing an estimated 350,000 children every year (close to 1000 cases a day). By the end of 2007, polio had been eradicated in three of WHO’s six regions – the Region of the Americas, the European Region, and the Western Pacific Region.  Following implementation of the rubella elimination strategy in the Americas, the number of reported cases of rubella declined by 98% between 1998 and 2006.  By 2000, 135 countries had eliminated neonatal tetanus and by 2004, annual deaths from neonatal tetanus had fallen to an estimated 128 000, down from 790,000 deaths in 1988.”

If you oppose vaccinations, try to justify that position with the reality that in the absence of vaccinations polio would paralyze 10,000 children every year; German measles would cause birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 kids, and diphtheria would be a common cause of death in school children.  Anytime you have an urge to oppose vaccination, think of your kid dying of diphtheria.  If you oppose vaccinations, you are for 10,000 kids each year becoming paralyzed.

The deep, terrible irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the incredible success of vaccines has caused the uninformed to forget how important, successful and safe vaccination programs are; and how vital vaccines are to preventing horrible diseases from reemerging.  And reemerge they do: because of the anti-vaccination movement, measles is once again rearing its ugly head.  Measles is highly contagious and spreads rapidly among the non-vaccinated.  There is no treatment for measles, only prevention.  In 2000 measles was nearly eradicated in the United States; with a drop in immunization due to unjustified concerns about vaccines, the United States is witnessing this year the largest measles outbreak since 1996.  Ignorance, false claims to expertise and scientific illiteracy are threatening our children’s health.

And now to Schneider’s claim that vaccines are linked to autism.  Again, I desperately want to scream in frustration at the top of my lungs.  This bizarre claim comes from just one paper published in 1998 in the medical journal Lancet, subsequently withdrawn for suspicions of scientific fraud, and fully discredited by later study.  Repeat after me:  there is no evidence, none, zero, absolutely nothing, to link vaccinations with autism.  It is a myth, a fallacy, factually incorrect.  Yet tens of thousands of parents risk their children’s health by withholding critical vaccinations.  Like Schneider, many parents still to this day insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the complete absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper.  You might as well claim that vaccines cause baldness; no, no, I’ve got the perfect claim:  vaccines are ineffective but cause global warming!  In that we combine belief in something for which there is no evidence and disbelief in another other for which there is indisputable proof.  Perfect.

Vaccines save lives, millions of lives, and prevent untold suffering and misery.  Vaccines are safe and effective, as proven by billions of doses given with no harm. The efficacy of vaccines is beyond dispute with the eradication of some of humankind’s greatest scourges and the precipitous drop in diseases once common.  Of course absolutely nothing is 100% safe and effective; sitting on your couch with a helmet does not guarantee an airplane tail won’t fall through your roof and kill you.  But the awesome, amazing benefits of vaccines vastly, incredibly, outrageously outweigh any potential risk.  Opposing vaccines is foolhardy, dangerous, irresponsible, and just plain ignorant.  Please, please, please stop this misguided and misinformed effort to prevent vaccinations.  If you want to oppose vaccines, go to an island with all others of your ilk and witness the devastation as preventable diseases ravage your population.  But leave the rest of us sane people to the task of saving lives with the greatest medical advance ever seen in human history.

Ignorance Kills

We learned recently that eight health care workers combating the Ebola epidemic were killed by an angry mob who believed the doctors and nurses were infecting people with the virus. The population most in need of help murdered the only people who could provide assistance. In that tragedy we can learn much about ourselves, even if the problem initially seems distant and remote.

Sitting in the comfort of our homes we can easily see these horrible killings as ridiculous, obviously counterproductive to the killers, and dangerous to people globally with an increased risk of a broader epidemic. The terrible episode is based entirely in the transparently false idea that doctors were spreading the disease, a notion borne of ignorance of basic biology. While the killings in Africa are easy to condemn, and rightfully so, we in the West live in a big glass house while throwing stones. We are guilty of a deep scientific illiteracy of a magnitude similar to what we see in Africa, with equally deadly results. So look carefully in the mirror when disparaging the ignorance of native villagers.

Scientific illiteracy is pervasive in the United States. Examples are depressingly easy to find. People opposed to irradiated food ignore the existence of more than 50 known strains of E. coli that can cause bloody diarrhea, kidney failure, and death. This is a typical case of poor risk-benefit analysis. People are duped by claims of harmful emissions from cell phones. Life-saving diagnostic x-rays are eschewed from fear of radiation, and vulnerable people are persuaded to rely on crystals and astrology for guidance. The public is unable to filter exaggerated claims by environmental groups (Alar in apples) from legitimate concerns like global climate change. This ignorance has deadly consequences; ask the parents of every child who died from a preventable disease, or farmers looking at starvation in the face of crops withering in a changing climate.

On the subject of global warming, let us be brutally honest here: climate change deniers are no different than Africans fearful of doctors treating Ebola. They base their claims on ideas as transparently ridiculous as those attacking health care workers providing aid. As do those African villagers, climate deniers reject widely accepted scientific fact and accumulated knowledge. Without any anchor in the sciences reality is an option to be rejected whenever the real world gives us inconvenient truths. As in Africa, this deadly ignorance is borne of unfounded fears and denials based in the irrational rejection of basic established fact.

When fiction becomes confused with fact, we sever our critical tether to reality. The conclusions from years of careful research, scrutinized by competing scientists and published in peer reviewed journals carry no more weight with the public than the random thoughts of a bloated pundit. Talking heads with no training now have the same authority as highly qualified experts. So global warming is dismissed as a liberal hoax in spite of a preponderance of scientific evidence to the contrary. Climate and weather are mistakenly thought to be the same so that with every winter storm comes the pathetic and childish denial that the world could not be getting hotter. When presented with evidence, skeptics selectively demand more “proof” without understanding what that concept means in scientific inquiry.

Yet when we are not discussing climate change, many demand no proof at all before reaching a firm conclusion, the flipside consequence of misunderstanding the scientific method. The anti-vaccine movement is a classic case.

Because of just one paper published in 1998 in the medical journal Lancet, subsequently withdrawn for suspicions of scientific fraud, and fully discredited by later study, tens of thousands of parents risk their children’s health by withholding critical vaccinations against terrible diseases. Because of medical illiteracy and misplaced religious zeal, rates of childhood immunization for measles, mumps, and rubella have yet to fully recover from the impact of this one discredited paper. And many parents still to this day insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper. Some parents still force school boards across the country to accept students with no vaccination history, endangering their children, but worse, all children in the school, and ignoring the reality that vaccines are one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, saving hundreds of millions of lives. Rush Limbaugh exhorted his listeners to eschew the H1N1 vaccine. Are conservative pundits and these anti-vaccination parents any different than the villagers in Africa fearful of doctors spreading Ebola? Myth has usurped fact. And ignorance kills.

This deadly and ubiquitous scientific illiteracy will not be cured overnight. We must begin somewhere, though, and that would be to reform our system of education. The sad state of public schools in America is a disgrace. If you have doubts, just look at the results from a Newsweek survey a few years ago of 1000 American citizens; almost 40% of which failed the test necessary to gain citizenship. Forty-two percent of Americans could not name the Taliban as an enemy, but seventy-five percent of Brits could. We lag terribly behind the rest of the modern world in mathematics.

From the Newsweek survey we learn that nearly one-third of Americans could not name the then-current vice president; seven-three percent could not explain why we fought the Cold War; forty-four percent were stumped when asked to define the Bill of Rights. We cannot realistically expect a citizen who has not been taught about the Bill of Rights to know the difference between an atom and a molecule, to know what a vitamin is or an enzyme, or the definition of species, or the meaning of a calorie, or to understand dose-response curves, or to distinguish between correlation and causation, or to accept the reality of climate change.

Without an ability to reason critically, people believe in weeping statues of the Virgin Mary, the existence of a carved face on Mars, out-of-body experiences, and Christ’s image captured on the Shroud of Turin. Among the most notable miraculous relics of Catholicism is the much publicized “blood” of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples. Since the fourteenth century, a substance said to be the dried blood of the martyred saint periodically liquefies and reddens, indicating good years and bad according to legend. Virtually the entire metropolitan congregation turns out once a year to wait anxiously as the miracle proclaims the city’s fate. The explanation is absolutely trivial. Many substances, including mixtures readily available to medieval chemists, have the property exhibited by the purported blood.

Former NASA administrator Dan Goldin, while defending funding for the space agency, was famously asked, “Why are we building meteorological satellites when we have the Weather Channel?” Critical thinking is an endangered species.

Nowhere is this bottomless pit of deep ignorance and lack of clear thinking better illustrated by the issue of evolution as taught in the United States. Evolution is one of the most successful, thoroughly documented scientific discoveries in human history. However, more than 75 years after the trial of State of Tennessee v John Scopes and despite incredible advances in biology, many public school boards strive to eliminate the teaching of evolution from the curriculum. Those who deny the obvious truth of evolution are no different from fearful African villagers who reach conclusions based on ignorance of established fact. Teaching evolution is equal to teaching that the Earth is a sphere or that the sun is the center of the solar system. Or that doctors help prevent the spread of Ebola. All are established beyond doubt.

Some may still believe that the sun revolves around the Earth as the Bible implies, but including such an idea in a school curriculum is unacceptable. Teaching creation according to Genesis also would require the science curriculum in public schools to include the notion that a great fish swallowed Jonah, that Joshua made the sun stand still, that Noah put a breeding pair of every animal species on a boat, and that the Earth was created in six days, along with a host of other literal interpretations of the Bible.

How can society hope to teach children the basics of science when forced to fight this primitive battle? The public education system is broken and desperately needs focused attention, but civil society is forced to divert time and resources to a ridiculous battle more appropriate to the 1600s. But without winning the battle on teaching evolution, there is no hope of conquering scientific illiteracy in general.

We have a long road ahead. To fight this scourge of illiteracy, people must move beyond silly controversy, such as whether to teach evolution, and emphasize the importance of critical thinking; we must focus on reading, language proficiency, history, math, and science from the early grades, and build on that foundation through to graduation. Science is not an elective; critical thinking is not a luxury. To combat scientific illiteracy, middle school students should be required to demonstrate a minimal proficiency in basic science against a national or international standard as a requirement for graduation. Society does no service to the student or to itself by graduating children ill-prepared for today’s world. Take a good look in the mirror; we are in danger of becoming like those who murder doctors who are trying to help. Ignorance kills.

Pray to Jesus – Or Else

I applaud those who retain the strength to fight the never-ending battle against ignorance, intolerance and persistent persecution of rationalists.  The latest nonsense comes from Georgia, a state that seems hell-bent on conserving medieval values.  A school district in Hall County has allowed a high school football coach “to organize team prayers and promote biblical messages on team documents and pre-game banners.”

Coming from Georgia this is not shocking news.  This after all this is a state absolutely delighted of its efforts to leave the Union of which they are now so proud; so intellectual inconsistency is hardly surprising. And forget for now the patently silly idea that any god would care about the outcome of a football game.  Instead, what has awakened me from my stupor is the odd response to those who objected to the school’s, and therefore state’s, obvious endorsement of religion.  Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) actually accused atheists of “trying to bully” those poor, isolated and tread-upon Christian high school students.   Here is the full quote from Collins’s Facebook page:

“The liberal atheist interest groups trying to bully Chestatee High School kids say they have a reason to believe that expressions of religious freedom are ‘not an isolated event’ in Northeast Georgia. They’re right. In Hall County and throughout Georgia’s 9th district, we understand and respect the Constitution and cherish our right to worship in our own way.  This morning, while Chestatee students gathered on their football field to support their school leadership and exercise their rights, unspeakable human rights atrocities continued to happen across the world in places that have no regard at all for religious freedom. It’s utterly disgusting that while innocent lives are being lost in Iraq and other places at the hands of radical religious terrorists, a bunch of Washington lawyers are finding the time to pick on kids in Northeast Georgia. I want the football players and all the students at CHS to know I support you, I’m here for you, and yes, I’m praying for you.”

This vein of irony is so deep and rich we could be mining this outburst of inconsistencies for years.   A Jewish football player would be forced to make some unpleasant choices: leave the team, stay on the team but be singled out as a non-team-playing outcast, or participate in Christian prayer.  Who is the bully and who is being bullied? Collins would say the Jew is the bully for questioning his forced participation in prayers to Jesus.  According to this worldview, when the overwhelming majority attempts to impose its religious views and practices on a small minority, that majority is exercising its rights under the First Amendment.  When a small minority voices objections to the majority’s attempt to impose their religious practices on them, the minority is bullying the majority. Irony. Christians can impose their beliefs on others with impunity, such as imposing public Christian prayers, but any effort by non-Christians to express their religious views is a violation of constitutional rights.  More irony.  Collins’s appeal to the Constitution would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.  His support for Christian domination (forced Christian prayer) is in direct violation of the First Amendment rights he so piously cites.  Irony yet again.

The deepest irony, though, is the idea that a tiny minority can bully a vast majority.  According the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian.  Only 4% are self-proclaimed non-believers (broken into the survey categories of atheists at 1.6% and agnostics at 2.4%). A Christian complaining about being under attack when submerged in that religion’s ubiquitous presence is like a fish in the Pacific Ocean complaining that there is not enough water.  A lone rationalist swimming in the middle of the vast ocean of Christianity would be hard pressed to agree that water was in insufficient supply.

Let me pause here on a tangent and explain why “rationalism” is a more acceptable term than atheism.  As I have written before, “atheist” is derived from the ancient Greek adjective atheos, which means “without gods.”  Defining anybody or any movement as the negative of another is a bad start.  I refuse to be defined as an absence of what somebody else supposedly has; I simply cannot be without something that does not exist.  I am not lacking what someone else has.   The idea is ridiculous.  Calling me an atheist is like defining me as a man without a dragon tail, and then denying me my rights because I do not have a dragon tail. I cannot be absent something that is nothing but another’s myth.   I am a rationalist, and if others wish to believe in an invisible man in the sky with magical powers, we can label them arationalists.

I stand on a soap box about this because of the power of words to impact our perception.  Atheism is a pejorative term in the eyes of believers because it is the negative of them (without something that others have), and with that inherent negativity comes implied permission to discriminate blatantly and openly.  We can trash that which we do not respect.  During the Second World War we called our enemies Japs and Krauts among other degrading epithets in order to diminish them as humans, making them easier to hate, fight and kill.  Our cause was just enough without the name calling.  Many Christians use “atheists” in a similarly derogative vein.  The solution is to abandon completely the use of the term atheist, just as polite society no longer uses the “N” word to describe African-Americans, “Rag Heads” for Arabs or “Wet Backs” for those south of the border.   Offensive?  Yes, just as is the use of the word atheist.

Atheism is pejorative because of the inherent negative assumption (we lack what others possess) embedded in the word. African-Americans were once called “Colored” when civil rights were a distant dream.  That word is offensive because of the implication that all others must be compared to the pure “standard” of White.   If black skin was considered the standard, all Caucasians would be properly called “a-pigmented” or “uncolored.”  Likewise, the word atheist implies a standard of religiosity in which belief in god is somehow the measure by which all others must be judged.  Religion is no more legitimate as a standard than is white skin.

With that understood, while Christians like Collins complain of being bullied, the real victim is rationalism.  In our modern world, nowhere is there more blatant and overt discrimination than that against rationalists. Surely, race discrimination is rampant and real, but it is largely hidden under a veneer of civility in polite company.  Blacks cannot overtly be refused office because of their skin color; yet rationalists are still discriminated against based on nothing but their fidelity to logic and reason.

You may think I’m exaggerating or a bit hysterical.  If so, you may be shocked to learn that elected officials in North Carolina are constitutionally disqualified from office if they “deny the being of Almighty God.”  Yes, you read that correctly.  But let us not pick on the ignorant bias of the Tar Heel state, for they are not alone in primitive thinking appropriate to the 1600s.  Arkansas, Maryland, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas all deny atheists the right to hold public office.  Here is the wording typically found in all of these state constitutions, this one from Arkansas:

Article 19, Section 1:  No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any Court.

Imagine the outrage if the same ban applied to Jews, Muslims, women, blacks or gays. Yet somehow it remains acceptable in our society to blatantly discriminate against someone based on a personal conviction that Santa Claus is not real.

Never mind that the Supreme Court ruled way back in 1961 that the U.S. Constitution trumps such outrageous religious discrimination through the supremacy of federal law.  That particular invocation of the supremacy clause from our Supremes came about when some poor guy in Maryland by the name of Herb Silverman (now a Huff Post blogger among many other hats he wears) could not be appointed as a notary for his crime of not believing in god.  Herb spent eight years claiming a right that any other American would take for granted without a second thought.  In other news, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Catholics can run for public office.  Don’t touch that dial.

State sanctions applied against one belief system in favor of another are an abomination, a stain on our society, and in direct contradiction to everything our Founding Fathers wished for our great country.  Consider the deep irony of a conservative group of people who claim a unique fidelity to the Constitution while they actively undermine the document’s most important principles.  To understand how outrageous these prohibitions against rationalism really are, just substitute “Christian” everywhere atheism is mentioned in the offending state constitutions.  Let’s prohibit Christians from becoming notaries or holding public office.  Absurd?  Why is that not acceptable but somehow discrimination against rationalism is so mainstream as to be codified in state law?

Discrimination against rationalism makes no sense on multiple levels.  First, rationalism is a worldview not a religion, and therefore an odd victim of institutionalized bias.  The absence of dogma is not another form of dogma; the commitment to rational thought is not another form of belief along the spectrum of religious doctrine.  My worldview is available for disproof; religion is not.  Second, the establishment clause in the First Amendment is unambiguous of intent.  Third, the label of atheism is itself invalid, and therefore an invalid subject of discrimination; atheist is an idea that allows others to conveniently confuse rationalism with religion, and confounds the baseline from which people’s views can be measured.

The latest dust up in Georgia reveals an ugly truth in modern America:  our commitment to the founding principles embedded in our Constitution is in jeopardy.  Paradoxically, efforts to undermine our most cherished ideas are couched in terms of patriotism and respect for the rule of law.

Fellow rationalists, we have our work cut out for us.  We live in a secular country in which the vast majority of citizens incorrectly believe the United States is a Christian nation.  We live in society in which a Christian majority exceeding 78% claims to be a victim of discrimination.  We are singled out in state constitutions as particularly unworthy of holding public office.   We witness a Supreme Court Justice that believes surrealistically that the Christian cross is representative of all religions – and rationalists. Let us, finally, reject the false inevitability of creeping religiosity in American politics.  We are a small minority but have on our side facts in place of fiction.  The atrocity of stupidity in Georgia is a call to political arms.

As we approach the year 2015, the United States owns the dubious distinction of being the only western country in which a candidate’s qualifications can be challenged because he does not believe in god.  Do we really want to emulate the theocracies of the Middle East?  The citizens of Georgia, North Carolina and their brethren who support the imposition of public Christian prayer on all, and who support the constitutional discrimination against rationalists, are more like the radical Muslims they apparently have such disdain for than they could ever possibly imagine.  I hope we can do better than Iraq or Iran.  But officials like Doug Collins keep dragging us back to the Dark Ages.

The South lost the war; but perhaps the time has come to grant them their earlier wish and cut them loose from the Union.  They can form a confederacy of Christian states. Their theocracy can act as a magnet for all those in the north who find that attractive.  Then the rest of us can be left to govern by reason and logic.  Hey, we can always dream.

Laughter as Nutrition

Humor is an essential part of the human experience. We tend to think of comedy as frivolous, a side show to the miseries of hunger, disease, and poverty that visit the vast majority of the global population. In the face of humanity’s enduring travails, humor is often seen as a prerogative of the privileged. But that is not quite right; humor can ease even the greatest suffering; without the ability to laugh, in the face of tragedy and depravation, our human experience would be terribly diminished. What often strikes me when we see the aftermath of war, or scenes of desperate hunger, are the sounds of children laughing and playing in the rubble and devastation. Humor is embedded in our DNA.

We are reminded of the important role of comedy in our lives when a titan of that genre dies unexpectedly. Robin Williams’s suicide hit hard because he was our national court jester. That term is often used pejoratively to dismiss someone as buffoonish or unworthy of serious attention; but that too is wrong. Court jesters have a noble history that can be traced back to ancient Chinese dynasties, although the role only really flourished during the European Renaissance. Jesters with their comedy played an important and serous role. Jester often developed deep friendships with ruling royalty, who tired of false compliments and unearned praise from yes-mean. More importantly, the performers could share valuable insights into court affairs delivered inoffensively through wit. We all know that truth is spoken in jest. We learn in B. Otto’s “Fools Are Everywhere” that some Royal Courts consulted Jesters before going to battle. In 1386, the Duke of Austria, Lepold the Pious, asked his jester for his opinion on his plans to attack the Swiss. His jester, Jenny von Stockach reportedly bluntly said, “You fools, you’re all debating how to get into the country, but none of you have thought how you’re going to get out again.” Ah, if only George Bush and Dick Cheney had a court jester on hand to reign in the madness.

Humor is also a unifying emotion; people from diverse backgrounds and political perspectives can laugh at the same joke. Robin Williams’s death is national news precisely because his clowning and personality as our country’s court jester were appreciated across social and political divides; he was our collective voice of comedy. Sure, as always we have the odd exception of a few outliers like Rush Limbaugh, who says Williams killed himself because liberals are never happy. He said of the left, “They’re always angry about something. No matter what they get, they’re always angry.” Which itself is a bit funny because nobody is a bigger curmudgeon who specializes in ceaseless unhappy rants. Irony is an important form of comedy too.

In appreciating the serious role of comedy in human life (an oxymoron like “serious comedy” can also be funny – in the right hands; I’m here all week) we need to understand how laughter is deeply embedded in our evolutionary history. As odd as the concept may seem, laughter and joy are not uniquely human, and in fact are relatively ancient in animal history. Researchers like Jaak Panksepp at Bowling Green State University in Ohio are exploring the neural basis of humor and laughter and finding the phenomenon widespread. Scientists in this field have completed recent studies with rats, dogs and chimps demonstrating that the source of play behavior and laughter is subcortical, embedded in the ancient portions of the mammalian brain. Chimps that are play-chasing and tickling each other vocalize with “play panting,” which scientists believe is the equivalent of human laughter. Even rats laugh when tickled playfully, emitting a distinct chirp that researchers believe to be real laughter. Rats tickled playfully socially bond with the tickler, seek out tickles, and always “laugh” when successful. Human infants laugh and shriek with delight long before they have mastered any language, an indication of laughter’s primitive origins. Chimps will not be headlining at the Comedy Club any time soon, but they have their own brand of humor even if the joke is lost on us.

As a tangential aside, surprisingly, getting a handle on smiling in other species is somewhat more difficult. All primates share common neuromuscular control over facial expressions, so one would think that we could make a nice claim about smiling as a behavior seen across many animals. In fact, the “silent bared teeth display” seen in non-human primates is considered by some researches to be similar to a human smile. But most scientists dispute that conclusion. The meaning of displaying our pearly whites seems to have been lost in translation. A human smile typically conveys joy, but signals appeasement and fear in non-human primates. For other species we simply have to conclude that smiling is tough if you have no lips. I hope Robin Williams would have found that funny.

Oh Mercy Me, I Do Declare, I Have the Vapors

Excuse me; for I thought when I woke up this morning the year was 2014. Yet a headline today reads “University Plans to Finally Remove Confederate Flags From Campus.” In the article we learn that Washington and Lee University is leaving the age of muskets to join the rest of the world.

That a confederate flag is flying anywhere is an affront to all Americans, at least those who live in the 21st century. Southerners claim a deep national pride in the good old United States of America but ironically celebrate their ancestors’ efforts to dissolve the very union of states whose flag they now so proudly fly. They honor a campaign to dissolve our country but claim the mantle of patriot, wrapping themselves in the very Stars and Stripes the South sought to leave behind. That makes no sense. The contradiction is always swept under the rug, but that must stop. Now is a good time to close this chapter of hypocrisy and inconsistency. A southern loyalist cannot be a patriot; the two ideals are mutually incompatible. You cannot simultaneously love the United States and love the idea of dissolving the bond between states that constitute the country. To claim both is insane, the equivalent of declaring that you love all Chinese food but hate chow mein. The claims are each exclusive of the other and therefore by definition both cannot be true. You can’t be proud to be among those who wanted to secede from America while claiming to be proud to be American. That is crazy.

Few things could be more absurd than simultaneously flying Old Glory and a flag of the Confederacy. Forget not that when a state seceded from the Union one of the first acts was to destroy the Union flag, that is, the flag of the United States, atop the state capitol building. The moniker Old Glory comes from 1831 when Captain William Driver, a shipmaster in Salem, Massachusetts, unfurled on his ship a brand new banner with 24 stars prior to embarking on a voyage that would eventually lead to the rescue of the mutineers of the Bounty. He was so taken by the magnificent flag waving to the ocean breeze that he yelled “Old Glory.” He took the flag with him when he retired to Nashville. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, Rebels were determined to find and destroy this flag. So let us not romanticize what secession meant; it was anti-American by every definition; Rebels were set on destroying the symbol that represented the union they sought to dissolve. That is the very same Stars and Stripes that they now so proudly wave as patriots. The inconsistency and hypocrisy are horribly ignorant of our history. Flying a Confederate flag with the American flag is no less absurd than if Japan flew the Stars and Strips next to the flag of the Rising Sun.

Let us take one issue off the table immediately. Certainly one can rightly honor the bravery of fallen soldiers no matter whether they wore blue or grey. We can appreciate the rare military genius of Robert E. Lee, and the loyalty and dedication of Stonewall Jackson, George Pickett and Nathan Forrest. These generals and the men they led fought valiantly, with integrity, with honor, for a cause in which they believed passionately even if we despise that cause.

But honoring the man’s bravery or military insights is not equivalent to honoring the cause for which he fought. The cause championed by the South should cover every American with shame. Have no doubt that the South was at war to dismantle our nation, to dissolve our Union. Some southern loyalists try to skirt this historic reality by claiming they did not seek to harm the United States, only secede from it. But that is patently absurd because with the ability to secede comes disunion as an inevitable consequence. Proof is seen not only in the number of confederate states who left the union, but in that later in the war states even tried to secede from the Confederacy.

For this goal of secession, of which nobody should be proud, more than 630,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in four years of hellish war. To put this in perspective consider that the entire population of the United States at war’s end was 35 million, putting war casualties at nearly 2% of the total populace. Equivalent rates of casualties today would result in 5 million dead or wounded, dwarfing our losses in World War II, or any other war.

Why did 2% of our population suffer death or maiming? Over the issue of state sovereignty and the interpretation of the Tenth Amendment (ratified in 1791). The text is simple enough: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But we also have the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution, which say, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

Simply put, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in protest against federal legislation that limited the expansion of slavery claiming that such legislation violated the tenth amendment, which they argued trumped the Supremacy Clause. The war was indeed about protecting the institution of slavery, but only as a specific case of a state’s right to declare a federal law null and void.

The inherent tension between Article VI and the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution has kept lawyers busy and wealthy since our founding, and the argument goes on today. But the South went a significant step further than arguing a case. In seceding from the Union those states declared the U.S. Constitution void. The president of the United States, sworn to uphold the Constitution, had no choice but to take whatever measures were necessary to fulfill his commitment. So war came.

So what exactly about that sordid history would lead one to fly a Confederate flag over a state capitol building, or paste one on a F150 bumper or wear one on a T-shirt, or unfurl one over a campus quad? Is the South proud of its efforts to protect slavery? Or attempting to ruin the United States through dissolution? For starting a war in which 2% of the population died? For losing the war? These are odd banners to carry around for nearly 150 years.

Perhaps the pride comes from the fact that the South stood up to a greater power, at least checking or slowing the pace of an expanding federalism. But even that does not pass the smell test; by starting but then losing the war the South created the exact opposite effect, solidifying federal power like never before.

But damn if the South does not hold on to the war as if they never actually lost, fighting incongruously for a hopeless cause of questionable value while simultaneously wrapping themselves in the American flag! So we get oddities like universities still flying a Confederate flag; or in 2010 then-Governor Robert McDonnell of Virginia proclaiming April “Confederate History Month” without ever mentioning slavery. When questioned about this curious oversight, McDonnell lamely explained that “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Really? If slavery was not among the most “significant” issues for Virginia, exactly what other state right was being violated by federal law leading to the Civil War? Does McDonnell even know the history of the war? Sadly, McDonnell was the not the first governor of his state to explicitly omit slavery from lofty declarations. Former Republican Virginia Governor Republican George Allen also failed to recognize slavery when making a similar proclamation. Seems to be a disease of Republican governors, a historic irony given the role of the young Republican Party in the war.

The South started and lost a war that nearly destroyed the United States in pursuit of a terrible cause. Let it go. Let. It. Go. LET. IT. GO. You fought well but lost decisively. Your cause was unjust. Your actions were treasonous. There is no part of the Confederate cause of which to be proud. There is no moral high ground here. Waving the American flag while fiercely defending the effort to destroy what that flag represents is untenable. Make a choice; be a proud American or a proud Confederate. You cannot possibly be both. Washington and Lee University has come very, very late to this party.