Hypocrisy about cyberwar

One of the crucial steps by which the US entered a state of permanent warfare was when acts of ‘terror’ (however one defines that politically malleable word) shifted from being criminal acts that could and should be treated as lying within the province of law enforcement agencies, to political acts that required a military response such as bombing and invading countries or extra-judicial ones such as setting up kangaroo courts where the normal processes did not apply but convictions could be easily obtained or even where people could be held without trial indefinitely.
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The facts about Social Security

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), exposes all the myths and lies about Social Security being in crisis and requiring a radical overhaul.

Fortunately, the program is fundamentally solid. While you can sound really smart in Washington by saying that Social Security is going bankrupt, the facts say the opposite. According to the Social Security trustees’ report, if we did absolutely nothing the program could pay every penny of scheduled benefits through the year 2036.

Even if we never did anything, Social Security could always pay near 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
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Social Security is a great program that does exactly what it was supposed to do. It provides a core retirement income as well as insurance against disability and support for survivors. It has extremely low administrative costs and little fraud. The only problem is the politicians who say they want to save it.

End of The World

The News of the World, one of England’s largest circulation newspapers, will close down after this Sunday’s edition, ending a 168-year run. It is the first major casualty of the phone-hacking scandal involving the Rupert Murdoch empire.

It is reported that Andy Coulson, a former editor of the paper who was British prime minister David Cameron’s director of communications until January when he resigned over early hacking allegations, will be arrested tomorrow and that other arrests are expected.

News Corp scandal

There is a huge scandal blowing up in the UK involving News Corp, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post in the US and several of the biggest newspapers in Britain, including the Sun and News of the World. The Guardian has been providing exhaustive coverage of this story in the UK but it has not caught fire here. In the June issue of Vanity Fair, Sarah Ellison provides some background to the whole sordid affair.

Murdoch’s media outlets have been implicated in the widespread hacking of the phones of people. It started with the phones of celebrities and they used the information thus gained to essentially blackmail them, not for money but in exchange for the kinds of exclusive celebrity gossip stories that are the trademark of their tabloids. But they also hacked into the voicemails of politicians, crimes victims’ families, families of dead soldiers, and the victims of terror attacks and it is these revelations that have really sparked outrage. Furthermore, these sleazy people had a close symbiotic relationship with the highest levels of people in the government and the police, whereby they provided favorable coverage in exchange for protection for their illegal activities.
What pushed the story over the edge was that they had hacked into the voicemails on the cell phone of a 13-year old girl Milly Dowler who went missing in 2002 and was found murdered about six months later. But when her mailbox filled up, mostly with friends and family pleading with her to contact them, the snoopers deleted some messages to allow new messages, cruelly raising the hopes of the family and police that the girl was alive and monitoring her voice mail.

Readers of this blog know that I do not hold the traditional media in high esteem but even by those low standards, Murdoch’s operations represent the absolute dregs. Unprincipled, sleazy, and corrupt are the words that jump to mind when Murdoch’s name is associated with anything. So far there have been no allegations that Murdoch’s American operations have engaged in similar actions but given the close ties between the UK and US operations I would not be in the least surprised if it had happened.

The logic of science-2: Determining what is true

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

An important question in any area of knowledge is being able to identify what is true and what is false. The search for what is true and the ability to know when we have discovered truth is, after all, the Holy Grail of epistemology, because we believe that those things that are true are of lasting value while false statements are ephemeral, usually a waste of time and at worst harmful and dangerous.

Aristotle tried to make a clear distinction between those things that we feel we know for certain and are thus unchanging, and those things that are subject to change. The two categories were variously distinguished as knowledge versus opinion, reality versus appearance, or truth versus error. Aristotle made the crucial identification that true knowledge consisted of scientific knowledge, and his close association of scientific knowledge with truth has persisted through the ages. It also made the ability to distinguish between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge, now known as the demarcation problem, into an important question since this presumably also demarcates truth from error. (This brief summary of this history is taken from the essay The Demise of the Demarcation Problem by Larry Laudan which should be referred to for a fuller treatment.)
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Casey Anthony and Anthony Sowell

Sometimes I am so clueless about current events that it amazes me. What triggered that thought is that I had been almost completely oblivious to the goings on in the murder trial of Casey Anthony. It was only yesterday when she was acquitted of her daughter’s murder that I became aware that this case had apparently been gripping the cable news world over many years and that people around the nation had been so obsessed by it that some actually flew to Florida from all over the country and lined up early outside the courthouse in order to get a seat at the trial.

Apparently the cable news world and chattering classes had decided Anthony was guilty and the acquittal seems to have caused some kind of national freak-out. Why are people so quick to dismiss the jury’s verdict? After all, they are the ones who followed the trial most closely.

I had not been totally unaware of the trial. I check Google News headlines regularly and had seen mention of the name Casey Anthony accompanied by a photo of her and knew that she was on trial for something but did not see any reason follow it up.

While the death of a two-year old child is undoubtedly tragic and sad, there are many such murder cases and it baffles me why some become the focus of so much attention. Is it due to the fact that the media pays more attention if there is a young, white, reasonably attractive (as far as one can tell from the thumbnail photos), middle class woman at the center of events?

Right now there is a trial going on in Cleveland of Anthony Sowell, a man accused of the serial rape and murder of eleven women and burying their bodies in various parts of his home. It is a macabre and truly sensational case that is a big story locally. But as far as I can tell, it is not receiving much attention nationally. I would not be surprised if even many Clevelanders were following the Casey Anthony story more closely than the Sowell case. Is it because the people involved are all black and the victims were mostly drug addicts, prostitutes, runaways, homeless, or otherwise social outcasts?

My article in The New Humanist is now online

You can read it here.

The article is titled No Doubt and suggests a short and simple new definition of the term atheist that more accurately and unambiguously captures what that label represents to those who choose to adopt it. This new definition leaves little room for agnosticism.

I’d be curious to hear from the readers of this blog what they think of my suggestion. If you think it is an improvement, maybe you could spread the word to the other atheist forums and groups that you patronize.

The logic of science-1: The basic ideas

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

In the course of writing these blog posts, especially those dealing with religion, atheism, science, and philosophy, I have often appealed to the way that principles of logic are used in science in making my points. But these are scattered over many posts and I thought that I should collect and archive the ideas into one set of posts (despite the risk of some repetition) for easy reference and clarity. Besides, I haven’t had a multi-part series of posts in a long time, so I am due.

Learning about the principles of logic in science is important because you need a common framework in order to adjudicate disagreements. A big step towards in resolving arguments can be taken by either agreeing to a common framework or deciding that one cannot agree and that further discussion is pointless. Either outcome is more desirable than going around in circles endlessly, not realizing what the ultimate source of the disagreement is.
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Livening up the fourth

Over at National Review Online, Dennis Prager has come up with an exciting new ritual to liven up that dull holiday known as the fourth of July that he hopes will instill in young people a better understanding of the true meaning of the event. He says he based it on the Passover seder and we know that there is nothing that children like to do on a holiday more than engage in solemn quasi-religious rituals instead of running around outside eating hot dogs and watching parades and fireworks. Here’s a sample of Prager’s ritual (I am not making this up):

Host holds up each symbolic item as he explains its symbolic meaning.

  • We drink iced tea to remember the Boston Tea Party. “No taxation without representation” was the patriots’ chant as they dumped British tea into the Boston Harbor.
  • We eat a salty pretzel to remember the tears shed by the families who lost loved ones in the struggle for freedom in the Revolutionary War and all the wars of freedom that followed.
  • We ring a bell to recall the Liberty Bell, which was rung to announce the surrender of the king’s army. On the Bell are inscribed these words from the Book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
  • We eat strawberries and blueberries dipped in whipped cream to celebrate the red, white, and blue of our flag.

Once this gem hit the internet, there was much merriment in the land, courtesy of Tbogg and James Wolcott.