Plead the First

Justice for (some of) the bankrupt

2005-10-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

It seems that the recent bankruptcy laws are so harsh that even our own government won't enforce them. Via The Talent Show (who found it at TPMCafe):

the Justice Department has announced that it will waive enforcement of portions of the new bankruptcy law for Louisiana residents and some Mississippi residents. They got it right: On the eve of the effective date of the new laws, they see that the bill is a terrible mess for people who are in desperate financial trouble. Hurrah for the Justice Department for saying they will back off this terrible bill. Notice that to provide even minimal protection for people following a catastrophe, the Justice Department must offer wholesale waiver of enforcement of multiple provisions that Congress specifically put into the bill. That's pretty strong evidence that the changes in the law are going to have a hard impact on families in trouble--including those who don't get a special hurricane break.

Of course, this doesn't help all the people around the country who are facing their own personal disasters, such as medical emergencies, job loss, and other such circumstances. Why should those issues be any less deserving of help simply because they aren't concentrated in one geographical area?

Voices from Converge

2005-10-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

Roch has some audio from Converge, a collection of brief comments from some of the participants.

Converge concludes

2005-10-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

By any measure, ConvergeSouth seems to have been a success. I enjoyed my time there Saturday. The talks were great, and it was a lot of fun meeting some of the local bloggers I've talked to only online.

The organizers and session leaders did a great job, and it was nice how Ed floated around between sessions and gave the conversations a shot in the arm on the rare occasions when things seemed to lag. I think Roch's talk on Local Online Alt Media was my favorite. The audience participation seemed to be at its best there, and it was inspiring to hear about how blogging can actually effect change in the real world.

An ironic quote: "No medium is more powerful than the moving image" -- From a slide in a Powerpoint presentation that contained no images, moving or otherwise, in the Video blogging session. To be fair, Amanda had several videos ready to show us, but unfortunately the sound on the computer couldn't be hooked into the room's PA system.

A profound quote: "You ask a question and you'll get an answer. And it may not fit with your view of reality." -- Michael Bowen, talking about interaction on blogs.

Merge with Converge

2005-10-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

Looks like ConvergeSouth has been a success so far. I'll be there tomorrow for the Saturday session, hoping to meet a few local bloggers in person and absorb some knowledge and ideas.

What about High Point's city council?

2005-10-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of coverage about the upcoming Greensboro City Council elections. However, living in High Point, I feel left out of it all. As far as I can tell, High Point has City Council elections coming up as well, but the only information I could find is this list of the candidates' names (you'll need to scroll down to pages three and four to see them). Is there coverage I'm missing? Are the High Point elections of no interest to anyone? Am I totally wrong and there's actually no High Point election coming up? Somebody fill me in please.

Bush to give "greater detail" about Al Qaeda and the war on terror

2005-10-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

President Bush will be giving a "major speech" today:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan characterized Bush's planned remarks Thursday morning as a "major speech" that will address the connection between Iraq and the broader war against the al Qaeda terrorist network "in greater detail than he has before."

Aslan, the lukewarm lion?

2005-10-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

Time has an article on the upcoming Narnia movies, wondering if they'll maintain their Christian message. There will be an easy way to tell, they say:

The White Witch: "That human creature is mine. His life is forfeit to me. His blood is my property."

Aslan (later) : "The Witch knew the Deep Magic. But if she could have looked a little further back... she would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards." —from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

...The second, more intriguing question, "Has it reproduced the Christian character of C.S. Lewis's book?" could also be worth tens of millions if it inspires Passion of the Christ-style repeat viewings by conservative Christians. And the answer could lie in whether the four sentences above, which constitute a kind of evangelical sniff test make it into the film.

I, for one, think it would be a shame if Disney were to leave out the Christian motifs present in the original story. They're so intertwined throughout the series, that cutting them out would either involve some major reworking of the story, or would significantly water down the strength of the emotions and motivations of the series' characters.

There's little reason to cut them out anyway, as the story is far from preachy. Lewis worked the themes in rather subtley in most cases, and nearly all of the specifics are changed in some way. As the Time article points out, for instance, Aslan's sacrifice is "on a huge stone table ... not [on] a cross; and performed with a stone knife, Aztec-style", and the books pull from many other traditions such as folk tales, and classical and Norse myths.

One thing I'm not sure about though is Time's notion that the film could "be worth tens of millions if it inspires Passion of the Christ-style repeat viewings by conservative Christians". Passion of the Christ was pretty much a literal retelling of a portion of the Bible. It would be hard for most Christians to find fault with that concept. Narnia, on the other hand, is a land populated by magic and witches, and many of the more fundamentalist Christians don't take too kindly to those things, even when put to use as allegory for Christian themes.

Sodor's dark underbelly

2005-10-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

Watching Thomas the Tank Engine today with my 3 year old, it occurred to me that something's not quite right on the Island of Sodor. No, it's not the fact that the trains talk -- although it is a little weird that their mouths don't move. In the episode we watched, Sir Topham Hatt finds that there are too many passengers on the island, but not enough trains to carry them, so he presses Bulgy the double decker bus into service. And that's where it gets weird.

Apparently, Bulgy got stuck under a bridge a few years back, and since then he's been relegated to being a henhouse, sitting in a field all day as a home for chickens. This normally wouldn't be disturbing, except for the fact that Bulgy, like all the other vehicles on the island, is a sentient being, aware of his surroundings and capable of thought and emotion. Imagine if you had a small fender bender, and as punishment you were forced to sit in a field for several years with only the clucking of some egg-laying hens to console you.

Further adding to the insult, consider that Bulgy has a driver. Does he share no responsibility for this? If not, then why does Bulgy even need a driver?

Too many questions. I think I need to hide the Thomas DVD and cue up The Incredibles for the 73rd time.

Just one word: Plastics

2005-10-03T19:50:00.000-07:00

Sunday's News and Record had a set of columns on the opinion page debating the implications of peak oil. On the "Pro" side, Steve Yetiv argued that we need to start working on alternatives now to stave off the worst effects of the decline of oil production. Scott Tinker argued the "Con" side, saying that yes, we will run out of oil, but it won't be "doomsday".

I found it interesting that both sides appeared to see the same problem. However, the pro side had some specific suggestions to begin addressing it now, while the con side seemed to advocate letting the market address the problem as necessary, and not worrying so much in the meantime. It's true, the end of oil probably won't be the end of the world. But doesn't it make more sense to start working now to minimize the pain of the transition?

Oh, and there's one other thing I'd like to know: Why didn't either of them say anything about plastic? It's not just about energy. Plastic is used just about everwhere, and we need oil to make many of the most useful forms of it.

Krugman on Katrina aid

2005-10-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

Ed Cone brings us some excerpts from Krugman's latest article, which talks about the ongoing Republican car wreck as it relates to helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Update: Ed also has a great takedown of Bush's handling of Al Qaida in a response to this letter in the News and Record's Letters to the Editor blog.

X-Mice

2005-09-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

Pharyngula has an interesting article about mice that have developed the power of regeneration.

Republicans wreck the car again

2005-09-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

Lance Mannion nicely sums up the Republican Modus Operandi (via Science and Politics):

It's another old song from the Republican repertoire. The poor are poor because of their own bad character, goes the chorus, of course, but the verse is like this: Liberal government programs encourage, foster, and make virtues out of the vices that keep the poor poor. You know, because not letting their children starve, not leaving them to attend rotten schools, not letting the old and young die of treatable diseases, not forcing them to live in squalid housing, all that just makes them lazy and dependent and (shhhh) shiftless.

At this point, a good small-government conservative who knows his hymn book will sing out that after all these years of Liberal social programs, poor children still go hungry, their schools are still rotten, the young and old still have no reliable medical care, and their homes are often squalid, no better than shacks in some places, lost amid noxious slums in others ...

The argument depends on ignoring the fact that over the last 40 years the Republicans have either run the government or had a strong enough hand in the running of it that they have been able to thwart, sabotage, stymie, underfund, pervert, or plain mismanage just about every meaningful large-scale "Liberal" big goverment social program ...

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

And they do this so that they don't have to chip in on gas.

In the article, Lance quotes Matt Yglesias:

This is the basic dilemma the right faces. It's committed to the view that the government shouldn't help poor people. But things happen from time to time that make it politically imperative to do something to help poor people. And if the government responded to those circumstances in ways that were efficient and effective, that would generate more political momentum for further poor-helping measures. Thus, the right finds itself forced to implement policies it knows to be ineffective.

The Katrina aftermath is providing us with an opportunity to view this in action. From the LA Times:

As President Bush tackles the monumental task of easing the social problems wrought by Katrina, he is proving deeply reluctant to use some of the big-government tools at his disposal, apparently out of fear of permanently enlarging programs that he opposes or has sought to cut.

Instead of depending on long-running programs for such services as housing and healthcare, the president has generally tried to create new, one-shot efforts that the administration apparently hopes will more easily disappear after the crisis passes. That has meant relying on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has run virtually all of the recovery effort.

The LA Times article talks about how the administration is working to "derail" a bipartisan proposal to expand Medicaid to provide healthcare for storm victims, instead seeking to implement a narrower plan to avoid "covering certain groups of evacuees". The White House is also pushing for government-built trailer parks to house evacuees rather than providing financial aid to help with rent for existing housing. Trailer parks would concentrate the poor in one area -- a very bad idea, as even some Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, admit. In short, the Bush administration seems to be pushing for inefficient, inadequate solutions rather than using or strengthening existing programs that are already in place for these purposes.

The hurricanes may be over for now, but we need to keep an eye on the car wreck that the White House may be bringing to Louisiana.

All your chiken are belong to lamp

2005-09-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

Artwork from a children's puzzle belonging to one of my kids.

Update: For those of you who are unfamiliar with the reference of this post's title, take a look here.

Intelligent Design versus Steve

2005-09-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

Starting today, the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania begins defending its decision to bring Intelligent Design into their biology classes.

The school district's policy is being challenged by eleven parents of students attending one of their high schools who assert that intelligent design is "unscientific and has no place in a science curriculum".

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which ... is defending the school district, said Dover's policy takes a modest approach ... "All the Dover school board did was allow students to get a glimpse of a controversy that is really boiling over in the scientific community," Thompson said.

Boiling over in the scientific community? Hardly. The Institute for Creation Research, one of the proponents of ID has a list of scientists who disagree with evolution. I count about 127 scientists on their list. Granted, their list is "partial" since "Nobody has ever taken a comprehensive survey of the world's universities, research organizations, etc. to find out who is an evolutionist or creationist."

However, Project Steve over at the National Center for Science Education gives us a list of over 600 scientists named Steve who support evolution.

Of course, the truth isn't decided based on the number of people adhering to a given position, but when the list of scientists supporting ID is one-sixth the size of the list of just the Steves who support evolution, I think Thompson's picture of a controversy that is "boiling over" is stretching it, to say the least. The controversy about intelligent design isn't in the scientific community -- it's in the school districts and courts, largely due to the PR efforts of ICR and similar organizations.

The Case for a Creator: Definitions

2005-09-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

Strobel's The Case for a Creator, claims to present scientific evidence for a creator. Before evaluating this claim, I think it will be useful to have a working definition of "science". This one seems pretty straightforward and to the point:

The study of the material universe or physical reality in order to understand it. This is done by making observations and collecting data about natural events and conditions, then organising and explaining them with hypotheses, theories, models, laws, and principles.

A definition of "material" might be in order as well, since that term is used in the definition, and since "materialism" was a concept that ECUMAN took issue with in our original discussion:

Consisting of matter; not spiritual; corporeal; physical; as, material substance or bodies.

I may return to this post to add other definitions if necessary. In the meantime, I'll be working on the next post, which should address Strobel's take on the first item in ECUMAN's list, "The evidence for the Big Bang".

Posts in this series:

1. Introduction
2. Definitions

Nuclear comeback?

2005-09-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

Alabama and Mississippi are under consideration as potential locations for a new nuclear power plant:

A consortium of utilities has picked two sites in Alabama and Mississippi as possible locations for what could be the first nuclear power plant built in the United States in more than three decades.

The consortium emphasized that no decision had yet been made on whether to seek a license for a new plant from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The group is developing an application for advanced approval of the two sites, which would allow for quicker completion of the project if a go ahead is given.

I think it's definitely worth taking another look at nuclear power. I only hope that some consideration is given to more safety-conscious designs, such as pebble bed reactors, and that security is taken seriously, with an eye towards the reactor as a potential terrorist target.

Plague sweeps through major urban areas

2005-09-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Its consequences are deadly. Its reach was unforseen. Luckily, it's not happening in real life:

Players of Blizzard's incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading across major cities in the virtual land of Azeroth, infecting player characters at an alarming rate.

The trouble started when Blizzard programmers added a new instance [dungeon] ... One of these instances, Zul'Grub, contained the god of blood, Hakkar. Hakkar was a powerful foe that could cast spells of his own, including a spell called Corrupted Blood. This spell did a large amount of damage to any player within the vicinity of the casting, and the effects lingered on after the spell was over.

What happened next was something Blizzard did not expect. Some of the players who had gone into the instance emerged back into the main world of Azeroth, and started spreading the Corrupted Blood disease to others who they came into close contact with. The infection soon spread into many of the cities and towns in the virtual world. Since the disease was intended to be a danger to powerful players, it tended to kill those less than level 50 almost instantly.

I play WoW, and it's a very rich and detailed game. The amazing thing about this is that it's an event that affects the entire game in a way totally unforseen by the developers, but it's not a result of a bug or glitch. The game is working as intended, and one aspect of it has taken on a life of its own, unintentionally bringing even more realism to the game.

The Case for a Creator: Introduction

2005-09-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

I'd like to use this post to begin a follow up on a discussion I was having with someone on the News and Record's Letters to the Editor blog, home to a host of some of the most partisan posters on the Internet.

The debate between Evolutionists and Creationists has been going on for quite some time now, making its way back into the news recently with the Kansas State Board of Education's debate on Intelligent Design and Evolution in their school curriculum and with President Bush's remarks on the issue.

A recent letter to the editor in the News and Record pointed out the difference between science and philosophy, correctly noting that evolution is sound science and implying that the philosophy behind Intelligent Design is not scientific. "If you want to find out why atoms interact, ask a scientist. If you want to know why life has meaning, do what I and my colleagues in the sciences do: Ask your pastor, minister, parish priest, rabbi or imam," said the writer.

In the course of the comments, a poster named ECUMAN said:

[W]hat you mean is all philosophies should be excluded from science classes except materialistic naturalism, no matter how illogical it can be at times ... [T]he second definition is the philosophical definition of materialism and naturalism that everything MUST have a materialistic explanation. That is the definition that is arbitrary and that I take issue with.

I responded:

It is not arbitrary... the assumption of materialism is fundamental to practicing science. It doesn't necessarily mean that that's the way the world is, it's just that this assumption is useful for making science work. By definition, the supernatural, or immaterial can't be quantified or observed by science. So trying to make such explanations a part of science is incoherent.

And you know what? This assumption of materialism.... it works. How's that computer that you're typing on working out for you? Have any lifesaving medical procedures done lately? Evidence of the usefulness of the assumption of [materialism] in science is all around you.

We briefly discussed the necessity of materialism to science, and at one point I commented:

If you look at ID arguments, you'll see that they are all just criticisms of evolution. They look for an area where something is not fully explained, or where there is disagreement, and rather than say "we don't know that yet" they say "an intelligent designer did it"

To which ECUMAN replied that there was more to it than that, and a good place to find a summary of the evidence for ID was in the book "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel. I asked for a brief overview of the strongest evidence presented there, and ECUMAN listed the following:

The evidence for the Big Bang

The difficulty of life beginning in the cosmos, this solar system and this planet by accident.

The complexity of biological life.

The amount and complexity of information found in DNA.

Accounting for human consciousness.

The problems with the evidence for macroevolution.

Since then I've visited the library and checked out a copy of the book, and I'd like to spend a few posts going through it and addressing the points raised by ECUMAN. Some things I'll be looking for: Are they in fact arguments that fit the definition of science, or do they lean more towards philosophy? Do the arguments indeed point towards a creator? Can I actually finish reading a library book before it's due back?

Police bring crime into your home, via the Web

2005-09-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

This is a very cool way to use the Internet:

Tipping off the police has never been easier.

Law enforcement agencies in the Triad increasingly are using the Internet as a tool to collect and deliver information. This creates a situation where residents can more easily discover what police have found going on in their neighborhoods -- or let police know what they haven't discovered.

The Greensboro Police Department's Web site allows residents to submit anonymous tips to Crime Stoppers.

People who are hesitant to actually speak person-to-person to tip off police about something might not be so reluctant to anonymously use a website to do so.

High Point's department began putting incident reports and other information online. The service rapidly became popular, with more than 4,000 requests made during the first half of September.

"It's getting a lot of use," said Lee Hunt, a crime analyst for the department. "We hoped it would happen."

The site allows users to map out activity, which permits residents to see what is going on in their neighborhood.

I took a look at High Point's site -- visually, it could use some love, however, functionally it's intriguing. When we first moved down to the Triad we actually went to downtown Greensboro and spoke with the police to get similar info about areas where we were looking at apartments. An online database makes that process a lot easier. Looking at some of the reports, details are often sketchy, or altogether absent ("I responded to the above location in reference to a property related issue"), but the reports seem to be useful for getting an idea about the type of crimes or frequency of incidents in an area. It would be nice to be able to search by zip code, or neighborhood though, something in between the street and city level.

One more blog in the mix

2005-06-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

I created this account simply to post a comment over on this blog. Will I actually make use of my new blog? We'll see.