Pastors who are not believers.

Clearly, I must be avoiding some kind of work or I would not be posting so much. This is an academic journal article published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. It looks at 5 pastors who do not believe in God, or at least not in the same way that their parishioners believe they do.

Wikileaks Strikes again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

They've released thousands of classified reports from Afghanistan dating back to 2004. Much like the McCrystal article, they paint a terrible picture of war gone wrong. For Example:

"MARCH 5, 2007 | GHAZNI PROVINCE
Incident Report: Checkpoint Danger

Afghan police officers shot a local driver who tried to speed through their checkpoint on a country road in Ghazni Province south of Kabul. The police had set up a temporary checkpoint on the highway just outside the main town in the district of Ab Band.

“A car approached the check point at a high rate of speed,” the report said. All the police officers fled the checkpoint except one. As the car passed the checkpoint it knocked down the lone policeman. He fired at the vehicle, apparently thinking that it was a suicide car bomber.

“The driver of the vehicle was killed,” the report said. “No IED [improved explosive device] was found and vehicle was destroyed.”

The police officer was detained in the provincial capital, Ghazni, and questioned. He was then released. The American mentoring the police concluded in his assessment that the policeman’s use of force was appropriate. Rather than acknowledging the public hostility such episodes often engender, the report found a benefit: it suggested that the shooting would make Afghans take greater care at checkpoints in the future.

“Effects on the populace clearly identify the importance of stopping at checkpoints,” the report concluded."

Here's the document.


Our wars look more like a Joseph Conrad novel every day.

Good synopsis of Sarah Palin's life till now.

There's a big brouhaha going on right now.

Some background: remember the recent NAACP vs Tea Party spat last week. Monday, Andrew Breitbart released video (can't find the original anymore so an article will have to suffice) of a black USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod, USDA Rural Development Georgia State Director, who admitted to racist feelings against a white farmer.

It ends up all over Fox News, Drudge, the bologsphere and conservative talk radio run with it. By the end of day, Shirley is fired from her job at the request of the White House.

Later it comes out that the video was edited. She was actually telling a story about how she felt guilty for having racist inclinations and wend above and beyond her duties to help a white farmer keep his home. Following the experience she realized her duty was to help the less fortunate and to move beyond race.

I have two things to say about this.
1. Total proof of the TDS right-wing media feedback cycle. Right wing commentator, blogger, publisher says something radical > news reports that "some say" or "new information shows" > pundits now cover the controversy over the issue > cycles back into the news reports. This all happened in less than 12 hours. We went from video posted on right-wing news site to the ordered firing of an employee in less then 12 hours.

2. This knee-jerk reaction by the White House in response to what was a radical right claim is disconcerting. It shows us that the administration is deeply afraid of the Fox News right. They folded like a deck chair. This kind of defensive, near paranoid attitude reminds me of the Bush administration: reactive rather than proactive; ultimately at the mercy of their own desire to appear flawless and in control. The administration is too tightly wound and it shows. This time it was one woman's job but what comes next?

UPDATE: Here's Breitbart on CNN with some world class wargarbl. He claims that CNN didn't do enough to prove that the farmer they had on was the same farmer Shirley Sherrod helped all those years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfPqG_kjBoY&feature=player_embedded

Random Thought/Question

Would paying out Reparations for Slavery constitute an effective economic stimulus?

More stuff about college educations.

A few weeks back, I posted about the benefit I may have received from attending a big state school rather than an elite university. I've been thinking about it since then. Ultimately, I think that I do value the freedom I had in both high school and college to choose my own path. Since I didn't see myself as a student on the elite path, I didn't feel like I had to follow it. I think ignorance had a lot to do with it too. I really had no idea what college was going to be like or why it was valuable. I didn't have perspective on what a "better school" would get me. It didn't bother me that I was going to UGA and once I arrived, I found I was outclassed by most of the freshmen on my hall. After meeting the 15th person with enough AP hours to make him a sophomore, I decided that I was lucky to be there. I felt like I had been given a chance that I didn't necessarily deserve. Later, that same though process played into my switch from business to English. If I was getting a lucky break, I wanted to study something that I believed was valuable and enjoyable. Same thing with deciding to teach.

I found two more articles. The first is just a run-of-the-mill piece about the employment difficulties facing new grads. The other, is written by a Yale professor and meshes pretty closely with what I wrote about last time. The article is so similar I actually think I may have read it a year or two ago and forgotten about it.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs-educate-20100612,0,1944150.story?track=rss

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/ 

Artificial Life

The Cover of The Economist this issue:

Here is the lead story.

Here is the more in depth article.

However, I think our required reading is actually an article from April 2000. Its an infamous article by Bill Joy (founder of Sun Microsystems and all around smart guy) titled "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" and it is your required reading this week. Yes, I said it twice. Yes, its that important. Its long so give yourself some time for reading.

I haven't reread all of it, but I seem to recall that Bill is going to take a decidedly negative view of technological convergence. We're playing with powers we don't understand or have full control over. So long as human beings are making decisions, we'll be okay. Once we turn over decision making capabilities to the very entities we create, things get ugly. It is a very compelling, if negative, view of our future.