Here and There: Neo-Puritanism and the Dutch

I am prompted by this ridiculous story about a young woman training to become a teacher. She had once posted a picture of herself drinking, wearing a pirate hat, at a party, on her Myspace page. later in life, while in placement as a prospective teacher, her supervisor googled her and spotted the picture and expressed his deep, solemn, disapproval. He and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, in their ultimate, beneficent, instructional piety and wisdom, decided that Ms. Stacy Snyder was thereby not worthy of a teaching job, and denied her a teaching degree.

Ms. Snyder went to court and, stunningly– to me– lost. (Of course, this was a U.S. court, where judges are elected by the same people who made Britney Spears a household name). The ruling was that this was not an infringement of her right to “free speech”. Is that what they thought the issue was?

How dare they? How dare those puritanical, self-righteous, stupid zealots deprive this young woman of her dreamed-of career because she didn’t meet their fanatical standards of purity and innocence?

I’ll bet those gentleman are patriotic. I’ll bet they are pious. I’ll bet they are believers. I’ll bet they would feel far more comfortable living with a bunch of Islamic extremists than they could ever imagine. I’ll bet that deep down in their tiny, crispy, blackened little hearts, they would love to force Ms. Snyder to wear a burka.

* * *

One thing I’ve always liked about the Dutch– and one reason a lot of people don’t like them– is this kind of pragmatism that was apparently too rational and sensible for the delicate Americans.

July 9, 2010

[I’m going to note in fairness here that getting accurate, detailed information about this well-worn story about the six-year-old kissing his classmate is difficult, and there are websites out there that believe the offense was more serious than just one kiss. On the balance of things, however, I still think giving the six-year-old a suspension was a tacit confession that the adults in charge had no clue about their jobs, children, or life. While I’m at it, let me note that as for the woman who sued McDonald’s because the coffee was too hot– I’m on her side. There’s a lot more to that story than the media generally admits. It’s become a stalking-horse for conservatives who want to relieve corporations of liability for their defective or dangerous products.]

Speaking of alleged urban myths… has there been a single confirmed use of the “date rape” drug yet?

We appear to have quietly entered an era of Neo-Puritanism in North America. While you can show any kind of violence, blood-letting, torture, cruelty, dismemberment, and murder on television or movies at any time or place, we have become extremely weak-minded and hysterical at the idea of sex.

Part of this is due to the unfortunate, unholy alliance between feminist psychology and Christian fundamentalism in the 1980’s. Off-hand, you might think these two cultural streams had very little in common. They did. But there was one thing they shared: an almost frantic paranoia about sexuality. The result: a kindergarten student is suspended for kissing a classmate on the cheek. Another student is taken away in handcuffs are drawing pictures of weapons. And another student is busted for waving a chicken-finger like a gun.

But the most egregious sins of this ilk are committed by middling managers– people who have some authority because they are astute suck-ups with a bit of education who can fill in forms and transfer money to consultants. They are afraid to make real decision and, therefore, not really smart enough to evaluate advice either. They always tell you, “the consultant said…”, or “the expert said…” So they see the 6-year-old kissing a classmate and they are too crumblingly stupid to realize that this was not ever what was intended by the term “sexual harassment”. * * *

What if your school day consisted of playing guitar, making papier-mâché “aliens” for your Mars project, dropping eggs from the roof to see how they splattered, and learning how to create puppets? Insanity, right? That’s how St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights operates.

I don’t know why it’s taken me 54 years, but I have finally begun to realize just how arbitrary so many of our social and cultural institutions are. In the 60’s and 70’s, we often talked about how schools basically train us to be mindless consumer drones, but, only a few years later, we began to “realize” how impractical it would have been do things otherwise.

And here is St. Ann’s, a towering affront to conventional wisdom. St. Ann’s does not award grades. There are few rules. Students are encouraged to explore their creative sides. And the kids are all right– they go on to good colleges and universities. The sky does not fall in on them.

I have no problem believing that a school like this would be quite successful, and that the students who spend all of their high school years in this institution would be capable, accomplished, and competent, and ready to take on the world.

I think thirty years ago I would have believed the products of this system would be nearly illiterate. Just as I would have believed that someone without access to surgery would die young. Or that a nation without a military (like Costa Rica) would be invaded by its neighbors.

At the same time, the Obama Administration is pushing the Bush educational program: teaching to the tests. Firing teachers and principals if a school does not meet the minimum average. Not an iota of effort made in the direction of teaching children how to actually think: we’ve gone back to the 1950’s where we only want them to read, write, and show up at the assembly line– or, more likely, Walmart, for their minimum wage jobs– and consume, consume, consume.

Go into debt — the modern form of indentured servitude.

Not This Evidence

After all the news coverage of the wrongful convictions that have been overturned with DNA evidence and the incompetent or malicious police investigators and forensic “experts” responsible, you would think the police might think twice before pulling something like this:

Michigan State Police fiber expert Guy Nutter testified Wednesday fibers found on Dickinson’s body and the pillow covering her face were consistent with those taken from a 100-percent acrylic sweatshirt police discovered at Taylor’s home in Southfield.

Graham noted Nutter’s report said no individual source of the fibers could be determined because his sweatshirt would be indistinguishable from others just like it. She used prosecution photos of Dickinson’s closet to point out a dark blue or black-hooded sweatshirt, which Nutter admitted was not tested for fiber comparisons. From Grand Rapids Press, April 2, 2008

Wow. Here we go. A “fiber expert”! Do you know what that is? Did you think that there was a college somewhere where you could go to study for four years so you could become a “fiber expert”? Or do you think this might just be some science major with a big ego and a microscope? What constitutes a “match”, do you think, of two fibers? Do you think there is some objective criteria involved, or just a lot of verbiage and charts and graphs and power point slides? How many “points” of similarity should there be? How many different chemicals used in the formulation of the material?

It turns out that the fibers– of course– were not tested until after the police had their suspect. There’s no point in testing before you have a suspect, ha ha, since you don’t use fiber evidence to find a suspect. If you did, it would find too many suspects. Think about that.

The only purpose of fiber comparisons is to prove that the suspect you already have– it could be anybody– is guilty. Since there are any number of fibers available at any given crime scene and any number of fibers available in any given suspect’s closet at any given time– this is a snap. Why don’t juries laugh this kind of evidence out of court?

Then we have this:

Michael Arntz, a former EMU police officer, testified for a second time this week about video images he pieced together during a two-week review of footage from campus surveillance cameras.

The images, played repeatedly on a projector screen Wednesday, show a man identified by several people as Taylor leaving Buell Hall shortly after 4 a.m. Dec. 13.

So Michael Arntz, an Eastern Michigan University police officer, took it upon himself to “piece together” some video footage that he and some others claim shows the suspect, Orange Taylor, leaving the residence in which Laura Dickinson’s body was later found. That is worrying. One hopes the defense team– public defenders, of course– is astute enough to demand that the district attorney either provide a single, intact continuous tape, or exclude the evidence altogether.

The defendant, the colorfully named Orange Taylor, has a serious problem. His semen was found on the body. But the door to her room was left locked from the inside, and there was no evidence of foul play. In fact, the police and medical experts have no idea of how she died. They suggest she was suffocated with a pillow. This is the second trial for Orange Taylor — the first jury couldn’t reach a verdict.

Taylor’s attorneys argued that he entered Dickinson’s dorm room the night of Dec. 13, 2006, to steal items and masturbated over her body, not realizing she was dead. His DNA was found on her inner thigh.

From Here.

It’s hard to know what to make of this case. He might be guilty of murder. It’s very hard to explain his DNA on the body if he wasn’t there, and it’s very hard to explain why he was there if he wasn’t committing a crime– he and the victim were not acquainted– and it’s hard to explain why she died if the sex was consensual.  Not all prosecutions involving dubious evidence (the fibres) are of the wrong person.

The fiber evidence should be laughed out of court.

Update:  New York Times article on a forensic scientist who committed suicide shortly after it was revealed that he had not followed correct procedures in at least some cases.

UFO

Just for a moment, assume that there really are aliens out there and some of them are flying spacecraft around, maybe scouting the earth for the prospects of future colonization. And you see one. And the government knows you saw one. It knows you are a witness.

Why would the government need to cover up the possible existence of UFO’s? Go into work tomorrow and tell everyone in the office that you saw a UFO last night. What do you think? You are now the best friend of any government that wants to convince people not to take UFO sightings seriously. You can’t help but acknowledge the inherent absurdity of what you are saying, and the more you know that, the more you are likely to giggle, or become demonstrative or excited, which makes you look crazy, of course.

Suppose instead that you don’t believe in UFOs and then you see one. You would not have seen one, because you will not believe what you have seen. Contrary to the movies, in which spontaneous revelation happens all the time, you will simply not believe what you have seen. You will tell people, I saw something that looked almost like a UFO. But actually, it was obviously some kind of civilian aircraft, or a helicopter, or an optical illusion. It couldn’t have been a UFO.

Even if you could produce a UFO, you would explain that it is some kind of advanced experimental aircraft, probably, that the government is trying to keep secret. With hairless bulbous monkeys inside.

There is absolutely no proof that UFO’s do not exist. There is a lot of proof that no matter what people actually see or hear, certain smart people will never, ever believe it was a genuine UFO.

I am thinking of three cases in particular. The sightings over Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia on October 4, 1967; the one over Lebanon, Illinois on January 5, 2000, and the one near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, December 9, 1965.

In each case, numerous reasonable and otherwise reliable individuals reported seeing an object in the sky that did not appear to resemble any other known type of aircraft. In each case, you have to grant the possibility of numerous whacky people all agreeing to tell ridiculous stories to the media for personal reasons we will never understand.

All right. I realized as soon as I typed “numerous reasonable and reliable” that maybe I’m asking too much of any random sampling of individuals who happen to be in the same general area at any given time. And at different periods of history, “numerous reasonable and reliable” people concluded that there were witches, communists, and terrorists everywhere around us. “Numerous reasonable and reliable” people think that nuclear power plants are less safe than coal-fired power plants. “Numerous reasonable and reliable” people think that ethanol can help save us from the energy crisis. Numerous “reasonable and reliable” people think the Leafs have a shot at making the playoffs.

 

Panderemic

This is in the New York Times, March 28, 2006:

The vaccines produced every year to prevent seasonal flu are unlikely to be of any use in warding off a pandemic strain. But a flu shot could provide at least some peace of mind, by preventing the false alarm that could come from catching a case of garden-variety flu.

Being older than 11 years old, I tend to look somewhat askance at warnings of pandemics. That’s because I’m old enough to remember that there were warnings about swine flu and Legionnaire’s Disease, and SARS, and people talked seriously then about “pandemics” and “millions dead” and whether or not you should buy yourself a tight-fitting face-mask. More from the New York Times:

Some health officials have recommended stockpiling two to three months’ worth of food, fuel and water in case a pandemic interferes with food distribution or staffing levels at public utilities, or people are advised to stay home.

Ahem. Did you read this? Are you scared now? Have you scheduled a trip to the grocery store to stockpile three months worth of food in your basement? No? Are you crazy? This is a serious newspaper which prides itself on credible reporting based on factual research and accurate information. This newspaper is accountable, damnit!

This newspaper is seriously quoting “health officials” as recommending that you stockpile food in your basement because this pandemic might be so serious that it will seriously impact the food supply chain.

The article said nothing about arming yourself against roving bands of desperate mutants.

Am I crazy? Even the usually-sober CBC has been hyping avian flu for the past several months, frequently bandying about the phrase “global pandemic”.

I often recall a phrase from a Michael Moore’s documentary, in which he alleges that the government and media seem determined to frighten people, for two reasons. Firstly, to scare you into obeying them because, they would have you believe, only they can save you. Secondly, — and this may sound counter-intuitive– but they also want to scare you into consuming. They need you to feel that your life is insecure or inadequate unless you have acquired all those valuable things that other people are trying to take away from you. Our “way of life”– a clever euphemism for “extravagant toys”. [added November 2009]

But then I think, ah, no– this is the famous New York Times, and the CBC, for heaven’s sake, not ABC news…

The New York Times goes on to describe how “some experts” are afraid that this particular flu virus might mutate in humans and spread very, very quickly, and might even reach Arctic communities that can only be accessed by dogsled, like the Spanish flu.

The Spanish flu of 1917-18 was real. That is the nightmare our “health officials” worry about. Millions of people really did die. The threat of nuclear war in the 1960’s was more real than even the alarmists thought. The generals really were– and sometimes still are– psychotic lunatics. They were really prepared to bomb the entire planet into oblivion rather than surrender to any kind of Soviet ultimatum.

Pardon me if I observe, however, that people really did die of flu back then, and not just of Spanish flu. They died young, of any of dozens of illnesses or infections or injuries, most of which we have managed to overcome lately with basic nutrition, hygiene, safety precautions, and decent health care. Are we really vulnerable to a large scale “pandemic” of anything? In fairness to the New York Times, that same article quotes some “health officials” as believing that the likelihood of a pandemic is very small.

Nutrition and medical care today are way, way better than they were in 1917. Counter-point: about half of the people infected with avian flu (who caught it directly from birds) die. Counter-counter-point: what sometimes happens during these scares is that every random flu-like illness suddenly becomes attributed to the high-profile threat.

There is a subtext. Nobody who seriously believes in the threat of avian flu believes the government should have less authority to force people to be vaccinated or shutdown air ports, or arrest people.

I do wish I could bet against the CBC on the issue. It wouldn’t have to be a decisive yes/no type of bet. I would just like the CBC to carefully and publicly state what it thinks the odds really are– and put money behind it. They benefit from hyping the threat of a pandemic by getting interested listeners, who can’t wait to hear about the latest potential disaster.

There should be five million dollars on deposit with a neutral third party. If we get an pandemic, the CBC gets to keep their money and the listeners.

But if there is no pandemic– as there never was a SARS outbreak, for all the ink spilled about that business– skeptics like me should get paid for putting up with the bullshit for so long.

Your Fingerprints: Junk Science

When we were little children watching police shows like “The FBI” and “Adam-12” on TV, we became convinced, along with everyone else, that if a criminal’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, it was case closed, proof-positive, open and shut.

Why? Because no two fingerprints, in the entire world, could be alike. How did we know that? How did we know that that was true? Because everyone acted as it it was true. Everyone acted as if no two fingers in the entire world could have matching patterns on them. Everyone acted as if this was the product of years of sound, thorough research conducted by revered scientists.

It is very odd, then, to discover, that there might never have been a good reason for believing that the evidentiary value of fingerprints has ever been established with any kind of scientific rigor. There really is no body of systematic research or scientific proof that fingerprints really are unique to each individual, at least, not in the way the movies and television would have you believe. In other words, nobody has ever systematically compared fingerprints to each other to establish just what the odds are that any two, from perfect strangers, might match.

In 1995, a proficiency test was administered to 156 law enforcement examiners. These are the guys called in to court to testify that the suspect’s prints — don’t forget, we could be talking about Lee Harvey Oswald here, among others– were found on the murder weapon, or a door knob, or a table surface, or something. Only 44% of these “experts” could correctly identify all five of a set of test prints. Read that again: less than half of the “experts” were proficient. And again: half of these guys got at least one of the prints wrong, out of five. Twenty percent. One in five.

I don’t know the details of the test, but I do know that the people who administered it considered the performance of half the experts to be inadequate and unreliable.

What has happened is that the Supreme Court of the United States has recently made some rulings that require courts to establish that “scientific evidence” really is scientific before it is allowed in the courtroom. What you have to imagine is some “expert” talking in obscure, difficult language about some scientific information which the jury doesn’t understand. The jury takes the guy’s word for it. The jury figures that the “expert” knows. The jury figures that he wouldn’t be testifying this way if he didn’t have a solid body of research and knowledge behind him. Think about fiber and hair analysis. Think about fingerprints. Think about those difficult cases where the prosecution actually has very little evidence so they scrounge around for “matching” fibers and hairs and semen and spots of blood. We have been trained by television and the movies to regard such evidence as definitive and decisive. Now we are beginning to know that such evidence can be constructed around a suspicion.

In France, 16 points of similarity, between fingerprints, are required before a “match” can be asserted. In Sweden, the number is 7. The FBI, in the U.S., won’t tell us how many it considers decisive. The FBI says it decides on a case by case basis. I thought that justice is exactly the opposite of that. Blind and impartial. Consistent. The FBI says, “trust me”. I wish I could.  Science does not provide standards that apply on a “case by case” basis.

Our system of justice– adversarial– encourages both sides to become advocates for their clients’ interests, rather than the truth. The police don’t just present facts– they invest in the suspect’s guilt, and advocate for it, and do whatever they feel needs to be done to “win” their case. It is apparent that often they feel that they know who did it– they just need to muster the facts necessary for a conviction. They sometimes regard the law as an impediment to justice.

They almost never willingly admit a mistake, even when DNA analysis proves they were wrong.

Occasionally, it is clear, they manufacture the “facts”. An expert, for example, will testify that a fiber found in the suspect’s car exactly matches a fiber taken from the victim’s sweater. So how do you assess the real degree of similarity, and the real likelihood that these fibers could have matched fibers from almost anyone else’s sweater? The lab is not presented with five samples and five potential matching fragments of evidence, and then asked to identify which ones match. They are presented with a set of fibres from the suspects home or clothing, and a set of fibres found at the crime scene. Do they match, yes or no? If no matches are found, we’ll find more fibres, and then more. The lab technician knows that the police will be happier if a match is found.

A suspect’s car– or any car– is loaded with smells, particles, dust, fragments of things, scraps of paper, coffee stains, oil and grease, residues, maybe even bodily fluids. If you took thousands of samples of every substance in a any car, how hard would it be to find something– anything– that matches something that can be linked to a victim– any victim? I’ll bet it wouldn’t be that hard at all.  Look at the Azaria Chamberlain case.

The Supreme Court is right. We should demand very high standards of “expert” testimony, before allowing smooth-talking partisan professionals to try to bowl over a jury with analysis that might well be nothing more than “junk science”.


Random Notes:

Until the 1880’s, the commonly accepted “age of consent” in America was 11.

2011-06: in the case of Casey Anthony, the prosecution is actually presenting “evidence” that traces of the smell of a decomposing body can be detected and analyzed from the trunk of Ms. Anthony’s car. This has all the hallmarks of the good old fibre analysis presented at so many cases by discredited forensic “scientists” in the past.

I hope her defense attorney has the intelligence to ask the prosecution to produce evidence of the smells of hundreds of cars compared to the smell captured from Ms. Anthony’s car and then have the “expert” blindly identify which one had the body in it.

Surgical Error

In some kind of documentary to be shown on television in the near future, a brilliant Toronto brain surgeon comments on how discouraging his work can be when so many of his patients die.

As discouraging as having a doctor give you an option with little real chance of a success, but a large probability of reducing your quality of life for what little time you do have left?

You know all those ads urging you– if you are a woman– to do a breast self-examination regularly? Check, check, check! Early detection will save your life!

Maybe. But then again, maybe not. A recent study conducted in Denmark showed that the results of therapies administered after “early” detection do not show a marked improvement over the results of therapies administered upon “late” detection. I suppose the latter refers to a situation in which a woman never checked herself until she experienced some obvious symptoms.

A few years ago, it was de rigeur to insist on DREs for men over 40. Digital Rectal Examinations. Then again a similar study came to the conclusion that early detection did not improve the chances of survival for the patient, though it certainly resulted in drastic changes to the patient’s quality of life.

Some people occasionally snipe at me for daring to question the wisdom of doctors. Are you a doctor? Then how do you know whether someone should have surgery or not? How can you possibly make a judgement like that?

Fine. So let’s consult a doctor. (But first, since you are so high on “experts”, what’s your opinion of Global Warming?) The trouble is, these new studies are conducted by the same “experts” that set us on the wrong path initially. Doctors vs. Doctors. Which ones are right? Doctors in North America are quick to install tubes when children develop repeated ear-aches. In Europe, they almost never insert tubes. Doctors used to like to have pregnant mothers lie on their backs on an operating table to deliver their babies. We now know– from other doctors– that that is about the worst possible position to be in to deliver a baby. Doctors prescribed Thalidomide and removed your tonsils and maybe parts of your brain and still perform triple-bypasses.

The vast majority of doctors probably do still believe in breast self-examinations. But established wisdom is often wrong (you can’t swim for one hour after eating?) and it gets entrenched, and it should not be surprising that it takes a few years for it to be dislodged.

Sometimes, a radical new idea has hallmarks to it. It “rings true”. It seems strikingly to address vacancies in the established wisdom. But the idea that any cancer should be surgically removed or bombarded with deadly radiation has the kind of simple logic to it that you just know might not make as much sense as it seems to at first glance. It flies in the face of something that seems more logical: do no harm.

For example, how do you explain this fact: the professional group least likely to consent to surgical treatment is…. get ready… surgeons!

You are getting ready to travel by air for the first time. Your best friend– a frequent traveler– has been urging you on. Maybe he even sold you the airline tickets. He escorts you the check-in desk.

Then he waves goodbye.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“Are you nuts? I never fly. I’m taking a boat.”

The Expanding Universe and Leonard Cohen

I just have to remark on how interesting it is that the universe is expanding. I know– you think Bill’s off on another one of his pointless tirades here— but think about it. Until about 1918, almost everybody in the world thought that the universe was essentially static and unchanging. Sure, the earth rotated around the sun and the planets circled in their orbits, but this was part of a complex, mechanistic entity that had been devised by God or nature eons ago and could not be altered. It remained only for science to uncover the rules by which this mechanism operated.

Einstein ran into problems with this view. His theory of relativity should have led him to the conclusion that the universe must be expanding, but he found this concept so odious that he postulated the existence of “anti-gravity”– something that kept the stars and planets from collapsing in upon themselves with the force of gravity.

Unfortunately for everyone, Edward Hubble came along and proved that not only were there more galaxies than just ours, but that almost all the other galaxies were high-tailing it out of here as fast as possible. Hubble used something called the Doppler effect to analyze the position of distant stars. Essentially, the Doppler effect means that sound or light waves decrease in frequency the farther away an object is, and increase when an object moves towards you. Think of a police car siren.

Hubble studied the light waves emitted by the stars and was astounded to discover that almost all of the stars are moving away from us.

Don’t you find this alarming? Imagine you are in a big stadium with 100,000 people. You look around with your binoculars for about two-thousand years and make all kinds of charming observations about people’s different heights and weights and hair colours. You notice that they are moving around, but you think that they’re just circulating around the stadium. Suddenly you begin to realize that all of the people, in all directions, are moving away from you. Furthermore, you suddenly realize that they are all leaving rather quickly. Why are they leaving? Where are they going? Why do they hate us so much? What do they know that we don’t know?

Is there a bomb in the stadium? And nobody told you?

“Four o’clock in the afternoon, and I didn’t feel like very much”. Leonard Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag (Songs of Love and Hate)

Would such a line have been possible in a static universe? I don’t think so. I think Cohen knows why they’re leaving. Furthermore, I believe that Cohen is aware of the the effects of time-travel: “The rain falls down on last year’s man”. Could it be that he has uncovered the secret, and went back one year to look at himself? Is that why it “seems so long ago/none of us were very strong”– how would he know that, if he hadn’t found a worm hole, probably somewhere on Clinton street? Why does he claim, “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder”?

So, what does it all mean? “You’re living for nothing now/I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.”

Some Christians believe that the expanding universe is proof that God created the world. The idea that all the stars and galaxies are flinging themselves off into infinity faster than the speed of light does indeed suggest that God put out his finger and actualized the entire universe in a blinding flash.

After insisting that the world was flat for 2000 years, and then insisting that it was only 5000 years old (if it was 5000 years old, we wouldn’t see the light from stars that are more than 5000 light years away, even though there are a zillion of them), and that Noah took dinosaurs into the ark, (even though he couldn’t possibly even have had room for every species of insects), and that the sun revolved around the earth, one has to take the church’s pronouncements on science with a small degree of skepticism. On the other hand, the Big Bang is about as apt a description of the idea of “creation”, out of nothing, as any.

Well, I find Hawking very edifying, and I think a lot of what he has to say applies to Leonard Cohen’s songs.

The Immorality of Komodo Dragons

I just watched a television documentary on Komodo Dragons. These creatures are real slime balls. I think we should have nothing to do with them. In the first place, they are very ugly. They’re up to five feet long, covered with scales, and they have kind of a baggy, flabby look. They look like a log covered with wet burlap. And it’s no wonder: they’re only active for about three hours a day. Why are they only active for three hours a day? Why don’t they get out there and put in a regular eight-hour day like the rest of the hard-working animal kingdom? Because they will eat anything, no matter how old or disgusting. Komodo dragons will kill large animals, like goats and deer, and eat part of them, and put the rest away for later, and not in a fridge. I guess when you’re as ugly as a Komodo dragon, you don’t care what goes into you. You see this fresh elk go leaping by and he looks real tasty and all, and then you look over at a two-week old rotting goat carcass and think, “hey, that looks good…”

Komodo dragons drool when they’re hungry. But not like you and me. Oh no. Komodo dragon drool is toxic. You see, Komodo dragons don’t go chasing after deer, knock their legs out from under them, and then break their spines, like the hard-working jaguar or cheetah. No, the Komodo dragon sort of wanders around as if he wasn’t up to anything, and then, if a deer gets kind of careless and doesn’t move out of the way quickly enough, they leap– “leap” being a relative term here–into the air and bite them. The deer often gets away, or thinks it gets away. It moves off into the distance and looks behind itself and sees this ugly, baggy old lizard coming after it… slowly. But the Komodo dragon will follow the deer for a week, from way behind, because the Komodo dragon knows that, thanks to that toxic sludge drool, that little bite is going to get very badly infected. That deer is doomed. Eventually.

You have to respect the Komodo dragon’s patience, don’t you? Would you go into MacDonald’s, order a hamburger, take a bite, and then wait a whole week until it quieted down ten blocks away so you could finish it off?

Komodo dragons will eat other Komodo dragons if they can. This is a non-issue for Komodo dragons. I don’t think they give it much thought at all. You certainly don’t see other Komodo dragons gathering around a corpse and demanding an investigation. They are more likely to demand a share. And this is why young Komodo dragons live in trees until they are three years old and at least five feet long.

Komodo Dragons mate for life, but the male doesn’t have a good memory. He can’t tell just by looking at a female whether it’s his wife or not. He kind of follows her for a while until she notices him. “Huh? What do you want? Oh—again? I should have known. Is that all you think about?” Yup. That’s her.

Seriously, if he is strolling along and he happens to see a female and he gets the urge, he has to get real close first and then taste her sweat glands. Then he knows. It is very important for him to be very, very sure that this beauty is his wife, because, if it isn’t, the minute he gets close, she might kill him and eat him. This makes it very difficult for Komodos to have orgies. I’m not saying it’s impossible or that it’s never happened: just that it’s difficult. And for the same reason that a dead goat lasts a Komodo a month, they aren’t too worried about “protection”. A Komodo thinks, “Listen, I just had a mouthful of month-old maggoty goat meat, I’m been crawling through leech infested muck for three hours, I live in a dark cave with thousands of fruit bats, and I just sniffed your sweat glands— and you’re worried about exchanging bodily fluids? What are you? A prude?”

In order to mate, the male Komodo has to bring his body temperature up about ten degrees. So he goes and lays in the sun for an hour before sex. This takes a lot of spontaneity out of the Komodo dragon’s life, but hey, how spontaneous can you be if you only move three miles per hour? So, say a couple of Komodo dragons meet in a singles swamp. He says, “hey, you look like my type.” She says, “Oooo. You’re getting me hot. Let’s make it.” He says, “Okay. I’ll go find a sunny rock and we’ll see you in an hour.”

And what if the nearest sunshine is waiting for him on the other side of a shady mango grove? He waddles over there at 3 miles per hour, lays in the sun for an hour, brushes his teeth and slaps a little after-shave under the old burlap, waddles half-way across hell’s half acre, through swamps, under trees, through gnarled roots, finds the female, sniffs her sweat glands to make sure it’s her, rears up… “Oh damn. I’m too cold.” And you thought Viagra was inconvenient?

As if life isn’t hard enough for the male Komodo dragon, if he stays in the sun too long, he will die of heat stroke. So he can’t let himself go way over the ten degrees up, and then hope he cools off just the right amount by the time he gets to the female. For Komodo dragons as for humans, timing is important.

Komodo dragons live in only one place in the entire world: you guessed it: Komodo. People have to be careful on Komodo because Komodo dragons will sometimes eat people. Now, you’ve got this 150 pound lizard roaming around this island drooling this toxic sludge and attacking your children… and what do you? You protect the lizard! You put him on the endangered species list!

Well, I think we’re just getting carried away with this endangered species business. If it was up to me, we’d be having Komodo soup every night until they were all gone.

The Missionary Position

The statistics keep changing– depending on who is doing the counting– but there can be little doubt that there are now more Christians in Africa, Asia, and China, than there are in Europe or the United States. So why does the United States and Canada keep sending missionaries to the “Third World”?

The answer is, probably, because we can.

I remember reading a fairly detailed story about a large charity organization that raised funds for research into a certain childhood illness. It might have been polio or something. Anyway, the disease was finally virtually eradicated.

So what happened to the charitable organization? They had a big party, right? They laid off all their staff, sold off their buildings, shredded their internal memos, and disappeared, right?

Wrong. The organization simply adopted a new cause and began raising money for it. The tools were all in place. Jobs were at stake. The decision of what to do was made by the people whose jobs depended on the continued existence of the organization.

Well, obviously, we haven’t found a cure for apostasy yet, so, in that sense, missionary organizations should continue their work. The trouble is, they are doing all this work over-seas, not here.

The real reason we don’t send missionaries to New York and Chicago and Paris and Toronto is that we haven’t yet found a way to present the gospel message in a compelling way to a literate, educated, and somewhat cynical population. Why not? Because the church chose certain battlefields many years ago, and they were the wrong battlefields. We chose to fight the doctrine of evolution, and we lost. We chose to fight the discovery of dinosaur fossils, and we lost. We chose to fight the scientific conclusions about the age of the earth, and we lost. Now we are fighting a battle for the morals and cultural values of our society, and we pretend that we never lost any of those earlier battles. We tell people, “take our word for it: we’re right”. But we haven’t earned the right to invite anyone to take our word for anything. We haven’t explained yet why we fought the idea of dinosaurs so energetically, and now we try to explain that Noah actually took dinosaurs with him on the ark. We haven’t explained how Noah could have saved two of every creature in his ark when it wasn’t even big enough to carry two of every single species of fly.

I am told that no other world religion, Buddhism, Islam, or Confucianism, for example, entertains a conflict between the evidence of our senses and the evidence of sacred scripture or tradition. And that is why, the educated, professional classes of Buddhist and Islamic societies are full participants in the religious life of their nations.

But here in North America, and in Europe, religion–Christianity–has virtually proclaimed: forget everything you learned about truth and science and knowledge, and accept these doctrines without question…

The Tears of a Clone

You may have heard that a Richard Seed, a scientist in Chicago, has announced that he is going to proceed with human cloning experiments, in spite of President Clinton’s request for a voluntary ban on such experiments for five years. Then it was announced that two labs, one in the U.S. and one in Bath, England, have succeeded in cloning headless mice and tadpoles.

Charles Krauthammer, in Time Magazine, reacts with horror. Please, oh please don’t create headless humans. He feels it should be a capital crime. “Cloning is the technology of narcissism”.

Well, I didn’t know narcissism was a crime. But I do know we don’t have room in all the prisons in the world for the guilty. And I know that Krauthammer is a raving hypocrite. We have spent 200 years building the culture of narcissism and Time Magazine has been it’s biggest cheerleader. Suddenly Frankenstein gets up and walks, and Time goes “eek”. Where was Time Magazine’s righteous indignation when we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

There is one major problem with stopping scientific experiments on human clones. We don’t have the intellectual, moral, or cultural framework left to support the idea. Our boldest thinkers have killed God, the thoughtless middle class has locked him into a charming little box in a tiny little corner of Sunday, and most of our religious “leaders” are too busy building crystal cathedrals and erecting statues of themselves to do anything more than rant about high school sex education and pornography on the Internet. And now science has gone pornographic and nobody is ready to grapple with the complex scientific and moral issues that arise from it.

The problem is that the idea of free enterprise, or allowing the “market” to determine the success, failure, or acceptability of different technological inventions or ideas, has come to dominate not only our society’s economics and corporate management and even government, but our culture as well. And the fundamental philosophical belief that makes free enterprise possible is individualism. If you ask yourself, who should have ultimate authority to determine whether or not you can buy something, read a book, listen to music, watch a video, or wear your seatbelt—the answer is always “me”. We don’t want the government, the church, the union, or the corporation to have that authority. We want it all for ourselves. And if we want to make brain-less clones to provide us with an unlimited future supply of transplantable organs, who has the right to stop us?

Let’s say the government does pass a law—as seems likely—banning the creation of human clones. First of all, some big corporation (or maybe a bold, little corporation) is going to go ahead and do it anyway and then challenge the law in court. Try to imagine the Supreme Court’s ruling on the issue. What are the grounds they will give for supporting the law? As long as the clones don’t have a brain, they won’t be human, because our courts and legislatures have steadily shrunk the definition of “human” in order to accommodate all the other scientific developments of this century, including artificial respirators that can keep brain-dead humans “alive” indefinitely, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and, of course, abortion. Would you want to argue that cloning violates some universal concept of human dignity? The courts have ruled over and over again that such concepts are religious in nature and thus discriminatory.

Even if the Supreme Court in the U.S. supported the law, scientists would simply move off-shore to some obliging little island nation and proceed with impunity. Does anyone doubt that there’s money to be made in this business, regardless of any national laws?

So there will be no law. We will clone humans because we can clone humans. We have a new Pandora’s box before us and we will open it because we have already opened every other Pandora’s box and nobody knows any more how to even conceive of an idea of a rationale for keeping it closed.

What are we going to do with all these new powers? We’re going to live longer. We’re going to automate everything. We’re going to have all the information in the world at our finger-tips. We’re going to become more and more self-sufficient and self-contained. We’re going to be completely selective about what we do, who we see, what we know about, where we go, what we believe. Can government survive these developments? Can the church? Can the family? In Sweden, already, almost half the population lives alone. In the future, all of us may have two, three, or four different families in our lifetimes, and then, for the last decades of our lives, we will live alone, because the ultimate convenience is to be completely self-sufficient.

No civilization in history has been faced with so many issues that confront the question of what being human really means. The Middle Ages believed that man was a worm riding on the waves of a colossal tempest, whose only dignity was the possibility of redemption by an all-powerful god. The Renaissance gave man faith in himself, as “the measure of all things”. The late 19th Century gave rise to a prevailing belief in human progress—both moral and material. The sinking of the Titanic was a little blip on the radar screen of the horizon of human potential; the two World Wars—including the holocaust and Hiroshima—were major blips. But we continued our race to the future. To the average citizen, the 1949 World’s fair, with its displays on the wonders of technology, had more impact than the ruminations of Jean-Paul Sartre on absurdity. Now, with the collapse of communism and world peace, for the first time, within our grasp, we seem to stand on the brink of unimaginable wealth and progress. The computer and the Internet have become the poster boys of this brave new world, and DNA manipulation may be the crown jewel. But all of these developments have created a profound spiritual unease.

What if we are soon able to live to 100? 120? 150? Can a marriage last 100 years? I don’t think so. Think about it: our notions of fidelity and commitment were forged in an era in which the average life-span was less than 40 years. People married young, so the average marriage lasted about 25 years. Is the rise in the divorce rate merely a reflection of the fact that people can live together for only so long? The Bible is emphatic about divorce—it is wrong. But life expectancy in 30 A.D. was even shorter than it was in the 19th century, and the status of women was equal to livestock. Can such an imperative survive today’s social climate?

And what will we think about as we replace our burned out organs and continue to grow older? Will we grow wise and begin to understand that there are moral satisfactions that can’t be bought or manufactured? Or will we grow foolish and increasingly desperate, and resort to drugs and cosmetic surgeries and ever greater obscenities in order to recapture the shallow illusions about the satisfactions of youth and vigor and sexual appeal?