Atheist Soldier Sues The DoD, and The Evolution of Compassion

This April, The New York Times reported the case of U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, a soldier who started a chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and subsequently had to be removed from Iraq due to numerous threats from his fellow soldiers.  Now, I’m not exactly surprised by this.  I’d expect the military to be drooling with evangelicals, of course.  And I could probably cynically overlook verbal harassment of an atheist in the armed forces, just because I expect that sort of bullshit from indoctrinated meat-heads.  But physical threats?  That really is beyond the pale.  Now, Spc. Hall is suing the Department of Defense and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to protect his freedom from religious persecution as protected by the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution.  You go boy.

Seriously, this is not the sort of reputation the military should want, given that non-religious Americans are the largest (non) religious group after Christians.  They have enough trouble recruiting as it is!  This is just another example, sadly, of Christians thinking the world revolves around them.  It’s bad enough that brave men and women who are devoted to the service of their country were blithely thrown into harm’s way in Iraq by a callous and evangelically-motivated administration… but non-religious soldiers’ lives are threatened by their loving, Christian comrades-in-arms as well?  What a disgusting blemish on our armed forces.  I hope Spc. Hall wins his lawsuit and the DoD cracks down on prosyletizing by officers.

I haven’t posted anything in a while, have I?  Still, life marches on.  I got some paperwork done that’s been taking forever (to put it mildly).  I also was inspired by the news I wrote about in my previous post, and decided to read Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Compassion.  This book tells the story of his experiment: a computer tournament in the early 1980s that pitted programs submitted by game theorists from various academic disciplines (as well as an 11 year old computer prodigy) in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game (a classic thought experiment).  It’s quite interesting, and you can expect me to write a more in-depth review when I’ve finished it.

P.S. - I would love to get some comments on my posts.  If you’re reading this, any feedback will be appreciated.  It’s hard to talk myself into posting when it feels like no one is reading! I’d really like to get this blog fired up.

A life well spent: Aubrey Williams

I checked the website of my former college’s anthropology department today, and I was saddened to learn that one of my favorite professors, Aubrey Williams, died a couple months ago. The story was in the Washington Post, and I feel like shit for having taken so long to find out about it. Aubrey (he insisted on being called by his first name, including by his undergraduate students) was one of those rare teachers who you inevitably remember fondly years down the road. He was also a humble guy; I didn’t know during his courses, for example, that he had been a B-17 gunner in the European theater of WWII. I did know, on the other hand, that he’d been actively involved in organizing protests against every war since, up to and including the present war in Iraq. I remember him telling my Cultures of Native North America class, for instance, of the time he was invited to partake in a peyote ritual with members of the Navajo church. He said that he’d gotten up and began running at right angles (in sort of a giant square pattern), and that it took four adult Navajo men to capture and restrain him until he calmed down. He also told of the time he was served psilocybin mushroom tea by an indigenous medicine woman in rural Mexico. He’d hallucinated that he was inside a soap bubble, and could see the world curved around him. Needless to say, that drew a lot of snickers from the wide-eyed classroom full of undergraduates. But I got the biggest kick out of it, having recently had my first experiences with that same entheogen.

At the end of my last class with Aubrey (I’d taken two), he invited all of us to a barbecue at his home in Tacoma Park. That was definitely one of the most unique experiences I had in college: hobnobbing with my professor and my classmates over cocktails, while our final papers sat on his living room table, waiting to be graded. When we spoke that night he said he was leaving soon to consider a job offer as the curator of ethnography at the national museum of Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world and one where few westerners have ever traveled. As I later learned, that position was not funded as planned and it didn’t work out, but Aubrey still got to enjoy a rare vacation in the Kingdom of Bhutan. A selected autobiography of Aubrey Williams’ work can be found here.

I’ll always remember him for his intelligence, his humility, his passion, and his dedication to his students and his treatment of them as peers. His was truly a life well spent. Rest in peace, Aubrey, and thank you for making a difference in my life.

Presenting science as art with interactive experiments.

This year, I’ll make my fourth trip to Black Rock City, Nevada for the annual Burning Man arts festival, which is, to understate, a bacchanalian explosion of radical self-expression. It’s also a pretty wicked extreme camping experience, set on a flat, alkaline plane of dust at 4,000 feet above sea level. Temperatures can soar to 44° C in direct sunlight during the daytime, and drop to around 5° C at night. The elevation causes you to receive a higher dose of UV radiation; this means unprotected skin burns faster. On windy days, there can be sudden gusts at speeds in excess of 120 km/h. All that said, it’s a fantastic experience—visitors are almost certain to witness the most gaudy, gauche, irreverent, and sublimely beautiful art they’ve ever seen. It’s a commerce-free event; although tickets are pricey (it costs a lot to build the city’s temporary infrastructure), nothing is allowed to be bought or sold once you’re inside the city limits. Black Rock City is built rapidly each year, with the overwhelming majority of the work occurring in the week before and the week of the event. The Leave No Trace ethic is fundamental to Burning Man, and each year the federal Bureau of Land Management gives accolades to the Burning Man organization for its remarkably thorough cleanup and restoration efforts.

Another important ethic at Burning Man is participation. It is not a spectator event - the subject/object dichotomy is constantly under attack, and this is generally agreed to be a good thing. However, in each of my past three attendances, I contributed relatively little to the overall interactive wacky-ness of Burning Man. This year I want to do something special to participate, and I have an idea of what it is. I want to perform (and invite onlookers to help me perform) science experiments. The point is to teach the value of skepticism and the scientific method, while having an entertaining time. I haven’t settled on any particular experiments, yet. So, dear readers, here’s where you come in. I need your input!

Please tell me your most memorable childhood experience involving a science experiment. Maybe it was something mom, dad, or a cool aunt or uncle showed you. Maybe it was a science teacher at school doing something wacky in the classroom. Maybe it was something you saw Mr. Wizard do on Nickelodeon. It doesn’t matter where you saw it. I’m looking for the most visual, most thought provoking, and most entertaining experiments you can recall. Once I get at least a short list together, I’ll start performing some of them to get a good idea of how practical they’d be to perform in the desert environment. If I can, I’ll record videos of them and post them here on Survival Machine. If you want to help me perform it (and even appear in the video) just let me know. I’d also gladly welcome video submissions of you performing the experiment yourself. If anyone actually does that, I’ll make a post just to feature your video!

So, brainstorm, and let me know what you remember from the exciting world of science experiments!

A Lame Excuse to Rattle the Sabres

Bush administration officials announced yesterday that they are going to shoot down a disabled military spy satellite, and that the sole reason for this is “to avoid a spread of toxic fuel in an inhabited area.” Bullshit alert! The odds of this satellite crashing down near anywhere inhabited by people are so low, it’s not worth sweating over. The odds are far better that you’ll be struck by lightning. And besides, the “toxic fuel” they’re referring to is hydrazine, which isn’t all that dangerous. If a populated area were contaminated with hydrazine gas, at worst you’d have some people with symptoms similar to chlorine gas poisoning. This satellite shoot-down attempt is just a way for the U.S. military to test their high tech anti-satellite defenses; the toxicity risk is a lame excuse. The political implications of this action are ugly, especially considering that America got on China’s case for doing the same thing last year. And for pete’s sake, this plan poses a risk to other orbiting objects, such as the International Space Station! Granted, it’s not a very big risk, but it’s still higher than the odds that any of us would be wiped out by a single school bus-sized gas tank dropping out of orbit.

For the record, I am adamantly opposed to any combat occurring in space. If you can shoot at a satellite, it won’t be long before the satellites can shoot back.

Frankenstein’s Mycoplasma

There’s incredible news this week in biotechnology. Dan Gibson, a geneticist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland (strong deeds, gentle words!), has announced that his team of researchers have succeeded in constructing the largest man-made DNA structure—at 582,970 base pairs in length, it’s over 20 times longer than the previous record! The artificial sequence was pieced together from four smaller (but still massive!) strands of DNA by utilizing the transcription power of yeast, and is precisely modeled on the genome of a bacterium known as Mycoplasma genitalium. With characteristic optimism, they’re now confident that they will be able to produce the very first man-made organism within the year. If they do that, the goal of biofuel production from cellulosic biomass will be within arm’s reach.¹

What does this mean? Imagine the end of fossil fuels: a cessation of ecologically devastating drilling operations, deflation of the political and economic power of neoconservative oil barons, and affordable, low-emission transportation, heating, and electricity. The impact of this technology is profound, and it doesn’t stop there. By discovering the details of biochemical and metabolic pathways, we can more closely mimic their elegance and efficiency to solve problems that plague industrial civilization. Maybe we’ll engineer a primitive, self-sustaining bio-robot that feeds on CO2 and excretes O2. Perhaps we could remove mercury from our water supplies. The limitations are not known, but the possibilities are awe-inspiring.

There has been some criticism of this work, notably by the Canadian-based ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization. I agree with most of ETC Group’s principles (conserving agricultural biodiversity, fighting against patents for bioengineered plants). It is therefore fair to accuse me of wanting to have it both ways on this issue. I do see both sides, and I think that governments should regulate this kind of biotechnology. I am not worried about the J. Craig Venter Institute, which has demonstrated a responsible concern with ethics in this and previous projects. Venter himself shared the human genome’s raw code with the public for free after decoding it; his business aimed to make money by selling analytical services and bioinformatics software used for studying the genome. Others, however, are not nearly as scrupulous. I can’t say I endorse a moratorium at this point, but I do think that the USDA and Centers for Disease Control should be closely monitoring this type of research.

Still, this is exciting. You can expect me to post more on this topic in the future.

¹ Science Volume 315, No. 5813, 9 February 2007, pp. 801-804. Challenges in Engineering Microbes for Biofuels Production, by Gregory Stephanopoulos.

The Grim Reaper v. The United States of America

Tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in two lawsuits involving the use of lethal injection to execute condemned prisoners. The last time the court considered a method of execution, in 1878, they ruled to allow executions by firing squad to continue. The court is not directly considering the constitutionality of the death penalty itself, although if lethal execution is ruled to be “cruel and unusual punishment,” it might effectively be a death knell (yuk, yuk) for capital punishment in the United States. Of the nearly forty states that still have the death penalty, only Nebraska uses electrocution as its sole method of execution. There has been a de facto moratorium on executions in the United States since September, when the court first agreed to hear arguments in these lawsuits.

The death penalty is an abomination, an obtuse expression of state power, hypocritical, institutionally racist, anachronistic, and utterly wrong. We live in an age where DNA evidence has exonerated prisoners who were mistakenly convicted and sentenced to die at the hands of the state. Even that, however, I feel is tangential to the more salient point: murdering people to punish them for the crime of murder makes no sense at all, and sends no reasonable message to society. The sanctimoniousness with which judges impose the death penalty and executioners carry it out belies its real nature. It is a monument to state authority and power, a relic of times when monarchs and emperors ruled by fear and intimidation.

The crime committed by the prisoner should not be a part of the ethical calculus here. Further, this debate over a method of execution is just a technical squabble. The fundamental question: is it ever acceptable to kill a human being against their will? I say no, with the only exception being an immediate act of self-defense (or defense of others under direct threat of serious harm). Because this exception could never apply to the state, and because the death penalty is carried out with malice aforethought, there seems to me little room for argument over whether it is “cruel or unusual punishment.” At least most murder victims are fortunate enough not to anticipate their untimely end for very long. State murder victims suffer the added torture of anticipating their death.

I hope that this Supreme Court case raises an outcry against capital punishment in the United States. As a society, we need to break the grasp that our prison-industrial complex has developed on our justice system. We also need to get off our fucking high horses, stop imprisoning drug users, and start concentrating on fixing our crumbling public education system. That’s a policy that would pay off in the long run. Instead of jailing and murdering the dregs of society, let’s stop raising so damn many of them.

As an aside, it also gets my goat that so many Christians support the death penalty. These wackos worship a mythological person who was allegedly crucified by the powers that be, and they can sleep at night knowing that their beloved republic carries on that barbaric tradition dozens of times a year. Suffer unto me…

Michael Vick’s Sob Story

I just read these letters written by Michael Vick and a few of his supporters (including his mother, Hank Aaron, George Foreman, and Shirley Franklin - the goddamn mayor of Atlanta) to the judge in his dogfighting trial.  They’re pleading for a lenient sentence in light of all the “good things” Vick has done, and how he’s genuinely remorseful.  First of all, I can’t understand why anyone is willing to gloss over Vick’s vicious, cruel, deliberate, and premeditated actions just because he maintained a good public image — let alone people with reputations, and no personal connection to the case.  How can anyone perceive dogfighting as anything short of shockingly cruel?  And how could they claim that his entrepeneurship and operation of Bad Newz Kennelz for six years was a temporary lapse in judement, a one-time mistake?  Their shoddy arguments are all the same in principle: that an already wealthy athlete’s canicidal cruelty to dogs for his own profit is morally insignificant compared to his history of visiting poor kids in the hospital.  The prevailing sentiment seems to be that compassion is for humans, and if we throw any scraps of it to the dogs, they’re lucky.

The main point is: fuck Michael Vick.  His letter reeks of hyopcrisy; he even has the audacity to portray himself as an animal lover who never learned that dogfighting was a serious crime.  Perhaps he loves women too—so much so that he’d start raping them and taking their money if they ever knocked that statute down to a misdemeanor?  I also bristled at the part where he emphasizes that his dogs were in “good health” and he always “made sure of the continuous upkeep of the dogs.”  I suppose if you counted running the fighting dogs on treadmills as keeping them in “good health,” he might have had a point - if only his other method hadn’t been drowning, hanging, and electrocuting the dogs who weren’t in such “good health.”  It’s also morbidly amusing that he says he’ll work with PETA to fight animal cruelty — PETA is responsible for far more unnecessary animal deaths than he is, especially in North Carolina, not far from Vick’s hometown of Newport News!  I hope the judge has enough ethical sense to give Vick the maximum sentence.  Maybe in prison, when Vick gets his ass kicked by other inmates, he’ll realize that Cajun Rules aren’t really fair.

And shame on Hank Aaron, Warrick Dunn, George Foreman, and Mayor Franklin.  They’ve exemplified the worst kind of anthropocentrism and do not deserve the respect and recognition they’ve traditionally enjoyed.

Lastly, to those of you who are still clinging to some fantasy of Vick’s righteousness, get real.  He led a double life, and he was a brute who hurt living, feeling beings for his own perverse enjoyment and profit.  No matter how remorseful he claims to be (while pleading for leniency), he wouldn’t have ruthlessly engaged in this blood sport for six years unless he were, face it, a bad man.