carapace – Not your father's america

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

RICHARD DAWKINS
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor’s Tale

Let’s all stop beating Basil’s car

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give “satisfaction’ to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as “atonement’ for “sin’.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn’t surprise me).

But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Complete article at:

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_12.html#top

“Intergalactic radio signals from quasars could emerge as an exotic but effective new tool for securing terrestrial communications against eavesdropping. Japanese scientists have come up with a method for encrypting messages using the distant astronomical objects, which emit radio waves and are thought to be powered by black holes. Ken Umeno and colleagues at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo propose using the powerful radio signals emitted by quasars to lock and unlock digital communications in a secure fashion.”

Learn more in the New Scientist.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8913-your-secrets-are-safe-with-quasar-encryption.html

From: Future Brief

BARRY BONDS DEMANDS DRUG TESTS FOR JOURNALISTS

Claims Latest Steroids Books Were Written On Steroids

San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, who has been resolutely silent while allegations of steroid use have swirled around him, broke his silence today by demanding drug tests for all baseball journalists.

At a press conference at the Giants’ spring training facility, Mr. Bonds claimed that such tests were necessary because most of the recent books about steroid use in baseball were written by journalists on steroids.

“In the 1970′s there were no books about steroid use, and now a new one comes out every week,” Mr. Bonds said. “The only way to explain such an extreme increase in production is that these writers are obviously juiced.”

Mr. Bonds’ charges drew an immediate rebuttal from Carol Foyler, a spokesperson for the Baseball Writers Association of America, who denied that baseball journalists were on steroids and instead attributed their increased production to advancements in nutrition and training.

“Having said that, it is not unusual for writers to use dietary supplements to complete manuscripts when they are under a writing deadline,” Ms. Foyler said. “If some of those supplements turned out to be steroids, then journalists could have been taking steroids without even knowing it.”

For his part, Mr. Bonds said that if any writers break sales records with their books while on steroids, those records should not stand.

“If any of these books make the New York Times bestseller list, they should have an asterisk after them,” he said.

Elsewhere, President Bush urged legal status for 11 million illegal aliens in the hopes that some of them will approve of the job he is doing as President.

Borowitzreport.com

JENNIFER VAN BERGEN, jvbxyz@earthlink.net

Van Bergen has written about the Bush administration’s use of signing statements in her articles “Scholar says Bush has used obscure doctrine to extend power 95 times”

[see: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20060109_bergen.html ]

and “The Unitary Executive: Is the Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State?”

[see: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CanExecutive_Branch_Decide_0923.html ].

She said today: “In signing the Patriot Act renewal into law, President Bush has yet again issued a signing statement in which he suggests he will ignore provisions that require submission to congressional oversight. Bush relies on his unorthodox theory of the ‘unitary executive’ — which really is a ‘unilateral executive theory’ — to withhold information from Congress. He issued a similar signing statement on signing the McCain bill prohibiting torture, declaring he could bypass the law if he felt it necessary.

“The Department of Justice has followed Bush’s lead by urging courts not to second-guess decisions of the president. But it is becoming clearer every day that Bush has no qualms about violating either international laws and obligations or domestic laws. The recent revelations about the secret NSA domestic surveillance program revealed Bush flagrantly violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which was specifically enacted to prevent unchecked executive branch surveillance.”

Van Bergen, who wrote the book “The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America,” added: “Instead of openly objecting to provisions and working with Congress in good faith to make changes, or vetoing a law, which would allow the Congress to override the veto, Bush is again sneaking around the laws, playing the savior while thumbing his nose at and actually undermining the efforts of this largely Republican Congress.

“Bush’s use of signing statements to undermine and avoid duly passed laws is an attempt to suppress the power of Congress. In some signing statements, he has even declared his intent to evade or restrict judicial oversight. His signing statements, thus, are nothing short of an attempt to change the very face of our government and our country.”

From: Institute for Public Accuracy