Sunspots 629

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: Christianity Today points out, with some examples, that spreading conspiracy theories and other fake news is, well, sin.


Education: Listverse discusses the origins of 10 widely used school supplies (such as backpacks and pencils).

Finance: (or something) Wired comments on the possible changes to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Health: Science reports that a new antibiotic, which may make it impossible for bacteria to develop resistance, has been produced. In tests, it seems to be very effective.



Politics: Scientific American fact-checks President Trump's speech on the Paris climate change accord.

Scientific American says that torture is not effective in extracting information.

Science: The Conversation says that killing coyotes does not make sheep and cattle safer, and explains why.

Scientific American reports on a long-term study of the social lives of wild horses.



Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 561

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: Gizmo's Freeware lets us know that the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra offers about 250 orchestral works for free streaming.

Christianity: Relevant tells us what the Bible says about dating. (Nothing direct, but there are some important principles.)

Computing: Gizmo's Freeware discusses an easy, and free, method of sharing information across computers. You can create, and/or share, code, sketches, lists, and other types of information.

Gizmo's also reviews free Windows firewall programs.

A Wired post argues that you should never delete a Facebook account upon the death of the owner of the account.

Humor: (or something) Listverse tells us the strange stories of the names of some candies, and also gives information on the "candy desk" in the U. S. Senate. Who knew?

Listverse also lists 10 common words, and gives their history -- they used to mean something quite different. The list includes "artificial," "nice," and "silly."

Politics: Sojourners discusses evidence that our political, and other, strongly held beliefs influence our perceptions of the facts. Surprise.

National Public Radio reports that the head of the government's interrogation program says that waterboarding, and similar strategies, do not work.

Listverse reports on 10 controversial statistics often used by advocates of one side or another in the culture wars -- on rape, suicide, and gun violence.

Science: Wired discusses some electric fish, some new to science. They can communicate electrically with each other.

NPR, and many other news outlets, report on the discovery of gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein, and giving more evidence that black holes really exist. Nature also has a report on this.


Image source (public domain)

More on torture, II

This is not my favorite subject, but I feel that it should be aired. The Obama administration, under pressure under the Freedom of Information Act, released memos from the previous administration, describing what procedures that government operatives could use, in examining prisoners.

If you want to read those memos, here they are.

The Washington Post has an article on these memos, and what they authorized, with reactions from both critics and supporters.

CNN reports that a former CIA Chief has said that these memos should not have been released, but that South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who served in the military justice system, says that the techniques they describe should never have been allowed in the first place.

I saw G. Gordon Liddy, in a discussion on CNN. Liddy said that waterboarding (see in-depth Wikipedia article) wasn't torture, because his son had been waterboarded as part of his Navy training, and he hadn't broken under such torture. Well, there was one crucial difference. Young Liddy knew that he was being trained, and that those training him would not kill him. Enemy prisoners don't know any such thing.

The US Senate Armed Services Committee, which, of course, has members of both parties, agreed unanimously that the US had, indeed, carried out torture, and that such techniques do not serve a useful purpose.

It is also possible that we turned over some prisoners to other countries, where legal restrictions are even less than ours have been. I'm not sure of that.

A person under torture is likely to admit to anything, true or false, that will end the torture, so testimony obtained under torture is unreliable. Torturing others is an invitation to other countries to torture US citizens, and a recruiting tool for the enemies of our country. Let's stop it altogether.

Here is a post on Christianity and torture.

Thanks for reading.

* * * * *

On April 20, 2009, at 10:54 EST, I discovered an article in the Christian Science Monitor, which reports that waterboarding was used many times on two prisoners. This indicates, perhaps, that it isn't so likely to be torture, or, maybe, on the contrary, that the CIA overstepped its own guidelines, given in the memos above. It also indicates that the technique must not have been very effective.

More on torture

I don't like to think about torture, and I don't want anyone torturing me, but I believe that I have a responsibility, as a Christian citizen, to be concerned about the use of torture.

Some people believe that fighting terrorism justifies the use of torture, and that torture is an effective means of obtaining information.

A report from the Senate Armed Services Committee, dated December 12 of this year, disagrees with both of those assertions.

It begins by quoting General Petraeus: “What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight… is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings”

The report includes this statement, too:
Conclusion 3: The use of techniques similar to those used in SERE resistance training – such as stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, and treating them like animals – was at odds with the commitment to humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Using those techniques for interrogating detainees was also inconsistent with the goal of collecting accurate intelligence information, as the purpose of SERE resistance training is to increase the ability of U.S. personnel to resist abusive interrogations and the techniques used were based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions. (emphasis added. SERE is an acronym for Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape training.)

According to this unanimous bipartisan* report, the US did use torture on prisoners, and this was encouraged by then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and other high government officials. Some techniques used were not done so legally, although there were attempts to justify their use. (And also to deny such use.)
*According to news reports, such as one in the Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 22, 2008, the report was bipartisan and unanimous.

Some of the techniques used by the US military, then, led to:
1) diminution of the moral status of the US in the eyes of the world
2) implicit approval of the use of torture of captured US personnel by other countries
3) no more reliable information than we would have gotten without such use

Unfortunate, and regrettable.

Sunspots 150

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science:
Male birds fed some pollutants can be more attractive to females, according to an article in Wired.

Wired selects the top ten chemistry on-line videos. (Nine from YouTube, one from PBS.)

Politics:
An editorial in USA Today , calling for a special prosecutor to pursue the issue of torture carried out by the US. Here's an excerpt:

In refusing to allow a criminal investigation, therefore, Mukasey has chosen an argument often used by criminal defendants: He blamed the lawyers. It was not a crime, Mukasey has said, because Bush relied on advice from his handpicked lawyers. Because the lawyers said it was OK, it was: "Whatever was done as part of a CIA program at the time that it was done was the subject of a Department of Justice opinion through the Office of Legal Counsel and was found to be permissible under the law as it existed then."

Of course, any crime could be magically transformed into a non-crime by simply hiring clueless or collusive counsel. Ironically, while Bradbury was one of those misguided lawyers, Mukasey is seeking his confirmation as one of his top lawyers. It is enough to make the most mobbed-up lawyer blush.

Computing:
(or politics) An allegation that the Clinton campaign darkened Obama in a TV ad.

Christianity:
Jan points out that, in one New Testament story, the men were fixing the meal while a woman was engaged in evangelism.

Thanks for reading! Keep clicking away.

Image source (public domain)

More on torture

I don't often post on political matters, even though many people think that's what blogging is all about. However, I'm afraid that the time has come for me to say something about torture again.

In recent weeks, official spokespersons for the Bush administration have: admitted that the US has used waterboarding on prisoners; stated that, if waterboarding were applied to the official personally, he would consider it torture; bragged about the use of waterboarding. This after years of claims that the US doesn't torture people, and that what we do to prisoners is within the law.

The Bush administration has, by using means of interrogation of questionable effectiveness, destroyed its own credibility, disregarded international treaties, exposed our own troops to an enhanced threat of torture, and, likely, crippled attempts to condemn real terrorists in court, because some of the evidence against them has been obtained illegally. How can we expect North Korea, Iran, or the Sudan to abide by treaties if we don't?

See here for some background on Christianity and torture. The Wikipedia article on waterboarding is here. (The article is in dispute, which shouldn't surprise anyone.) This is the Wikipedia article on torture. Here, here, and here are White House press briefings which document, with considerable reluctance, the allegations in my second paragraph. Here is a speech by the Vice President, which also does. Here is a much more negative view, from Slate. The administration claims that waterboarding is not torture, and that it has never violated the law in this area. I consider such statements to be on the level of former President Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" -- they are made in an attempt to deceive. We have tortured, and, in doing so, we have violated our own laws, defied treaties that we have been signatory to, lost any moral high ground that we had, and, perhaps, not even gotten accurate information from those tortured.

I don't expect much, if anything, to happen because of this post. I don't expect all of my small group of readers to agree with me. But I do believe that it is necessary for me to speak my own mind. Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 100

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science: (also Literature, and Christianity) my own post on Green, from March 17, 2005, part of a series on the colors of the rainbow. (St. Patrick's Day occurred since the last Sunspots.)

The Conservapedia's article on Baramin (the equivalent, the article says, of "kind," which is used in the King James Version of the Bible.)

Politics: (sort of) American Women Through Time

Christianity Today says that the National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed a statement condemning torture.

Article claiming that, even if there were no moral reason not to torture, torture is counterproductive, anyway -- first, because information obtained that way is suspect, and second, because it encourages torture of our own troops.

Music: Today is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, arguably the greatest composer of all time. According to The Writer's Almanac, he said (in German, no doubt): "There's nothing remarkable about [making music]. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." (Thanks to one of our daughters for the links.)

Computing: Zotero is a Firefox extension (free, of course) for capturing bibliographic information.

This week's Christian Carnival is here. (For information on locating these Carnivals, see here.)

When I don't tell where I found an item above, I either found it directly, or was probably pointed to it by the Librarian's Internet Index, SciTech Daily, or Arts and Letters Daily. All of these sources are great.

Thanks for reading! Keep clicking away.

Image source (public domain)

Torture and Christianity

I previously posted on the subject of torture, expressing surprise that evangelical bloggers had said so little about it, when we have expressed a lot of moral outrage over other issues. (I don't read every such blog, of course!).

Joe Carter and Justin Taylor have gone a long way toward remedying this, hosting an on-line symposium on torture. I recommend that anyone seriously interested in the subject read these articles. I found that Augustine had considered this issue, and that Kenneth Magnuson, a Southern Baptist, no less, was the writer who brought it up in his contribution to the symposium. Albert Mohler (also a Southern Baptist, if it matters) wrote a good essay, paying careful attention to moral distinctions and reality. Robert Vischer takes the White House's John Yoo to task. Here, he says, is part of what Yoo wrote, followed immediately by Vischer's response:
Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.

And in that single statement, we have the essence of why Christians cannot condone torture, no matter the justifications offered. An ethic grounded in human dignity can never hold that the purposeful infliction of pain on a person is insignificant, nor that its significance can be minimized as though concerns over human life and dignity are mere variables in a cost-benefit analysis.

Richard John Neuhaus had this to say:
Establishing a principle is not “merely for show.” Recognizing, clearly but sotto voce, that there will sometimes be exceptions to the principle is not hypocrisy.

There were a couple of other articles, just as deserving of your time. This is a serious issue, indeed, and I am grateful to the symposium's hosts.

* * * *

Cleaned up a little, without changing anything substantial, on Dec 29, 2005. All but one change (his to Vischer's) was in the formatting.

Where's the moral outrage?

Evangelical bloggers (and other kinds) occasionally express their moral outrage. There was a lot of this over the Schiavo case, and there has been a lot over embryonic stem cell research, plus some over whether or not churches should meet on Christmas Day. But, unless I missed it, not much on some other things . . .

As regular readers (thank you--you know who you are) know, I generally post "Sunspots" once a week, with links to various things that have interested me, and might interest you. I almost entitled this post "Things I haven't spotted," using a negative image of the sun graphic, but I didn't. But here are three things I didn't spot much, or any of:

1) Comments on the execution of "Tookie" Williams. I saw only one blogger who wrote about the matter. No doubt I heard more about it than some, as I am currently residing in California, where he was executed. It is true that Williams was a convicted felon. But, on the other hand, he was black, and there have been injustices against blacks, involving the death penalty. He claimed that he was innocent of the crimes he had been charged with. He had tried to influence young people to stay out of gangs. Maybe the death penalty itself is wrong. Perhaps he shouldn't have been executed. Didn't this doubt cross anyone else's mind?

2) Moral outrage at the Bush administration for its opposition to Senator McCain's no-torture amendment to the Defense appropriation bill. President Bush went so far as to threaten to use his first-ever veto on the bill, if language forbidding the use of torture was not removed. Vice-President Cheney lobbied for its removal. They finally backed down, but because of political reality, not, apparently, because they suddenly realized that there is something terribly wrong with a country that uses torture for any purpose, especially when it claims the moral high ground. (To say nothing of the fact that use of torture by the U. S. makes it easier for other countries to justify torturing our own citizens in the future!)

You didn't read anything in this blog about these matters, either, until now. Sorry. I have, mostly, stayed out of political matters, and I intend to be very careful before posting on such in the future. I did contact my congresspersons about the second matter, and the one below.

3) Moral outrage at Senator Ted Stevens for another amendment to the defense appropriations bill, namely one that would allow drilling for fuel in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Senator Stevens is the same one who put about a quarter of a billion dollars of U. S. taxpayer's money into the highway appropriations bill, for the purpose of building a bridge in Alaska, so that less than 100 workers wouldn't have to use the ferry. As another senator pointed out, the same money could have bought each of these workers a small plane.) If we have a God-given mandate to be good stewards of the environment, doesn't that include preserving some parts of it? Doesn't that include becoming less dependent on fossil fuel? I think so.

You are, of course, welcome to disagree, even to the point of moral outrage!