Yesterday, I was pointed to an article that described a young American woman who was allegedly assaulted after withdrawing money from a Bank Machine by a "dark skinned man" who had stolen $60 from her.  Furthermore, the alleged victim claimed that when her assailant noticed a McCain/Palin bumper sticker on her vehicle, he threw her to the ground and began to beat and kick her while screaming anti-McCain epithets and during which he inscribed a backwards letter B into her face with a dull knife.  Presumably representing "Barack".

I had some skepticism toward the account but given that it was forwarded to me by someone who can't exactly be described as an Obama supporter :) but who claims (unconvincingly) that he is "undecided" in this race, I decided to respond:

Charles... I too am sickened by this behaviour if indeed the report is true. But... what we have here though is a hearsay report, that's all. A report made by a woman who self-admittedly works for the McCain / Palin campaign and has claimed that she was assaulted by an "dark skinned man" who happens to have gotten pissed off because he saw a McCain bumper sticker. How should we analyze this report?

There is no other evidence provided for any of these claims other than the woman's account of the incident. We don't really have any other proof to justify the truth of this claim. It could be true, in which case, it would be a reprehensible act and would represent one ignorant person whose actions cannot speak for for an entire group of people. With the McCain supporters, we have video footage of a large number of them in multiple states all showing the same mob mentality.
 
Second, given how dirty the McCain camp has been with the whole "guilty by association" tactic throughout the campaign, we now have a McCain supporter claiming injury by an Obama supporter. Is it beyond the McCain campaign or its supporters to resort to the dirty tactic of a sensational news story to tarnish their opponent's supporter's reputation?

Last night, I thought about this some more and I decided to write a blog entry about it, summing up my argument in a more coherent, logical fashion.  Here is the result of my last night's thoughful deliberations, timestamped at 1:01am:

The entire report is based on hearsay; the word of the alleged victim in question.  Now, if the incident is truly real, then it’s despicable and such heinous acts should be condemned with the full force of our conviction and the perpetrator must be caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

However, we cannot dismiss the possibility that this might also be a set up -- and there is good reason to believe that it might be -- to draw some heat away from the deluge of news reports of McCain's racist supporters and toward supporters of Obama and Obama himself (by tenuous association).

Given McCain supporter's runaway fanaticism recently on display on our TV screens, fueled by Sarah Palin’s hate-mongering at McCain Rallies across the country, and given the McCain campaign’s penchant for lying and dirty politicking, we cannot rule this out.

First, there is a conspicuous absence of any corroborating evidence for the report; no eye-witnesses accounts nor any recorded audio or video evidence that can verify the victims claims that she was attacked, much less by a deranged anti-McCain Obama supporter.  A black eye and a facial scratch is not conclusive proof that an attack was carried out by an anti-McCain, Barack Obama supporter.  It is just as plausible that these marks could have been self-inflicted (or inflicted by colleagues) if the victim is herself a deranged McCain fan, or works for / associates with a group of deranged McCain fans.  They have opportunity and demonstrated motive to make this look like an Obama-supporter-related attack.  Further proof for this theory is that the lady is a self-professed supporter of McCain and volunteer for his campaign, and the fact that all fhe following conditions were miraculously met:

- The victims car is parked precisely such that the McCain/Palin bumper sticker would be in the attacker's immediate line of site; and
- That the attacker would have to have the deficiency of focus on the task at hand (the robbery and assault) and the simultaneous presence of mind to be looking around for McCain bumper stickers; and
- Be able to make a definitive determination that a random parked car on the street with a McCain sticker is a car belonging to the victim.

These are a very unlikely set of circumstances to occur as reported by the victim to the police.  It's all a little too convenient, isn't it?

Today, I am vindicated in my early skepticism given that the original article sent to me was updated today with news that the young lady fabricated the whole story.  Here is the article (which is now updated with the new facts): http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/17789356/detail.html. 

Another article backing up the story here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/10/23/national/a141614D31.DTL&tsp=1 

Now, before you ask... no, I cannot see into the future nor can I read minds, but you don't have to be psychic or clairvoyant to figure out how the Republican mind works... you just have to be observant.  This is the pattern by which their simple little minds operate.  They are a collective suffering from a grand delusion and mass case of arrested mental development.  A hick nation on the verge of becoming reasoning primates.  They are a bunch of sore-loser cry-babies who, when they can't win on the facts, have to fabricate lies and spread fear.  The Republican mindset is an abomination to humanity, from the stinking pinnacle of its hierarchical top to the rotten grass roots that feed it.  I spit on their every conviction and crap on their deeply ingrained and unwavering dogmatism.  I would like to really speak my mind on this, but I think I'll hold back for fear of sounding impolite.

I wonder if we shall hear of the London man who was shot in the face for wearing an Obama shirt? http://www.icsouthlondon.co.uk/tn/News.cfm?id=19976.

The assailant this time is described as "white, in his mid-30s, around 6ft tall with short ginger hair, wearing a grey camouflage jacket and combat trousers". Pretty much describes your typical McCain supporter doesn't it?

Signed,

Pissed off in Canada.

In response to my all-too-frequent encounters with modern humans whose notions of reality, the world, and our place within it herald from and are steeped in Bronze-Age mythology handed down to us from 2000 to 4000 years ago, I decided it’s time to put together a little refresher course for anyone who’s been away from the science class for a spell too long.  I've tried to select content from readily available, and accessible, Internet resources that expound scientifically credible and widely accepted modern explanations of our existence, origin, and evolution.

I compile this material in hopes of helping those with a God addiction get free of religion's distorting influence and get back on the road to rational recovery.  Like many twelve-step programs, designed to “help” wean you off of undesirable substances and behaviours and onto Jesus instead, this program is designed to wean you off of Jesus (or other imaginary spiritual saviour) and away from the accompanying intellectually stifling and planetary-endangering beliefs in unfounded, unsupported, supernatural creation myths and their associated irrational adherence to blind faith -- incidentally, a redundant term which stands for a fervent belief in things for which there is, and can be, no evidence.  My hopes are to turn you on to the amazing and wonderful world of fact, reality, honesty, and the scientific (ie. undeluded) search for truth.

In a way, I’m evangelizing a different and rational world view to compete with the one that you may have accidentally been born into and which was the result of a sheer accident of birth, for a Christian could just as easily have been born into a Muslim family, thus growing up a Muslim, as could have a would-be Muslim grown up a Jew.  For almost the unanimous majority of religious people, they belong to the same “faith” as their parents do.  Sociologists tell us, in fact, that there are exceedingly few exceptions to this general rule worldwide.  Thus, an innocent and impressionable child may never come to “know” Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Santa, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy without someone first teaching them about these figures, and thus may never grow to “believe” in these figures unless taught so from a very early age.  Most of us would agree that a grown adult of 18 or 20 who still fervently believes in Santa or the Easter Bunny arguably has some developmental problems.  But why is this not the case also for belief in any of the so-called prophets or saviours?  While a child's indoctrination into all sorts of these beliefs often starts with the child’s parents, it is also the parents’ religious institutions, and immersion in a surrounding religious social and cultural milieu that delivers the ultimate coup de grâce to a child's developing sense of natural wonder and budding rationality.  Of course, a particularly intelligent and willful child may always try and exercise his free will to reject these early teachings, but such an individual must contend with the repercussions of parental and communal backlash against such rebelliousness as can be seen in the following shining example of the Christian “tolerance” and “love” that we've come to hear about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Aq00yJSxo&feature=related

For many reasons, all strongly unscientific and dogmatic ideologies and or other radicalizing systems of belief, particularly those of supernatural and spiritual origin (which are often bounded up in strong emotional attachment and a requirement for suspension of reason and rationality), carry with them an ever-present and menacing potential for oppression, violence, and abuse as history has amply shown.  A good resource for exploration of this argument is given in the eloquent book “End of Faith”, by Sam Harris.  Book summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith.  Read excerpts online here. 

The absurdity, non-necessity, fallacy, and dangerous potential of the “God" delusion are exquisitely addressed in many of the works of Richard Dawkins, including but not limited to these of his books:

-          “The Selfish Gene” (emphasis on the word ‘gene’, not ‘selfish’; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene for overview, or read excerpts of the book for free online here.

-          “The Blind Watchmaker”  See overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker. Read excerpts here.

-          Or most recently, “The God Delusion” (http://richarddawkins.net/godDelusion,
Watch Richard read excerpts from “The God Delusion” and answer questions to a university audience here.

-          For a compelling account of the impressive and vast interrelatedness of all species of organisms, past and present on this blue planet, have a look at the summary for the book “The Ancestor’s Tale” here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale, or read parts of the book online here.

In his book, “The Devil’s Chaplain” and in reference to Bertand Russell’s proposition of a hypothetical, non-disprovable, invisible celestial teapot orbiting our Sun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot) as an analogy for the belief in God, Dawkins had this to say:

The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don't exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don't stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don't warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don't kneecap those who put the tea in first.

For a view into the origins and evolutionary basis of our most complex and innate drives and emotions such as love, compassion, sacrifice, altruism, justice, and many more, take a look at “The Moral Animal” by Robert Wright (http://www.scifidimensions.com/Mar04/moralanimal.htm).  For some very recent scientific findings on the Evolutionary Psychology basis of “the Golden Rule” take a look here.  This is a NY Times Online article, so you might have sign up for a free account to view it.

For lies, bologne and inane metaphysical speculations about how we got to be here, you can read pretty much any of the unintelligent drivel produced by the Intelligent Design or Creationist movements that seem to be unquellable in today's America, promoted by any of the following (woefully incomplete) list of examples from the lying, deceitful cabal of Evangelists and pseudo-intellectuals on the vanguard of the truth-abolition movement:

-          The devout gay-hating, atheist-loathing, evolution-denying, (not to mention very creepy) Christian Evangelical minister/hypocrite Ted Haggard, George W Bush’s former best religious buddy.

o        And here where Haggard professes to be a wonderful (Christian) person, transformed by his communion with Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6A7_gsq-w

o        You can watch Haggard's prophetic rant against gays to young attendees at a bible camp in the excellent but scary documentary “Jesus Camp” (see clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6rSjrBhUIA)

o

o        If that isn’t enough to give you the creeps about this guy, watch him here go after Richard Dawkins like a rabid dog in this clip from the documentary “Root of All Evil?” (video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGrltT54OsA).  Haggard claims he has unshakeable evidence for God’s existence from the authority of “a book, written over 1500 hundred years ago, by 40 different authors on 1 subject and which doesn’t contradict itself”).
-  For revealing insights on the claims of consistency and the non-contradictory nature of the bible, check out the documentary “The God Who Wasn’t There” (film trailer here; a good clip from the movie here) whose only critics seem to be Christians or Christian Apologists with a bone to pick.
-  Also, by comparison, have a look at this compelling alternative hypothesis on the origins of Christian belief, rites, and rituals: “Zeitgeist [Religion]: The Greatest Story Ever Told” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNf-P_5u_Hw).  There are 3 parts to this.  A transcript w/ source references is available here: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/transcript.htm

-          The devout, evolution-denying, atheist-loathing, tax-evading-turned-federal-prisoner (and likely gay-hating closet-homosexual) Christian Evangelical hypocrite/minister Kent Hovind.  He and his “Creation Science Evangelism” movement have produced some astoundingly messed up explanations of life's origins and the fossil record.  People rode Dinosaurs in the Garden of Eve don't you know!  The man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind and his shame: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51236.

-          The Discovery Institute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute).  The conservative Christian think-tank that brought you Intelligent Design.  These are the original Intelligent Design advocates; ID-iots for short.

o        The “Center for [attacking] Science and [dumbing down] Culture” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Science_and_Culture)

o        The original *ahem* “scientific” voice of the ID-iot movement, Michael Behe, author responsible for the factually-lame and childishly simplistic book “Darwin’s Black Box” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe)

o        William Dembski (I'll a void an obvious disparaging play on the last name) is another God-loving irrational who thinks we need "more Bible” in math class.  He loves cooking, jabbering, walks on the beach, and oh yes, pushing his IDiot anti-science political agenda onto hapless school children. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dembski)

o        Phillip E. Johnson, founder of the Discovery Institute and leader of the IDiot village (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_E._Johnson)

-          Any one or combination of these weasels: Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, and the late Jerry Falwell, to name just a few.

-          Or the hopelessly deluded, the likes of Kirk Cameron, Roy Comfort et. al., and their raves about God and bananas.  See the idiotic “God’s Banana: An evolutionist’s nightmare” video here.  FYI, the earliest edible banana is believed to have been domesticated about 7000-8000 years ago by early tribal cultures in Papua, New Guinea; the banana variety we are most familiar with today is the Cavendish – the type used by Roy Comfort in his God's Banana video.  This banana variety is probably no more a 1500 years old, which means God didn’t make it, people did, through selective pollination/breeding (a deliberate and useful form of artificial evolution long exploited by mankind)
Today, there are hundreds of distinct banana varieties in the world, each in a family serving vastly different uses: cooking, beer-making, sweet, roasting, etc.
There are currently 95 distinct varieties of Banana grown in Uganda alone (84 endemic to the region).  Now that’s a lot of banana shapes that God has to account for!

Of course, you could always choose to relax and enjoy a read about how Intelligent Design was recently spanked in court in the judicial decision of “Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District” or watch the video documentary of these events at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html.

I could go on and on, but the pickings are just too easy and it doesn’t actually get us anywhere.  So, without any further ado, let your immersive crash course in science begin:

1.       History of the Universe, Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg1fs6vp9Ok

2.       History of the Universe, Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMQk6MveZOE

3.       The Story of the Earth:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN8XXaDrK4A

4.       Molecular Biology: The Chemistry of Life:
Origin of life: Self-replicating molecules: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozbFerzjkz4
The amazing power of simple chemistry and electrical atomic interactions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2kIatxYrws&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8lhPt6V-yM&feature=related
Visualization of DNA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UoKYGKxxMI
Visualization of RNA translation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl8pSlonmA0
Visualization of DNA replication, DNA->mRNA Transcription RNA->Protein Translation (protein manufacture and assembly from amino acid chains): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkdRdik73kU&feature=related
Visualization of Kinesin (a motor protein) used in intracellular vesicle transport: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TGDPotbJV4

5.       DNA Structure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy8dk5iS1f0&feature=related

6.       Genetic Mutation (as occasionally expected and anticipated by the theory of Evolution): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp0esidDr-c&feature=related

7.       Computer Simulations of genetic Evolution showing speciation by the means of the evolutionary mechanisms of replicator recombination (parental gene mixing), random mutation, and a process of deterministic selection, just like in the wild:
a) A virtual organism (image) that is bred over several generations and which evolves to meet a defined “fitness” criteria for the prescribed environment.  The environment favours resemblance to a given South Park character:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SVMKZhV2g
b) A virtual population of breeding prey organisms adapting to match the changing colour of their environment (ie. camouflage): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeTssvexa9s
c) Evolving a precise, time-keeping virtual clock/watch (complete with gears, hands, and pendulum) using nothing more than elements of Evolution: replication, recombination, mutation, and selection.  See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0.

8.       Means of Artificial, Natural and Sexual Selection:
a) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4FqAUEEv_U (R.I.P. Carl Sagan)
b) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zV7v2H7io8

9.       One miracle (of many) of 4.5 billion years of evolution: The human Leukocyte (white blood cell) see brilliant computer-animated video here.

10.   The Human Genome Project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuUpnAz5y1g

11.   God and DNA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXfIop5ZOsY

12.   Making peace with the grand truth (this is the only world and only life we have, we must preserve it and use it well):
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShJwq3aPLMk
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxQR6gdd1P0&feature=related

You’ve now completed the 12-step program, and by this point, you should have cast out your childish spiritual beliefs and stopped clinging to your religious delusions and supernatural crutches, and hopefully have begun to accept the healing power of science and reason into your heart and have embraced them as your guiding light and compass going forward in life from here on in.  If so, you have my congratulations and future generations’ gratitude for your courage in quashing mindless superstition and irrationality and bringing the world one step closer to true peace.  Now, watch this video and begin to feel good about and proud of your new-and-improved rational self: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdVucvo-kDU&feature=related.

If you wish to learn more about Evolution and more generally about the scientific mindset, check out these resources:

-          Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85diEXbJBIk&feature=related

-          Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmphlbRhLu8&feature=related

-          Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewtw_nZUIDQ&feature=related

-          Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkwRTIKXaxg&feature=related

-          Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5NG8SYQSzE&feature=related

-          Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jBD8xfbf4Y&feature=related

-          Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKtamnmrNqs&feature=related

For some resources on how Intelligent Design falls flat on its face when it’s most powerful “evidence” is analyzed scientifically:

-          Argument for the irreducible complexity of Bacterial Flagellum... debunked: watch this.

-          Argument for the irreducible Complexity of the Eye... debunked: watch this and this.

-          Argument for the irreducible Complexity of the Clotting Cascade... debunked (see Kenneth Miller argument distilled for the layman here)

-          Argument for the irreducible Complexity of the a Mouse Trap... debunked (see Chapter 8 of the NOVA video "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial")

Here is a video of a great talk that Ken Miller gave to students and faculty of Case Western University on the subject of Intelligent Design.

The “Classical” Big Bang theory has now been extended and subsumed in a far greater explanatory framework called Inflationary Cosmology.  If you want to learn more about what we currently believe about how it all got started, read Brian Greene’s latest book “Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality” (summary here, and a helpful review here).  Focus on Chapter 10 (pp 272-303) for this explanation.  Rather than an explosion IN space, Inflationary Cosmology suggests an explosion OF space -- a rapid expansion of the very fabric of spacetime driven by a massively-high-energy field called the Higgs Inflationary Field or "Inflaton Field" for short.   Yes, it’s spelled with a -ton ending on purpose.

I'm thrilled to announce, that as I presently write this, Monday November 26, 2007, the largest and most powerful scientific instrument ever built is coming online and we are about to embark on a whole new and exciting journey of human discovery.  The very powerful (sub)atomic particle collider, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider), the largest atom smasher ever built -- designed to search for humankind's cosmic origins -- is coming online, with the express purpose of answering the most important physical questions that have eluded us for the past 40 years, including "where did all this come from?"  One of the chief goals of the LHC is to find evidence of the Inflaton Field via detection of the theorized Higgs Boson particle.  If this particle is found, it will be confirmation of the explanatory power of our scientific theories with respect to cosmic origins and proof of the mechanism which caused our universe to come into existence.  In addition to this primary concern, the LHC collider is also poised to help us answer a variety of questions that have eluded us for 4 decades concerning features of the most fundamental elementary particles and forces of nature and of the conditions of the earliest moments of the universe: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fJ6PMfnz2E. The video is a little over-dramatized for my taste, but there’s not much out there about the LHC at the present time.  I’d take some of the comments by the interviewees as being designed to evoke false controversy for entertainment’s sake than for what we actually know and theorize today about the Standard Model of Particle Physics.  If you are curious, pick up The Fabric of the Cosmos and read all about what we know and what we think we know.

If you’re still unconvinced that science, reason, rationality, and objective truth should replace your religion, read this post again, follow the sources, examine the evidence, watch the videos; this time with your eyes, ears, and mind wide open.

Atlanta teens killed dog, then threatened children if they told about it

The Associated Press

Updated: 6:19 p.m. MT Feb 9, 2007

ATLANTA - Two teenage brothers each were sentenced to 10 years in prison for torturing a puppy by cooking it in an oven.

Joshua Moulder, 17, and Justin, 19, pleaded guilty in January to charges including burglary, criminal damage to property, terroristic threats and cruelty to children.

The brothers brought neighborhood children to see the dead puppy, then threatened to kill them if they reported it, prosecutors said.

Police said they found the dead mixed-breed puppy inside an oven at an apartment community center Aug. 21. Scratch marks were found inside the oven, indicating the puppy had been alive when it was placed inside, prosecutors said.

A necropsy on the 3-month-old dog found its paws and snout had been duct taped and it had been doused with paint before being placed in the oven, prosecutors said.

Authorities also found damaged computers, broken glass and splattered paint on the walls of the newly refurbished community center.

The brothers’ first trial ended in a mistrial in December. Their attorney, Timothy Owens, said he had hoped his clients’ sentencing would have focused more on rehabilitation than incarceration.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17074960/