Random Blogging – Page 392

We Seem to be Going in the Wrong Direction

Is there something in the water?

In Louisiana, a Justice of the Peace refuses to perform inter-racial weddings, insisting that such “racial mixing” produces children who are not accepted by either whites or blacks.

In Paraguay, two women were tortured and killed after being accused of being witches. According to reports, Dorotea Colmán, 50, and María Espínola, 23, died after being submitted to three days of brutal torture by members of the Bya Guaraní ethnic group in Santa Lucía, 220 miles north of Asunción. The women were hung upside down, beaten with sticks and had boiling water poured on them.

In Congress, we are regularly treated to comments by elected officials– Michele Bachman and someone named King from Iowa come to mind, but there are plenty of others–that are not simply stupid (that would be a very long list!) but paranoid and delusional.

Anyone have an explanation for this explosion of irrational behaviors?

Maybe in this age of blogging and 24/7 news cycles, we’re just more aware of crazies who’ve always been around. I hope that’s the answer, because otherwise, I feel as if I went to bed in the 21st Century and awoke in the 16th.

This Says It All

I was about to post on the surprising award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama when I read this.

It expresses my own thoughts on the matter, and does it better than I could.

Excuse Me??

According to an article in the Huffington Post, In 1568 Montgomery Highway v. City of Hoover, the Supreme Court of Alabama this week upheld the constitutionality of an Alabama statute prohibiting the sale of “any device designed … primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.” The law was targeted primarily at the sale of such objects as vibrators and dildos.”

Evidently, the Alabama Court agrees with Justice Scalia that the Bill of Rights doesn’t protect a right to privacy, and that it is government’s job to impose religious morality on the citizenry.

Next thing you know, the state will post signs telling us that such activities will cause us to go blind!
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/sex-and-sin_b_308732.html

Inspiring Places

It’s really difficult to listen to the news without concluding that humanity—or at least civilization—is doomed. From Afghanistan to healthcare, from global climate change to the global economy, the focus is on the massive problems we face and the gigantic barriers to solving them. For every thoughtful analysis of a situation by someone who actually knows something about it, there seem to be twenty bloviating know-nothings trying to compensate for cluelessness with volume.

It’s enough to make you climb into bed and pull the covers up over your head.

So it helps if, every once in a while, we remind ourselves that news is by definition that which is out of the ordinary. As the old saying goes, when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When a man bites a dog, that is.

We hear about hatred and conflict: racial strife, homophobia, religious intolerance. We don’t hear about the innumerable people of good will whose daily activities include interfaith outreach, efforts on behalf of racial reconciliation, or protecting children from homophobia.

Which brings me to the Spirit and Place Festival, now in its 14^th year. Between November 6^th and 15^th, there will be some 40 programs sponsored by over 100 collaborating organizations, all centered on this year’s theme, “Inspiring Places.”

Spirit & Place grew out of a Polis Center project in the 1990s that examined the relationship between religious practices and urban life. The idea was to explore how the places we live shape our identity. Spirit & Place programs are intended to be “public conversations” rather than lectures or speeches. As their website puts it, “Its mission is to promote civic engagement, respect for diversity, thoughtful reflection, public imagination, and enduring change through creative collaboration among arts, humanities, and religion.”

Inspiring places can be great works of architecture, or humble neighborhoods. Inspiring places can also be gatherings of supportive people focused on improving some aspect of our civic life, or providing a safe and nurturing place for people who need sanctuary and encouragement. Falling into that latter category is PFLAG—Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays—which is once again hosting a Spirit and Place event.

On Sunday, November 8, the Indianapolis PFLAG chapter will team with the Indiana Youth Group and St. Luke’s United Methodist Church to sponsor a discussion about nontraditional families. Reverend Barbara Child of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis will help guide a discussion about how people make places inspiring. She will discuss the role of safety and security in a place of sanctuary, and how ordinary people with loving and generous hearts make places inspiring for others.

PFLAG is one of literally hundreds of organizations and voluntary associations working to make our community better, safer and more nurturing for all of us.

We need to remind ourselves that, for every self-important pundit hurling invective, there are millions of good people giving their time, effort and money to improve the human environment.

Those people create truly inspiring places.

Jean-Luc Was Right

I admit to being a shameless fan of Star Trek, the Next Generation. (Okay–also Deep Space Nine and Voyager..) The series was at its best when it tackled civil liberties issues, and one example that I’ve always remembered was a two-part story about Captain Picard’s capture–and torture–by the Cardassians. Pickard resisted the pain and humiliation as the hero of a show should. Each time the interrogator began a “session,” he would show four lights and ask Picard how many he saw. The “correct” answer was five. At the very end, when his interrogator was once again demanding that Pickard tell him how many lights there were, our hero was rescued. Later, however, as he recounted the experience to the ship’s counselor, he told her that he was about to tell his tormentor he saw five, because by that time he actually DID see five!

Turns out that science supports art in this case.

Wired magazine has an article about a new paper by Shane O’Mara in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that examines the neuroscience of using things like stress positions and abuse to get accurate information out of detainees. He bluntly calls the belief that abuse and torture are effective a form of folk neuroscience that does not conform to what we know about how the brain works.

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.”

So–even leaving issues of humanity and morality aside, science shows us that torture does not work. It isn’t a question of ends justifying the means–which is an approach specifically rejected by our Bill of Rights in any event. Assuming that “the ends” are the acquisition of reliable data, the means don’t get us there.

Tell me again why Dick Cheney believes we should torture people?