Decrepit Old Fool

Cranston High School vs US Law and a courageous student

At Cranston West high school in Rhode Island, an atheist student named Jessica Ahlquist requested that her school administration remove a prayer banner that had hung in the gym for some thirty years. While the banner had a positive message, she said, it was couched in religious terms that excluded people of non-Christian religion, and also atheists. By no small amount of case law, that is illegal.

Her request was refused, and was followed by school board and town meetings that, in the words of the case judge, “resembled revival meetings”. This did not help their claim that the banner was, in fact, somehow secular. The judge ruled as expected in favor of Ms. Ahlquist and the ACLU. That’s the pro-forma part.

Then the really interesting part began.

Jessica had to leave Cranston High* under a storm of threats and invective. I’m talking actual death threats, rape threats, and death-plus-eternal-rape threats. No, I’m not making this up; I wish I were. On Facebook, Twitter, in blogs and discussion groups, and even letters to the editor, it was painfully obvious this young woman simply wouldn’t be safe at Cranston High. Police finally began investigating some of the threats but there are too many to follow up on.

Rhode Island congressman Peter Palumbo, pandering to the majority, called her “an evil little thing“.

Prayer banner at Cranston West high school in Rhode Island (Does anyone know who I can credit for this photo?)

When the FFRF tried to send flowers to Jessica, two florists in town simply refused.

At a school committee meeting, one of her 16-year-old friends stood up to give an explanation and was booed by the “adults” present.

Would this be a good time to look at the content of the prayer? Why yes, it would.

They seem to be having a little problem “smiling when they lose”. Or showing any of the positive attributes advocated in the banner.

My point here isn’t that “All Christians are big fat poopyheads”, because there’s plenty of counterexamples to that.  No, I’m trying to show that tribalism is an easy trap for anyone to fall into, and most people do. And almost every atrocity ever committed in the history of humanity was a manifestation of tribalism, whatever label it was given at the time.  And that our secular constitution was an attempt to light a path beyond tribalism, which is also known as “exceptionalism”.

Someone asked me what I want Christians to do in these all-too-common cases. I want to see Christian leaders get up in front of cameras and microphones, and look into the camera with steely determination and ask their fellow Christians: “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you think we need the Government to protect our religion? Do we even want the government involved in our religion? Do you think it serves the Prince Of Peace to threaten a high school student?”

It doesn’t do much good for me to say these things – I’m just a filthy atheist. But a popular Christian minister could straighten out this travesty real quick if he or she wanted to. Can you guess what conclusion I draw from the fact that they don’t?

Here’s the short version of US law:

It pretty much amounts to this: Religious expression is allowed in schools, but not by schools. Or by any government agency: religion is a private-citizen thing. Schools can teach citizenship, ethics, morals, even manners, but not religion. Students are free to be as religious as they like, but teachers, when acting as representatives of the school, must be secular. You can read the judge’s excellent opinion here.

I’m still trying to figure out what’s so damn complicated about that, or why Christians get so upset when they can’t get an unconstitutional government endorsement of their religion.

NOTES and updates

• Author of the Cranston High school prayer outraged - be sure to scroll down and listen to the interview with Jessica. Keep reminding yourself she is only 17 years old, because she speaks with more clarity and maturity than her critics.
• Early reports that Jessica was leaving Cranston high were not correct: she is staying. She has said she intends to graduate from there. Read the threats against her linked above and then imagine going to classes every day, the lunch room… that is courage.
• If the picture is not showing up, here’s the text of the prayer banner:
  

  Our Heavenly Father. Grant us each day the desire to do our best. To grow mentally and morally as well as physically. To be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers. To be honest withourselves as well as with others. Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win.  Teach us the value of true friendship. Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West. AMEN

  Only slight edits would be required to make it constitutionally acceptable.

This lovely piece of music resurfaces every so often – I think I overheard a few moments of it in a commercial for something or other yesterday. It deserves its own showcase. Enjoy!

This piece has been described as “a musical joke” – it could be, and has been, overlaid on many animations and stop-motion videos. Like any meditation it is a creative starting point, not a destination.

First, the trailer:

Margin Call is a drama about life inside a giant Wall Street trading firm during the 36 hours before the bottom fell through. Or more correctly the bottom already had fallen but only a small group of analysts knew it – and the question of whether to have their traders act on that information in the four or five hours before the rest of the planet figured it out.

And in fact the story feels more like a stage play than a blockbuster movie. There’s no violence and only a little music: everything is done with acting and dialog and directing. How you take 36 hours in the life of some characters, compress it down to 109 minutes, and in the process humanize them and give context to their actions I leave to people who understand literature.

Notice I said “humanize them”, not “excuse their actions”. Because, while it isn’t clear they could have done anything differently once things came to a head, there is a strong sense of consciously-made steps leading for years into disaster by brilliant people who knew better.  We are presented with a kind of moral nihilism possible only with tightrope-walking levels of balance and skill. Not by all the characters, to be sure – but by the most powerful ones.  The less-powerful characters sounded warnings, yes. In plenty of time to do something about it. It rings true because it echoes nearly every human-made catastrophe I have ever studied.

109 minutes. Highly recommended.

NOTES:

• See also the documentaries;  Enron, the smartest guys in the room and (of more direct relevance to this film) Inside Job
• There’s also a scene that will make you look at bridges a little differently from now on.
• I said “moral nihilism” but on reflection, there’s as much fatalism as nihilism.
• Update: I forgot to give credit to alert reader Chas who emailed me to recommend the film. Thanks Chas!

From I-74 between Champaign-Urbana and Bloomington, IL. Hard to hold the camera still in a 30mph wind at 20 degrees f. (Click to embiggen)

I drove down to Champaign today for a great meeting with @RelUnrelated, and then back to BloNo in the face of advancing Winter. The turbulent wind and blowing snow made every mile a new visual feast, a joy of sheer, unendurable beauty. Clouds and snow do amazing things with sunlight. And on the prairie you can see clouds and storms far enough away to get a sense of how they move and fill space.

The wind was gusting across blacktop slicker than boiled flaxseed, with white-out visibility sometimes dropping to 100 feet.  I lost count of the cars in the ditch; there were miles of emergency vehicles and tow trucks. One pickup had rolled over and landed on its wheels again. When I got back to Bloomington, I saw a minivan come down an on-ramp, frantically blowing its horn and trying to brake. Cars were able to move out of the way; it shot through the intersection and hit a traffic light pole, snapping it off at the base. It didn’t look as if anyone was hurt, which is a testament to modern car design.

Folks, let me just say this about adverse driving conditions. Please set your Celebrity Voice Imaginator to “Samuel L. Jackson” for the following Public Service Announcement:

“Hey, when snow crashes in and you suddenly can’t see where you’re going, turn on your G*D* flashers and slow the f* down! And that speed-limit sign don’t mean s* when the road is slick! This ain’t no race!”
/SLJ

NOTES:

• It is a little odd/worrisome that real Winter did not arrive until January 2. Cold Winters are important – they keep crop pests and invasive species down.
• I stopped at an off-ramp and shot this picture a short distance from the car. It was cold but the howling wind gave it teeth; unprotected in shirt sleeves you’d die in a half-hour. But yes, I did have full Winter gear in the car in case I needed it.
• I once knew a guy who died shooting a photograph. There are worse ends; lots of people die in office cubicles.
• My old Honda is only fair in the snow but it has good aerodynamics, which is a plus with high winds. And the tires are past their prime. But I notice something: when you turn on your flashers and slow down, people actually follow your example.  You still get the odd vehicle – usually a big SUV or pickup, blasting by at the speed limit, only to decorate the ditch further down the road.

We live in the thin veneer - a two-mile layer on a globe 7,000 miles across

The World

In the new year I’d love to wish for a sudden attack of good sense among the world’s leaders. Maybe a full-on effort to develop clean energy for example. And cut the US military budget by half, so we’d only be out-spending the next largest mil-budget by a factor of three instead of six. Or if you prefer, outspending the next five countries combined instead of the next 20. I suppose it could happen, but planets don’t generally win lotteries. So my wishes will have to be more personal in nature.

And us…

I love movies, and especially ones where the main character is changed by the story. Which is to say, they learn something that deepens their humanity, often at a terrible price but sometimes not. This is called character development, and it marks the difference between James Bond and Wikkus from District 9 or Sarah Connor from Terminator. In Bond movies, a bunch of stuff happens, but 007 himself is no better than when he started. In a good movie the main character is edified by the experience.

Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…” So I guess that makes you and me actors in our own little movies.

So my wish for you is that your character development this year be an inspiration to your audience, whoever that may be. And that the ratio of benefit to cost be high. As happy a New Year as can be, may it all add up in December, and many sequels.

Idle question for New Years’…

What percentage of New Years’ posts do you suppose use the “Earthrise” picture?

NOTES:

• Astronomer Phil Plait explains; “What is a new year, exactly?“

Chevrolet ad featuring new Sonic. Click to watch the video

It’s actually a rather lovely video, for a car ad. You see the car falling, with skydivers alongside it, and you think; “Huh. Wish Galileo could have seen this.” But then it appears on the net, with the caption “0 to 60 in .4 seconds (when dropped from a plane)”.

Not even on Jupiter. Because if you drop a car out of a plane on this planet, it’s going just under 9 miles an hour in 0.4 seconds. After one full second, it’s about 21 miles an hour. Takes almost three seconds to get up to 60. Which would still be pretty damn fast on the ground, but there are few cars that can accelerate at 1G, let alone almost 7G.

It’s hard to explain why this bothers me, but I’ll try.

“If you want to get technical about it…”

You might think, “What difference does it make?” But I can’t help picturing a bunch of advertising creatures sitting around a table brainstorming new slogans for the campaign. And apparently not one of them would admit to knowing that the acceleration due to gravity on our planet is about 32 feet per second per second.

This is not exactly esoteric information – it has been known to fairly high precision for hundreds of years. You can damn well bet the engineers who designed the car’s inner workings knew it. Maybe even the stylists who sculpted the sheet metal did. But why should I not be bothered by one more data point in the scatterplot of scientific ignorance in US culture?  It wouldn’t cost anything to say; “0 to 60 in 3 seconds (when dropped from a plane)”, and our recognition of reality would go up a notch.

There’s a price we pay for having no sense of the proportion of things. Our kids grow up not knowing a million from a billion, and preferring simple answers to complex realities. We vote for Senators who get glassy-eyed listening to testimony about food safety, environmental hazards or the damage SOPA will do to the Internet. We think we’ll just brace ourselves, hold on to something, rather than buckling a seat belt.

Hey, I struggle with numbers as much as anyone. More, probably, since I am dyslexic and they keep jumbling up on me when I work with them. But damn it, there’s a real world out there. And there are real consequences if we don’t at least try to understand it.

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
- Carl Sagan

NOTES:

• Rick Santorum says science “should get out of politics”. But anti-scientific populism isn’t just sideshow entertainment anymore. It might actually threaten the human race.
• Acceleration due to gravity is awfully important: it influences the thickness of your bones, the size of bird (and airplane) wings, the action of waves, the maximum height-to-base ratio of a gravel pile, the size of a building, everything to do with architecture, the weather, bridges, our chances of ever getting into space… the list is endless.
• Of course we’re ignoring the forward momentum of the car: the plane wasn’t just hovering in place.
• I recently watched the movie October Sky. It is a moving tribute to science as a way out of toil and darkness for humanity.

As a child I remember being told various things that “separate us from the animals”: we were thinking, learning, playful, tool-using, language-using, social, compassionate, loyal, forward-looking creatures. They don’t really have emotions like we do; we have souls. But over the years I have seen all these things to one degree or another in animals. Including every indication of a soul, defined as a sense of self.

Then the squirrel looked up from her fallen friend, saw our stopped car, and hurried on to safety.

A couple days ago we came upon a squirrel that had just been hit by a car. That isn’t rare, but his companion was venturing out onto the road. I stopped our car as she walked around him, nudged him. Then she looked at us, stopped thirty feet away, and made her way to the safety of the curb.

You read about elephants mourning their dead, and you think; “Oh, well elephants are a special case.” But when our girl cat died last year, her brother became visibly depressed. This year, he is showing signs of senility, and going around the house looking for her in all her old places, making the sounds he used to make to entice her to come out and play.

You read about crow intelligence and octopus intelligence and people’s dogs and how pigs can solve problems, pigeons can count, and that scientists have at long last concluded we need much greater restrictions on primate research, and it dismantles all the old assurances that we are somehow not part of the animal world. For some reason this really upsets religious people who want to think Man is special. I suppose it fits the pattern that they think our world is special, our country is special; why wouldn’t our species be cosmically favored?

But, we aren’t that special. We are different in matters of degree, not in substance. I’m not a vegetarian or an animal-rights activist – my calendar is full enough already. But when I have a choice I often find myself looking for the reduced cruelty option. Cage-free organic eggs cost a bit more for example, but if they succeed in the marketplace it can carve out a better niche. If I have a choice between a tested-on-animals product and one that isn’t, I can choose the one not tested on animals.  It isn’t much, but it’s a start. I don’t know where the finish line is; it may be an ethical consensus that follows my generation.

Your thoughts?

NOTES:

• Illusion-busting: from a cruelty perspective cage-free eggs are only slightly better than the regular kind. Organic, again a little bit better for the chicken (no antibiotics requires more space). Not ideal; not the idyllic country life of farmer Brown and his horse and tractor. I’ll reward even small improvements, and look for brands that promise more.
• I don’t know either squirrel’s gender; the narrative above is simply a guess.

"Powered by Personality -- The perfect friend" "Dances, walks, and 'emotes' with sophistication" "Access over 56 functions and interactive routines by touch, sight and sound" (Click to embiggen)

I promised something more horrifying than Martian Barbie, and here it is: WowWee Robotics’ Femisapien. The question I can’t get out of my mind is “Why? Why? Why?”

Actually that’s three questions. #1 is “Why do robots have gender?”. The answer may be that if we see something vaguely anthropomorphic, we’re uncomfortable until we’ve attached gender to it. People even assign gender to their cars – usually their own gender which should keep a Fruedian busy for a while.

#2 is “Why are the secondary gender characteristics so pronounced?” I mean, proportionally what is that – a 40 D-Cup?

#3 is “Does she nurse little robots with those?” (Do they produce 30-weight motor oil?)

OK, that went a little too far. My bad.

As a culture we’ve only recently begun to consider the idea that our fixation on gender could be a bit overdone. There’s hardly any product you can imagine that isn’t targeted to one specific gender or the other. As if there were only two; nature sometimes produces ambiguities, not all of which are visible in a medical photograph. Heaven help the young person who can’t feel at home in the gender that was culturally assigned to them at birth.

We’re not less gender-crazy than “primitive” cultures we look down on – we just apply more technology, and media, to our insanity.

NOTES:

• Think a robot this small couldn’t be horrifying? Remember “Talky Tina” from The Twilight Zone? When the subetheric signal goes out to “Kill all humans”, little Femisapien here will be wiring up your house mains to the bathtub faucet – count on it!
• It was pointed out to me that Wall-E and Eve from the movie Wall-E were gendered robots who exhibited a strong attraction to each other. Neither had pronounced anthropomorphic secondary gender characteristics, other than that Wall-E was boxy and angular and Eve was graceful. But their primary motivation seemed to be companionship; they were geeks who liked the same things.

I hope these alien-looking faces are painted by machine. Either that or picture Chinese workers painting thousands of tiny little Barbie faces all day.

Not sure what planet her people evolved on. Mars, perhaps: darkness selecting for larger eyes and lower gravity for freakishly long limbs and neck.

Martians are naturally bald, but there’s a current fashion for hair based on Earth television, which they get together to watch for laughs.

H.G. Wells speculated that Martians wanted to invade Earth, and perhaps Barbie is the first wave of that invasion. When her people step off the spaceships, little children would run up to them with glee. “Look, mommy! It’s Barbie!”

Tomorrow: something even more horrifying than Barbie…

NOTES:

• Have you read War Of The Worlds? That is a seriously awesome book. Here I’ll get you started: “…across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us…”

Everyone will be writing about Christmas. MrsDoF and I are having the lowest-key Christmas ever – no kids at home, she’s going to church and I’m staying home.  So here’s a wood shaving.  I’m sharing it with you because I think wood shavings are pretty.

I was making a desk for my son (not as a Christmas present – just a desk because he needed one) and the maple trim around the edge didn’t quite line up with a short section of the top surface. I could have gone back in the garage to find a chisel, but it was just a little section and my pocketknife was right there. I put the curve of the blade right along the trim so it barely grazed the desk surface and drew it toward me. The maple wood shaved off into a 12 cm curl as you see here. The background for this picture is my Lenovo tablet.

Anyway, wherever you are, whatever you are doing – have a wonderful Christmas! And may the New Year find us all happy and healthy.

UPDATE: The day did not work out quite as planned. MrsDoF requested I accompany her to church, and then we went to lunch at MerryAnn’s.