The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: First Half of February 2009 Archive

Happy Darwin Lincoln Days
February 12

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Their simultaneous births were a coincidence of course, one of those oddities of history like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day. A less obvious coincidence that both men had in mind the ending of slavery. Lincoln's story is probably the better known, running as a moderate abolitionist, and finding the partial abolition of slavery helped to win the war. Darwin too, it turns out, was also an abolitionist. His researches were partly in response to the social Darwinists of his time. They weren't called "social Darwinists" yet of course, but the attitudes were exactly the same, social superiority dressed up with pseudoscience that rationalized privilege and oppression. Darwin hoped to show that whites and blacks were the same species, taking away any rational claim that blacks were inherently inferior and fit only as slaves. Social Darwinism must have pained him. Far from being the natural application of his theories, it was a self-serving twisting with no real scientific basis, and scientists who tried to apply natural selection to human society never showed the great care to detail Darwin showed.

What might seem most surprising about Darwin was that he wasn't the one who came up with the idea of evolution. It had been around for decades, and even Darwin's grandfather had suggested it. By the time Darwin published On the Origin of Species, many scientists had already accepted evolution was happening, or at least come as close to accepting it when they couldn't prove it. Mostly, they lacked a mechanism that could cause one species to change into another. That's what Darwin provided. Natural selection offered an explanation of the changes observed could have occurred, and suggested evolution was still in progress.

What Darwin gave us was more than just filling in some data, more even than providing biology the solid theoretical basis Newton gave physics or Galileo gave astronomy. Darwin showed that life could be explained with resort to the supernatural. He showed that the natural explanations relied on by science, abolishing superstition form one phenomena after another, could be applied to the very core questions of what we are and how we got here. No need for revelation, divination, or prophesy. This must be what religion can never forgive Darwin for, why is name is darker than even Galileo and Copernicus, more than geologists who figured out the age of the Earth and astronomers who worked out the age of the universe.

Of course, though Darwin showed that natural explanations suffice to explain life itself, he didn't explain everything. We still can't explain everything. We might not ever explain everything.

So Happy Darwin Day to all of who accept that you don't have and never will have all the answer.

Unspinning the stimulus
February 4

It's a shame Republican spin and half-truths are decreasing public support for the stimulus bill. They call for tax cuts for big business, but don't bother mentioning that money-losing businesses -- the great quantity of which is one of the problems we're trying to address -- don't have profits to tax, so a cut won't help them. Profitable businesses already can't sell what they can make, so tax cuts won't cause them to expand facilities or hire more workers.

Republicans also pick a few small items in a $800 billion bill that don't make immediate sense and pretend they're examples of what the whole bill is like. They cite the $44 million for the Dept. of Agriculture building, but don't mention that some unemployed people will have to do that work and get a paycheck for doing it, nor that delayed maintenance will just cost more later. They call the $200 million work on the Capitol Mall "resodding", but don't mention that this "resodding" would have included fixing the crumbling foundations of our national monuments. A lot of people would have gotten paychecks for doing that work, with the added benefit of not having to watch memorials slide off into the Potomac.

The best way to stimulate the economy long term is to give people a paycheck to do some work. Plenty of work needs to be done regardless. The best way to answer the nonsense that this is government "make work" is to point out that the work will be used for a long time. If the Capitol Mall and Agriculture building are a little theoretical, find something built by New Deal programs that are still standing. Locally, Minneapolis parks had extensive work by the WPA. Until extensive work a few years ago, I used to see "W.P.A" in the sidewalks of Minnehaha Park. The retaining walls along along the creek are about to be rebuilt --- in other words, these walls lasted 70 years. Some "make work".

And one warning, to those who thought the Republican Party was moribund: if they're coming this close to winning the first debate of the year when they're so clearly wrong, their ability to mislead short term for tactical purposes appears undiminished.

More scared of their sergeants and officers
February 1

The story of Rep. Phil Gingrey apologizing for daring to criticize Rush Limbaugh seems to fit something many of us in the left have thought we were seeing from congressional Republicans. They refuse to compromise with Democrats, but never dare defy the talk radio right. I worked at long time at Historic Fort Snelling here in the Twin Cities where we portrayed the early 19th century army, and I've done other historical reenacting from the eras when soldiers were trained to fight in straight lines in open battles. Republicans remind me of those soldiers, and not because they rarely see a war they don't support, or like to use warlike language to describe politics(opponents are "the enemy" and activists are "warriors"). Oddly enough, soldiers in the era of line infantry tactics didn't want to stand there and get shot at, and officers tended to look at enlisted men as the lowest part of society who understood nothign but force anyway. They therefore made discipline very harsh. They literally wanted soldiers to be more afraid of their sergeants and officers than of the enemy. That way, if soldiers were tempted to break and run, they would remember that though the enemy might kill them, their own superiors definitely would kill them, maybe on the spot, maybe by painful execution later.

Republican congressmen aren't going to be shot even by their own side, but I think we see now why they consistently refuse any sorts of compromise. It isn't pure stubbornness, or a stupid failure to see how they've been hurt electorally, or even an utter fearlessness about defending principled but hopeless positions. They're more scared of their base and the big names in talk radio than they are of Democrats. Democrats can outvote them in Congress, but not in the Republican primary.

Maybe we need to start a "Free the Republicans" campaign.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guantánamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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