Immediate don’t ask, don’t tell injunction

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Michael

The courts have traditionally been the place where the immorality of bigoted Americans has gone to die. Today is no different.

A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday immediately stopping enforcement of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, suspending the 17-year-old ban on openly gay U.S. troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling also ordered the government to suspend and discontinue all pending discharge proceedings and investigations under the policy.

The Obama Administration is under no obligation to challenge this. It’s unclear what this administration will do, especially this close to midterm elections, but I feel decent about the right decision being made. A challenge to this ruling would be a slap in the face to all the gay people who serve the United States in uniform, not to mention a weakening of our military. There’s no rational justification in DADT and it needs to stop.

Filed under: News, Rights | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Sick school district admits wrongdoing

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

When a government organization settles a lawsuit, can we just start saying they’re admitting wrongdoing? If they thought they were going to win, they would try. For example, Lower Merion School District knew it was going to lose a case since it was in the wrong, so the district effectively admitted as much when they settled a case of spying on underage students.

A Philadelphia-area school district agreed Monday to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits over secret photos taken on school-issued laptops.

The Lower Merion School District admitted it captured thousands of webcam photographs and screen shots from student laptops in a misguided effort to locate missing computers.

Harriton High School student Blake Robbins, then 15, charged in an explosive civil-rights lawsuit filed in February that the district used its remote tracking technology to spy on him inside his home. Later evidence unearthed in the case showed that he was photographed 400 times in a two-week period, sometimes as he slept in his bedroom, according to his lawyer, Mark Haltzman.

The settlement calls for $175,000 to be placed in a trust for Robbins and $10,000 for a second student who filed suit, Jalil Hassan. Their lawyer, Mark Haltzman, will get $425,000 for his work on the case.

The district often did this in an effort to figure out where lost laptops were located. That would be fine if they did it with simple GPS units – after informing students and parents – but that isn’t the method they chose. Instead they decided to go with turning on webcams. What’s worse, they went about falsely accusing students of things they illegally saw them doing.

According to his suit, Robbins learned of the practice when a Harriton vice principal cited a laptop photo in telling him that the school thought he was engaging in improper behavior. Robbins told reporters the school had mistaken candy he was seen eating for drugs.

I’m entirely against a school punishing a student for any illegal activity that takes place outside school which does not directly affect anyone else at school while at school, but this is above and beyond that. The school thought it would be okay to illegally obtain images which they would illegally view and then illegally punish students for what they saw. Have these people no common sense?

I’m glad this district is out $600K. Maybe they can add this incident to their civic and government courses.

Oh, and there’s this unsurprising tidbit:

The district is no longer using the tracking program.

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Judge Talmadge Littlejohn is a moron

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Michael

Everyone with any knowledge of history and any bit of rationality knows a government entity cannot require individuals to say the Pledge of Allegiance. This might lead one to believe a judge, of all people, would never be genuinely dumb enough to require a courtroom full of people to recite it. But that’s a faulty lead when Talmadge Littlejohn is involved.

The furor began Wednesday when an attorney with a reputation for fighting free speech battles stayed silent as everyone else recited the patriotic oath. The lawyer was jailed.

A day later, Judge Talmadge Littlejohn continued to ask those in his courtroom to say the pledge.

…

Attorney Danny Lampley spent about five hours behind bars before Littlejohn set him free so that the lawyer could work on another case. Lampley told The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal he respected the judge but wasn’t going to back down.

“I don’t have to say it because I’m an American,” Lampley told the newspaper.

Littlejohn clearly needs to face some disciplinary action for this. It would also help if he apologized to Lampley. It’s hard to believe he doesn’t know he’s in the wrong. I’m sure he thinks what he did was morally right – because the religious often have screwy morals – but how he might think he can do what he did? It’s nuts.

Of course, with others it’s abundantly clear they don’t really know what they’re talking about.

“I thought he was a disgrace to the United States,” Bobby Martin, a 43-year-old self-employed maintenance worker, said of Lampley. “If he can’t say that in front of a judge, he don’t deserve to be here” in this country.

Ayuh, he ain’t not don’t deserve to be no dang lawyerin’ fella in front of no judge! It ain’t right!

Oh, the silliness of nationalism, huh?

Filed under: News, Religions | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Two lessons to be learned

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Michael

David Gardner and Michael Ecker thought that it would be better to recycle and donate the proceeds from some scrap metal than to watch a government entity let it all go to waste. But both that entity and the police disagree.

For years, David Gardner and Michael Ecker had watched scrap metal from the Veterans Administration facility at Togus get carried off in exchange for what they believed to be a token fee.

Then, in May, they saw that the medical center was scrapping about 1,000 pounds of copper and brass.

Instead of taking it to a storage area, they took it in their personal vehicles to One Steel Recycling Inc., in Augusta, and sent $2,487 in proceeds from the sale to the Gulf oil cleanup operation via the office of U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe.

That plan cost them their jobs and a pending theft conviction.

The two men who worked at Togus from 1981 as waste-water treatment plant operators said they had planned to tell their supervisors at Togus after they got an acknowledgment of the donation from Snowe’s office.

“Basically, it was to show them it could be used for a good purpose,” Gardner said.

But before that happened, Togus authorities learned the metal had disappeared.

On May 7, a Friday, Togus police questioned Gardner, 61, of Auburn, and Ecker, 55, of Vassalboro, about the missing metal. They denied knowing anything about it.

…

On May 10, the following Monday, Gardner and Ecker came clean about the scheme to the police, and each was charged with one misdemeanor count of theft by unauthorized taking.

So here are the two things that ought to be taken from this story. First, don’t talk to the cops. If they suspect you of anything, they are not there to help you. That is not part of their job. Had Gardner and Ecker not talked to the police in the first place or if they did, had they not later fessed up to what they had done (ya know, the whole recycling for charity thing…the horror!), they would still have their jobs. Giving statements to the police means giving power to the police. It isn’t in the interest of the police to use that power for the good of those they suspect of anything.

Second, this is a case of rule internalization. It’s clear what Gardner and Ecker were doing, everyone knows that. Well, everyone except Brian Stiller.

Brian G. Stiller, director of the Togus VA Medical Center, wrote, “I have concluded that the sustained charges against you are of such seriousness that mitigation of the proposed penalty is not warranted and that the penalty of removal is appropriate and within the range of reasonableness.”

The reasons for dismissal cited in an earlier letter to Gardner were “unauthorized sale of government property,” “concealment of material facts in connection with an investigation” and “absence without leave.”

This jamoke is just internalizing rules – and in melodramatic fashion. Drama Queen Stiller is enforcing rules that are in place for the sake of preventing actions with a negative effect on the Togus VA Medical Center from happening. Since no such actions actually did happen at any point – these guys took trash and made use of it – he’s just following rules for the sake of following rules. He isn’t enforcing the reason for the rules. It would seem he ought to retract his statement then that he has acted “within the range of reasonableness”, perhaps replacing it with “within the range of truthiness”.

But maybe I’m just being silly. Afterall, who wouldn’t find it reasonable to shitcan two guys for doing something with the right intentions? I mean, it’s not like they had each been there for nearly 30 years.

Oh, wait.

Filed under: News | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Ken Cuccinelli is on a witch hunt

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Michael

The Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, is on another witch hunt.

When Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli II on Monday revived his anti-climate science crusade with a new, 30-page civil subpoena demanding boatloads of documents from the University of Virginia, we wondered what he might have discovered recently about the work of former U-Va. researcher Michael E. Mann, the object of the probe, that would justify further investigation. The answer: essentially nothing.

Slapped down once by a Virginia judge in his effort to investigate Mr. Mann, the attorney general is trying again with a screed that rehashes a lot of the old arguments about Mr. Mann’s findings, including the complaint about his famous “hockey-stick” graph in 1998, which shows a spike in world temperature during the 20th century. What Mr. Cuccinelli doesn’t discuss is a 2006 inquiry from the National Academy of Sciences on reconstructing historical temperature data, which found that Mr. Mann might better have used some different statistical techniques but that his methods weren’t unacceptably poor. Instead, the academy stressed that his basic conclusions appear sound.

As I’ve said before, people like Cuccinelli don’t have the qualifications to read, understand, and appreciate scientific papers. It’s frustrating when jokes like this guy go out and attack good science out of political and economic ideology.

Oh, and the cost?

To defend itself from Mr. Cuccinelli’s investigation into the distribution of a $214,700 research grant, the University of Virginia has spent $350,000, with more to come, and that doesn’t count the taxpayer funds Mr. Cuccinelli is devoting to this cause. Sadly, though, that’s the smallest of the costs. The damage to Virginia’s reputation, and to its universities’ ability to attract and retain top-notch faculty and students, will not be easily undone.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Chief scientist of Ed. Ministry fired for right reasons

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Michael

Gavriel Avital was the chief scientist of the Education Ministry in Israel. But over the past year he made a lot of stupid comments, so now he’s gone.

Sources familiar with the affair said Avital was fired over past statements he had made, in which he questioned evolution and the global warming theory.

Avital, who was named chief scientist in December 2009, said Darwinism should be analyzed critically along with biblical creationism.

“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” he said.

He’s at least right that there are many people who don’t accept evolution. He just forgot to mention the part about how those people aren’t qualified to participate in scientific discussion.

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How to write a news article

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Michael

It’s unfortunately common that journalists are always so eager to seek out all sides on an issue. It’s this sort of blind following of protocol that has resulted in the anti-vax crowd rising to the prominence it has, or the fact that creationists will often get to spout lies concerning recent scientific discoveries. And do the journalists ever challenge those lies? Not really. It’s apparently enough that we hear what two groups think, even if one of those groups is incompetent.

That’s why I really like this article by Ashley Yeager of Duke. Without simply presenting us her point of view, something for which we have plenty of bloggers and the like, she informs the reader of what happened at a particular event – and she doesn’t ask for the needless opinions of dissenters.

People filed into Page Auditorium on Oct. 3 carrying The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution tucked under their arm. The scene was typical of a lecture given on a college campus, except the instructor was the controversial and outspoken British biology writer Richard Dawkins.

…

Dawkins’ lecture used no props or PowerPoint slides. For 45 minutes, he simply talked his listeners through his latest book, mixing scientific discussion with scathing jabs. He cited evidence for his argument that “we stop calling evolution a theory and call it a fact.”

…

He spoke about the family trees that linked all animals and how some would argue that “God deliberately deceived us.” Maybe God did, Dawkins conceded. But if so, “I’m not sure if that is the kind of God you want to worship,” he said.

…

“You have all the arguments on your side. (Students) may say well my parents, say or my preachers say this. Well, damn your preacher, these are the facts.”

You know when you watch a DVD of a TV show and it has that weird cut where you feel like you’re about to watch a commercial? Well, this is the point in this article where most other journalists would go to some priest or well-known creationist for a dissenting view. I can just feel it. But Yeager doesn’t do that. Here is the next paragraph.

One audience member asked Dawkins if he and religious groups that advocate for many of the same causes as his foundation — natural disaster relief, education reform, among others — could ever work together. No, Dawkins said. At a fundamental level, the two groups’ views would have them debating much more than aiding others, he said.

She just continues on with her account of the event. I love it. This is a good example of how journalism should be done.

Just because there is another side doesn’t mean it’s a side worth hearing.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Evolution, News | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

Tyler Clementi

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Michael

It would be disingenuous and misguided of me to pretend like I can at all relate to what happened to Tyler Clementi. I’m a white male whose biggest claim to having anything remotely close to a hardship is being an atheist. The stigma that surrounds my lack of belief is trivial in comparison to what gays and other minorities go through. And there’s a significant difference: I choose to be an atheist. Tyler Clementi didn’t choose to be gay, no more than one chooses to be black or white. That was his identity – and he was forced to keep it in the ‘closet’. We have society to blame for that.

Minorities have been held down and ostracized and mocked ever since early humans began to notice the superficial differences we have between us. But how many minorities have been forced to stay silent on who they were? Blacks have historically been kicked, but they haven’t been forced to hide the physical color of their skin as a routine matter. The same goes for all racial minorities. This doesn’t make their plight any less significant or less important than any other plight, but it does make the discrimination gays face a unique beast. Gays are in the unique position where they can disguise who they are. The horribly hateful bigots out there take advantage of this, proclaiming the existence of some fairytale ‘homosexual agenda’, suggesting homosexuals want to teach gay sex to children, among all the other ugly lies we hear every day. This forces many gays to keep a major defining aspect of their lives a complete secret; fear drives them to hide who they are.

That’s why Tyler Clementi killed himself. If society accepted who he was because, damn it, he’s a human being and deserves at least as much, he would still be alive. He would graduate in three and a half years from Rutgers University, ready to contribute as much as he could to society, to his family, to his friends, to his own well-being. Instead we’re left with an unnecessary and permanent absence because that very society to which Tyler Clementi would have contributed so much is so immersed in a dark, dark hate.

Filed under: News, Rights | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Internalize and hurt

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Michael

I’ve written about rule internalization in the past. It’s when people care more about a rule itself than the reason for the rule. It’s a good mark of someone who isn’t doing much thinking.

I’ve also written about a lot of discrimination. I’ll spare myself the tediousness of linking back to a number of stories and just point out one particularly relevant to the rest of this post: when Constance McMillen was denied the right to wear a tux to her senior prom. A gay female student wanted to attend prom with her girlfriend while wearing something besides a dress. The school acted out of bigotry and denied her that right. (And then got sued and lost, but continued its campaign to alienate Constance anyway.)

Now there’s the case of Oakleigh “Oak” Reed at Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Michigan. Oak is a transgendered student at his school and, by all accounts, seems to be well accepted by his classmates and teachers. Even the administration has made some correct decisions with him.

Teachers use him, his, and he when referring to Oakleigh in class. The school has allowed him to wear a tuxedo when marching with the band at football games and he has been given permission to wear the male robe and cap at graduation.

But then Oak decided to run for homecoming king. Like 500 million other people, he turned to the Internet.

[Oak] let the school community know he was running for homecoming king on Facebook.

The honors student quickly became the leading candidate.

He even won. Oakleigh Reed is the 2010 homecoming king at Mona Shores High School.

Except the administration doesn’t see this fact.

“They told me that they took me off because they had to invalidate all of my votes because I’m enrolled at Mona Shores as a female,” Oakleigh told Wood TV.

…

Assistant Superintendent Todd Geerlings told Wood TV, “The ballots gave two choices — vote for a boy for king and a girl for queen.”

This is rule internalization at its worst. So the hell what if the ballot is black and white? There is no rational justification in what Geerlings is doing. (But is that much of a surprise coming from someone who has chosen to spend his life in high school?) The reason the ballot only gives two choices is because it would be unwieldy and silly to have it say “Vote for a boy for king and a girl for queen. And, oh, vote for transgendered students based upon official school records.”

This is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario. If Oak wants any shot at being voted homecoming royalty, he must run as a girl and be crowned a queen – something which would make him a liar to himself and his identity. It’s ridiculous that Geerlings desires that such a thing happen. But giving it an honest shot means Oak can’t be crowned – even though he actually is the 2010 Mona Shores High School homecoming king.

Congratulations to Oak for winning. Shame on Geerlings and co. for acting shamefully and internalizing rules.

But I’m not directly addressing what matters; maybe I could just sum up this entire post in one line: Don’t treat people like shit.

Filed under: News, Rights | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 27 Comments »

Atheists score higher than religious on religious survey

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Michael

Pew has a new and unsurprising poll about what Americans know about religion.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

One head of an atheist organization has an idea why we’re seeing these results.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

And for some, I suspect, the deep conflict between science and religion helps to inform people about the religions of the world. People see the truth of what science has to tell us, then they hear the lies of religion (miracles, for example), and they look into both more deeply. I lend much more weight to Silverman’s more straight-forward explanation, but I think there’s something to be said of my suggestion; people want to know what’s true and religion hasn’t a single answer.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, News | Tagged: , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

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