The Real Gibson Story

Mel Gibson was arrested this weekend for a DUI.

Now the news stations are all abuzz about the newest twist: Gibson's alleged racist remarks during his arrest. I've been watching CNN's Headline news for the last 15 minutes, and heard three stories about Gibson.

I can't believe no one cares about the real story here, though: Mel Gibson decided it was OK to get in his car and speed while he was drunk! Drunks kill thousands of innocent people every year -- and we're worried about what he may have said about Jews?

I think Adrianna Casta on Headline News summed it up: people are arrested in Hollywood for DUIs all the time. That's not a big deal.

I think Mel Gibson should go to jail - but I don't care what he said about Jews.

Professional Training

Recenty, in my Making Children Cry post, a reader of this blog (1 of 3!) challenged my credibility, and the legitimicy of this blog:

You are obviously not that intelligent, or trained in a profession that would qualify you to even make such a statement. Having a blog does not mean that your opinion is based on fact. Typing crap on a computer screen (especially worthless drivel like you have said about this matter) just proves that the world is full of people with worthless opinions who will spread them around like they really mean something. When in fact, they don‘t.
--Ralphyboy

I'm sorry he doesn't think I'm intelligent (I try very hard to be - so I'm kind of sad that I've failed at something very important to me), but in this post I'm mostly worried about the rest of what he wrote.

Does one have to be "trained in a profession" to comment on something in a blog? Chris Garret over at Perfomancing.com doesn't seem to think so in his recent post Expertise; Is it Necessary? (I would hope he knows what he's talking about - he's working for a site dedicated to promoting blogs!). Among the blogs he mentions where the author does not talk about his expertise, or where the author talks about something he is clearly not an expert in: The Dilbert blog, BoingBoing, and Digital Photography School blog.

This sort of makes me wonder - if I wasn't intelligent, but was trained in a profession related to my comment, would it make my comment valid?

I can think of several examples where people who are supposedly experts are dead wrong.

It is not the first time that [Senator Bill] Frist [MD] has created a stir in medical and political circles. In December, on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," he repeatedly declined to say whether he thought HIV-AIDS could be transmitted through tears or sweat. A much-disputed federal education program championed by some conservative groups had suggested that such transmissions occur.

After numerous challenges by Stephanopoulos, Frist said that "it would be very hard" for someone to contract AIDS via tears or sweat. The Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says: "Contact with saliva, tears, or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of HIV." (from The Washington Post)

Another, this time from published "non-fiction":

An international bestseller upon its release, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" spurred interest in a number of ideas related to its central thesis. Response from mainstream historians and academics, however, was nearly universally negative. Professional historians argued that the bulk of the claims, ancient mysteries and conspiracy theories presented as fact, are pseudohistorical. (from Wikipedia: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail)

So it seems clear to me that the old maxim "Don't believe everything you read" is true - I don't know why my critic didn't remember that and move on. Instead he confused fact with opinion, and apparently doesn't understand that a) only 5% of blogs reference actual facts (reference required) and b) blogs are, by definition, commentary. I'm not sure I've ever claimed anything on here was fact - but I am mostly concerned with finding fact (which is hard to do - because anyone can write anything and call it a "blog").

If you find a fact that disagrees with something I've written here - I'd love to see it. But I'll write what I want.

Global Warming, Pt III

My friend alerted me to some interesting links re: global warming.

• Canada's polar bears will be extinct within 25 years, scientist warns

• More species slide to extinction

The assertion that polar bears are near extinction doesn't seem to be free of controversy:
Polar Disasters: More Predictable Distortions of Science

• Here's another of the links, which, on the surface at least, seems more balanced:
  Heatwave in Europe, U.S. But Is It Climate Change?
  

Are the sea levels actually rising? I don't know.
Tuvalu won't disappear

• Another:
  Rising sea temperatures
  

But wait! This article claims the study mentioned above massaged the data to fit!
Man Blamed for Rising Sea Temperatures; Deforestation Blamed for Cooling; Arctic Sea Ice Thickness and Wind

I found several of the skeptical links on www.globalwarming.org. I don't find anything on SourceWatch that is too damning. It seems SourceWatch is grasping at straws, and playing at demonization, when it tries to draw connections to the tobacco industry. ExxonSecrets doesn't seem to have anything juicy about them either. I didn't explore the personel lists.

Sometimes I wish I was a scientist, so I could read this stuff all day, and, you know, be smart enough to sort out truth from BS.

Global Warming, Pt II

I've had some interesting conversations about Global Warming recently. I lamented in my last post on the topic (Global Cooling) that I hadn't seen any skeptical responses to the national report that recently came out.

Fortunately, I have friends that keep up with this stuff.

A Statistician Speaks

Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

The actual report:
AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Of course, it's tough to quote the report itself:

This committee does not believe
that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.

Global Conflicts

I had a discussion this weekend with a friend about the current era vs The Rennaissance. I think his point was that when you look back at our time, it will be recognized as a time of technological growth, but not of the growth of society or the improvement of mankind. Unfortunately, my memory is bad, so I can't get much further than that.

What I do remember is that a central part of his point of view was that global conflicts are increasing, and that the world is becoming more militarized. I wasn't sure that this was a logical progression, as I wasn't sure that global conflicts were actually increasing. I think it would be hard to deny that the nature of conflicts are becoming more global than they've been - beyond 400 years ago there simply wasn't much global contact between nations, so any conflicts must have been local. However, I don't think this means that the quantity or severity of conflicts is going up.

So I googled "number of world conflicts," and discovered the following helpful links:
World becomes slightly safer as number of violent conflicts falls
The number of armed conflicts has dropped 40% since 1992.
Issues: UN Funding and Peacekeeping

This one is actually derisive in it's denial that things are getting worse:
WW4? Don’t Flatter Them

This link, while slightly off topic, puts the number of American military deaths in perspective:
U.S. Abortion Deaths Compared to U.S. War Deaths

This link tries to document the number of war deaths for a couple of hundred years:
Military and Civilian War Related Deaths Through the Ages

I put together a little chart from what I could get from this site:


But when I was putting this together, things didn't seem to add up. I tried to reconstruct the chart with numbers from Wikipedia, but, well, it's hard.

Since I consider myself a realist, not someone who makes up facts or someone who ignores inconvenient truths, here's a site that claims that some international conflicts are not reported:
The Balkans War Reigns But World Conflicts Rage

So, he may be right that history will judge us as shallow and empty, but I think he's wrong in that we're becoming increasingly warlike.

The War on Terror and The Geneva Convention

Generally, I'm of the opinion that the United States, in dealing with people who are not citizens, should give them the same treatment as citizens with "God given rights." The right to a fair trial, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, etc.

Up until recently, I was bothered by our treatment of captured "insurgents" in Iraq - I mean, shouldn't we give them some status, give them the same rights as Americans under arrest? I was under the impression that, if we weren't bound to do that by our government, at least we're bound by the Geneva Conventions.

But wait a sec... The Geneva Conventions are for the "civilized" conduct of war. I'll go to war with you, and as long as we both play by the rules, I can be sure that even if I lose or you get a lot of my people as prisoners, at least we're all still human and there are certain activities (torture) that you won't make my people suffer through.

The Supreme Court recently decided that the President could not order military trials for Guantánamo detainees without the protections of the Geneva convention and American law. Part of their ruling depends on Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which spells out who retains rights in a war situation.

So we've decided to extend protections of civilized warfare to people who's very methods are designed to explicitly cause pain and suffering to everyday people. We've decided that even though there is a covert organization at war with us, who takes civilian hostages, beheads them, tortures and mutilates soldiers, bombs mosques, blows up civilian buildings, and encourages murder in the streets, we should give them the same rights we'd give prisoners of a war with, say, the U.K. Now the terrorists have another way to whittle away at our resources - though our own court system. Great - like we needed another front.

I'm no longer bothered by our treatment of captured terrorists. I am bothered by the opaque way our government has detained them - we don't know who they are, and don't have any way to verify that they are actually terrorists.

Making Children Cry

Thomas Hawk believes that Jill Greenberg is a child pornographer.

Jill Greenberg is a Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse

Although the children are not sexualized, I consider what she is doing child pornography of the worst kind.

What is he all worked up about? Jill Greenberg's exhibit, End Times, posted in the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, shows small children at the height of emotion - crying, sad, and angry. The pictures are emotionally wrenching, but that's the point.

Hawk believes Greenberg is doing "something horrible." So how is Greenberg getting these reactions from the children? According to Hawk, "[s]he is taking babies, toddlers under three years old, stripping them of their clothes and then provoking them to various states of emotional distress..."

Wait, is this woman beating the children, or telling them their parents are dead, or showing them movies of puppies being killed? Nope. She's giving them lollipops, and then taking them away. With the parents present in the room. These children, as children do, cry like little babies.

Thomas Hawk, you should be ashamed of yourself. To equate this kind of activity with pornography is morally bankrupt. Your arguments make no more sense than those of conservatives who equate gay marriage with legalizing pedophilia.

I see children cry every day, for less than no reason. I've made children cry by looking at them. Parents make children cry every day by denying them their sugar cereal at the grocery store, by making them turn off television, and by dropping them off at school. Maybe we should make all of these activities illegal as well. Well?

UPDATE: In response to the comment below by how can folks toop so low, I'd like to make a couple of points.
1. I don't think I said anything about this piece being art, nor do I deny that it can be gut wrenching (disgusting is too strong a word for me, as I'm pretty desensitized). I don't pretend to know the difference between good and bad art, but I'm pretty sure this falls in the "art" category (as opposed to, say, the "photo documentary" category). I'll leave it to future generations to define whether this constitutes good art.
2. You appear to be making a logical fallacy in equating the experience an adult would have with the experience a child would have in the same situation. While the treatment might be construed as torture if done to an adult (Abu Graib, anyone?), I hardly doubt the experience is as tramatic to a child. Children regularly stip themselves of all clothing, and the naked kids I saw on the beach seemed happy and oblivious. Remember also that kids have not developed the communication skills that adults have, and can often only express themselves with loud crying and angry screaming. These kids that are crying are expressing, in my opinion, the same thing you would by saying, "Hey, that's not nice. Give that back." It's hardly torture.