I've made a little photo essay about the anti-war march that Erin and I went to today. There were too many pictures to post here, so I put them on a separate page, which you can view here: Edmonton Protest, March 22, 2003 Here's some teaser photos:

Obviously adrift in a sea of confusing politics, Canadian hockey fans in Montreal cheered during the US national anthem before a game against the Carolina Hurricanes tonight. Two days ago the same fans were booing the US national anthem before the game. This time they were chastised by a local hockey hero, and so promptly turned their boos into hurrays. [link]

I saw on CNN yesterday a brief mention of protests in downtown Salt Lake City, but I can't seem to find any mention of them in the Utah press. In fact, I've noticed that almost all the opinions quoted in the Utah press are pro-war, or sort of weakly nervous about the war. Is Utah even acknowledging the existence of protesters? The headlines all read things like "Utah delegation back Bush," and so on. The guy-on-the-street interviews sound like they could have been conducted in a Mormon church parking lot. Even the non-editorial (i.e. "factual") articles have language like "Though their views on the war differ, Utahns are united through their prayers. All are praying for a speedy end..." (that was a paraphrase of something from KSL). No, all Utahns are not "united by their prayers." I'm sick of reading shit (though some of it is well-intentioned shit) about how Republicans and Democrats go to the same churches and blah blah blah. The whole point in Utah is that partisan lines are virtually equivalent to religious lines. Fuckers.

My brain is not sure how to proceed with this one: "One protester in a rope and harness committed suicide by letting himself fall from Golden Gate Bridge as police tried to coax him to safety."

Hockey fans in Montreal today booed the US national anthem before a game between the Montreal Canadiens and the New York Islanders. Having duly noted their moral superiority, the Canadian team went on to loose the hockey game 6-3. [link]

In references to James' post on the monkey song: Falwell refers to the "miracle of recording" as being responsible for bringing us the song. I guess, in my rabid Satanism, I've somehow overlooked the contributions of Jesus to technology and every day life. What if Jesus hadn't invented the grammophone? Where would we be? All those Satan-woshipping rockers and Sodomite rappers should really think about that the next time they get ready to abuse God's invention with their filthy tongues. Jesus has given us so many miracles over the years: the miracle of direct-current electricity, the miracle of electric motors, the miracle of electric lights, the miracle of moving pictures, and .... oh, wait! That was all Thomas Edison! It's so easy to get human science and ingenuity confused with divine miracles when your whole life revolves around church.

Fuck the war; let's talk about creationism some more: Remember the 365 Days Project? Every Sunday they post Jesus-y stuff. Last Sunday was Robin and Crystal Bernard -- The Monkey Song and The Ecumenical Movement. It says it's from a 1972 LP called "Dr. Jerry Falwell: Feudin' Fussin' and Frettin' (Fret Not)". As far as I can tell, that's Falwell introducing the Bernard sisters, and marveling over the new-fangled voice-recordin' machine. "The Monkey Song" is a great example of creationist argumentation.

I'm no kin to the monkey no, no, no The monkey's no kin to me yeah, yeah, yeah I don't know much about his ancestors But mine didn't swing from a tree

Here we have the popular Proof by Blatant Assertion and the perennial Argument from Rhyming. Both extremely effective. And they admit that they "don't know much about his ancestors". Uh-huh. And "The Ecumenical Movement" is also great, though not about creationism. See, Falwell is such a dedicated bigot that he's anti-anything-that-he-doesn't-happen-to-be-at-the-time, like ecumenism. Also, re: Chris's last creationism-related post: When did NASA start employing "evolutionists"? How long have they been the first and only source to whom to turn for the latest in evolutionary biology? Why does it matter if Jastrow is from NASA or is "famed"?

American troops moving into Iraq are being told not to display US flags. [link] The rationale: too many flags might make us look like conquerors, not liberators. The article also has an interesting debate between some soldiers in the invasion force. One thinks the war is being fought over weapons of mass destruction. Another thinks its for oil. A third soldier thinks Bush called for war as an act of "revenge for his father."

Forgive me, but I need to dwell on creationism for another minute. Still reading the same creationist banner ad from Corpse Divine today [link], I would like to make some stylistic observations. These are argumentative flaws that consistently appear in creationist writings. First, honest statements by scientists about the limitations of their current knowledge are highlighted. As in this quote from "NASA's famed evolutionist, Robert Jastrow":

At present, science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on the earth. Perhaps the appearance of life on the earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited; either life was created on the earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the planet.

Two things have been accomplished: 1) a "famed" scientist has been invoked, and 2) a tidy binary distinction has been established. They find as many instances as possible of scientists saying "I don't know" about something: "...it has left paleontologists grasping for an explanation..." "...there is no way of answering the question..." Surely, if scientists don't have complete answers for everything, then they must not know that creationism isn't right. Paraphrase: "You don't know for 100% certainty that I'm not right, so I must be." Second, they reduce the opposition (most of modern ecology, geology, paleontology, and cosmology) to one or two key arguments. They present evolution as though it is 100% dependent on the "primordial soup" concept. They do this to establish and amplify a false dichotomy. Prior to invoking the famed scientist, they identify "abiogenesis" as an "unproved assumption." This is a false classification. The claim that life originated through non-living chemical processes is a theory, not the key assumption on which evolution is based. Early life could come from some mystical beyond, or from outer space, or (my preferred theory) from the future, without changing much of evolutionary theory. Third, why are they so snide? Example: "DINOSAURS-TO-BIRDS THEORY— A THEORY FOR THE BIRDS, NOT ABOUT THEM." Is that science? Snickering at conflicting theories? Maybe it's a psychological ploy: "scientists may snkicker at us, but we can snicker back, ha ha!" Exclamation points also help a lot:

evolutionists now are faced with the possibility that birds may have evolved from moles instead of reptiles! Consequently, many scientists are trying to discern how it is that animals that normally burrow in the ground suddenly decided to abandon their usual environment and “just fly away.” [We imagine that a goodly number of farmers would be interested in learning how to get these pesky creatures to abandon their fields and “just fly away”!]

Fourth, any argument can benefit greatly from reducing the oppisition to a logical contradiction. Example: cite the "law of biogenesis, that life comes only from life of its kind, and that this law is the cornerstone of all biology." Offer no particular reason for this assertion, but note that if this law is violated, it is violated. Then claim that as evidence for creationism. Baffle your readers by tossing in some Platonic-sounding gibberish right at the end: "the Universe is contingent, and that contingent entities ultimately are dependent upon a non-contingent entity." Having studied some epistemology and some metaphysics, I can honestly say in response to this: "Wha?" Follow that up with the complaint that "that is something the evolution model cannot begin to explain." No shit. Last, toss out that tried and true "evidence" from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is the closest thing to positive argument for creationism. Unfortunately it is completely bogus, and relies on horrible equivocation between different concepts of "entropy," a side-stepping of formal definitions in favor of analogical reasoning. When I was in high school I thought long and hard about entropy, because I realized it was the best argument creationism had. I ultimately thought too hard about it, and decided to stop being a creationist because their use of entropy was incorrect, and they had no other serious leg to stand on.

Ads for Jesus: this ad, titled Creationists Fight Back! was on the Corpse Divine banner today. It is a very typical creationist publication: two guys with PhD's (Brad and Burt) put together a retort (in mostly laymans' terms of course) to an article in US News and World Report. Observations:

• Creationist authors always seem to circulate in popular literature rather than peer-reviewed scientific journals. That must be because they are ostracized from science, due to the influence of Satan.
• They restate ad-nauseum the simplistic bullet-point version of creationism, in response to a simplistic bullet-point version of evolutionism.

In this one they say, "Darwin’s theory begins by postulating that life arose from nonliving matter as a result of some purely naturalistic, completely mechanistic, and equally mysterious process on a prebiotic Earth. Abiogenesis, or as it is known more commonly, spontaneous generation, is one of the foundational concepts of evolution." Actually Darwin's theory is natural selection, not abiogenesis... "Abiogenesis" follows from a conveniently binary classification scheme favored by creationists. The world, according to them, has living things and not-living things. There are single-celled organisms and not-single-celled organisms. Simple classifications yield simple arguments. They just happen to be wrong. Twentieth century biology was practically an exercise in discovering gray areas between life and non-life. What is a virus, for example? Living or non-living thing? Can it "pop into existence" spontaneously? Now that we can feasibly whip up some Polio in the kitchen, it doesn't seem so far fetched to me that nature could just whip up a virus. Creationists spend so much time producing skeptical-sounding quotations from reputable scientists, and making sarcastic remarks about the validity of evolutionary models. What they never ever do is make a decent positive argument for their own system. For them it is as simple as "Well, it didn't come out of nowhere, so we are left with an omnipotent intelligent designer who sets the world in motion from beyond." Why the hell shouldn't we be left with "All life originated in the future. At the end of time there is a time-funnel that sucks organisms back around to the beginning, and they become the ancestors of themselves in a glorious feedback loop." My future-origin theory has just as much evidence as the divine-creation theory: none in particular. I don't know why I'm wasting so much time on creationism. Isn't there supposed to be a war starting?

Judaism in the news: By now, you've probably already read about Rep. James P. Moran, Democrat from Virginia, who stepped down from a party leadership post because of comments he made about Jews being responsible for the buildup toward war with Iraq. The version of the article above is from the New York Times. It doesn't actually quote any of the statements in question. It doesn't mention if anyone actually analyzed or even thought critically about the things Moran said, to see if they were, in fact, bigoted remarks, or if he was expressing a rational and sound, albeit politically incorrect and unpopular, sentiment. It simply describes the auto-on function of the Outrage Machine kicking in, whenever anything even remotely critical is said about a people-group that is extremely sensitive about its feelings being hurt. From this article alone, one is only left to guess at what was said. He very well may have said, "Those fucking yids and their interest rates are directly and solely responsible for the impending war in Iraq." Which is a ridiculous statement, worthy of condemnation. But what if he actually said something like, "Well, I don't know, I think Saddam Hussein, and the ousted Taliban, and Al Qaeda operatives, and Palestinian terrorists, and several intractable, irrational Muslim extremists are of course somewhat responsible for the tense and difficult situation in the middle east, which now seems to be headed toward an actual, physical war, in which the United States will play a huge part, but I have to say, I think several intractable, irrational Israeli fundamentalists, in both Israeli terrorist organizations and the Israeli government, and both in the middle east and here in the States, are a little responsible too, if not just as responsible." Is that anti-Semitic? Is it worthy of condemnation? Is it bigoted? The other Jewish thing in the news: The talking carp. "Some people say the story is as credible as the Bible's account of the burning bush." Exactly.

From the BBC: This thing, by Justin Webb, is kind of interesting. It's a BBC Washington correspondent's thoughts on the hyper-religiosity of Americans, especially when compared to the British and other Europeans. I love this part, concerning the American media coverage of the Elizabeth Smart thing:

During the last week a child who'd been missing for nine months has been found safe and well - the event was described routinely on the news media as a miracle. One broadcast had a caption reading "the power of prayer". In fact the child had been abducted and her abductor was recognised and captured. In rational old Britain the media circus following the finding of the child would have been focused on ways of preventing this happening again - on police errors in the investigation. Here, metaphorically, sometimes literally, they just sink to their knees.

He also mentions that "...86% of Americans, we are told by the pollsters, believe in heaven." This makes me a little happy. No, not the statistic, which, I'm afraid, is totally accurate. It's gladdening because it correlates well with the City University of New York American Religious Identification Survey findings, in which more than 14 percent of respondents answered "No Religion" to the question "What is your religion, if any?" It's a pretty comprehensive study, and seems much more accurate and trustworthy than any of the random, non-named studies cited by idiots who claim, variously, that 92 or 95 or 98 percent of Americans believe in a god. I've never been shown a well-done study that finds these figures. It is true that religious identification and belief in a god are two different things, but god-belief seems too intangible a quality to ever measure with any accuracy. Like presidential approval, I'd venture that it would fluctuate wildly from day to day and hour to hour. Religious identification, on the other hand, is much more reliably defined and quantified. And it's a much more specific and easily understood figure that can more readily be cited to politicians and policy makers. The CUNY study also reveals an interesting tidbit about Utah: only 57 percent of respondents in Utah identified themselves as Mormon/LDS. This differs wildly from the 70 percent that we've always been told. And it rather nicely reveals the major discrepancies between the LDS church's bookkeeping methods and the reality of the individual citizens of Utah. It also raises an interesting question: what if we did a worldwide survey of the people the LDS church considers to be members? If 19 percent of administratively-listed Mormons in Utah either don't consider themselves LDS or forgot that they were baptized into the religion, what would the percentage be in other countries? Considering that the LDS church will still list a person as a member, even when he or she has taken great pains to have his or her name removed from church records, I would guess it'd be pretty high.

The problem with protests, rallies, and demonstrations: I walked past a small group of protesters just off the University of Alberta campus today. They had signs that read various things, including "Innocent People Will Die!" "This war brought to you courtesy of Corporate America!" and most importantly "Honk for Peace!" The second one confused me. I think I know what it was getting at: oil contracts, Halleburton (spelling?), Cheney, etc. Protesters have been really haphazard about the sort of accusations they throw out. I don't really think that corporations can "buy" a war, no matter how much they might stand to profit. I also don't think Cheney is much in the inner circle of war planning (the VP usually isn't). I think Bush and Co. probably have what they think are valid reasons, both public and secret, for wanting to remove Saddam Hussein. I also think that Bush's absurd overconfidence in this risky venture might stem in part from his born-again conviction that God is on his side, and God will make everything work out in the end. I think Bush must be embiggened and emboldened by his hefty hard-on for Jesus. But the protest sign, "...courtesy of Corporate America," led me to wonder if you could just stick any old thing on the sign, as long as it is anti-war. If it said "Bush steals Iraqi babies and serves them at expensive Satanic ritual buffet dinner fund raisers for Nazis. Honk for Peace!" and people would honk and cheer just the same. Protesters are seldom called on to clearly explain their statements, and they don't really explain them when they're asked.

An angle I hadn't considered: The impending skirmish in Iraq is really to keep the dollar the international standard in oil transactions. This article, an editorial in the UCSD Guardian, of all places, sums it up nicely. The takeover of Iraq would not just allow the U.S. to control Iraq's oil resources, but to keep the U.S. economy from collapsing, as the popularity of rival currencies, like the Euro, is growing among OPEC nations. From the article:

A dollar is worth a dollar largely because it is the international standard in oil transactions. If OPEC nations were to suddenly switch to the euro and divest themselves of U.S. dollars, the sudden glut of dollars on the world market would force the dollar to drop even further and quicker than it already has. The quick inflation of the dollar would cause even more foreign investors to abandon the U.S. stock markets and dollar-denominated assets, simply to retain what value remains. At home, a run on the banks could follow. Eventually, current U.S. deficits would be unserviceable in devalued dollars and the nation would go into default. The nationwide social upheaval resulting from a currency collapse would pose a far greater problem for the government than trying to clean up a bombed U.S. city or military base. By conquering Iraq and installing a friendly regime, the United States will be able to guarantee that Iraqi oil exports are again dollar-denominated. A military victory would also communicate to OPEC the possible consequences of a switch to the euro. Any switch would be made at the other nation's peril.

So far, this explanation and the one involving a direct effort to bring about Armageddon are the two most plausible reasons Bush and Co are going to war. They're BOTH fantastic reasons, so what are we waiting for?!?