What if scientists had the ability to take an ape embryo and flip all the genetic markers necessary to make it human? Insert a little DNA here, snip a little out over there. It would open up any number of moral, ethical, legal, and religious questions.

• Is it human?
• Does it have a soul?
• Does it have the same rights as (other) humans?
• Is it an ‘it’ or a ‘he or she’?
• If creating life is precious and good, would religious people have to acknowledge that scientists had done a good thing?

Religion has always been at war with science because science has always had the power to damage religion. Scientists continue to say that science and religion can co-exist and, up until now, I agreed. I’m not so sure anymore. Science is fast reaching a point where it will be asking questions that I don’t think religion is prepared to answer.

I do know this: science has never had a greater ability to threaten religion than it does now.

And the sudden sense of urgency in the religious attacks on science begins to make sense. How loud would you shout if you heard the death knell of your worldview?

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This weekend it became obvious to me that I’ve spent entirely too much time reading and writing politics when I, with considerable beer and wine in me, devolved into a shouting monkey and turned a fairly civil political discussion with my friends into something less than civil. I actually shouted down the man who was Best Man at my wedding when he cut me off from finishing a point.

I think I’m going to spend a little less time worrying about which of my civil liberties Bush is going to attack today. I’m also going to try to spend less time worrying about what havok he’ll wreak on the environment, our economy, and Iraq. Not because I don’t care about those things, but for my sanity.

This might even give me an opportunity to get some work done. I mean, anything can happen, right?

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See also, the site of a true believer: Al Dente.

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In keeping with the theory that the Theory of Evolution is just a theory, I present to you the following site:

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

And since no theory should be held as scientific fact, I further present you with:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory

I was pointed to these links via Scott Rosenberg’s Blog. Enjoy.

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This is the first in what will become a series of posts on framing debates, which is a necessary part of winning debates.

In this particular case, the subject is cloning stem cells, often called therapeutic cloning. Paul Berg, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, recently made the statement “We are not cloning people, we are cloning stem cells to treat patients.”

That sounds good and people on both the left and right support stem cell research, which supporters hope will lead to therapeutic cloning, but people on the far right like to use words like “murder” when referring to stem cell research. I continue to advocate not sinking to their level, however, I do think the cause of therapeutic cloning could benefit from not using the word cloning. Instead, I propose that people refer to it as “copying cells” or “duplicating cells” which are both just as accurate but without the baggage that the word cloning carries with it.

BTW, the cells in your body replicate (duplicate themselves) all the time. But when scientists do the same thing with stem cells it has the chance to save millions of lives and make better millions more.

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I just found out that Salon gives free premium memberships for their website to anybody with a .mil email address. They want to support the troops by providing their service to them for free. That’s cool. If you are in the military or you know somebody who is in the military, the sign-up page is here.

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Are you anti-war? If so, what should you do? There seems to be a lot of questioning as to the point of the “anti-war movement.” Personally, I’m not anti-war, I’m anti-Republican leadership. Not to be cliche but this was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should have stayed in Afghanistan with more troops and with the broad international support that we had after 9/11.

Once that country was stabilized, which would (and will) take years to do, we might have been able to mobilize the U.N. with nothing more than the truth to go after the worst human rights offenders. There are countries under far worse rule that Iraq was suffering under that nobody talks about. That’s not to take away from the bad things going on in Iraq, but if it’s a humanitarian nation-building effort we were after, Iraq definitely would not have topped the list.

That’s probably why nobody pretended that human rights had anything to do with the invasion at the time it occured and why we built up a case for war under false and misleading pretenses. The false pretenses were also the most likely reason why the international community at large refused to help us.

Of course, now that we’re there we have to stay there and get the job done. I’m in the group that believes we need to significantly increase the number of troops we have over there in order to stabilize the country. I’m also in the group that wants to protest this war as vocally as possible. Whether you want to believe it or not, those two viewpoints go hand-in-hand.

The reason why is that this administration has refused all accountability for it’s actions. It refuses to setup even the most basic metrics by which to measure success. It refuses to present any sort of breakdown for budget requests for the Iraq war. It privatizes the war. It doesn’t seek competitive bids for the privatization. It won’t investigate the billions that have gone missing. It makes mistakes at every turn. It refuses to acknowledge that it has ever made a single mistake.

The point of protesting is to get the Republication party out of control of the White House and Congress so that we can get new leadership in to try and fix the problems. New leadership can acknowledge that mistakes were made and move to correct them. New leadership can put more troops on the ground to better stabilize the country. New leadership could approach the world community with at least the possibility of getting help.

These guys screwed up. Support Iraq, democracy, accountability, and our troops by voting them out of office the next chance you get. Oh, annd light a candle at the next vigil.

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There’s an AP article out today in which rapper Kanye West talks about using the word “gay” as an antonym to hip-hop (or presumably to “cool” or whatever you might use as a positive affirmation when you’re with your friends). The article can be found here:

Kanye West Calls for End to Gay Bashing

It just happens that I’ve recently considered my own use of the word gay as a negative affirmation. Now, I believe that gay people should be treated equally, not just under the law but by society too, and I know that the usage I’m describing of the word gay derived out of a negative connotation towards homosexuality. I just don’t care about the origin of this or any other word.

The reason I don’t care is that words can and do have multiple meanings and their origin is often irrelevant. The nature of language is that it evolves. A word can start out meaning one thing, be used to mean something else, and end up taking on an entirely new meaning (or meanings).

Think about it for a minute. Do you go around speaking ancient Greek or Latin? No. Language has evolved so far away from those languages that we can no longer recognize even a tiny fraction of them. Granted, these changes happen slowly, one word at a time. Sometimes the meaning changes, sometimes the pronunciation, and sometimes the spelling. The point is that they do happen.

Anytime you get into an argument over semantics you’ve moved away from discussing the actual issue. People need to be a little less sensitive and a little more focused. In this instance they should be more focused on equality.

Let me jump back to the evolution of language real quick. I have another beef to bring up. I’m from Texas and I’m sick and tired of people who say “ain’t isn’t a word” or “y’all isn’t a word” or “<insert southern word, expression, or contraction here> isn’t a word.” They are all words. If I can use it in a sentence and you can understand it, it’s a word. Again, the nature of language is that it is constantly evolving, whether you want it to or not. And anybody who says otherwise is soooo gay.

Update: I just realized that my calling things gay almost certainly arose from watching too much South Park. The creators of which are almost certainly gay. Those kids call everything gay. I want to be just like Matt Stone and/or Trey Parker when I grow up (except for the part about being gay).

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OK, posting has tapered off recently, but that’s because I’m working to get the site launched. The fact of the matter is, all of this content is going to be historical anyway. Nobody can read this yet (as of this writing). I’m just trying to fill in some content so there will be something there when the site launches.

So far it’s been mostly political, but I want to balance that with web design and development items as well as posts on a broader range of other topics.

Ok, going back to work now. Hopefully I’ll get this sucker launched soon.

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Man, that will just floor the religious right won’t it? Can you imagine the next President saying something stupid like that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution? Here’s the catch: the Pope made these statements back in 1996.

Here’s a good take on the battle being fought.

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