In response to an astute observation by Fred Clark, I’ve created a new bumper sticker on CafeShops/CafePress:

It’s for sale to the public (at no markup).

I heard on the local news this morning that Texas is running a pilot program to identify sex offenders with the “highest level of deviant arousal.” The offender is connected to a bunch of physiological monitors, including one on the shaft of the penis, and his arousal level is measured as he is shown different types of images that might be sexually arousing.
The purpose:

The state says these new tests will help them weed out the low-risk sex offenders, like the 19-year-old who has sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend, from the pedophile who seeks sexual pleasure from children on the playground.
“The folks that show the highest level of deviant arousal are the ones we need to pay the most attention to and contribute the most resources to,” said Siegel.

I’m already uncomfortable with the whole idea that sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated or that they cannot control their actions.
This test, should it be adopted, raises further questions. What about ‘false positives’: men who are incorrectly identified as being aroused by ‘deviant’ images? And to me, it seems there’s a big difference between arousal and acting on that arousal.
We’re letting these people back into society but we’re trying to tell the public that they’re likely to continue their violent behavior. I’m certainly not a fan of locking someone up and throwing away the key, but isn’t one reason for incarceration to remove dangerous people from the general population? If we are so sure they’re so dangerous, why are we letting them out of prison in the first place?

Gelf Magazine has a regular feature where they pair up reviewers’ quotes used in media advertising with the full reviews from which they were taken. Not surprisingly, the entire review is often not as flattering as the short quote used.
For instance, advertising for the HBO movie The Girl in the Cafe uses this quote from The Oregonian:

An endearing romantic comedy!

But here’s the paragraph from which that quote was pulled:

This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.

This is awesome!

I ran across this quote by St. Augustine this morning:

Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.

Katie and I have recently been given the challenge of puting St. Augustine’s advice into practice. You see, a friend of ours is now serving the first of a seven-year sentence in federal prison. He is not a close friend: I would characterize him as having a close connection to us through an accident of time, place and circumstance.

Despite my disappointment with the first installment of Guns, Germs and Steel, I went ahead and watched the second installment this week. Same impression.
I’ve concluded that I’m just not anywhere near the target audience for this show. The target audience must be people who’ve never really been introduced to the idea of history as interpretation and who, therefore, have never really questioned the more conventional presentations of history.
At the conclusion of the second installment, Professor Diamond states:

I came to Spain to answer a question – why did Pizarro and his men conquer the Incas instead of the other way around? There’s a whole mythology that that conquest and the European expansion in general resulted from Europeans themselves being especially brave or bold or inventive or smart, but the answers turn out to have nothing to do with any personal qualities of Europeans. Yeah, Pizarro and his men were brave, but there were plenty of brave Incas. Instead, Europeans were accidental conquerors. By virtue of their geographic location and history, they were the first people to acquire guns, germs and steel.

My response to that statement is ‘No duh!’ but the producers of this show must believe that this is a revelation to their target audience. I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on the show and understand that it was just not made for me.

I just ran across this great quote by Eleanor Roosevelt:

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

I just finished the unabridged audio edition of Skinwalkers by Tony Hillerman. It was a good mystery, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Dark Wind.

I’ve come across the name Jared Diamond a few times in the last year or two, and he sounds intriguing, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading any of his books. So, I was excited to hear that a three-part PBS documentary based on his book Guns, Germs and Steel would be broadcast starting this week.
So, I watched (most of) the first part this week, and the show disappointed me in several ways. First off, as noted elsewhere, it was slow (which is the primary reason I didn’t quite make it through the entire broadcast). But mostly, I found the presentation of the ideas insulting. The first episode explains how the availability of different resources (plants and animals to domesticate) led to different levels of cultural change in different parts of the planet in early human history. Good thesis, but it’s presented in two insulting ways: 1.) as if it is some revolutionary theory, and more importantly, 2.) as if Jared Diamond devised this theory all on his own. In fact, this is a long-established, uncontroversial academic theory, and Jared did not discover it; he is merely the popularizer.

If you like to shop at warehouse ‘club’ stores, and have a CostCo in your area, I urge you to support them over Sam’s Club because CostCo is a forward-looking corporation that views better pay for its employees as an important part of its corporate strategy.

Fred Clark, self-avowed liberal evangelical Christian and one of my all-around favorite bloggers, has posted about a series of ‘snapshots’ of experiences with creationists that he has had over the years (read posts one, two and three). In the latest one, he shares a good insight into the mind of Biblical literalists:

The most dangerous thing about fundamentalism is not that it sometimes teaches wacky ideas, like that the world is barely 6,000 years old or that dancing is sinful. The most dangerous thing is that it insists that such ideas are all inviolably necessary components of the faith. Each such idea, every aspect of their faith, is regarded as a keystone without which everything else they believe — the existence of a loving God, the assurance of pardon, the possibility of a moral or meaningful life — crumbles into meaninglessness.
My classmate’s church taught him that their supposedly “literal” reading of Genesis 1 was the necessary complement to their “literal” reading of the rest of the Bible, which they regarded as the entire and only basis for their faith. His belief in 6-day, young-earth creationism was not merely some disputable piece of adiaphora, such as …
Well, for such fundamentalists there is no “such as.” This is why they cling to every aspect of their belief system with such desperate ferocity. Should even the smallest piece be cast into doubt, they believe, the entire structure would crumble like the walls of Jericho. If dancing is not a sin, or if the authorship of Isaiah turns out to involve more than a single person at one time, or if the moons of Jupiter present a microcosm that suggests a heliocentric solar system, then suddenly nothing is true, their “whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.”

I’ll try to keep this in mind next time I’m inclined to try to persuade a literalist of the fallacy of his views on a particular topic.