Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?

There are two internet arguments going on right now that really highlight the problem with the whole anonymous-intertube-speak-my-mind thing that we got going these days: not enough brakes on being inconsiderate and not enough thick skins. Consequently, we get a little good ol'fashion radicalism. WOOT!

First, the trivial. Murky Coffee, a nice place where I study with good hot chocolate, apparently has a policy that prohibits them from pouring espresso over ice for integrity of the beverage reasons. (Don't ask me, I don't know anything about coffee.)

A patron ordered one and got offended that Murky was reluctant to let him have it. He wrote a blog post about it (here) jokingly threatening arson. Unfortunately, while at Murky, he didn't notice that the place is a damned fire-trap where arson is no joke, so the owner got all upset and threatened to punch him in the dick. Thus, we have tempers flaring over coffee and how it is to be served.

This puts things into perspective, I think, as we move onto discussions of the divine. It turns out that last week at some point, some dude goes into a Catholic church, accepts the Holy Eucharist and bolts without eating it. To Catholics who believe that through transubstantiation the little bread wafer actually becomes the body of Christ, absconding with the redeemer of our sins is obviously a big deal. On the other hand, to other folks like PZ Meyers (who I must add, I totally respect and proudly link to in this general direction ===>), the practice of worrying about the well-being of a cracker is just about as silly as refusing to serve espresso on ice.

Anyway, long story short, PZ rightly mocks Bill Donohue, head of the "Catholic League" (who as far as I can tell, doesn't actually speak for any actual Catholics), but then PZ takes it a step too far and says that if someone were to get him a piece of the Eucharist he would defile it (with photos) right there on his website. This make Donohue call out PZ as a Catholic hater and push for his university to fire him. This also results in a lot of hate mail and death threats by good Christian folk, apparently. PZ posts the death threats on his website. Then PZ's people start writing hate mail in the other direction.

So where did we go wrong? Well, for starters, we got into the habit of worrying too much about what people we don't know do with their own time. We get so worried about it, that we get offended. Frankly, its ok for PZ to think it is foolish to see the son of God in a "cracker," but it is entirely another thing to encourage people to fuck with the people who do and to be insensitive to how it would make people react. For starters, it just doesn't help his cause. Donohue is a fringe blowhard, but all of a sudden he can point to someone who is willing to desecrate a cracker just to piss off total strangers. All of a sudden, Donohue, a shallow hate-monger, looks reasonable in comparison.

Anyway, PZ: back off. Catholics: what can you do for the Son of God that he can't do for himself? We should all just go out and get an iced espresso and hug it out, but apparently not at Murky.

Well, at least Louis C.K. is more bitter about coffee shops than most of us could be about anything. Somebody's gotta take it easy for all of us sinners. Am I wrong, dude?

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

(Language NSFW.)

TED: Know Thy Enemy

If you do a Google(r) brand intertube search for "why they hate us," you'll get about 107,000 hits. 9/11 sparked two great arguments around this phrase. The first is an argument about the correct answer to the question, if there is one. The second argument is between those who think it is a topic worth studying and those who think asking is wrong because it somehow acknowledges some amount of our own culpability for the actions of terrorists.

Here are two very unrelated TED talks that illustrate beautifully why the folks who think we shouldn't ask "why they hate us" are so wrong. The first talk offers a new approach for our ongoing struggles against perhaps the most persistent and adaptable enemy our civilization has ever faced: germs. The second demonstrates a practical example of how to benefit from an intimate understanding of a pest (crows).

Paul Ewald: Can We Domesticate Germs?


Consider our approaches for battling infectious diseases in light of evolutionary principles. A lot of what we do pushes the evolution of infectious organisms in ways that ultimately make them more lethal. For example, our heavy reliance upon antibiotics naturally selects for drug resistant bacteria. Paul Ewald asks whether there are things we could do to make these diseases evolve in a way that selects for strains that are progressively less lethal?

He cites two examples:
1. Cholera: Diseases that spread person-to-person have an evolutionary brake on virility because strains that make people so sick they can't leave their homes can't spread to other hosts. However, water-borne illnesses are trickier to contain because even when a person with Cholera becomes bed-ridden and immobile, their waste products usually make their way back to the water supply for transmission to others. Consequently, improved drinking-water treatment systems have two affects on water-borne illnesses. First, they greatly reduce the spread of Cholera in general. Second, they completely eliminate the primary means of transmission for the most deadly strains. Consequently, even if you don't eliminate cholera, you make it manageable. To back this up, he cites a cholera outbreak in South America in the 90's and compared the severity of strains over time in two countries with strikingly different water treatment systems (Ecuador and Chile). In only five years, the severe strains disappeared in Chile but remained in Ecuador.

2. Malaria: Unlike cholera, malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes (or skeeters). Ewald points out that improvements that make housing more mosquito proof have tremendous effects in countering malaria fatalities, but not in the way you might think. Mosquito-proofing ensures that severely sick people can't spread the disease through mosquitoes while they are too weak to leave their beds. You're still just as likely to get malaria when you venture outside, but as time passes you become much less likely of catching a variety of malaria that will put you out of commission because the serious strains have failed to find new hosts. This becomes particularly valuable in places in Africa where no amount of conventional efforts can control the prevalence of mosquitoes and malaria.

Joshua Klein: The Amazing Intelligence of Crows



Crows are smart-damned-birds, and this video is worth watching simply for the examples of how well they are able to use their big bird brains to survive and prosper among humans. Despite their um... charm, lots of folks consider them pests. However, Joshua Klein accepts the challenge of harnessing their intellect toward constructive ends. His solution: crow vending machines.

Klein walks you through his process for training crows to deposit coins into a specially made machine in exchange for peanuts. The crows in his neighborhood now sweep the city for discarded change and return it to his back yard. Unfortunately, he doesn't report a return on investment.

Lesson:
By examining what makes bacteria and crows tick, have we somehow ceded the moral high ground? Of course not - the question is amoral. We're looking into the dynamics of a system to find efficient means to exploit it. (In the case of the crows, the exploit just happens to be a mutually beneficial exchange.) Terror networks are organisms. They have their own dynamics, and they evolve. It is madness to fight them without understanding them. Consequently, societies that tolerate this sort of willful blindness toward the motives of their enemies are ensuring their own demise.

TED: Thomas Barnett - The Pentagon's New Map for War and Peace

Lately I've been watching a lot of the talks given at the TED conference. TED takes place each year in Monterrey, CA and shows off the ideas of some of the world's most inspired thinkers. Most of the talks and performances are now posted on YouTube, so it is a great way to spend the occasional 20 minutes or so of down time. They are all pretty thought provoking, and I'll probably be posting many of them here.

Here's one to get you started:

Thomas Barnett is a strategic planner who has been working for the Pentagon since the cold war ended. He gave an entertaining briefing at TED about how the Pentagon needs to adapt for post cold war conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, he outlines a procedure for processing politically bankrupt states and proposes a dedicated force of people to manage the peace before and after conflicts. He argues that we have a brilliant Secretary of War, but we also need a Secretary of Everything else.

Here's a few choice quotes. The link is embedded below.

We field a first half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. That’s the problem. We can run the score up against anybody and then get our asses kicked in the second half.
...
What are we missing? A functioning executive to translate will into action. Because we don’t have it every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this immanent threat thing. We haven’t faced an immanent threat since the Cuban missile crisis – 1962. But we use this language from a bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we’re a democracy and that’s what it takes. If that doesn’t work, we scream “He’s got a gun!” just as we rush in. Then we look over the body, and we find an old cigarette lighter and we say “Jesus it was dark.”
...
What we need downstream is a great power enabled Systems Administration force. We should have had 250,000 troops streaming into Iraq on the heels of that Leviathan force sweeping towards Baghdad. What you get then is no looting, no military disappearing, no ammo disappearing, no Muqtadah Al-Sadr. No insurgency. Talk to anybody who was over there in the first six months: We had six months to feel the love, get the job done, and we dicked around for six months. Then they turned on us.
...
The question is, how do we reconnect American national security with global security to make the world a lot more comfortable and to embed and contextualize our employment of force around the planet?... Let's have a Department of War and a Department of Something else. Some people say, "Hell, 9/11 did it for you. Now we got a home game: an away game." Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel-good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA: Thousands Standing Around. Just be grateful Robert Reed didn't shove that bomb up his ass.

Turn Off the Light and Get That Out of Your Mouth!

A post entitled Top Ten WTF? US Sex Laws was getting a lot of Diggs today - understandably, I suppose. Two of the mentioned laws caught my eye because they were... um... in local jurisdictions. They are:

"2. In Virginia it is illegal to have sex with the lights on."

-and-

"5. Engaging in any sexual position other than missionary is illegal in Washington, DC."

I know there are a lot of useless laws still on the books that legislatures haven't gotten around to repealing and haven't been challenged in the courts, but I also know better than to believe everything I read on the internet. So I decided I would look into these a bit.

The DC law is easy. There is no sign of it in the DC code, and at some point DC repealed the entire section on indecency where such a provision, if it ever existed, probably resided. So, feel free to mix it up in the District.

Virginia turned out to be a little more tricky. The Code of Virginia devotes Title 18.2 Chapter 8 to "Crimes Involving Morals and Decency." Among the long list of unsavory topics covered by the chapter (including gambling, prostitution, bestiality, obscene books, and bigamy) there were three statutes that, facially, make criminals out of a whole lot of well-meaning and otherwise law-abiding folks.

They are:

§ 18.2-344. Fornication: "Any person, not being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any other person, shall be guilty of fornication, punishable as a Class 4 misdemeanor."

§ 18.2-345. Lewd and lascivious cohabitation: "If any persons, not married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, or, whether married or not, be guilty of open and gross lewdness and lasciviousness, each of them shall be guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor; and upon a repetition of the offense, and conviction thereof, each of them shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor."

§ 18.2-361A. Crimes against nature; penalty: "If any person... carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony..."

Shocked? Imagine how uncomfortable the floor debate over these bills must have been way back in the early 19th century. (An old version of the last one used the classy term "buggery.")

Thankfully, the courts have granted us (some) relief from the prying whims of narrow-minded legislators.

Fornication:
This statute was indeed intended to punish all sex outside of marriage, but the last conviction occurred before the civil war. However it has been invoked to support public policy arguments against sex outside of marriage. But in 2005, the law was finally ruled unconstitutional when a man who was being sued by an ex-girlfriend for knowingly giving her herpes argued in his defense that he could not be liable for damages suffered by a willing co-venturer in an illegal sexual relationship. Martin v. Ziherl, 269 Va. 35 (2005). The Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the Va. statute citing the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas: "[T]he fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice." Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 577.

So why does the statute remain on the books? The decision only invalidated the statute "as applied." Because the court found that the statute could be applied to cases lacking consent, involving minors, or involving public acts, it wasn't entirely unconstitutional. However, there are lots of other laws on the books that cover these other situations. This law is clearly intended to target the activities of consenting adults anywhere. A plain reading of it is misleading and totally uninformative about where the line is between legal and illegal conduct. Consequently, this law needs to be repealed.

Lewd and Lascivious Cohabitation:
This statute has two distinct parts. The first applies only to unmarried people and proscribes living with or routinely shacking-up with someone with whom you have a sexual relationship. The second part applies to married and unmarried folks alike and proscribes public displays of affection that cross the line into "lewd and lascivious" conduct.

This statute gets a lot more use than the fornication statute, but most charges stem from public acts outlawed by the second part. The last recorded conviction for private, consensual cohabitation was recorded in 1883.

The second part of the statute could be source of the alleged Virginia prohibition on having sex with the lights on. In one case, the defendants were acquitted when police officers saw the offenders in their home as the wind blew the drawn curtains to the side. Perhaps another case stands for the proposition that if you have the curtains open and lights on so that you are in view of the public you violate the second part of the statute.

In any case, the first part of the statute has not been challenged since the Loving decision, and it probably would not hold up. Consequently, it should be appealed along with the fornication statute.

Crimes Against Nature
This one, a prohibition on oral and anal sex, is also unconstitutional in light of Loving. Prior to Loving, the constitutionality of this statute was upheld, but it is hard to see how it might be constitutional today when applied to the private acts of consenting adults. Though I have little doubt it will stay on the books, like the fornication statute, to be piled onto charges otherwise illegal activity. But if that is all it is good for, why not clear things up with an amendment?

I'm not a fan of these long-outdated laws. Aside from the fact that they provide opportunities for selective, discriminatory enforcement against unpopular groups, they also contribute to a general lack of respect for the law by making nearly everyone a criminal at one point or another. Anyone who has ever argued against amnesty for illegal immigrants had better agree with me on this one or advocate throwing the book at slightly kinky couples everywhere.