Christian leader David Barton: “Whatever the government’s got, we’ve got to have the same thing.”

December 23, 2012 • 5:37 am

DallasNews.com reports on a particularly embarrassing appearance by prominent Republican David Barton on Tuesday night’s Glenn Beck show. Who’s Barton?

Barton is a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and an influencial religious conservative who was active promoting conservative GOP candidates, including Rick Santorum and failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, whose “legitimate rape” comment was partly responsible for his defeat. Barton runs the Alido-based Wallbuilders, which produces tapes, DVDs and books disputing the separation of church and state. Although some of his claims about the Founding Fathers’ advocacy of a Christian government have been disputed, including by his own publisher which recently withdrew a book he wrote about Thomas Jefferson, Barton has long been a favorite speaker among Christian conservatives and tea party activists in churches and political gatherings, especially in swing states the GOP has sought to win during recent elections.

Barton says:

“In the case of the Second Amendment, the founding fathers didn’t call it the right to keep and bear arms the way it’s written, they called it the biblical right of self-defense. So the ultimate goal of the Second Amendment is to make sure you can defend yourself against any kind of illegal force that comes against you, whether that’s from a neighbor, whether that’s from an outsider or whether that’s from your own government.

In the case of the American Revolution, if the Founding Fathers had not been able to take on that illegal British government coming … so for them, it is not a matter of you have too many bullets in your magazine, it’s not whatever the government’s got, that’s we have got to have the same thing,” he said. “If they have an AK-47 and we only have a bb gun, then that is not a deterrent. The whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure that you have equal power with whatever comes against you illegally. At that point, that’s what’s gotta to control the gun debate.”

I can haz nukes now???

I’m not sure where Barton got his information about the “biblical right of self defense, but that’s sure as hell not what the Second Amendment, as passed by the Congress and ratified by the states, said.  According to Barton, I guess we all have the right to drones, nukes, and tanks. Another moron embarrassing America.

Let’s have a look at the Second Amendment of the Constitution:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In a thorough and well-researched piece in the 1995 New York Review of Books (kindly pointed out by a reader), “To keep and bear arms,” historian Garry Wills pointed out that this amendment was clearly intended to apply to weapons for military use, not to private gun ownership. If you’re an “originalist” like Scalia, that should settle the issue. I don’t adhere to originalism, since so much has happened since the Constitution and Bill of Rights were passed, so private gun ownership could—and has been—subsequently approved by the courts. Despite that, I vehemently oppose the largely unrestricted sale of guns in this country, including all semiautomatic weapons.

But that’s not the point. What Wills is saying in his superb piece is that one cannot under any circumstances justify gun ownership as a legal right established by the Bill of Rights. His case is convincing. (See the subsequent exchange of letters at the NYRB here.)

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UPDATE: There are two relevant op-ed pieces in today’s New York Times:

“The scourge of concealed weapons,” by the editors:

Nowadays, however, there are four states that require no permit at all to carry a gun, and 35 states have permissive “shall issue” or “right-to-carry” laws that effectively take the decision of who should carry a weapon out of law enforcement’s hands. These laws say that if an applicant meets minimal criteria — one is not having been convicted of a felony, and another is not having a severe mental illness — officials have no choice about whether to issue a permit.

Some states go even further by expressly allowing guns where they should not be. Nine states now have “carry laws” that permit guns on campuses; eight permit them in bars; five permit them in places of worship. In Utah, holders of permits can now carry concealed guns in elementary schools.

Among the arguments advanced for these irresponsible statutes is the claim that “shall issue” laws have played a major role in reducing violent crime. But the National Research Council has thoroughly discredited this argument for analytical errors. In fact, the legal scholar John Donohue III and others have found that from 1977 to 2006, “shall issue” laws increased aggravated assaults by “roughly 3 to 5 percent each year.”

and “From apocalypse to dystopia,” by Maureen Dowd, who goes after yesterday’s “press conference” with Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association:

The press conference, where the press was not allowed to ask questions, played like an insane parody: a tightly wound lobbyist who earns a million or so a year by refusing to make the slightest concession on gun safety, despite repeated slaughters by deranged shooters with jaw-droppingly easy access to firearms.

LaPierre makes Charlton Heston look like Michael Moore. The N.R.A. vice president, who once called federal agents “jackbooted government thugs,” insists the solution to gun violence is putting police officers, or “armed good guys,” in every one of the nation’s 98,817 K-12 schools.

His logic is spurious. Hunters can have their guns without leaving Americans so vulnerable to being hunted by demented souls with assault rifles that can fire 45 rounds per minute.

h/t: Joshua

NYT’s best books of the year

December 23, 2012 • 5:32 am

I’m a sucker for “best-book lists, as they can provide leads on some great books. Last week the New York Times put up its list of the “Ten best books of 2012“: five fiction and five nonfiction. I’ll list only the nonfiction below. They include one science book (Why Does the World Exist?), but it sounds a bit wonky and dog’s-breakfasty, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I’m also appending Michiko Kakutani’s list of her ten best books of the year, which appeared the other day. Of these, six are nonfiction and among those, two—Hallucinations and The Idea Factory—are about science or technology.

If anyone’s read some of these, weigh in below. I’ve started Caro’s book on Johnson (which is magnificent, as are all his books), but haven’t read any of the others.

So many books; so little time.

NONFICTION

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
By Katherine Boo.
Random House, $27.

This National Book Award-winning study of life in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum, is marked by reporting so rigorous it recalls the muckrakers, and characters so rich they evoke Dickens. The slum dwellers have a skillful and empathetic chronicler in Boo, who depicts them in all their humanity and ruthless, resourceful glory.

FAR FROM THE TREE
Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.
By Andrew Solomon.
Scribner, $37.50.

For more than a decade, Solomon studied the challenges, risks and rewards of raising children with “horizontal identities,” traits that they don’t share with their parents. As he investigates how families have grown stronger or fallen apart while raising prodigies, dwarfs, schizophrenics, transgendered children or those conceived in rape, he complicates everything we thought we knew about love, sacrifice and success.

THE PASSAGE OF POWER
The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
By Robert A. Caro.
Alfred A. Knopf, $35.

The fourth volume of Caro’s prodigious masterwork, which now exceeds 3,000 pages, explores, with the author’s signature combination of sweeping drama, psychological insight and painstaking research, Johnson’s humiliating years as vice president, when he was excluded from the inner circle of the Kennedy White House and stripped of power. We know what Johnson does not, that this purgatory is prelude to the event of a single horrific day, when an assassin’s bullet placed Johnson, and the nation he now had to lead, on a new course.

THE PATRIARCH
The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.
By David Nasaw.
The Penguin Press, $40.

Nasaw took six years to complete this sprawling, arresting account of a banker-cum-speculator-cum-moviemaker-cum-ambassador-cum-dynastic founder. Joe Kennedy was involved in virtually all the history of his time, and his biographer persuasively makes the case that he was the most fascinating member of his large, famous and very formidable family.

WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
An Existential Detective Story.
By Jim Holt.
Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton & Company, $27.95.

For several centuries now, thinkers have wondered, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” In search of an answer, Holt takes the reader on a witty and erudite journey from London to Paris to Austin, Tex., as he listens to a varied cast of philosophers, scientists and even novelists offer solutions that are sometimes closely reasoned, sometimes almost mystical, often very strange, always entertaining and thought-provoking.

Kakutani’s list (descriptions truncated).

THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON by Robert A. Caro (Alfred A. Knopf). In the latest installment of his magisterial, multivolume biography, Mr. Caro uses his wondrous narrative gifts to tell the dramatic story of how Johnson was catapulted to the White House in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and how he used his potent political skills to push his predecessor’s civil rights legislation through Congress and lay the groundwork for his own revolutionary war on poverty.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s Books). Using a new, pared down voice in this sad-funny-moving novel, Mr. Eggers recounts the tale of a penny-ante Job named Alan Clay, who’s betting everything on a quixotic scheme to sell the king of Saudi Arabia a lucrative new technology contract.

THE YELLOW BIRDS by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown & Company). The author of this beautifully observed first novel joined the Army when he was 17 and served as a machine-gunner in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. In chronicling the friendship of two young soldiers struggling to stay alive on the battlefield there he has written a deeply affecting book that conveys the horrors of combat with harrowing poetry.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE by Michael Chabon (Harper). Taking its title from the famous thoroughfare that bridges Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., this fresh, tactile novel introduces us to Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the proprietors of a struggling vinyl-record store that’s threatened by the prospect of a new megastore opening down the street.

THE IDEA FACTORY: BELL LABS AND THE GREAT AGE OF AMERICAN INNOVATION by Jon Gertner (Penguin Press). From the 1920s through the ’80s Bell Labs — the research and development wing of AT&T — was the most innovative scientific organization in the world, pioneering the development of the transistor, the laser and digital communications.

THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE by Ayana Mathis (Alfred A. Knopf). Thisextraordinarily powerful debut novel chronicles the many sorrows visited upon one Hattie Shepherd, a woman who left the Jim Crow South in the 1920s to start a new life in Philadelphia, and who at 16 lost her twin babies to pneumonia.

THE REVOLUTION WAS TELEVISED: THE COPS, CROOKS, SLINGERS AND SLAYERS WHO CHANGED TV DRAMA FOREVER by Alan Sepinwall. In this engaging new book the television critic for hitfix.com provides a smart, observant look at 12 “great millennial dramas” — including “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “24,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” — that transformed the TV landscape and moved the small screen out from under the shadow of the movies.

EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY: A LIFE OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by D. T. Max (Viking). This revealing biography of Wallace — who committed suicide in 2008 at 46 — traces the connections between his life and art, mapping the sources of his philosophical vision, while chronicling the heartbreaking struggle he waged throughout his adult life with severe depression.

HELLO GOODBYE HELLO: A CIRCLE OF 101 REMARKABLE MEETINGS by Craig Brown (Simon & Schuster). In this captivating volume a longtime columnist for the satirical British magazine Private Eye weaves together dozens of real-life encounters into a glittering daisy chain that reads like an entertaining illustration of the theory of Six Degrees of Separation.

HALLUCINATIONS by Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf). This physician’s latest book is a fascinating natural history of hallucinations.

Country music week: Grand Finale

December 23, 2012 • 5:14 am

Here’s the finale of the 1993 documentary, “Women of Country,” sent to me by alert reader Linda Grilli. I spot at least three dozen country music stars joining in on Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “The Hard Way”—a song that’s clearly symbolic.

How many luminaries can you recognize? (Here’s the list, but don’t look until you’ve tried).  And there are more cowboy boots than you can shake a stick at!

And I might as well throw in one more great country song: “Passionate Kisses“, sung by Carpenter on the television show “The Texas Connection.” The song was written by Lucinda Williams, recorded by Carpenter in 1993, and charted at #87 on Country Music Television’s list of 100 best country songs of all time.

Priest gets into hot water for telling kids that there is no Santa

December 22, 2012 • 1:58 pm

From the Irish Times, we have an unintentionally hilarious tale of a Roman Catholic priest who got into trouble for dispelling the myth of Santa:

Children at a north Kerry school who became upset after a visiting priest implied there was no Santa Claus have been reassured by parents and staff that the priest was mistaken, and Santa does indeed exist.

The priest who made the blunder while visiting the Scoil Mhuire gan Smal in Lixnaw last week believed he was speaking to mainly sixth class pupils.

Fr Martin Hegarty, a retired priest who was filling in for the parish priest, was visiting the school to explain the message of Christmas.

During an exchange with children in the 4th, 5th and 6th classes, Fr Hegarty implied Santa Claus did not exist. A number of children got upset and at least one 11-year-old child began crying.

A meeting of the board of management was called to discuss the matter.

Fr Hegarty, who is understood to be deeply embarrassed, told the Kerry’s Eye newspaper on Wednesday he did not realise the children were upset.

He also remarked to the newspaper that Irish children got more presents than other nationalities at Christmas time. “So they needn’t worry, the presents will come, whether Santy comes or not,” the priest said.

The stuff about Irish kids getting the most presents is, of course, made up, but priests are good at that. One wonders, though, whether a precocious kid will wonder who brings the presents if “Santy” doesn’t.

It’s a great pity for Father Hegarty that heaven doesn’t come whether Goddy exists or not.

But the funniest and most ironic quote from Hegarty is this:

“I regret any upset that I have caused to children and parents of Scoil Mhuire gan Smál. My intention was to talk about the birth of Jesus and the true meaning of Christmas. I must admit that Santa Claus is not my area of expertise.”

What?

And the article ends with a final burst of the funnies:

Some parents told their children “the priest was making it all up,” according to one parent who did not wish to be named.

It’s a pity the parents didn’t go just one myth further!

Lawrence O’Donnell excoriates NRA official

December 22, 2012 • 11:57 am

Political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell went after Wayne LaPierre this morning on MSNBC. Lapierre, as you may know, is the executive vice-president of the odious National Rifle Association (NRA). And you may also recall the solution to the Newtown massacre proposed by LaPierre in a press conference this week: let’s put armed guards in every school instead of legislating more effective gun controls! As O’Donnell notes, that would mean hiring more than 132,000 police officers at a cost of 6.7 billion dollars per year. Nobody can afford that in this fiscal climate, so it’s really a prescription to do nothing.

Let’s stop calling for patience and reflection on this “complex” issue, twiddling our thumbs while waiting for yet another massacre to happen. It’s time to start taking the guns out of American hands.

In the words of the Jewish scholar Maimonedes (1135-1204), “If not now, when?”

O’Donnell is ticked off big time—as we all should be when faced with baby-killing apologists like LaPierre—and this is a great clip. Please watch it.

The NRA makes me sick. And, of course, the gun nuts are a huge embarrassment to the U.S.  Have a look at this tweet:

image 120

Wonders of Life by Brian Cox – with added Eric Idle

December 22, 2012 • 10:48 am

by Matthew Cobb

Here’s something to whet the appetite of UK readers and to make those elsewhere pester their TV providers. It’s the trailer for Wonders of Life, the new series by University of Manchester particle physicist Professor Brian Cox:

The series consists of five episodes, will begin broadcasting on BBC2 on 29 January, and continues two earlier and highly successful series, Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe. As Cox is a particle physicist, he is especially interested in the physical underpinnings of life and evolution, and the physical constraints within which evolution operates.

The series has its usual beautiful USP – Brian wandering around the world pointing at things. Seriously, the series is stunning and very different from traditional BBC natural history programmes. (I should point out that I would say that, wouldn’t I, for I was a scientific advisor on the series, along with Nick Lane from UCL. However, any errors are Brian’s!)

The song – I imagine many WEIT readers will recognise it instantly, is a new, specially-written evolutionary version of the “Galaxy Song” by Eric Idle, from the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life.

Brian is a very popular TV science presenter in the UK, and is regularly spoofed for his enthusiasm and his Oldham accent. Here are a couple of spoofs:

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Jerry’s update: Over at the New Statesman, Cox and Robin Ince (Cox’s co-host of “The Infinite Monkey Cage,” discuss the profoundly antiscientific nature of climate change denial, and along the way explain the nature of science. The piece is a bit turgid and preachy, but includes a wonderful quote from Feynman that I hadn’t heard:

The key to science is in this simple statement from the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman, who once remarked: “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

The assertion is surely uncontroversial, but implementing it can be prohibitively difficult, primarily because it demands that everything be subordinate to evidence. Accepting this is fraught with cultural difficulty, because authority in general rests with grandees, gods, or more usually some inseparable combination of the two. Even in a secular democracy, a fundamental tenet of the system is that politicians are elected to reflect and act upon the opinions of the people, or are at least given temporary authority by the people to act upon their own. Science is a framework with only one absolute: all opinions, theories and “laws” are open to revision in the face of evidence. It should not be seen or presented, therefore, as a body of inviolate knowledge against which policy should be judged; the effect of this would be to replace one priesthood with another. Rather, science is a process, a series of structures that allow us, in as unbiased a way as possible, to test our assertions against Nature.

Mob kills man for buring Qur’an

December 22, 2012 • 8:08 am

One of Steven Weinberg’s most famous quotes is this:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Many people have deemed that statement a gross exaggeration, but I don’t think it’s far off the mark.  I’d define a “good person” as someone of good character, whose life is generally characterized by empathic acts.  Save fulminating mental illness or religion, I can’t think of much that would make such a person do something dastardly.   Religion, of course, is a powerful force—a meme, if you will—for evil, for it convinces you that God has ordered you to do good things which, in reality, are evil.  It’s no coincidence that Dawkins calls it a “delusion.” Other things, like political ideologies, can also make good people do evil things, but religion is the most pervasive.

Now someone is going to chime in saying that someone who does something evil in the name of religion is not bu definition a good person, but then the whole thing becomes tautological, and misses Weinberg’s point.

Regardless, we have another example of Mulsims murdering someone in the name of faith: the New York Times reports today that an angry Pakistani mob killed someone for burning the Qur’an:

Police officials said on Saturday that a mob had tortured and killed a man accused of burning the Koran, the latest in a series of violent episodes in Pakistan stemming from allegations of blasphemy.

The killing occurred on Friday in Seeta, a remote village in Dadu district in southern Sindh Province. The village’s head cleric, Usman Memon, said charred remnants of the Koran had been found in the mosque that morning, and that the victim had been staying at the mosque alone. It is common for impoverished travelers and religious proselytizers to stay at mosques while traveling.

The man, whose name was not known, was handed over to the police and accused of violating Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, Mr. Memon said. But as news of the episode spread later Friday, an angry crowd gathered outside the police station and eventually forced its way in. The man was dragged out, tortured and killed, and his body was set on fire, according to the police.

. . . Cases of violence arising from blasphemy accusations appear to be on the rise in Pakistan. Human rights groups have said that most of those victimized are members of religious minorities, particularly Christians, but Muslims are sometimes accused. In a case similar to Friday’s, a mentally disabled man was beaten and burned to death in Punjab Province in July, also after an angry crowd broke into a police station.

It’s only one murder, of course, but a human being was snuffed out because he supposedly (there’s no proof here) torched a book of myths. That’s sick.