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Current Events

America’s Cup: Fun and Games

It seems to be in the nature of America’s Cup competition that, every now and then, the race for the world’s oldest active sporting trophy becomes nothing less than a farce. The most recent competition, held this last February, was another instance.

The match amounted to three racing days, two races, and two and a half years of legal wrangling. In addition, there was no international competition for the right to challenge, and the race (traditionally a monohull competition) was between two ridiculously large and expensive multihulls.

Despite this, the 2010 challenge was not the most farcical. That “honor” is still held by the 1988 mismatch between a huge New Zealand monohull and Dennis Conner’s 60-foot American catamaran. So ridiculous was the race that Conner held back the speed of the multihull to help the American position in the court case that he knew would follow.

These one against one matches are called “Deed of Gift” matches. More appropriate, I think, would be to call them “Court of Law” matches.

Fortunately, the 2010 campaign was won by the right team, BMW Oracle (racing as USA 17). Larry Ellison of Oracle wants to return the cup to the traditional format of competition between potential challengers to determine the eventual challenging boat and competition between boats from the defending country (currently USA) to determine the defending yacht.

I hope Ellison also returns to monohull competition. We already have a multihull regatta, modeled on America’s Cup, the Little America’s Cup. It was here in the Little America’s Cup that the wing type sail that BMW Oracle sported was first used in competition.

America’s Cup racing is traditionally between monohulls. America, the schooner that started it all, was an innovative monohull design in 1851. The best competition has always been between monohulls of similar design, with room in the rules to allow for innovation.

The heyday of America’s Cup was when the yachts were of the 12-metre class. These were less expensive than earlier yachts and also less than the class that replaced it, the International America’s Cup Class. If Ellison (as he said) wants to get back to a less expensive format with more countries competing, it should be to something similar, though a different class from standard yacht racing classes to provide for development. The 12-metre rule allowed for considerable flexibility in design, through limiting trade-offs, with a lot for room for innovation. (The yachts were not twelve meters in length; competing plus and minus measurements had to total twelve meters.)

It was in a 12-metre yacht in 1983 that Australia II broke the New York Yacht Club’s 132-year-old stranglehold on the cup. Contributing to the win was an innovative keel design on Australia II. Too much has been made of the winged keel. Australia II was the superior yacht and would have most likely won anyway, though they were up against a formidable opponent in Dennis Conner. The kind of innovation that the winged keel represents would not have been accepted under the rules of standard yacht classes. Indeed, the winged keel was promptly banned from other classes.

The move to 12-metre racing turned out to be a very significant move. It eventually opened up the competition for the trophy. It enabled America’s Cup to spread to other countries and potentially become a truly international regatta of the highest order. Now it has a chance to stay that way—as long as we do not end up with any more “Deed of Gift” or “Court of Law” races.

God is Hate

On January 29th, 2010, the followers of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, descended on Gunn High School, Palo Alto CA, to spread their message of hate. They sported signs that said, “God Hates You”, “God Hates America”, “Your Doom Is Coming”, “God Hates Obama” and “Bloody Obama”. They picked on Gunn High School because of a number of recent suicides in front of trains of kids who were associated with the school, events that have traumatized students at the school.

The Westboro extremists were there to rub it in. “You’ll be in front of the train next! God laughs at your calamity!” Phelps’s daughter shouted. “Sodomites,” they sang, “your kids are killed by trains.” The Sodom reference is key, for these hate-mongers have a homophobic fixation and believe that the acceptance of homosexuality is the root of all evil.

Fortunately, the Gunn students and teachers rallied, and with support from the community and many students from other nearby schools, they met the messages of hate and evil spite with signs proclaiming love, with songs and with support of each other, so much so that their unity was an uplifting, inspiring experience. As one student said, “It really helped to pull us together.”

The Westboro group then took its hate to sinful Stanford University, only to be met by a large crowd of students, the school mascot, the outrageous Stanford band and a lone piper playing “Amazing Grace”. It was a message of love mixed with humor to counter those poisoned with hate from Kansas. A student posed with the extremists, holding a sign that said, “Gays for Fred Phelps.”

How can a “Christian” group like this be so filled with hate when the Christian message is so full of love? Only once did Jesus show a flash of hate, and that was when the Greek woman kept bugging him to cast the demon out of her daughter (Mark 7:26-29). Because she was a gentile, not a Jew, he called her a dog: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to the dogs”. But he quickly relented when she replied, “Yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” Jesus also showed anger at the desecration of the temple by profiteers, but this was not hate.

Phelps obviously has his own thing going (which is definitely not Christian), and his irrational paranoia about homosexuality says a lot about his own demons.

Abortion Terrorist found Guilty

The Kansas Christian, Scott Roeder, who shot and killed the abortionist Dr. George Tiller, was convicted of first-degree murder. His defense all along was that it was the only way he could halt the “death of babies.” The position on abortion is not relevant here. What is wrong is his justification.

The key question is who or what gives him the right to murder another in cold blood. He took the coward’s way and shot him from behind in a church and threatened others as he left. To do it in God’s sanctuary shows what little respect he had for sanctity. He and his supporters who are probably much like him feel that the courts should sanction his action and set him free. Worse still, he and the supporters identify themselves as Christian; yet he acted like the terrorists that we condemn. Should we let the 9/11 conspirators go free because they felt justified in their actions since America in their eyes is the force of evil in the world? Of course not!

The question remains then: Who gave you the right? It is written in the Bible, “Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place to wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, said the Lord” (Romans 12:19). Vengeance was not yours to take, you moron!

Let us pray that in his long, long time in prison, Roeder will realise that by giving in to his wrath, he played into Satan’s hand. If not, he’ll probably work that out in the hereafter.

Misplaced Reverence

The Reverend Pat Robertson showed his true colors again by saying in effect that the Haitians deserved the devastating earthquake of January 12. In the same vein, three days after the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, he “totally concur[red]’ with the Reverend Jerry Falwell that   “pagans… abolitionists… gays… lesbians… the ACLU” were to be blamed for those acts—God’s vengeance. Falwell has meanwhile gone to his ultimate reward, whatever that might be. (It may not have been the one he expected.) We are still left with Robertson and his extreme views.

It has been suggested that Robertson, like other televangelists, is motivated by money, not by religious altruism. I would not dispute that, since I have grown up believing that the sincere ministers do not seek publicity or vast audiences, or solicit large donations; instead, they work for the spiritual welfare of those who seek them out. Robertson, however, is after more than money, for there would otherwise be no need for the Haiti or 9/11 statements, or his suggestion that someone ought to take out Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

I think Robertson suffers from what a lot of clerics suffer from: an exaggerated sense of self-importance. They end up confusing the importance of their ministry with self-importance, in other words, pride (Satan’s sin). They believe that their pronouncements must be true because of what they are — something like the Pope’s infallibility, a person with whom clerics like Robertson would not wish to be identified.

Associated with the conviction of importance of self is a quest for power.  And Robertson did seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1987, an occasion when he apparently lied about his combat experience and also claimed he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa (not so), but then Christian conservatives are OK with lying. (See Christian Implants and Other Wonders, November 18th, 2009, below.) Lack of support forced him to quit, leaving him his media outlet to give him a platform of influence.

Except for the people who keep sending him money, we know that he is an extremist who shoots his satanic mouth off every now and then, and for that reason, we can ignore him except to contain his extreme statements. What is fortunate is that he is one of ours. If he were persuaded by another religion, or lived in another system, he would probably be another Osama Bin Laden.

On the Movie “Avatar”

(Warning: This post contains spoilers.)

After some conservatives, now the Vatican has come out against the movie “Avatar”. They are criticizing the movie because they say it suggests that the worship of nature is a replacement for religion. They also described the movie as simplistic and sappy, despite its “awe-inspiring special effects.”

Yes, the movie is simplistic, and yes, I suppose it can be described as “sappy”, but both of these shortcomings are lost in the grandeur of its presentation. On the basic concept level, the movie is little more than a screen rendition of a comic book story. What attracts in a comic book is the graphical presentation, and here “Avatar” has outdone the imaginable. The movie is more than two and a half hours long, but you are so drawn into the visual experience that you do not notice the passage of time. I have sat through ninety-minute movies that have seemed twice as long as this one.

The Vatican says that “Avatar…gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature,” and “nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship” (L’Osservatore and Vatican Radio). I would dispute the “bogged down” part, but certainly the Na’vi  (the blue deer people) are very closely attuned to and part of the nature of their world. But when we watch the movie, we know that these are the Na’vi, not human beings; we can’t even breathe their air; they are blue and ten feet tall; their world Pandora is an alien world, not earth (though in a metaphorical ecological argument, you might want to make that comparison); this is science fiction, a fantasy, not a sermon. Nor is it “Dances with Wolves”, despite the similar response to a pure native culture by a battered or in this case crippled military man. If these fictional native people “worship” Ewya, this is clearly their “religion”, not ours. Besides, Ewya is less a deity than the essence of Pandora, and “worship” and “religion” are not appropriate words for the Na’vi behavior. In our religions, we worship; in the Na’vi way, they commune.

The Vatican, therefore, has nothing to fear from “Avatar”, just as the conservatives, who are worried about possible “liberal” views, have nothing to fear. Even if you support the exploitation of nature, few conservatives are as ruthless as the Colonel Quaritch or even the company man Selfridge. The presentation of Quaritch is so comic book two-dimensional that he represents a concept rather than a real character. Selfridge, who is less of an extreme, towards the end seems to show some doubt over where everything is heading.

Some will see this movie as an allegory of American exploitation, but it is jingoistic to make it “American”. “Human” would be more accurate. There are elements that have allegorical overtones, say, in the names. Pandora reminds one of Pandora’s box (almost but not opened in this movie). The mineral sought by the humans is Unobtainium. Na’vi is a corruption of “native”, Selfridge of “selfish”; Quaritch seems to be derived from “quarrel” and “son-of-a-bitch”, while the sympathetic research scientist is called “Grace Augustine”. The plot can also be reduced to a formula: The bad guys want to strip mine the planet; the good guys beat them off. This is not a new theme. It is also not what draws a viewer into this movie, or what holds the viewer’s interest. The final battle is pure comic book style entertainment, leading to resolution rather than making a point. Besides, the strength of the movie lies in its presentation, not in its story.

The Na’vi are depicted as ten feet tall. One might rationalize this as being due to the “pure” way they live, but that is a minor point. What is  visually striking is that humans appear small and insignificant next to them, and, in the final scene, they seem almost like vermin, a reflection of their failed mission of destruction. Size is significant, as Jonathan Swift realized in “Gulliver’s Travels”, where in the first two books, the ones who are satirized are the little guys. In this movie also, we come to look down on the smaller figures. But our hero, the last good guy, has grown spiritually. He becomes his avatar and we have our closure.

Ignorance Triumphs Again

As we approach the end of 2009, the print media is giving us “The Decade in Review” features. No doubt as the year’s end approaches, so will radio and TV. These features all assume that the decade started in the year 2000. But the decade (and the century, and the millennium) actually started in 2001. We already had this confusion at the end of the 20th Century over Y2K, and it was clarified at that time. You would think a magazine like Time would get it right, but no! They are just as ignorant as the rest.

Once again, the reason why the decade, century, and millennium begin with the year ending in the number 1 is simply because our calendar started in Year 1. There was no Year 0. We went from Year 1 BC (or BCE) to Year 1 AD (or CE).

When the calendar was invented, there was no concept of zero in the western world; we counted from 1 and the digital count on our fingers ended in 10. In this way, the first decade (our time) ended in 10 AD, the first millennium in 1000 AD, the second in 2000 AD. The new time spans began in 11 AD, 1001 AD and 2001 AD.

So, Time Magazine and others, take note: the first decade ends at the end of 2010 AD, and the next begins January 1st, 2011. Get it right!

A Right Christmas?

The shortened word Xmas for Christmas used to upset my mother because she saw the “X” as negating the real reason for Christmas. But the “X” is not a negative. It is the Greek letter Chi, which stands for Christ, so the meaning of Christmas is actually preserved in Xmas.

Today as we go into the Christmas season, we are moving into a time when the holiday is being increasingly turned into something that is religion-neutral. Public displays avoid religious references, students at school concerts have to sing about Santa Claus and reindeer with red noses, and stores play neutered jingles that one might call holiday music—all to avoid the real reason for the holiday. The Post Office sells both “winter holidays” and Madonna and child stamps, the former as usual outselling the latter, and a survey shows that at least one third of us say “Happy Holidays” now, instead of “Merry Christmas.”

It is no surprise then that this is also the time when the right wing media front men rail against the movement away from Christ in Christmas. It is true that many people are concerned about the secularization of the holiday, but those shrill complaints are not really based on true religious concern. Their motives are political. They want to take possession of the holy-day part of Christmas, just as they wrapped themselves in the flag and seized on patriotism after 9/11, trying to make them theirs.

These small-minded reactions are presented as countering the perceived all-pervasive “liberalism” that is supposedly neutralizing Christmas, but even if the intent is genuine rather than calculated (as I suspect it really is), the result can only be divisiveness—us versus them; our version of Christmas is right—or Right; they are the heathens.

Letting narrow-minded bigots make Christmas theirs rather than keeping it ours will be a loss to all of us. We need to keep the religious side of Christmas intact.

Historically, it is very likely that Luke and Matthew (or their sources) made up their versions of the Christmas story, but this does not matter. Over the last two thousand years, the story of a couple traveling a long way with the woman pregnant, giving birth to the Savior of mankind in a stable, angels telling shepherds of the wonderful event, and they and wise men from the East coming to worship the new born infant—this simple story has become enshrined in our culture. It is part of who we are. And it is a very beautiful story, especially one that, together with its evocative songs, engenders the innocence and nostalgia of childhood and of a simpler time.

If we remove that part of Christmas, what are we left with? Santa Claus, elves and reindeer? Is this our substitute for the Christmas story? A story of deception until the child finds out that there is actually no Santa Claus?

I find the “worship” of Santa Claus of the North Pole highly ironic. Santa Claus is a corruption of Saint Nicholas, a religious figure, supposedly a bishop of note. But Saint Nicholas is himself a representation of something else. Missionaries commonly substitute acceptable figures or practices for pagan ones that are unacceptable. So Christmas is a substitution for pagan celebrations of the passage of the winter solstice, and Saint Nicholas is a substitution for Old Nick, the man from the north, and the one we still recognize in the name Nick, the devil himself. (Even more ironical, the word Santa is an acronym for Satan.)

A key aspect with public placement of religious symbols is whether there is proselytizing or not. On the hills of San Juan Bautista, California, there is a large cross, which overlooks the little town. This cross is clearly a Christian symbol, but its location has to do with the historical origin of the town, a Spanish mission founded in 1797. The original location of the cross on the hill not only was a substitution for an Indian meeting site, it also enabled the location of the mission to be identified from afar. The cross here is part of our heritage. Similarly, children in California schools routinely build model missions when they study early California history.

The same distinction should apply to seasonal displays. Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in an official location is different from displaying a Christmas crèche. The commandments are a religious prescription to be followed and so violate the distinction between church and state, but the crèche merely represents a story, albeit fundamental to Christianity. Similarly, the public display of a menorah, while strongly associated with Judaism, is again a representation of a story, not a general prescription for action or religious behavior.

We know what Christmas stands for, even if we pretend otherwise, and while we may still phrase our holiday greetings to accommodate others, we should not get away from what the day really represents in our culture. We should not abandon our heritage, and substitute something that’s plastic, shallow and deceptive. We are able to do precisely that with Thanksgiving. Let us also do the same with Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all!

Blair Justifies Iraq Invasion

The former British prime minister, Tony Blair, still maintains that the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein were justified, even if it had been known that he had no weapons of mass destruction. Blair’s argument is that Saddam Hussein and his two sons were a major threat to the region. Originally, Blair had claimed that Hussein was capable of launching a missile attack on any of his neighbors within 45 minutes.

Is this latest statement, made in a BBC interview, really a valid reason, or is it simply an attempt to justify a major blunder in judgment that that has led to costly wars and which, above all, threatens his legacy?

I have always thought higher of Blair than of the man he followed like a lackey into Iraq, seemingly blindly, yapping excitedly at his heels, but no more! The man he followed in the spirit of some weird bromance, ex-President George W. Bush, has also attempted to justify the Iraq debacle by stating that it was a good thing to do, even without the WMDs. Remember that it was Bush who was determined to attack Iraq, regardless, to “finish Daddy’s war.” It was Bush who jumped to the conclusion that Iraq was the culprit behind the World Trade Center attacks and ordered his people to find evidence to support his assumption.

If it was justified to go into Iraq regardless, as Blair claims, because the country’s loathsome leaders were a threat to the region, why haven’t we invaded North Korea? Why not invade Venezuela? Cuba? Iran? “We” think of them as threats to their regions and have said so publicly. By Blair’s justification, we are entitled to invade these countries, even if they have no WMDs. Why not Israel? And it does have WMDs.

Following September 2001, only the invasion of Afghanistan can be justified. The invasion of Iraq was never the right thing to do, despite the grim, unsavory nature of its leader. The WMD “intelligence” was always suspect and not supported by the UN inspectors. It was ego that that drove the decision, and no number of after-the-act excuses can justify that blunder, Tony.

2012: A Space Idiocy (but a Movie to See)

Is the world really coming to an end in December 2012, as the new movie 2012 suggests? There are certainly sites on the Internet that say it will, by a large rogue planet, maybe four times the size of earth – our nemesis, this time coming to finish us off for good.  Indeed, this planet Nibiru is returning after a close encounter with Earth 3,600 years ago. All this adds up to good movie material, but is it really going to happen?

Scientists like those at NASA say no. In fact, since they are beset by mail from worried citizens, they are at pains to squash such thoughts. One good source of their response is at http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ask-an-astrobiologist/intro/nibiru-and-doomsday-2012-questions-and-answers.

If this planet were going to hit us in 2012, it would be already in the solar system within telescopic sight. Some web sites claimed it would be visible to the naked eye by spring 2009. Why hasn’t anyone mentioned seeing it yet? The answer from the alarmist is the hoary old “government conspiracy” theory. “They” aren’t telling us, so we won’t panic. This is so ridiculous that it’s laughable. The United States government could hardly keep every astronomer in the world quiet, let alone the thousands of amateur astronomers around the world.

The idea that the Mayan calendar predicts this dire event is also nonsensical. To the Maya, the end of a cycle and the start of a new one was the cause of celebration – a far cry from the doomsday idea.  The Mayan “doomsday” was originally predicted for May 2003, but since that date passed without astronomical incidence, the date has now been recalculated to the winter solstice of 2012. Doesn’t this remind you of religious predictions of the “rapture”? When it doesn’t happen on one day, “recalculate” and set another date.

Associated with the rogue planet theory, we also hear obfuscating statements in pseudo-scientific gobble-de-gook, such as “galactic alignments”, “dark rifts” and “mutated neutrinos”, which don’t make any sense and don’t make the fiction any more real except perhaps to the uneducated.

Nibiru is a name that appears in the Babylonian poem Enuma Elish. It is associated with the god Marduk. Scholars are not sure what Nibiru is or what it may refer to. Marduk is the god that corresponds to Zeus or Jupiter. In planetary terms, Marduk is the planet Jupiter. I for one am prepared to accept the planetary nature of Nibiru, but it is not an unknown planet. Nibiru is the planet Venus, whom the Greeks associated with Athena (not Aphrodite, who was the goddess of the moon). Recall that in Greek mythology, Athena sprang from the forehead of Zeus. The planets Venus and Jupiter are therefore closely linked. (See my “Scientific Orthodoxy and Venus”, August 26, 2009 below). We have the same association with Nibiru and Marduk. If Nibiru is a planet, it is the planet Venus, now safe in its inner orbit around the sun.

The alarmist statements, the misleading web sites, the pseudo-science, the misrepresented Mayan references – all this hoohah has one direct commercial object: Go see the movie! Guess what? I will, but not because of these idiocies. No, special effects suck me in every time, even as I groan at the nonsense the characters spout, trying to make it all sound scientifically feasible.

The Log Ness Monster

It is interesting that despite the evidence of science, myths continue to be perpetuated in the face of such evidence. One such myth is the Loch Ness monster. The solution to the sightings appeared in an article by Robert Craig, published in the New Scientist in 1982, but it is most often conveniently overlooked.

Fake photos aside, such as the most famous plesiosaur-like neck sticking out of the water, there is no doubt that there have been sightings of something in the water at Loch Ness, one of the four very deep Scottish lochs (or lakes), this one almost 750 feet deep. At two other deep lakes, Loch Morar and Loch Tay, there have also been “monster” sightings. The fourth deep lake is Loch Lomond, but there have been no sightings here.

One other very deep lake should be included in this group, but this one is not in Scotland. It is Lake Seljordsvatnet in Norway. It belongs in this group because there have also been “monster” sightings there.

What do these lakes have in common, apart from the “monster” sightings? Why have there been no sightings at Loch Lomond, a lake that appears similar to the others in all respects?

The answer has to do with a kind of tree, the Scots Pine (Pinus Sylvestris). These lochs were once surrounded by large forests of Scots Pines, including the lake in Norway. The exception in our list is Loch Lomond, which had no pine forests.

The “monster” starts with a Scots Pine, a very resinous, tarry tree, falling in the water. It becomes waterlogged and sinks to the bottom where the pressure is equal to about twenty-five atmospheres. Here under this enormous pressure, the log begins to decay, forming small bubbles of gas. The gas is trapped by the sticky resin, which gradually expands out of the log. Eventually enough gas bubbles form to lift the log off the bottom, and it begins to rise.

As the log nears the surface, the outside pressure decreases; the bubbles begin to expand rapidly and start bursting. At the surface they explode, partially breaking the log into pieces, churning the water violently until all the gas is released.  Some of the pieces fly up, and occasionally a trunk is momentarily ejected as the log disintegrates. Quickly the gases are released and the log sinks back down, heavier than water, never to rise again.

Remnants of such logs have been found ashore.  The process of decay and building up gases can take as long as a century, and because it is almost that long since the surrounds were populated by those trees, the age of the “monster” sightings is practically over.

The decay of these logs only occurs in very deep lochs, since very high pressure is needed to build up buoyancy in the logs. Naturally, it will only happen where the right kind of logs lie deep in the water. The conditions were right at Loch Morar and Loch Tay, and the famous Loch Ness in Scotland. They were also right at Lake Seljordsvatnet in Norway. These are the lakes with “monsters”.

So why do we ignore the evidence of science? Has too much mystery gone out of this world? I suspect this is the reason why we want to hang on to our notions of UFOs and aliens, of Big Foot and the Yeti, and of the one that we regard most affectionately, the Loch Ness monster.