News and Announcements
1 May Meeting
1 April Meeting
Other stuff
2 The Earth Chapter
2 Humanity 2.0
3 The Two World Orders
4 Book Review #1
5 Book Review #2
6 Humor — Alternate Meanings
6 Humor - Accident Details
7 Cartoon of the Month
May Meeting - Remarks on Post-Modernism and Objective Truth.
By Juan Bernal
This presentation is intended as an invitation to a discussion of this modern challenge to scientific truth and rational philosophy, and is not to be taken as an in-depth look at post-modernism.
It will include references to criticism of post-modernism by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate and to remarks by Taner Edis in his book, The Ghost in the Universe.
In addition, people can refer to the "Free Inquiry" magazine, the volume of fall 1998, which has a series of articles on post-modernism, science and objective truth, and the FI volume of winter 1999/2000 for an article by Daniel Dennett entitled "Why Getting It Right Matters, Postmodernism and Truth."
Also at the May meeting: The election of the 6 board members ( President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and two members at large ) will be held.
April Meeting - Celebrating Earth's Day
By Dr. Gary Herbertson
Growing up in the Pittsburgh area, Dr. Gary Herbertson first learned about environmental problems at the age of six when his grandfather showed him how the steel mills were polluting the local rivers. Later on he made natives of the Congo aware of pollution from copper mines, and fought the attempt by private interests to seize control of the Queen Mary. He has served as head of the UNEP ( United Nations Environmental Program ) NGO ( Non-Government Organizations )
section and as executive director of Earth Day International.
The Earth Charter
From http://www.earthcharter.org
Why is the Earth Charter important?
At a time when major changes in how we think and live are urgently needed, the Earth Charter challenges us to examine our values and to choose a better way. It calls on us to search for common ground in the midst of our diversity and to embrace a new ethical vision that is shared by growing numbers of people in many nations and cultures throughout the world.
What is the history of the Earth Charter?
In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development issued a call for creation of a new charter that would set forth fundamental principles for sustainable development. The drafting of an Earth Charter was part of the unfinished business of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. In 1994 Maurice Strong, the secretary general of the Earth Summit and chairman of the Earth Council, and Mikhail Gorbachev, president of Green Cross International, launched a new Earth Charter initiative with support from the Dutch government. An Earth Charter Commission was formed in 1997 to oversee the project and an Earth Charter Secretariat was established at the Earth Council in Costa Rica.
By what process was the Earth Charter created?
The Earth Charter is the product of a decade long, worldwide, cross-cultural conversation about common goals and shared values. The drafting of the Earth Charter has involved the most open and participatory consultation process ever conducted in connection with an international document. Thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations from all regions of the world, different cultures, and diverse sectors of society have participated. The Charter has been shaped by both experts and representatives of grassroots communities. It is a people’s treaty that sets forth an important expression of the hopes and aspirations of the emerging global civil society.
Who wrote the Earth Charter?
Early in 1997, the Earth Charter Commission formed an international drafting committee. The drafting committee helped to conduct the international consultation process, and the evolution and development of the document reflects the progress of the worldwide dialogue on the Earth Charter. Beginning with the Benchmark Draft issued by the Commission following the Rio+5 Forum in Rio de Janeiro, drafts of the Earth Charter were circulated internationally as part of the consultation process. Meeting at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in March, 2000,the Commission approved
a final version of the Earth Charter.
What are the sources of Earth Charter values?
Together with the Earth Charter consultation process, the most important influences shaping the ideas and values in the Earth Charter are contemporary science, international law, the teachings of indigenous peoples, the wisdom of the world’s great religions and philosophical traditions, the declarations and reports of the seven UN summit conferences held during the 1990s, the global ethics movement, numerous nongovernmental declarations and people’s treaties issued over the
past thirty years, and best practices for building sustainable communities.
What is the mission of the international Earth
Charter Initiative?
A new phase in the Initiative began with the official launching of the Earth Charter at the Peace Palace in The Hague on June 29, 2000. The mission of the Initiative is to establish a sound ethical foundation for the emerging global society and to help build a sustainable world based on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.
What are the goals of the Earth Charter Initiative?
1. To promote the dissemination, endorsement, and implementation of the Earth Charter by civil society, business, and government.
2. To encourage and support the educational use of the Earth Charter in schools, universities, faith communities, and many other settings.
3. To seek endorsement of the Earth Charter by the United Nations.
Humanity 2.0
by Carl Elliott
( From The Wilson Quarterly
http://wwics.si.edu index.cm?fuseaction=wq.
welcome )
At the front of the conference room, Robert Bradbury of the Aeivos Corpor-ation is talking about immortality. He’s showing us PowerPoint slides, with scientific graphs and charts. He’s telling us about an artificial replacement for the human genome and about eliminating the need for a heart by replacing all the cells in the body with “vasaloid” systems.
Immortality is probably not in the cards, Bradbury tells us, but once we eliminate all diseases it will be possible for us to live for 2,000 years. When we get rid of all the other hazards of living, we’ll be looking at a life span of 7,000 years. Unless, of course, we happen to be over 40 years old already, in which case these technologies will come too late for us. Bradbury recommends that those of us past 40 look seriously into cryonics. If we have our heads frozen, we can be resurrected at some time in the future by our benevolent, superintelligent descendants.
As Bradbury speaks, I remember the cemetery across from the Yale University campus that I passed on my way to the seminar. Carved into stone on the front gates were the words “The Dead Shall Be Raised.” I’ve come to Yale for an intensive introductory seminar on transhumanism. The term transhuman is shorthand for transitional human, a stage along the way to becoming posthuman.
A posthuman, according to the World Transhumanist Association, is “a being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present-day humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards.” Nobody really knows exactly what posthumanity will be like, but transhumanists are certain that it will be a big improvement over the current model. Transhumanists embrace cryonics, nanotechnology, cloning, psychopharmacology, genetic enhancement, artificial intelligence, brain chips, robotics, and space colonization. In fact, they embrace virtually any conceivable technology aimed at “redesigning the human condition.”
Like many of my fellow seminar participants, I’m here out of curiosity. What little I know about transhumanism I learned many years ago from Ed Regis’s brilliant, quirky book Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990). Mambo Chicken was an affectionate but skeptical portrait of what Regis called “science slightly over the edge.” The heroes of Mambo Chicken were not especially interested in ordinary scientific grunt work. They had much grander plans. They wanted to download their minds onto computer disks, manipulate matter at the atomic level, colonize interstellar comets in private rockets. The title of the book refers to chickens that muscled up to Schwarzenegger-like proportions after gravity specialists at the University of California, Davis, spun them around in accelerators for six months. On the whole, the scientists in Regis’s book were less interested in creating superchickens than in creating superhumans. They chafed at human mortality and the limitations of their own brains. “Why should we be restricted to human nature?” asked one researcher in Mambo Chicken. “Why shouldn’t we go beyond?”
The Two World Orders
by Jed Rubenfeld
( From The Wilson Quarterly
http://wwics.si.edu index.cm?fuseaction=wq.welcome )
What’s the source of America’s growing unilateralism? The easy answer is self-interest: We act unilaterally to the extent that we see unilateralism as serving our interests. But the answer prompts a more searching question: Why do so many Americans view unilateralism this way, given the hostility it provokes, the costs it imposes, and the considerable risks it entails? Americans sometimes seem unilateralist almost by instinct, as if it were a matter of principle. Might it be? It will not do to trace contemporary U.S. unilateralism to the 18th-century doctrine of isolationism, for unilateralism is a very different phenomenon. An isolationist country withdraws from the world, even when others call on it to become involved; a unilateralist country feels free to project itself—its power, its economy, its culture—throughout the world, even when others call on it to stop. Although there may still be a thread of isolationism in the United States today, unilateralism, the far more dominant trend, cannot usefully be derived from it. The search for an explanation should begin instead at the end of World War II. In 1945, when victory was at hand and his own death only days away, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that the world’s task was to ensure “the end of the beginning of wars.” So Roosevelt called for a new system of international law and multilateral governance that would be designed to stop future wars before they began. Hence, the irony of America’s current position: More than any other country, the United States is responsible for the creation of the international law system it now resists.
Book Review
Rogue Nation (American Unilateralism and the Failure of
Good Intentions)
The US society has lots of peculiarities, as author Clyde Prestowitz notes. It has a high standard of living and the overwhelming majority of the world¹s richest people. It is a leader in charitable giving. But it also has a high number of citizens living below the poverty line, approximately one in eight according to a recent survey. It is also a country where the rich have great influence on the laws of the land, assuring that the rich keep getting richer, while more of the tax burden is shifted to the middle class, causing many of them to sink below the poverty line. The top 1% of American households have more wealth than the entire bottom 95%. More than fifteen thousand people are murdered in the US each year, far more per capita than in any other industrialized country.With five percent of the world¹s population, the US accounts for about one fourth of the world¹s prisoners. It is understandable that the US, as the world¹s super-power, is a cause of envy and disparagement for other societies around the world. Many think that our use of the death penalty is barbaric.
In its position as the only super-power, the US has lots of influence on the world economy and world politics. The current administration¹s unilateral approach to world actions has been gathering resentment around the world. A Latin American ambassador was quoted as saying The US mistrusts the whole world. It relies only on military force and has no vision of itself working with others.
Everything is always only about itself. An European ambassador said In the past the US has been a beacon to the world, but more and more it seems to be acting not only without regard for others, but also without regard for the very principals that made it a beacon.
For many Europeans, it seems that the US has turned its back on the values underpinning the global system and opted for might makes right. Some of our government¹s policies drastically affect the poor countries that are trying to survive. The US gives away about $3.4 billion as subsidies to large American cotton farmers. That means that cotton farmers in Africa cannot compete with US grown cotton on the world market, even though their costs to raise cotton are much less than the actual costs of raising cotton in the US.
Thus the subsidies drive the world¹s low cost producers out of business. That is a free market? Such actions naturally arouse a lot of resentment. Instead of subsidies, how about paying US farmers to limit production and at least stop flooding the world market? In other cases, the administration holds tight to the ideology of free trade, to the extent of removing most of the simplest governmental regulations on big corporations (like Enron) and claiming that the free operation of the market place will work everything out for the best. George Soros, on the other hand, has said that even though the conventional wisdom is that markets are always right, in his experience they are always wrong, although they can validate themselves (as a self-fulfilling prophecy).
US intervention in foreign countries has, for years, caused resentment against us. The September eleventh date that is remembered in Chile is 9/11/1973, when the US abetted in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and put in place a military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of people simply disappeared under his regime. That is certainly no way to make friends, and it certainly did nothing to make us safer. Many of our secret CIA activities in foreign countries have resulted in serious blowback, causing worse problems in the long run than the minor problems they were supposed to control. America continues to do itself enormous damage by allowing its view of reality to be distorted by intensely self-interested groups. Key positions in our government can be captured by dedicated minorities whose interests are directly at odds with those of the US as a whole. And
US foreign relations can be drastically affected by powerful lobbying groups that are more interested in a particular outcome than in what is actually best for the country and the world.
The hypocrisy of the self-defeating US war on drugs has also caused a lot of resentment against our government. Major efforts to reduce drug demand through treatment have never been really implemented in the US although a few pilot programs did get promising results before being shut down by the ideologues who prefer the supply-side approach of trying to shut down the source, which clearly is not working. At a cost to us of around $25 billion a year, our government goes into foreign countries and sprays over legitimate crops as well as coca crops, causing major long term damage in those countries.
The US unilateral approach in Iraq has focused the hatred of all the Muslim world on the US. Any remaining good will has all but been washed away. Clearly the US botched the best chance to get rid of Saddam, or to keep him under control, after the first gulf war, when neither the US nor the UN put serious conditions on the cease fire. They could have required real disarmament conditions and enforcement mechanisms to verify the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. The US is the rogue nation in regard to the Kyoto treaty. Actually the final Kyoto agreement was very close to the original American proposal, yet the Bush administration¹s attitude was that it would simply cost us too much money, that they apparently would prefer to spend on another non-functional star wars boondoggle. A longtime State Department official and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, said The United States is a City on a Hill, but it is increasingly fogged in; we need a war on arrogance as well as a war on terror.
This is a readable and informative book that helps to explain why there is so much resentment against the US by the rest of the world, and shows how the current administration has significantly exacerbated the problem.
Book Review
1000 Years for Revenge (International Terrorism and the
FBI -The Untold Story)
Although this book by Peter Lance centers on the International Terrorist problem, it is most notable as an expose of just how extremely inept the FBI and our federal government has been in protecting the country from the terrorists. Ignoring the fact that the FBI and CIA have always been uncooperative and often did not share vital information, the FBI, on its own, clearly had enough information to stop the first World Trade Center bombing as well as 9/11, and easily could have done so if had not had such a culture of compartmentalization, mutual distrust among its agents and offices, and for a number of really stupid and unjustifiable decisions made by those in power.
There is an old Pakistani expression If it takes me ten centuries to kill my enemy, I will wait a thousand years for revenge. Thus the title of the book, showing the mind-set of those that -justifiably or not -hate the United States. Ironically, Ramzi Yousef, the brains behind most of the terrorist attacks on the USA, acquired his bomb building knowledge under the tutelage of men who were funded by the CIA, which sent billions to the Afghan mujahadeens in their war against the Soviets.
Unfortunately, even after it was known that there were terrorist cells here in the United States, none of the government agencies (FBI, CIA, etc.) or the White House, or Attorney General Ashcroft, put much emphasis on terrorism. They refused to believe that there was any well financed international terrorist organization capable of doing significant damage. The FBI was spending more time on drug cases than on anything else, in spite of the fact that the DEA was supposed to be handling that. In the Phoenix FBI office, for instance, international terrorism was considered less important than organized crime, drugs, white collar crime, and even crime on Indian reservations. The New York office had a great agent who had recruited a valuable source who had access to the blind Sheikh who was involved in the original WTC bombing. But higher ups in the office decided to ignore the information that was available and then when it became obvious that they should have followed up on the leads, they charged the agent with an undercover investigation so that she could not talk about all the information that had been available, which would have embarrassed them, to say the least.
You may remember seeing Condoleeza Rice saying on an evening news program that the government had no reason to even think about the possibility of someone taking over an airliner and flying it into the WTC or Pentagon. Actually a terrorist that was captured in the Philippines, and was turned over to the FBI in 1995, confessed that there were plans in the works to hijack airliners and fly them into selected targets such as the CIA building, the Sears Tower, the Transamerica Tower and the World Trade Center.
Since it was known that that terrorist was working for Ramzi Yousef, who had escaped when that terrorist was caught, there was no reason to believe that those plans would not be carried out. How could that warning have been ignored? Unfortunately, the government was still emphasizing the idea of another star wars program to prevent some foreign power from bombing us from afar. This is a large book that can be slow reading, since it covers lots of ground and it can be a bit depressing when you
think of all the lives that were lost, and the missteps that allowed that to happen, but it is a great expose of how bureaucracy works.
Humor -Alternate Meanings
The Washington Post published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternate
meanings for various words. The following were some of the winning entries:
1. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightie
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.
13. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.
14. Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), The belief that, when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Pokemon (n), A Jamaican proctologist
Humor -Accident Details
The following are actual statements found on insurance forms, where drivers attempted to summarize the details of an accident in the fewest words possible:
**Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have.
**I thought my window was down, but found it was up when I put my head through it.
**The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intentions.
**I collided with a stationary car going the other way.
**A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face.
**A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.
**The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.
**I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment.
**In my attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole.
**I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up obscuring my vision, and I did not see the other car.
**I had been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.
**I was on my way to the doctor with rear end trouble when my universal joint gave way, causing me to have an accident.
**As I approached the intersection, a sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid the accident. To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian.
**My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle.
**An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished.
**I told the police that I was not injured, but upon removing my hat, found that I had a fractured skull.
**I was sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the curb when I struck him.
**The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way, when it struck the front end. I was thrown from the car as it left the road. I was later found in the ditch by some stray cows.
**The indirect cause of the accident was a little guy in a small car with a big mouth.
**The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run, so I ran over him.
Cartoon of the Month
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