He put the Hammer down...

Author Mickey Spillane has died.

I don't know that I've ever read one of his books, just as I've never sat through a whole James Bond movie. They're not my type of entertainment, although I suppose I should read and watch one each for the sake of their icon status.

The two things I find interesting about Spillane are these:

He was universally panned by critics over his career, but loved by readers. I think that says more about the critics than the readers. Although... a lot of people love Danielle Steele...

He was a Jehovah's Witness, neither drinking nor smoking, but he wrote a hard drinking, hard living, violent man. Catharsis? Would that mine were so lucrative.

Interesting man. I'm sorry he's gone. Maybe I would have read his next book...

What a Wonder!

There is a new (not so new? new to me?) chocolate bar designed specifically to...

wait for it...


CURE PMS!

Brilliant, just brilliant. It's got a number of herbal-type ingredients that are supposed to aid the natural chocolatey goodness in its curative powers. I say, bring it on! If ever a woman needs chocolate, during PMS is the time.

It appears, however, that some men are complaining. Rudely.

But here's the thing. If your wife or your girlfriend is on her fifth bar of the day and gobbling her way to a couple saddlebags' worth of extra poundage, she can say, "Honey, I'm doing this for you. Either I eat another Wonder Bar or I berate you irrationally and then burst into tears. Take your pick."

Checkmate! A man will have no choice but to sit back and gawk in horror as the little missus turns into a Greyhound bus.

Clearly, the writer, David Segal, has Issues. Irrational? During PMS? He's obviously viewing things through a male lens. I have never in my life been irrational. In the moment, I was being perfectly logical. Later assessments of the logic of whatever my point was must be made while taking the context into consideration. If you do that, you'll see that it was logical. Ahem.

And dissing the Wonder Bar because it can turn PMS into an excuse for expansion? Please. In that case, we'd have to say that nachos and hot dogs and all manner of Male Food turn sports into an excuse for expansion, and thus we should... Okay, I lost that point.

I feel tears welling. How dare he! What's his problem anyway? What's he got against women? I DEMAND HE BE DISMISSED FROM WAPO!! Besides, I'm not going to turn into a Greyhound bus.

I'll be a dainty little minivan.

Cutting edge crime prevention

In the US, it's all about guns. We have gun control laws, higher penalties for using guns in the commission of a crime, penalties for carrying guns without permits, restrictions on the purchase of guns. There's a lot of political tension between the gun control advocates and the gun rights advocates.

In Scotland, they've pretty much turned over their guns. Does that mean they don't have the same issues as we do in the US? No, of course not.

There, it's all about knives - knife control laws, higher penalties for using knives in commission of a crime, penalties for carrying knives about, restrictions on purchasing knives. And political tension about what should be done with the knife problem.

What happens when Scotland gets rid of all its knives? Are bats, sharpened forks, pillows and socks at risk? Will they pass laws requiring that pillows have air holes and socks must come apart if swung at a particular velocity while weighted with metal of a certain mass?

I have no problem with enhanced sentences for using certain types of weapons, if it shows evidence of reducing crime or the severity of harm to victims. But this continued effort to strip citizens of their means of protection - from rampaging family members, criminals or the government - cannot in the long run be the best thing for democratic governments. Yet still we blindly go forward like lemmings leaping off the cliff to destruction.

Terrorist plans foiled in NYC - but does that justify carte blanche?

I worked for the Jersey City Police Department in 2001, and was in Jersey City on 9/11. I used to ride the PATH train into NYC all the time, usually going to the WTC as my starting point for Manhattan excursions. I toured the ravaged WTC site just over two months after 9/11, seeing rubble, an office building partially standing with intact offices visible from outside, a viewing platform with parting words from survivors etched in with ink pens. "We will always love you", read one. It was wrenching. And one of my best friends still lives in Jersey City and takes that very PATH train daily to work. I'm very much in favor of our current military efforts, and in favor of protecting other Americans from similar attacks.

All this made it very personal when I read today that the US intelligence community has foiled an effort to attack the PATH train system, specifically the line that goes into the WTC station, which has reopened (another line branches off into Hoboken and then ends at 32nd Street in Manhattan, close to Macy's). That's my line, and every PATH train that goes there first travels through Jersey City, stopping at a station only two blocks from where I used to work. It gives me a chill, and a sense of urgency about stopping future attacks.

Yet despite that, I'm not in favor of the way NYC is using this as a wedge to get money from the federal government:

"More than anything else, if true, these news reports offer incontrovertible proof that the federal government's homeland security strategy is flawed in its rhetoric and in its application. Let me be clear: Americans who face the greatest risk should receive the greatest amount of funding," said Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. "How anyone, at any level of government, could argue otherwise is beyond me and shows a flagrant disregard for the realities of protecting our homeland."

He continued: "For too long, the federal government has distributed security grants in a manner that seems to be based merely on whim. It certainly is not based on risk. It defies common sense that a would-be terrorist in Beirut with an Internet connection recognizes that the New York region is rife with significant landmarks, yet Homeland Security Secretary [Michael] Chertoff doesn't."

I do think that NYC and other places with major targets need help from the federal government to protect those targets. Any attack on those cities is an attack on America, in the same way that a criminal shooting a police officer is an attack on society as well as an attack on an individual. What they don't need is a blank check.

As a grant writer, I pick up tidbits here and there about what's happening in the grant writing community. Every major funding effort, especially something like Homeland Security funding, requires a proposal stating what will be done and what the rationale is. This past cycle, the big cities, especially NYC, saw a big drop in funding and other places in the US saw a rise in funding. NYC howled, of course it did. But the word I heard was that NYC submitted poor proposals, with the apparent expectation that nothing more than "Give us lots of money" was needed to open the coffers. Other, smaller jurisdictions proposed specific programs with good need justifications and good evidence for success for their type of program. That's what I heard, and I tend to believe it.

NYC is a money pit. No matter how much money goes there, they will always need more - or at least say they do. Of course they will. I have no objection to giving them money for genuine national security needs. But they must be required to justify the specific uses for the money. No carte blanche. No blank checks. The programs must be directly related to Homeland Security goals, designed tightly without a lot of miscellaneous costs (grants are notorious for being ways to get hardware into departments under the guise of program needs), and monitored strictly to make sure those goals are being addressed by the program.

Despite what many seem to think, while we have lots of money the pot is finite. From what I've seen, a lot of those programs proposed by the departments that got money in this cycle were important. Timothy McVey was not a Muslim radical, and people like him still operate in the US, especially in the interior. The Muslim radicals who flew into the WTC and the Pentagon didn't train or live in NYC - they trained and lived in Florida, Arizona, and other places. And while the high-value targets now seem to be in the big cities, that doesn't mean other targets in the US aren't being scouted too. How better to succeed than direct the attention to a big plot against NYC while plans proceed to menace America's heartland?

I'm very pleased that the plot against NYC was foiled, and I hope they continue to be. But that shouldn't mean we open the country's coffers and bury Manhattan in gold.

Happy Fourth!

It's a wonderful day, in a wonderful country, during a great time to be alive. I'm very blessed. And grateful to be here.

I hope the same is true of you.

And it was a good one too

My brother preached on freedom in Christ today, but he touched on issues of science and anti-science too. It put me in mind of my last post. The sermon isn't online, but you'd enjoy his blog theosebes. And if we beg him hard enough, maybe he'll start streaming his sermons online again...

Who's afraid of the Big Bad Science?

For the last couple of days I've been reading Map of Bones by James Rollins, which is quite good. The central idea (so far - I'm about 1/3 of the way through) is that a secret society, hundreds of years old, has discovered a substance used in Bible times that has many startling properties. It's even been suggested that this substance may be responsible for what were termed "miracles" in the first century. I can't tell you more without spoilers, but that's enough for my purpose.

As is my tendency, I read the end of the book when I was about 1/4 of the way through. At the end, the author has a note that encourages gnosticism, a "religious" philosophy which essentially replaces the search for faith with the search for knowledge. It seems to me that through this book, Rollins is trying to work out for himself how the miracles of the Bible could have been a result of natural phenomena at work among a scientifically naive and religiously focused civilization. I don't get the sense that he is denying God in some form, just that he's gnostically inclined to take the "created then left alone to spin in space" idea. I can't speak for him, and I'm not claiming to have special insight into this thoughts. But that's how it all seems to me.

It made me think of scientists uncomfortable with the concept of unknowability and religious non-scientists uncomfortable with the idea of knowability. The scientists seem to believe that accepting that something may be unknowable is like an axe at the very root of science itself. The very idea must be beaten down until to express it is by definition evidence of ignorance. Some religious non-scientists seem to feel that the desire and effort to know as much as we can about our universe is an axe at the very root of faith in God, and must be denounced. I think they fear that science today is a modern Tower of Babel.

I think they both need therapy until they can let go of their fears.

As a scientist, I'm excited by all the things we know about the universe, and I think it's wonderful that we're learning more daily. I don't think there are any questions we can't ask, scientifically speaking, up to and including, "Is there a god?" I do object to the idea that believing there isn't a god, or supernatural force, is a necessary precursor to true science. I think it's legitimate to say we can't prove it using the scientific method, but to me a true, honest scientist would also say we can't disprove it that way either. The scientific approach would be to say, it's outside the purview of science. We'll deal with what we can know. Once you're outside the realm of fact and are constructing theory, the theory of a god is quite valid (although I won't go into why, right now). And I think the transition from "evidence points to the likelihood of a super/extra-natural force" to "that force is the God discussed in the Bible" is a theological question, not a scientific one in the sense that the scientific/experimental method can conclusively determine the answer. I do think it is a question that can be answered in the affirmative using clear logic and readily available physical evidence.

The other perspective - fear of science among the religious - is something I've never quite understood. If you believe, as I do, that the universe was created by an all-powerful being, then how can learning anything or everything about that universe in some way undermine that faith? I may at times be surprised by what I learn, but the surprise isn't because I doubt that God could do whatever it is that was discovered. The surprise comes from my own finite nature, which often can't conceive of the things God has done until I'm shown the evidence. My response is not, "Oh no!" It's "wow!!" There is no reason to fear knowing anything about the universe that God allows us to learn! As far as I know - and I think the Bible would have informed me - there isn't anything we are forbidden from knowing, as was the case with Adam and Eve (and we know how that turned out). So the problem with knowledge is not the knowing itself, but what we do with it and our intent in the doing. I don't believe the Tower of Babel was a problem because they were building a tall building - Chicago, New York, Tokyo would all be in dire trouble if that's the case. The problem with the Tower of Babel was the intent of the men of that time to set themselves on par with God. And he took care of the problem. I think likewise if we have problems resulting from our knowledge of the universe and what the things in it can do, it's going to be because we've put it to some arrogant, godless use.

That brings me back to the Map of Bones and James Rollins. In the story - as is common in stories dealing with religious relics of one sort or another - the bad guys are searching for the mysterious (but as we learn, actually scientifically knowable) substance because of what they can do with it - the power controlling it would give them. Although in Map the bad guys believe the substance's properties are naturally occurring, albeit complex to release, many other similar stories (like, say, Indiana Jones and the lost ark of the covenant) rely on a sense that religious relics carry their own power. That power originates with God, but somehow along the way became separate from him without dissipating. It's not an uncommon belief; that's exactly the core belief behind the Catholic obsession about dead saints' bones or supposed pieces of Jesus's cross or shroud or whatever. The physical things themselves are powerful, and can be used for the purposes of the person holding them, whether good or evil, separate from God's will. And thus the rush to save them from the hands of the evil people lest God's power be used for evil.

It makes a nice story, and naturally I love the "good vs evil" story line. But it does harm to the sense of the reality of God, just as the fear of science is evidence of a lack of faith in God. The ark of the covenant in the Old Testament had power because God resided in it. If God were not in it, it would have been just be a lovely bit of gold and wood. While God was in it, it would not be used against his will - it could not be used against his will. God is not a genie in a bottle to be captured and used. He never operates from a position of weakness. Even Christ's death was a voluntary submission to the God-given laws of nature for a higher purpose - it was not an involuntary submission to anything. And God is the source of all good, and nothing evil. So, if any relic or substance or chant has power that can be used for evil, it is by that very fact clearly not power from God. Could it be power from the devil? Possibly. I don't know how Satan works in this world, nor what tools he has at his disposal. I just know, unequivocally, that if something can be used for evil, it in that moment is not God's or from God.

That knowledge doesn't stop me from enjoying either Raiders of the Lost Ark or Map of Bones - it's all fantasy and "what if?" to me. I just wish a lot of Christians would ease up on their fear of science and bear down on their depth of faith in God's goodness in this world and out of it.