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The Dudeist Abides

I'm not really into religion, as you may have guessed, since Christianity isn't a religion, although you wouldn't have thought that from the circumstantial pomp of our mainline churches, not to mention those that break away, in a painful process called splintering, to form still other churches with charismatic-like preachers and ever-more contemporary versions of the Gospel. And so it goes, as with really long sentences, but the Dude abides.

Goethe, who was genuinely fond of religion, once declared in its favor, "Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt, der habe Religion." I'm not really sure whether Goethe would today go for such throne pretenders as the Moonies, Scientology, and Jehovah's Witnesses, to name a few,² but I just can't bring myself to believe that he would hate Dudeism, even if efforts are being made to trace its honorable vision to Taoism. In any case, if you're inclined, and can get off the couch long enough to check it out, you could go ahead and get yourself ordained as a priest in the Church of the Latter-Day Dude. Or not.

1. Permit me to translate: "He who has Science and Art also has Religion; he who has neither—let him have Religion."
2. There are many others, some really quite recent. Four years ago, I wrote about a few contemporary false messiahs.

Money for Nothing

As if I didn't have enough to worry about, now there's a chance that I'll be losing my Internet radio service Pandora as a result of a recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board.¹ I don't know that this will be the end of Internet radio itself, but it will no doubt be a diminishing force as it requires stations that stream music over the Internet to pay more per performance in licensing fees, starting at $.0008 cents and increasing annually to $.0019 cents by 2010.²

Well, at least I learned today that newquaker.com isn't banned by China.³

1.  "Royalties threaten internet radio," BBC, March 7, 2007.
2.  This fee is actually speculative and tied the Consumer Price Index: "The latter $.0019 per performance rate is to be adjusted by the change in the CPI-U from December 2005 to December 2009 (accordingly, if the CPI-U increases by 3% in each of these four twelve-month periods, the resulting per performance rate for 2010 would increase from $.0019 to $.00214). Read the ruling as a PDF document in Determination of Rates and Terms for Webcasting for the License Period 2006-2010.
3.  The aim of the Great Fire Wall of China project is "to collaboratively build a community that will be able to visualize Internet censorship in an increasingly accurate way" and "to be a watchdog and keep track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored." Every site that is reported as blocked through the group's server in China gets a spot on their homepage.

There Is No Gitmo

In today's TomDispatch is an updated eyewitness description of our notorious Guantánamo Bay detainment camp by Karen Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. Her piece, "Guantanamo Is Not a Prison: 11 Ways to Report on Gitmo without Upsetting the Pentagon," is as much about Christian Americans' failure to cry out against the ongoing human injustice there as it is about the gnarled language that the military authorities use to camouflage talk about the camp.

I think this is a must read. Otherwise, you can just wait and read the narrative—or others like it—at the future war crimes tribunals.

Stop Looking at My Volitions!

Researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim that they can now identify a person's decision to do something merely by looking at his/her brain. The easiest way, one would think, is simply to ask the subjects what it is they plan to do, but that would probably be too easy, or maybe too non-scientific, so these researchers are using MRI scans to do this.¹ In one study, "participants were told to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers a few seconds before the numbers were flashed on a screen." Their brain waves were imaged in order to predict the subject's intention.

 

This research at the Bernstein Center was begun in 2005, followed by last year's publication of a scholarly paper on decoding mental states.² Up to this point, researchers have tested 21 people, but their "71 percent accuracy rate is only about 20 percent more successful than random selection." At twenty percent better than a coin toss, or a guess, this is currently nothing more than a parlor toy, a technology not yet ready to replace our common cues about intention with something more precise. I mean, why should we have to infer intention if we can just look right at it?

Intentions are significant for many reasons. They not only help to establish us as purposive beings but also define us as persons capable of choice, of selecting from an array of possible actions and then doing the one, or the other. As humans, we first learn about other persons through actions. Actions are voluntary, purposeful, intentional—they are many things, but most of all they are deeds that are attributable to persons who are capable of doing otherwise. Perhaps nothing so identifies a human action as much as the forbearance, an action that is intentionally omitted. To forbear is to do a strange action, for you will never see it, and yet our ability to refrain from acting, when we otherwise could, marks us plainly, I think, as persons.

I just don't get too excited about brain research that wants to link a neuroimage of brain activity to an intention. There is not, nor can there be, a one-to-one correspondence between any intention—any thought, any mental act—and brain activity. I'm not claiming this to be a mere issue of privileged access. They are no more identical than my wave to a friend is the same as the precise, quantified movement of my hand. Such studies will never give us the ambitious material reduction of content-rich thought to complex, measured cerebral animations, although the latter can be signs of the former. If nothing else, this research is disclosing a new kind of semiotics, and that may be the lead researcher's more mundane intention.³

1. "Scientists Try to Predict Intentions," AP, May 5, 2007.
2. John-Dylan Haynes, Geraint Rees: "Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7(7):523-34. Abstract: "Recent advances in human neuroimaging have shown that it is possible to accurately decode a person's conscious experience based only on non-invasive measurements of their brain activity. Such 'brain reading' has mostly been studied in the domain of visual perception, where it helps reveal the way in which individual experiences are encoded in the human brain. The same approach can also be extended to other types of mental state, such as covert attitudes and lie detection. Such applications raise important ethical issues concerning the privacy of personal thought."
3. Says lead researcher, John-Dylan Haynes: "We are making the first steps in reading out what the specific contents of people's thoughts are by trying to understand the language of the brain." (AP, May 5, 2007.)

The Ides of March, or Thereabouts

As the month of March gets underway, I have a birthday coming up and some other weird things are going to be taking place in the next few weeks.

Notable is the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case that started five years ago in Alaska and is now about to be heard by the US Supreme Court.¹

Following that, we can look forward to the sentencing hearing for Julie Amero, the poor Connecticut substitute teacher who is facing up to 40 years in prison after being convicted of inadvertently exposing her middle school students to pornography on a classroom computer after viral adware generated sexually explicit pop-up windows. That all happened in October 2004.² Her sentencing was supposed to be held on March 2, but it has been postponed to March 29—so we can all have more time to rethink the whole concept of the jury trial.

Then there's the case of the real dirty dozen at Heritage High School in Vancouver, Washington, who were suspended on Friday for holding a morning prayer session in the school cafeteria. Most of the twelve suspended students are Russian immigrants. I guess they thought they could find religious freedom over here. Hey, we'll show them a thing or two.³

Before March is finished with, along with my birthday, don't forget to unlock the secrets of how men become Pope by playing VATICAN, a historically accurate board game in which reality and truth are "always more interesting than fiction" as you follow the life and career of an aspiring cardinal.

All that should certainly help give your mind a rest after reading the unforgettable diary entries of Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archive.

1.  "'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' goes to the Supreme Court," Anchorage Daily News, March 4, 2007.
2. See "Substitute teacher convicted in school computer porn case," Boston Globe, January 9, 2007. Her husband has set up a blog and defense fund on her behalf. This outrageous case has been all over the web for the past two months. If she actually goes to jail, then I guess we're all in trouble.
3. "12 Students Suspended for Praying at School," Christian Post, March 3, 2007. Not surprisingly, there's much more to this news story. See this blog for the many sides of the issue—and how it has been reported.