I'll have what she's having -- Estelle Reiner.

The Delicatessen scene from When Harry Met Sally, playing now at our house. Best quotes:

Sally Albright: "You are a human affront to all women and I am a woman."

Sally Albright: "Oh. Right. That's right. I forgot. You're a man."

Older Woman Customer (Estelle Reiner): "I'll have what she's having" one of the most memorable funny lines in movie history according to the New York Times. The line was written by Billy Crystal. More great quotes from the movie here.

Written by Nora Ephron (1941-2012), directed by Rob Reiner, music by Marc Shaiman and Harry Connick, Jr. and with a great cast.

CO2 Emissions and Ocean Acidification

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions have two negative effects on the World System: (1) CO2 pumped into the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect that drives global warming and (2) CO2 absorbed by the oceans (between 30-40% of emissions) creates ocean acidification (lower pH). 

Ocean pH is lowered through the creation of carbonic acid. As ocean pH is lowered, corals die and calcifying organisms who need carbonate to form their shells (carbonate is depleted by carbonic acid formation) start dissolving and dying. When corals and calcifying organisms start dying, food chains are disrupted. Since humanity is at the top of the food chain, humanity starts to suffer.

There are only two hopes here: (1) reduce CO2 emissions (substantially) and (2) hope that corals and calcifying organisms can evolve to flourish in low pH waters (evolution is slow). Since people who do not accept climate change science typically also do not accept evolution, there is really no hope for them except to deny that any of this is happening. 

Nova recently aired a segment titled Lethal Seas (trailer above) that discussed the topic in depth. The entire show can been seen here.

Plunk Your Magic Twanger Froggy

One of my favorite TV shows growing up was The Buster Brown Show with Andy Divine, Froggy the Gremlin and Midnight the Cat ("What do you say to the kids, Midnight? 'Nice'"). Evidently, after Andy Devine took over the show it was called Andy's Gang, but I guess I wasn't paying close attention because we still called it the Buster Brown Show.

Another great character actor on the show was Billy Gilbert.  Froggy was a prankster and typically infuriated Andy Devine and Billy Gilbert. The clip above is a good example. It's probably what I liked most about the show as a child. My remembrance was that there were Spaghetti Westerns played as segments but I must be remembering Andy Devine's earlier appearances on The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok.

Stooges: Press, Press, Pull

I was having a discussion today and the topic of generational humor came up. One of the questions we discussed was whether the clip above (or the Three Stooges in general) would still be consider humorous. I don't know the answer to that, but if anyone has any opinions, pleased leave a comment.

Religious Freedom and the Public Accommodation

The News Hour had an interesting segment last night on the controversy over Religious Freedom Laws being played out in Arkansas and Indiana. The most interesting interchange was between Rev. Tim Overton of the Halteman Village Baptist Church and Micheline Maynard of Arizona State University.

Rev. Tim Overton: Well, I do believe government needs a good reason to interfere with the private practice of religion among our citizens in this country...Our biggest concern with the changes is that Christian-owned businesses or religious-owned business are not going to be able to carry their faith as they would like into the business realm.

Micheline Maynard: Well, you know, Gwen, one of the things about business in the United States is that, when you open your doors and you sell something to the public, I think the principles in this country have been that you welcome all comers.

(Read the full transcript here, emphasis added above.) What the Religious Right Wing wants limited are the concepts of a public accommodation and discrimination under US law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the ADA require that public accommodations must be handicap-accessible and must not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Some States extend the Federal law to cover discrimination based upon, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, breastfeeding in public and sexual orientation and/or gender identity (read more about the public accommodation here and discrimination here)**. Discrimination is particularly interesting because it involves treating people differently based on their membership in a class. The "different treatment" can either be positive or negative (as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has has argued in trying to overturn Affirmative Action).

So, let's be clear. The US government should not interfere with either the private practice of religion or the private practice of bigotry. You can discriminate or make all the bigoted statements you want in private. You can even say these things in public settings such as a public church (exempt under public accommodation laws). It's when you move into the public sector that there are more restrictions (e.g., hate speech).

I have repeatedly run into this issue when I have worked in government from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I have always considered public and private acts to be different but a lot of very vocal people and politicians do not. Some on the Right Wing want to regulate private acts in the bedroom or in the physicians office. Some on the Left Wing, advocating for a privacy right, do not want public acts (such as murder or criminal convictions) to be part of the pubic record.  An event that sticks in my mind was to watch politicians on both sides of the spectrum trying to invent reasons to discriminate against the Coptic Christian Church because their community was predominantly of a different religion, both Christian.

Maybe most people do not have a problem rationalizing these concepts when they are in private. It's only when they get into the public sector that the political struggle begins. We're seeing one, maybe inevitable, public fight playing out right now in Arkansas and Indiana. On the other hand, I can't think of any reasons why a right to discriminate should be extend to the public sector under any circumstances. Can you?

**Why the State freedoms listed in this sentence should not be extended to the Federal level is an interesting questions with some obvious answers you can think about. The fact is, they have not been.

Politics, Religion and the Null Hypothesis

We are living in strange political times. Politicians running for president try "...to discern God's calling..." when making political decisions, are anointed as "kings" by fundamentalist ministers or claim that "...our civil laws have to comport with a higher law, God's law". This is all somewhat strange since the separation of Church and State is embedded in Article VI of the US Constitution. Since politicians are claiming divine justification for their actions, it is fair to ask some questions about the basis for that claim.

In science, hypothetical claims are evaluated against a null hypothesis. Scientists ask what is the evidence for a claim such as "divine guidance" and if positive evidence can't be produced then the null hypothesis is considered more likely. In this case, the null hypothesis is that divine guidance does not exists and, more strongly, that the people who claim it are delusional.

I know many wonderful people who are deeply religious but would never claim divine guidance for their actions. If they read this post, I hope they are not offended. But, by claiming authority from God, politicians have forced the question of the basis for that authority. If we're going to make an unbiased inquiry, we have to start from the assertion that it doesn't exist. Then, we can let the evidence take us where it will.



Luckily, PBS Nova has an excellent documentary that looks carefully at the basis for the Bible. Since the Bible is the direct link US politicians claim between themselves and God, in addition to being the justification for policy positions from Abortion to Gay Marriage to Climate Change, looking at the basis for the Bible is the obvious place to start.

To make a very long a contentious story as short as possible, there really is no hard evidence for divine origin of the Bible. The Old Testament was written in Babylon after the Temple of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians. It was written by men in exile to confront a nagging question: why did their God, Yahweh, forsake them and allow the Temple to be destroyed. The answer was that the Jewish people had, in addition to Yahweh, worshiped false gods before him (recall the second Commandment Thou Shalt have no other gods before me). Let's be clear, this was a guess about why the Temple was destroyed, a rationalization for military failure.

Modern scholarship has been unable to determine by whom or when the Ten Commandments were written but they do appear in the Hebrew Bible, which was written by men in exile. In other words, the Bible is its own source of authority for the word of God. Since there was no written language before the Hebrew Bible (written language being a great contribution of the Jewish people), that's the way it has to be. The Bible is the first piece of written history. It has some accurate parts and some inaccurate parts (described fully in the Nova documentary). It was written by historians, by people concerned with reasserting political power in the Middle East.

We still live in a World concerned with the reassertion of political power in the Middle East. It should be no surprise that US politicians invoke the Bible in their quest for political power. It has worked before and was written for just that purpose. On the other hand, it will probably be a mark of maturity if World civilization can ever move beyond this script. Watching the PBS documentary last night, it was difficult for me not to think that we have been fighting the same religious war over and over again for the last 3000 years. This certainly will not end in my lifetime or maybe ever.

Unfortunately, for the time being, the null hypothesis is most likely: Politicians claiming divine guidance are more likely to be delusional men in search of political power over the rest of us.


QUOTATIONS FROM THE PBS DOCUMENTARY

Read more here about the origins of the written Bible and read the entire transcript of the Nova documentary here.

As modern scholars suspect, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, takes its final form during the Babylonian exile. But dwarfed by the mighty temples and giant statues of Babylonian gods, the Israelites must also confront the fundamental question: why did their God, Yahweh, forsake them?

MICHAEL COOGAN: In the ancient world, if your country was destroyed by another country, it meant that their gods were more powerful than your god. And the natural thing to do is to worship the more powerful god, but the survivors continued to worship Yahweh and struggled to understand how this could have happened.

PETER MACHINIST: They resort first to a standard form of explanation, which is found elsewhere in the ancient Near East: "We must have done something wrong to incur the wrath of our God."

WILLIAM DEVER: It's out of this that comes the reflection that polytheism was our downfall; there is, after all, only one God.

NARRATOR: The Israelites abandon the folly of polytheism, monotheism triumphs, and the archaeological evidence proves it.