One Utah

I hate the way the so-called War On Terror has been twisted to make morally repugnant acts like torture acceptable.
Rather than argue that torture is a moral good, supporters of torture have argued it is a regrettable moral necessity.
The argument goes like this:
Terrorists do bad things. Doing bad things proves they are bad men. […]

From MSNBC:

A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000.
The grim milestone came on the same day that rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone, underscoring the fragile security situation and the resilience of both […]

There seem to be a few folks left on the planet who cannot accept the science of climate change. None of them are scientists except for the ones being paid by Exxon.
I’m thinking OneUtah should build a record of this debate for the benefit of Anthropologists, Sociologists and writers who, fifty years from now, […]

I’m going to be laughing about this for decades. In fact, I may be amused about this the rest of my life and if I’m reincarnated, I may be born amused about it in my next life.
The story from PZ Myers (h/t Feministe).
I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, […]

It may have been the ugliest part of the presidential campaign so far. Just before the Texas primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran a fearful TV ad. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Clinton can save them. Like similar Republican appeals to fear, it worked. Texans who […]

Recently, I’ve been doing some reading into game theory.  Classic game theory works on the premise that each person is a rational actor (as in classic economic theory) and will act to maximize the benefit to themselves.  Contemporary game theory however holds that how people perceive self-interest is different than traditional game theory holds; people […]

I hope that we have learned something from the most barbaric century in history — the twentieth. I would like to see us overcome our tribal factions, and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization.
Arthur C. Clarke

There’s a presidential primary campaign, complete with dirty tricks (let’s run the video clips of that crazy black preacher one more time!) –and the news media have largely forgotten that American soldiers are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even CNN’s excellent Saturday report “This Week at War” with Tom Foreman has been renamed […]

Easter this year is the earliest easter since 1913.  Easter won’t be this early again for something like two centuries.  What that means is that we are nearing the end of Holy Week.  Holy Week is not an easy journey; it is a journey from Palm Sunday into the Passion; a journey from celebration to brutality […]

The New York Times reports on March 19 that whereas the Bush administration sold the Iraq war to the congress as a $50 billion investment, the actual costs are more like–
1.) ultra-conservative Pentagon estimate: $600 billion and counting
(note: this Honest Abe estimate categorically excludes “extras” such as operations in the war zone, […]

I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map.  Johnson is doing social history of Victorian London, focusing on a very specific incident (a cholera outbreak) and it’s impact on how we manage our cities (in terms of waste management).  However, it’s impossible to do any Victorian history without coming into contact with the paradox of Victorianism. 

I am the first to admit, I have finally lost my marbles over the idiocy of the male gender of (my gender) our species. To wit, Bush and the few millions of U.S educated - supposedly - Americans.
Sign the damn petition if only to show these criminally stupid people that WE are many more […]

There, I said it. This country can’t afford a President McCain. Hillary Clinton claims that McCain would be a better commander in chief than Barack Obama. She couldn’t be more wrong.

Josh Marshall today has a superb take-down of McCain’s CINC credentials, after yesterday’s gaffe provided a small opening for such criticism. […]

There’s no better way to say it than by borrowing FDR’s famous phrase. March 20, 2003 is a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America launched its first (and we hope, last) 21st Century war of aggression. This has turned into the second longest war in U.S. history, […]

When you sleep you dream. When you dream, your brain sends messages to your body saying “Don’t move.” The phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis. What happens (apparently a lot) is that people will wake from a dream, their body is still paralyzed.  In those waking moments the brain is still in an altered state […]

In the interest of management, I’ve closed the discussion below the “Dear Dwight” post - not because the discussion should stop but because it’s about to be pushed off the front page and the thread has gotten rather long and quite frankly I’m feeling pretty lazy.
Each of us brings a set of assumptions, experiences, ideas, and […]

When I was a young Army officer, we had a sarcastic saying to describe a troublesome, unavoidable, and possibly career-suicide assignment: “it’s an opportunity to excel.”
Up to now, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign has been pretty good at dealing with a barrage of hypocritical accusations. Thanks to the right-wing noise machine and their […]

One thing that has always fascinated me about the LDS Church is the concept of apostasy in the context of revivalist America.

After the deaths of the Savior and His Apostles, men corrupted the principles of the gospel and made unauthorized changes in Church organization and priesthood ordinances. Because of this widespread apostasy, the Lord withdrew […]

Of course that’s the headline many of us disenfranchised citizens would have liked to have seen after Democrats finally stood up to Bush and the telecommunication giants, AT & T and Verizon for ignoring the FISA law and illegally wiretapping American citizens. I wouldn’t count on any present day media outlet portraying the Democrats […]

I’ve read about it a number of times but I don’t know that I’ve ever blogged about it.
The It in question is the Challenger study by the very bright Ulric Neisser.
Neisser, who is a scholar specializing in memory, had his students in 1986 record their memories of the Challenger explosion - he asked them to […]