The politics of rage

So Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president.

I got in an argument with a couple of friends last year when Trump first began to ramp up his campaign.  "Never going to happen," I was told.  Trump will fizzle out.  People will realize what a clown he is, and he'll go down in flames.  Or, maybe, Trump isn't really serious, he's playing a great big practical joke on America and at some point will shout "Ha ha, fooled ya!" and drop out.

My response then was that I wished I could believe that.  Trump, I said, has been serious from the beginning.  He's a power-hungry megalomaniac who looks at the presidency as another thing his money and influence can buy, another notch on his gun, another trophy on his wall.  Once he sets his sights on something, he doesn't give up until either he's attained it or been denied.  No way will he concede or (worse) drop out.

Never have I been so sorry to be right.

My fear all along has been that Trump would be able to go the distance because he is tapping in on something deeply interwoven into the psyche of America -- the idea that we are threatened, that anyone different from us is dangerous, that if we're poor all it means is that we are (in Ronald Wright's trenchant words) "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."  And, furthermore, that there's a simple solution to all of it.  Build a wall.  Deport all Muslims.  Cut taxes.  Get Obama out of the White House.  Nuke ISIS.  Stop trading with China.  Keep jobs on US soil.

So Trump has appealed to a group of people who share a dangerous combination of traits: a lack of understanding of the complexity of the world, and a deep-seated, visceral anger that the face of the United States is changing.

The result is that we have a nominee who has not only said, but been applauded for saying, the following:

• I'm the worst thing that ever happened to ISIS.
• Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
• No more 'Merry Christmas' at Starbucks.  No more.  Maybe we should boycott Starbucks.
• [About Carly Fiorina]  Look at that face.  Would anyone vote for that?  Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?  (When called on it, he said, "I think she's got a beautiful face.  And I think she's a beautiful woman."  And he still surged in the polls.)
• I think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.
• [About GOP debate commentator Megyn Kelly]  You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes.  Blood coming out of her… wherever.
• [About John McCain]  He’s not a war hero.  He’s a war hero because he was captured.  I like people who weren’t captured.
• NBC News just called it ‘The Great Freeze’ — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?
• [About same-sex marriage]  It’s like in golf. A lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive.  It’s weird.  You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore.  And, I hate it.  I am a traditionalist.  I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.
• I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.
• You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.
• We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people who really understand what’s happening and maybe, in some ways, closing that Internet up in some ways.

Each time, people like me have had a thought of, "Okay, that's it.  That's got to wake people up, get them to see who they're supporting for what he actually is -- a narcissistic, arrogant blowhard whose ideal of government is closer to a fascist dictatorship than it is to a democracy."  Instead, each time he's seen a spike in the polls, and comments like "He speaks his mind" and "He's saying what people are thinking."

I'm going to propose something radical -- that our president should be appealing to our highest ideals, not making utterances that sound like things my uncle said after his fourth can of Bud Lite.  (S)he should have a far better understanding of world policy than your average person does.  (S)he should help us to see reality, not reinforce the ugliest and most divisive of our preconceived notions.

But that hasn't happened here.  I keep being told by my optimistic friends that Trump may have won the nomination, but there's no way he can win the presidency.  That a match-up with either Clinton or Sanders, whichever wins the Democratic nomination, will result in a for-sure Democratic win.

I wish I believed that.  We've been hearing the same thing over and over during the last year, from Republicans and Democrats alike -- that the Trump candidacy was doomed.  Each time, the prognosticators have been blown back with surprise when he's surmounted challenge after challenge, seen nothing but growth in his support.

And now, a substantial fraction of Americans on both sides of the political aisle are looking at the election and thinking, "How in the hell did we get here?"  And lest you think that I'm exaggerating about the panic Trump is inducing in both parties, witness the op-ed piece written by David Ross Meyers, conservative writer and former staffer for George W. Bush, published yesterday over at Fox News Online.  In his scathing take-down of Trump's candidacy, he writes:

To begin with, Mr. Trump has autocratic tendencies, and openly admires tyrants such as Vladimir Putin.  In fact, his narcissism and cult of personality leadership style seem better suited to countries like North Korea and Uzbekistan than America.  Trump has repeatedly attacked core conservative principles such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and American leadership on the world stage.  He has incited the use of violence against his detractors, called on America to commit war crimes, and suggested the possibility of civil unrest if he is denied the GOP nomination. 

Mr. Trump proclaims that he’s going to make America great again, but can’t provide any realistic plans for doing so; instead, he frequently resorts to scapegoating outsiders, foreigners, and minorities.  The few policies that Trump has articulated would make America less safe, trample upon our most fundamental rights, and appeal to the basest instincts of the American people.

The simple explanation for how Trump has gotten this far is that political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have for decades encouraged the politics of rage, fanned the fires of divisiveness and anger.  We should not be surprised that the result is a candidate who has ridden to the nomination on the heat of those flames.

But like many simple answers, it's probably not entirely correct.  The divisiveness and anger were already there -- else the hateful commentary from Limbaugh, Coulter, et al. would never have resonated as it did.  And in a lot of ways, people are right to be angry; years of skewed governmental policies have favored corporate profit over the needs and struggles of ordinary citizens, have fostered job loss and outsourcing and the defunding of public education and environmental degradation, irrespective of the cost to the citizenry.

So I do get where this sentiment, at least in part, comes from.  But what I know is that Trump is not the answer.  I mostly stay out of politics, so for someone like me to feel this strongly about a political race is unusual.  We can't let Trump win.  A man like him in an ordinary job is at worst a boor, a lout, a loudmouth, a grandstanding demagogue.

Running a country, he could be a Mussolini, a Hitler, a Kim Jong-Un, an Idi Amin.  Impossible?  No way would he wield that kind of power, even if he won?

This man has beaten all of the odds, confounded every single naysayer from the beginning.  Don't tell me what he can and can't do.

Focus on making sure he's defeated.

Killing the cat

If there is one feature that is nearly universal to humans, it's curiosity.

I suffer from this myself.  When there's something I don't know -- even if it doesn't concern me -- I become kind of obsessed with finding it out.  It's not because I'm a gossip; in fact, I'm completely trustworthy with secrets (should you ever be tempted to tell me some salacious detail about yourself).  So even though I have no intention of ever doing anything with the knowledge, I still want to know.

Turns out, I'm not alone.  A study published last week in Psychological Science by Bowen Ruan and Christopher Hsee at the University of Chicago has shown that people are driven to find out things -- even when they know ahead of time that what they're trying to find out might well be unpleasant.

[image courtesy of photographer Julián Cantarelli and the Wikimedia Commons]

Ruan and Tsee set up a series of tests in which the outcome might be known to be pleasant (or at least neutral), known to be unpleasant, or could be either.  In one, they had a set of gag "electric pens" that deliver a painful shock when you press the button.  Test subjects were given either red pens (you know you'll get a shock from those), green pens (you know you won't be shocked), or yellow pens (you could either get a shock or not).  They then counted the number of times participants pressed the button.

Yellow pens got clicked twice as often.  (Oddly, the green pens got clicked the least.  I guess that a painful, but interesting, outcome is still preferable to a boring one.)

They repeated the procedure, this time using digital recordings -- one of a pleasant sound (running water), another of an unpleasant one (nails on a chalkboard).  Once again, the people who didn't know which they were going to hear clicked the "play" button the most often.

And yet again -- this time with pleasant natural imagery (a butterfly) and an unpleasant one (a cockroach).  Same results.

Study author Ruan said, "Just as curiosity drove Pandora to open the box despite being warned of its pernicious contents, curiosity can lure humans–like you and me–to seek information with predictably ominous consequences... Curious people do not always perform consequentialist cost-benefit analyses and may be tempted to seek the missing information even when the outcome is expectedly harmful."

What is the most interesting about this study is that Ruan and Hsee asked the participants to rank whether they felt better, worse, or the same after the tests than before.  Across the board, the participants who were presented with uncertainty -- most of whom decided to test that uncertainty even at their own risk -- felt worse afterwards.

This is pretty curious.  We're driven to do things that could be dangerous (or at least unpleasant), and feel worse afterwards, and yet... we still do them.  It seems as if our "let's find out" attitude, so lauded in science as the wellspring of our drive to understand, might have a darker side.

So we might all be Pandora, doing what we do just to see what happens, and only regretting our decisions after the fact.  Curiosity doesn't necessarily kill the cat, at least not every time -- more often, it keeps us curious felines coming back for more.

Snap judgment

The enlightened amongst us like to think that they're free from biases and prejudice, that they treat everyone fairly, that they make no judgments about people until they have information.

Unfortunately, that's probably not true.  A study by Jonathan Freeman et al. at New York University that appeared last week in Nature Neuroscience has shown that we all are susceptible to stereotyping people based on gender and race -- and that those stereotypes are remarkably hard to eradicate.

What Freeman and his team did was to take advantage of a technique for detecting unconscious cognitive impulses.  Using sensitive mouse-tracking software, the researchers were able to monitor split-second movements of the hands of the test subjects.  Presented with a variety of photographs of faces, and a list of descriptors ("angry," "happy," "fearful," "neutral," etc.) the participants had to select the word they thought was most appropriate -- but the software was keeping track of where their hands went as soon as the photograph flashed on the screen.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What happened is that the ultimate word selection is often not what the test subject had initially moved toward.  And far from there being no correlation -- in other words, that the initial hand motion was random until the subject decided his/her actual answer -- the unconscious impulses followed a rather disturbing pattern.

Female faces were far more likely to elicit a movement toward words like "happy" or "passive" or "appeasing," regardless of the actual expression their faces showed.  Men generated movement toward "strong," "aggressive," and "dominant."  More troubling still, photographs of African American males caused people to tend toward "angry" and "hostile."

And remember, these judgments were completely independent of the actual expression of the person in the photograph.  A neutral African American male still triggered negative judgments, a frowning female face labels of passivity and compliance.

"Previous studies have shown that how we perceive a face may, in turn, influence our behavior," said Ryan Stolier, an NYU doctoral student and lead author of the research. "Our findings therefore shed light upon an important and perhaps unanticipated route through which unintended bias may influence interpersonal behavior."

"Our findings provide evidence that the stereotypes we hold can systematically alter the brain's visual representation of a face, distorting what we see to be more in line with our biased expectations," Freeman said.  "For example, many individuals have ingrained stereotypes that associate men as being more aggressive, women as being more appeasing, or Black individuals as being more hostile—though they may not endorse these stereotypes personally.  Our results suggest that these sorts of stereotypical associations can shape the basic visual processing of other people, predictably warping how the brain 'sees' a person's face."

These findings are unsettling.  A lot of us like to think that we've grown past our tendency to make snap judgments about people based on their ethnicity and gender, but it turns out that we may not be as free of them as we believe.  You have to wonder how much these sorts of tendencies play in to things like the targeting of African American males by policemen.  When an instantaneous reaction on the part of a police officer can mean the difference between life and death, there may not be time to override the unconscious jump to judgment that all of our brains make, and that the rest of us have the leisure to rethink.

So are we all bigots at heart?  The conclusion may not be as dire as all that.  The virtue is not in eliminating automatic stereotypical thinking, but in becoming conscious of it, in not letting those thoughts (which are almost certainly incorrect) go unquestioned.  It behooves us all to consider what goes on in our brains as rationally as possible, and not simply to accept whatever pops into our minds as the literal fact.

Or, as Michael Shermer put it:  "Don't believe everything you think."

The price of silence

I'm going to make a bold statement here: in any modern society, the single most critical thing for fostering intellectual advancement is freedom of speech.  Nothing else -- whether the country is run by liberals or conservatives, whether it is predominantly religious or secular, whether it's a democracy or monarchy or some other form of government -- really matters.

Freedom of speech also trumps considerations of politeness and offense.  I'm all for being compassionate and kind, and think that "don't be a dick" is a pretty good starting point for morality.  That said, it is more important that you be allowed to say what you think than it is for me to be happy about it.

It's like the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  My general opinion was that as satire goes, Charlie Hebdo was juvenile and not particularly funny.  Their crude lampooning of... well, everything... didn't even reach Mad magazine standards for humor.  But you know what?  That is entirely irrelevant.  The fact that I, or anyone else, might be offended by what they publish leaves us the easy option of not reading it.

[Nota bene:  I'm not considering true hate speech, here -- when someone makes credible material threats against someone else based on ethnic origin, nationality, sexual orientation, or religion.  But I think the distinction is clear enough that the point hardly needed to be made.]

The whole topic comes up because of the deaths in the past months of eight Bangladeshi bloggers, journalists, and writers, hacked to death with machetes because they had, in the minds of conservative Muslims, "insulted Islam."  The government has been reluctant to pursue the attackers, because this puts them in the awkward position of supporting people who are being critical of the state religion -- or who are simply outspoken atheists.

It would be unsurprising if this had the effect of silencing the remaining secular writers in the country.  Who could blame people for going into hiding if there's a very real danger that they'll be butchered if they keep speaking out?  Amazingly, there are three bloggers who have refused to be intimidated.  They were asked to make a statement to CNN, and offered the possibility of anonymity.

All three gave statements, and refused to do so anonymously.

Their statements are profiles in courage.  I want you to go back and read the original post (linked above), but the words they wrote are so inspiring, and so germane to what I discuss here on a daily basis, that I have to excerpt them.

From Imran H. Sarker, founder of the Bangladeshi Bloggers and Online Activist Network:

With the killing of one blogger after another, we seem to be heading towards total oblivion. As the world progresses under the banner of freedom of expression, we seem to be hurtling backwards. Our freedom is being silenced by the serial murder of bloggers and publishers.

From Maruf Rosul, writer for the Mukto-Mona human rights blog:

Freedom of expression in my country is dying...   Right now, our beloved Bangladesh is bleeding ceaselessly.  The land is torn asunder by the fanatics.  There is no way to disagree with the establishment or to ask questions about anything, even though freedom of speech is our constitutional right.

From Arif Jebtik, secular blogger and writer:

As they continue to tally their votes in order to hold power and influence, our mainstream politicians are the ones who are creating the debacles our country is currently facing right now. It is they who are silently broadening the path for radicalized murderers and extremists.

It's very easy, over here in the United States, to feel nothing but helpless rage at the murderers who are trying to squelch free speech.  What can we do, other than stand by and watch as secular writers are intimidated, injured, or killed?

First, visit their websites (linked above).  Show them support.  If it's possible, contribute financially.  The extremists' goal is not only directly to harm secular bloggers, but to fragment and intimidate their allies.  These people are continuing to speak out, at the risk of their lives, in order to maintain the standard of free speech that is the hallmark of civilized society.

On a personal note, as a blogger who often writes on controversial topics, I can't imagine being in that situation myself.  Would I have the courage to do what Sarker, Rosul, and Jebtik are doing, knowing that I could be ambushed and murdered in the street simply for voicing my opinion?  I don't know.  I'd like to think I would, but am profoundly grateful that I don't have to live with that threat.  However, one thing is certain: there is nothing to be gained by silence.  The price of silence is the loss of one of the most important freedoms we have.  If the extremists stop the dissenting voices, they will truly have won.

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon

When I first started writing here at Skeptophilia, back in October of 2010, one of the first people to show up in a post was one Richard C. Hoagland.

Hoagland is well known in woo-woo circles, especially anything having to do with aliens and conspiracies.  He apparently thinks that The X Files was a series of historical documentaries, and his idea of "evidence" is apparently "whatever stuff NASA comes up with that I don't understand."  Back in 2010 what brought him to my attention was his commentary on a mysterious hexagonal pattern that showed up on Saturn (it turned out to be patterns of turbulence that were replicable in the laboratory), and that Hoagland said was the result of "the same phenomenon that causes crop circles."

So it amused me no end to run across his name again, this time in an article in Inquisitr that claims that we finally have a smoking gun with regards to (what else?) aliens.  Not on Saturn, but closer to home, right up there on the Moon.  We have all of the features of an evil NASA coverup (and/or an episode of The X Files); a fired NASA database manager, allegations that Neil Armstrong himself had seen alien bases on the Moon, and a film clip of something moving in one of the craters on the far side.

[image courtesy of photographer Luc Viatour and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I'm as excited about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life as the next science nerd, but watching this film clip (which you should also do -- it's only a minute long) left me singularly unimpressed.  The narrator, however, waxes rhapsodic; he says "it may go down in the history books as one of the clearest indications that there is current -- mind you, current -- activity [on the Moon]."

Myself, I thought it looked like a video processing glitch.  All you see is a highly magnified, and thus blurry/pixillated, blob in the middle of the darkly-shadowed crater.   But the aliens and UFOs crowd don't seem to mind this; in fact, the worse the evidence, the grainier the data, the more they can write upon it whatever explanation they want.  Too much detail, and people will see that it's not what they're claiming it is.

So, grayish smudge = highly advanced alien base, apparently.  Over at Inquisitr, they certainly sound like that was enough for them:

Since then, more conspiracy theorists have investigated activity on the moon and many have found what looks to be alien cities.  The most recent coverage showing “something” emerging from a crater on the moon is surely making headlines...  Do you think this is proof that aliens exist and are living on the moon?  It certainly looks like something “living” is making itself known to the world.

I especially like the use of quotation marks around the word "living," given the fact that quotation marks are often used to indicate doubt.  It brings to mind a local restaurant that had the following dubious recommendation in an advertisement:

You'll "never forget" the meals you have here at Upstate New York's "Favorite" Family Restaurant!  

Which would be enough to discourage me.  I've had a few meals before that I've *air quotes* never forgotten, and it certainly hasn't made me want to repeat the experience.

But I digress.

So yes, Hoagland et al. are at it again, this time claiming that NASA has discovered alien life, and instead of doing what space science research agencies do (i.e. research interesting stuff), they've chosen to cover it all up.  Because that's how you get funding -- make sure that if you make cool discoveries, nobody ever finds out about it.

It's kind of discouraging, honestly, that I'm still fighting the same lunatics that I started out fighting six years ago.  You'd think that at least they could come up with a few new tropes.  I mean, the crop circles on Saturn thing at least was one I hadn't seen before.  The fact that we've returned to alien bases on the Moon just seems to indicate that the woo-woos aren't trying all that hard any more.

Tactical assault weasel

So the Large Hadron Collider is having problems again, this time because a weasel chewed through a power cord and shut down the whole operation.

I am not making this up.  Nor is this the first time that an animal has wrought havoc with the world's largest particle accelerator.  In 2009, a gull dropped a baguette on "critical electrical systems," and shorted the whole thing out, causing damage that required several months to repair.

These sorts of things have caused an immediate bout of eyebrow-raising amongst the woo-woos, who tend to have the belief that nothing happens by accident.  If oddball problems arise, then it is not simply because the world is a bizarre and chaotic place (an observation that in my opinion explains a good 90% of the weird events that happen).  It is an indication of a conspiracy, or a bad omen at the very least.

And the fact that twice, animals have shut down the LHC?  That can't be happenstance.

And as I predicted, already the wingnuts are beginning to ferment with speculation regarding the possible explanations for the recent Weasel Attack.  Here are a few selected comments from online news sources that carried the story:

• What would make a weasle [sic] eat a power cord?  There's something they're not telling us.
• This isn't the only time this has happened.  A few years ago a seagull damaged the Large Hardon [sic] collider and now its [sic] happened again.  Nature and God are trying to tell us something that we are not supposed to be doing this.  What happens when its [sic] fixed and started up and something goes wrong?  We should take this to mean that the Large Hardon [sic] collider should be shut down permanently.
• Some scientists believe that this is happening because in the future CERN has created a black hole or something else bad, and they're sending us messages back in time to stop us.  We better listen.
• We sink billions of dollars into something a weasel can destroy.  How fucking stupid are we?
• Once was a weird thing to happen.  Twice is too much to be a coincidence.

Okay, let me address a few of these points.

• Why does a weasel eating a power cord mean there's "something they're not telling us?"  As far as I can see, all it means is "a weasel ate a power cord."
• I'm sorry, but the mental image I get whenever someone writes CERN's facility as "the Large Hardon Collider" is so hilarious that I can't even stay serious long enough to consider anything else they might say.  I may have a juvenile sense of humor, but there you are.
• As far as how fucking stupid we are, as a species, I think you can find a whole lot of pieces of evidence along those lines other than building a piece of expensive and fragile equipment.  There are far better examples to choose from of how fucking stupid we are.
• When one weird thing happens, it can't be a coincidence, because a "coincidence" is when two similar events coincide.  Thus the name.
• If CERN created a black hole in the future, my guess is that there wouldn't be an Earth around at that point, much less scientists to send a Tactical Assault Weasel back in time to stop it from happening.

Doesn't this have the look of a time-traveling vandal from the future?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, Arnaud Marsollier, head of press for CERN, has said that the repairs will only take a couple of weeks.  The Large Hadron [note the spelling] Collider should be back online, and ready to smash atoms and/or end the universe as we know it, by mid-May.

Unless the scientists in the future send some other animal emissary back in time to wreck it again.  Maybe this time with a highly-trained Military Attack Wombat with a strategic banana peel.  You can see how effective that would  be.

Educating your way out of superstition

One of the trends I find the most discouraging is the increase in superstition and religious fanaticism in other parts of the world.

Not that we don't have it here in the United States, mind you.  But I like to tell myself that it's on the wane, whether that's wishful thinking or not.  In a lot of places, however, it's undeniable that violent religious mania is on the rise, and I'm not just thinking about Muslim extremists in the Middle East.  Equally worrying is the explosion in religious-motivated violence in west and central Africa, where the Christians and the Muslims seem to be trying to outdo each other in who can cause the most havoc.

We have Boko Haram in Nigeria and Chad, a Muslim extremist sect specializing in capturing young girls and selling them into what amounts to slavery.  Because that's evidently not spreading misery around effectively enough, Nigerian Christians are also being encouraged by religious leaders to seek out, harass, and kill "witches" -- some of them mere children.

The same sort of thing has been reported from Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Gambia, Uganda, and elsewhere -- and those are only the cases that made the news.  Hundreds, possibly thousands, of similar cases undoubtedly never get reported.

So it was with tremendous pleasure that I found out that there is an orphanage in Uganda that was founded specifically to combat such practices -- where orphaned children are not only given care, they are raised to respect reason and logic over fear and superstition.

Called BiZoHa, the orphanage is in Kasese District in southwestern Uganda.  It was an outgrowth of the Kasese United Humanist Association, led by humanist leader Bwambale Robert Musubaho, who has spent his whole adult life fighting the zealotry that is commonplace in his country.  "I’m so concerned with how there is massive indoctrination and dogmatism and a brainwashing of the minds of children in orphanages," Musubaho said in an interview with Inverse.  "My goal here is offer an alternative, so that when these children grow up they are in the position to think freely, to be critical of everything.  One of the reasons I was motivated to open this orphanage was to send a message to the people of Muhokya and the world that we people of non-belief also care about the well being of others, especially children."

Which is about as refreshing a message as any I can imagine.  My experience is that if you can train children to use reason to understand the universe, they are set up to approach their whole lives that way.

It hasn't been easy.  Uganda is a staunchly religious country where there is a presumption of religiosity.  Musubaho considers himself an atheist, a stance that most Ugandans cannot even imagine.  "The religious conservatives continue to wonder how one can live without a belief in a god," he said.  "I am not shy when telling them who I am as a person, and I am always proud to call myself a non-believer.  This has given me a platform to tell them that you don’t have to believe in a god or gods to be a good person."

Which, I have found, is an uphill battle even in a country where there isn't an automatic assumption that you belong to a religion.  "How can you be a moral person?" is one of the most common questions I'm asked when people find out I'm an atheist.

As if the only thing restraining people from stealing, raping, and murdering is being under threat from a deity.  Myself, I hope you're refraining from murdering me not solely on that basis.

So as always, the important thing is mutual understanding, and Musubaho is approaching the whole thing the right way.  I strongly urge you, if you are able to afford it, to contribute to BiZoHa.  This is a place where your contributions can make a direct difference for children, and foster a humanist message in a country that is in sore need of it.

And their message is spot-on.  Right in their mission statement are the words, "Rely on Reason, Logic, and Science to understand the universe and to solve life’s problems."  Which is a standard that should be followed everywhere.

Equally poignant is the sign at the entrance to BiZoHa that reads:  "Education is the Progressive Discovery of Our Own Ignorance."