Crunchy goodness

So, as many of my readers and all of my friends know, I am a moral vacuum. I routinely brush those earnest young folk aside who seek my signature on their morally worthy petitions with that statement - they usually stand there blinking. I mean, what do you do? Run after the psychopath and try to reason with him? Just try it, young fellow...

Anyway, in a self-conscious attempt to make up for this, see below the fold.

Janet has done all Seed stablemates proud by attempting to get us to donate to DonorsChoose. Since it's an American thing, and I am not American, I have chosen to not get involved - if you want my suggestions as to a worthy organisation to contribute to in your official capacity as my reader, give to Austcare, Oxfam or some non-denominational and non-partisan charity that does actual good work. Whatever you do as an official reader of my blog, do not contribute to the evangelical and anti-family planning WorldVision, who, I was once told by a fieldworker who had been there, effectively kicked off the Ethiopian marxist dictatorship by their callous behavior during a famine. I also heard from a donor who travelled to the Philippines that their "child" was not seen more than once per year to get photographed and write the year's letters. Yet another worker at WorldVision themselves in Melbourne told me they engage in nasty accounting practices - sending money from one country to their sister organisations overseas so they can claim a set percentage is used overseas. All this anecdotal stuff is three decades old, but leopards rarely change their spots. Anyway, true or not, this is what my official readers should do. [Late note: in the light of criticisms of my views by reader Eamon Knight here, I make the following comment:

I cannot back up my claims with hard information as they all came to me sub rosa, back in the 70s. The opposition of WV to contraception was, I recall, public knowledge in the Philippines, where they were uncovered giving the standard line as evangelicals (it was odd because at that time the linkage between evangelicals and anti-contraception was still fairly recent). The "dry hole" comment was told to me by a worker who had left WV after finding out they had spent several tens of thousands of US dollars on refitting the office, and who found out that similar Australian WV money had been sent to the US. The business in Ethiopia was not publicised, but they helped contribute to the expulsion of western aid agencies, if they were not directly the cause of it, and of course it is silly of me to state it in such a way that they caused the revolution itself. A field worker there at the time said that the WorldVision media plane was deeply offensive to the new government, and it helped cause the ban on foreign workers.

I have no documentation for all this, but I remain deeply suspicious of WV, globally and locally. I know they once had a religious agenda. I doubt that somehow evaporated. And I was careful to say this was all anecdotal. You make of it what you wish.

Dave Strickland at Exploding Galaxies and Other Catastrophes has a great post on why philosophy of science needs to be taught to science students. And Phil Plait, in a book he is trying to get the punters to buy, actually talks about catastrophes... check this out:

The Universe is trying to kill you.

It’s nothing personal. It’s trying to kill me too. It’s trying to kill everybody.

And it doesn’t even have to try very hard.

The Universe is an incredibly hostile place for life. Virtually all of it is a vacuum, so that’s bad right from the start. Of the extremely few places that aren’t hard vacuum, most are too hot for chemical reactions to do very well – molecules get blasted apart before they can even properly form. Of the places that aren’t too hot, most are too cold – reactions happen too slowly to get interesting things to occur in the first place.

And of the very few places that aren’t in vacuum, too hot, or too cold – and we only really know of one: Earth – there are all manners of dangers lurking about. Volcanoes blast megatons of noxious chemicals into the air, spew lava for miles, and cause vast earthquakes. Tsunamis rewrite huge sections of coastlines. Ice ages come and go, mountains pop up and change the global weather system, whole continents get subducted into the glowing rock of the mantle.

And those are just the local problems. Earth still sits in the incredibly hostile environment of space, and all kinds of disasters might befall us from there – literally.

I think I may have to get a copy.

And since we're talking about psychopaths, the journal Neuroethics, edited by sometime commenter Neil Levy, has an issue on psychopathy and responsibility. As the journal is open access for the first volume, you should go check it out. If you figure out if I'm responsible for my lack of morals, let me know, hey? I may need that defence one day...