30 posts from August 2007

A fundamentalist church pastor had sex with two of his teenage daughters to educate them on how to be good wives, a South Australian court has heard.

The 54-year-old man, who cannot be named, was today sentenced in the SA District Court to eight and a half years jail after pleading guilty to seven counts each of incest and unlawful sexual intercourse.

The court heard that the man had sex with his daughters for nearly a decade from 1991 when they were aged 13 and 15 at the family property.

The sex took place at various locations including in a shearer's shed, a paddock, on the back of a ute and, on one occasion, at the girls' grandparents house.

The man told the court the sex was not about fulfilling his desires but about teaching his daughters how to behave for their husbands when they eventually married, as dictated in scripture.

In sentencing, Judge David Lovell said the misrepresentation of scripture used to justify the abuse of the girls "defied belief", and that he had "hypocritically betrayed" his religion and principles.

"You said the acts were about learning about sex rather than engaging in the acts of sex," Judge Lovell said.

"I do not accept that.

"You treated your daughters as your property ... using them to satisfy and gratify your sexual urges."

Judge Lovell gave full credit for the man's guilty pleas, saying he was genuinely remorseful and had a good chance of rehabilitation as his wife and the church remained supportive.

The man will be eligible for parole in four years.

The Sydney Morning Herald

You Are 5: The Investigator

Lengthy but worth the time.

Contains representational nudity. Discretion is advised.

A little boy's natural curiosity may have turned up archeological evidence that the earliest Native Americans came from Europe, not Asia.

When UD doctoral student Darrin Lowery was 6, he and his father began collecting arrowheads and spearheads that they found along the shoreline of Tilghman Island in the Chesapeake Bay. "We found some interesting things, but we didn't know what they were," Lowery said.

These artifacts remained interesting curiosities until the late 1970s when Lowery and his father were watching "The Search for the First American," a television program about the first inhabitants of North America. During the broadcast, Dennis Stanford, chairperson of the National Museum of Natural History's anthropology department, showed a Clovis point, or fluted spearhead made of stone, used as a hunting tool at the end of the last ice age about 11,000 years ago and named after the first of its kind discovered in Clovis, N.M., in 1932. Clovis tools have rock spear points, are thin and bifacial and share "overshot" flaking characteristics that make wide, flat blades.

Delmarva Clovis Point Samples

After watching the program, Lowery said he told his father he had Clovis points in his collection, but the senior Lowery was skeptical. "My father wondered why someone during the ice age was living on what is now Tilghman Island," Lowery said. At that time, Clovis points were mostly found in the west, and anthropologists believed they were used by hunters who migrated from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering Strait.

Then, when Lowery was 13, he and his sister went to a conference in Washington, D.C., where Stanford was speaking. Lowery brought along his collection, and when he had the opportunity, he approached Stanford. Lowery said Stanford was astonished that these artifacts had been gathered in Maryland and began excavating on Tilghman Island almost immediately.

Stanford found that Tilghman Island's Clovis points were older than those found in New Mexico--about 2,000 years older. Since then, a site discovered more recently near Richmond, Va., has yielded Clovis points that may be 17,000 years old.

More at GeneticArchaeology.com

Why do we believe the things we do? Fans of evolutionary psychology might be tempted to construct an evolutionary story about how such-and-such a belief might have proven beneficial to our ancestors on the African savannah. (Freudians and others might construct other stories.) But this is usually the wrong level to focus on. Evolution has equipped us with reliable general faculties of sense and reason. This means that the specific conclusions we reach are better explained by what's justified than by what's adaptive. In other words, if a belief is justified then no further explanation is necessary. It is only blatantly unreasonable beliefs that call out for special explanation -- perhaps in terms of evolved biases, developed disorders, social pressures, or the like.
This is important because people often treat evolution (and causal explanations in general) as an argument for moral skepticism: whatever caused our beliefs, it presumably isn't the abstract moral facts themselves!

This is  hilarious.

Here's a little bit of feel good for the day!

From Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (yes, that guy):

...one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.