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The Morality of "The Hateful Eight"
Last night I had the opportunity to see The Hateful Eight (in its much vaunted 70mm, roadshow format, with a souvenir program and everything!). Tarantino's movies are, of course, always controversial, and this movie is no different. But as I discussed it afterwards with my companions, I realized that, despite the complaint that his movies revel in violence and nihilism, there is actually a moral core to Tarantino's work that is often overlooked.
There will be spoilers in what I am about to write, so consider yourself forewarned.
The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's homage to the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, but it's equally indebted to the drawing room mysteries of Agatha Christie. It tells the story of seven bad men and one bad woman trapped together in an isolated way station in the old west, waiting out a blizzard. Two of the men are bounty hunters. John "The Hangman" Ruth, always brings his bounties in alive to be tried and hanged. Major Marquis Warren is an African American Civil War veteran, who claims to be in possession of a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. The woman, Daisy Domergue, is Ruth's bounty. Along the way, they also pick up a man who claims to be the town's new sheriff, but who also turns out to be an unrecalcitrant racist, who once belonged to a unit of Confederate soldiers who terrorized black towns in the name of "honor in defeat." Before we even arrive at the way station, tensions are running high among these four.
Once they arrive at the way station, they meet four more men. A Mexican named Bob who claims to be running the place, a cowboy on his way to spend Christmas with his mother (did I mention this is a Christmas movie?), the local hangman, and a former Confederate general. As the snow traps them, the central question driving the action is who is there to betray whom, and who will make it out alive.
It's no spoiler to say that not everyone does. Nor is it a spoiler to note that, along the way, enormous amounts of blood will be spilled. This is after all a Quentin Tarantino movie. If he really wanted to surprise us on this score, he'd make a movie with no violence at all.
However, that having been said, the level of violence is relatively muted for the first two hours of the movie. From the early panoramic scenes of a stagecoach traversing a mountain pass to the bulk of the time our cast of characters spends trapped together in the way house, most of the movie passes with relatively little violence (however, unfortunately most of the violence that does take place in those first segments is inflicted on the one woman in the cast). The third hour more than makes up for the slow burn, however, once the masks come off and the participants in the setup are revealed.
Here is your last warning about spoilers. After this point I will be revealing elements of the movie's plot that you might rather not know.
In the last act, it's revealed that Daisy's brother, along with the Mexican, the Brit, and the Cowboy, have staged an ambush at the way station in order to rescue her. After killing everyone there except the Confederate general, they set up the scene to appear innocent and then wait for Ruth to drop his guard. Eventually he does and gets himself poisoned to death along with their stage coach driver. At this point, Marquis and the Sheriff, who have every reason to hate one another, team up to figure out who the murderers are. They quickly establish that everyone except the two of them is now in on it (Marquis had killed the general right before the intermission, after a long scene where he described his humiliation and murder of the General's son, an act of revenge for the General's misdeeds during the war -- again, these are all bad people).
As violence, murder, and chaos descend on the cabin, everyone finds themselves dead except for Marquis, the Sheriff, and Daisy. Marquis is fatally wounded, and the Sheriff is not much better off. Daisy offers him a deal: If he will kill Marquis and let her go, he can cash in the bounties on the men her brother had brought to help rescue her.
Before I talk about what happens next, it's worth talking a bit about the connection between the western tropes that Tarantino is accessing (such as those in Sam Pekinpah and Sergio Leone) and naturalistic fiction. Naturalism stressed the struggle of human beings against their environment and their nature. It tended to be morally pessimistic, and leaned toward a degree of nihilism, in that it portrayed human beings as ultimately slaves to their own natures, and to the whims of fate. Watching the movie, I could see Tarantino dipping into that well, presenting us with eight characters who were not bound by any rules of morality of any sense of transcendent value, looking only to their own survival and sacrificing whoever and whatever was necessary in order to do so. At best, perhaps, they were bound by notions of kin and blood, whether Daisy's brother's attempt at bloody rescue, the Sheriff's lingering loyalty to the values of the Old South, or Marquis's desire to see justice done for the years of slavery and repression heaped on black Americans. But even there, one could argue that those bonds of blood and kin are tenuous at best, and can break under the right stressors. If this were a work of naturalistic fiction, then when those bonds were finally dissolved for the surviving characters, all that would be left would be the desire for survival and gain.
However, that's not what happens in the bloody aftermath, once everyone is dead except for Daisy, Marquis, and the Sheriff. After listening to Daisy's offer, and perhaps even seriously considering it for a moment, he instead rejects it, on the grounds that, as the Sheriff of Red Rock, he has a duty to perform, and furthermore, he doesn't believe Daisy's threat that, if he kills her, fifteen additional men are waiting in town to kill everyone. He is about to shoot her when Marquis insists that, for the sake of John Ruth, they enact a rough form of frontier justice and hang her themselves. Thus, as both men lay dying, and despite the fact that they each have good reason to hate one another, they overcome their mutual hatred in order to see some form of justice done.
Now, perhaps I'm stretching more than a bit in seeking to skim some form of moral redemption from this grand guignol, and there is certainly much to criticize in the way that Tarantino brings this drama to a conclusion. Certainly the violence is excessive. Certainly Tarantino seems to take far too much glee in acts of casual misogyny (directed mostly toward Daisy, though she is as thoroughly despicable as every other character), and in allowing the characters to express and explore their own depravity. And certainly the light of redemption at the end of this very deep and dark tunnel that Tarantino has led us down is very dim, yet I would still argue that it is there, and that, in spite of the racism, in spite of the misogyny, and in spite of the violence, Tarantino's message in this movie is about the possibility that, even under the most brutal circumstances, we can overcome even the most entrenched differences between us in the name of some transcendent reference point. Naturalism does not rule the day. In the end, our lives exist for the sake of something more than mere survival. John Ruth may not have been much of a moral guidepost for The Hateful Eight, but he did believe in the need for justice, and his example ultimately inspired the two remaining representatives of social order in that cabin to seek to bring about what justice they could, given the limited means at their disposal.
Posted at 10:10 PM in Ethics, Film, Philosophy, Society | Permalink | Comments (0)
Once More Into The "One God" Breach Dear Friends
Benjamin Dueholm has a piece in Religion Dispatches today that adds a bit more to the ongoing Wheaton College controversy over whether Christians and Muslims worship the "same God." A few points that he raises are worth accenting. First, on the subject of how "monotheism" has traditionally functioned in Christian theology, he writes:
To some extent this may reflect the relative decline of classical philosophical monotheism in Christian discourse. Aquinas and his non-Christian influences had a common language for the nature of God—one, transcendent, necessary, eternal, not subject to change or decay, and so on. This language was at one time believed to be logically prior to revelation, and to be valid even if no revelation had confirmed it (this led thinkers of all three faiths into some risky territory with their co-religionists).
Moreover there were aspects of the revelations themselves—the "book" of which Dr. Hawkins spoke, quoting a common Islamic formula for the adherents of the monotheistic religions—that cohered in broadly shared themes. The world has an origin and a conclusion; humans are made for relationship with God; moral precepts are ordered to the knowledge and service of this God.
This philosophical language and these intertextual themes are less prominent in Christian thought today, especially among Protestants.
This point cannot be stressed enough. The theological positivism represented by way that Wheaton's administration has chosen to interpret Professor Hawkins' statements represents a failure to recognize the continuity of tradition in thinking about the question of monotheism. What Medieval Catholic theologians and Medieval Muslim scholars shared in common with one another allowed them to actually argue over the substance of their theological claims. These scholars were actually having a disagreement, whereas Wheaton College can't actually be said to be "disagreeing" with anyone because it's refusing to even engage in a substantive conversation with Islam over the nature of its differences. The best that can come -- the best -- from a religious dispute of this sort is a set of mutually dueling monologues, in which religious traditions talk past one another and refuse to recognize any common ground from which they can speak. Of course, the more common result of this refusal to engage on a set of common terms is violence, coming from both sides in the dispute. But if the goal of speech is understanding, then recognizing a common language for conversation is a necessary first step. We once had that in the conversation between Christians and Muslims, but we don't any longer.
Ben goes on to make another point:
Where Christianity's similarities with the monotheisms—whether of Greeks, Jews, or Muslims—were once central to Christian interfaith apologetics, now it is the distinctive marks that predominate. Some evangelicals have adopted a sort of slogan that Christianity is "not a religion but a relationship," fully severing the anguished familial bonds with Judaism and Islam.
In other circles it is now more common to describe religion as constituted by its practices and its distinctive narratives, diminishing the abstract notion of God to something of a cipher.
This point is even more perplexing to me coming from an evangelical institution such as Wheaton. Given the focus on conversion, and the need for apologetics, the fact that they would abandon what has been, since Paul's speech at the Areopagus, the central apologetic strategy of Christianity is really rather mind-boggling. It also raises troubling questions, as several commentators have noted, about the relationship between evangelical Christians and Jews, suggesting as it does that they do not believe that Jews worship the same God as Christians any more than Muslims do. As Daniel Kirk has noted, throwing around accusations of Marcionism is a bit of a cottage industry these days, yet I cannot be the only one to find traces of Marcionism in this implication. I was rather startled in my own exchanges over the past several days on this topic to realize that many Christians are actually quite happy to abandon the claim that Christians and Jews worship the same God, if that means that they don't have to accept that Muslims worship the same God as well.
But what this demonstrates is how the commitment to the exclusion of Muslims has led to an incoherent and tribalistic rhetoric in some evangelical circles, where evangelism simply consists of responding to every question with a Bible verse (as though that would convince anyone who didn't already hold the Bible as authoritative in some way, and as though those passages themselves don't require contextualization and interpretation), and where there is not even a scintilla of rational engagement with those with whom we disagree, or even an acknowledgment of a shared language. The problem is not, I think, that there are some people who just can't be bothered to rationally engage on these questions. There will always be people whose capacity and desire for such engagement is limited. The problem is that those who can't be bothered occupy positions of power and influence in educational institutions intended to represent the Christian intellectual tradition at its best.
For now at least, Wheaton's administration seems to have decided that it's given up on the business of education, in name of indoctrination. More's the pity for its excellent faculty and students.
Posted at 10:10 AM in Religion, Society, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
Christians, Muslims, and God Take Two
Much as I've appreciated Miroslav Volf's defense of the argument that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, one passage in his Washington Post article jumped out at me as rather dissonant, but I didn't really feel qualified to comment on it. However, it turns out that my Catholic Theological Union colleague Scott Alexander noticed the same thing, and he is qualified to comment. Here's the passage from Volf:
In addition to contesting the Trinity and the Incarnation, Muslims also contest the Christian claim that God is love — unconditional and indiscriminate love. There is no claim in Islam that God 'justifies the ungodly' and no command to love one's enemies. But these are the signature claims of the Christian faith. Take the redemption of the ungodly and the love of enemy out of the Christian faith, and you un-Christian it.
Clearly, Christians and Muslims disagree, just as Christians and Jews do, on the questions of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Trinity. These are rather basic disagreements, though profound as they are, they do not nullify the underlying argument. Christians and Muslims may be said to worship the same God, even if they disagree about the nature and attributes of that God. However, what about this business about Muslims not believing that God is Love, or that God commands us to love our enemies? Scott Alexander writes in response to these assertions:
My experience with Muslim interlocutors of various types have taught me that, although they may reject the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, Muslims have their own different but equally powerful expressions of God's love in profound divine-human intimacy.
Muslims personally testify in an abundance of ways to the immanence of God in their lives—the God whose active will is felt in the pulse of the very blood coursing through their veins. This sense of intimacy with a God who loves (His) creation is also echoed in classical interpretations of the two divine attributes attested in Islamic discourse above all others: "The One Who is (Him)self Compassion" and "The One Who Ceaselessly Acts Compassionately in (His) Relationships with All Creatures."
I discussed this point with a Muslim colleague who pointed out that the Islamic emphasis on God's rahma or "mercy" is the equivalent of Christian agape in that it is "flows eternally with no expectation of reciprocation."
Alexander then goes on to address the assertion that Muslims aren't commanded to love their enemies:
In the context of burgeoning Islamophobia in the U.S. and rhetoric which propagates the falsehoods that Islam is an inherently violent faith and that Muslims are uniquely prone to violence in the name of their religion, Volf suddenly resurrects another age-old Christian anti-Muslim polemic. He declares, by way of implicit contrast with Islam, that "love of enemy" is "the signature claim of the Christian faith."
This highly spurious declaration raises at least two questions.
The first is whether Prof. Volf is familiar with verses such as Q 41:34:
وَلَا تَسْتَوِي الْحَسَنَةُ وَلَا السَّيِّئَةُ ادْفَعْ بِالَّتِي هِيَ أَحْسَنُ فَإِذَا الَّذِي بَيْنَكَ وَبَيْنَهُ عَدَاوَةٌ كَأَنَّهُ وَلِيٌّ حَمِيمٌ
"[Given the fact that] goodness and evil are not equal, defend yourself [against evil] with what is greater in goodness, such that the one between whom and yourself there is enmity may be as though s/he had always been your intimate friend."
He goes on to ask how any religion can be said to have a singular "central claim," the absence of which would make it cease to be what it is. He then concludes:
Volf seems to imply, Wheaton and other Evangelical Christian institutions and theologians can then get about the more important business of truly loving Muslims by showing them just how flawed their understanding of the God they worship really is.
As a Christian committed to the study of Islam and Christian-Muslim dialogue, I must respectfully offer my "thanks, but no thanks" to Prof. Volf's well intentioned but ultimately troubling intervention in the controversy over Prof. Hawkins's suspension.
I'm not as willing to throw over Volf's whole argument because of these flaws, but I do recognize that they are flaws in his argument. What Volf, Alexander, and I all share is a commitment to the creation of an ongoing conversation between Christians and Muslims, which recognizes and addresses the genuine core differences between them, but also engages in an honest assessment of what we share in common. When Volf argues that "Many Christians and many Muslims worship the same God," I understand him to be saying that those of us who recognize God as the common source and originator of our distinct faiths, and affirm that God wishes us to live in peaceful community with one another, then we are worshiping the same God. Of course, by that same argument, it can be said that Christians and Muslims who desire this share more in common with one another than they each do with members of their own faith that are committed, as far too many are, to the perpetuation of violence and conflict.
Posted at 08:51 AM in Current Affairs, Political, Religion, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?
Wheaton College has made the news this week for putting a tenured professor on "administrative leave" for having asserted that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." Here's a brief account of the details via Inside Higher Ed:
Wheaton College, a Christian institution in Illinois, has suspended Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science who has attracted considerable attention for saying she would wear a hijab throughout Advent to express solidarity with Muslims. A statement from the college said the suspension was not for her wearing the hijab, but because of "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements" she has made. "Wheaton College faculty and staff make a commitment to accept and model our institution's faith foundations with integrity, compassion and theological clarity. As they participate in various causes, it is essential that faculty and staff engage in and speak about public issues in ways that faithfully represent the college's evangelical statement of faith," said the college's statement on the suspension.
The particular statement that got Professor Hawkins into trouble, as described by Christianity Today is this: ""I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book, ... And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God."
There are a number of strands of this controversy which are difficult to unravel. On the one hand, there's the question of academic freedom, in that as a faculty member at a university, Professor Hawkins should be permitted to make statements in her capacity as a professor without fear of institutional reprisal. Yet, at many religiously based colleges and universities today, those rights are to one degree or another curtailed. Yet it undermines Wheaton's credibility as the "Evangelical Harvard" as it claims to be.
Then there is the issue of Professor Hawkins' decision to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslims. Wheaton insists that this was not a factor in their decision. And perhaps it wasn't, but it's hard to disentangle her public display of solidarity from the words she used to express that solidarity. It seems that Wheaton was uncomfortable with the degree to which professor Hawkins was acting "too Muslim" for them. As Miroslav Volf noted in the Washington Post today: "When Hawkins justified her solidarity with Muslims by noting that as a Christian she worships the same God as Muslims, she committed the unpardonable sin of removing the enemy from the category of 'alien' and 'purely evil' other. She also drew attention to the simple fact that most Muslims aren't enemies."
Then there is the issue of whether Professor Hawkins' defense of her position is "too Catholic" for Wheaton, given the school's history of firing faculty for the "crime" of converting to Catholicism. But at bottom, the school's claim is that she has violated its statement of faith via her assertion that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." But why should this be controversial?
Certainly there are Christians who are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Christianity has anything at all in common with Islam, as well as those who can't comprehend how Christians and Muslims could worship the same God. However, Islam has always insisted that the God it worships is the God of Abraham, the same God attested to in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. Thus it places itself firmly in the Abrahamic religious tradition. But the fact that Muslims believe they worship the same God as Christians and Jews doesn't necessarily require that Christians believe that, does it?
Well, Muslims assert that they worship the God who was revealed to Moses and the Prophets, just as Christians and Jews do. They assert that the God they follow is one God, just as Christians and Jews do. In many respects in fact, the way that Islam conceives of God is much closer to the Jewish conception of God than the Jewish conception of God is to the Christian conception of God. If Christians and Jews worship the same God, then in what sense would Muslims not do so?
Indeed, as Professor Hawkins statement notes, this position has been officially recognized within the Catholic Church. According to Nostra Aetate:
"The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth (Cf. St. Gregory VII, Letter III, 21 to Anazir [Al-Nasir], King of Mauretania PL, 148.451A.), who has spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God's plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own. Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet, his Virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting.
Of course, as noted above, Wheaton has some issues with Catholics as well. But there is certainly nothing alien to the idea that Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship the same God. Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that we understand God in the same way. Our conceptions of God are relevantly similar, but not identical. This is again, clearest when one contrasts the Christian conception of God as one, but also triune, as eternally spirit, but also incarnate in the flesh of Jesus Christ. And in terms of salvation, as Christians we affirm that God saves humanity through Jesus Christ, while both Judaism and Islam believe that it is accomplished through God's law and covenant as attested in the Torah or the Quran. These are deep and relevant differences between these traditions, but acknowledging these differences is quite distinct from saying that each tradition is not, in its own way, seeking to follow the same God.
What's more, if, as many Christians affirm, all truth is one, then anyone seeking to faithfully follow God, whatever tradition they embrace, is following the same God. This position, which was powerfully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in his book The Last Battle implies that one can be mistaken in the substance of one's belief, while still truly following the true God. As Volf states:
All Christians don't worship the same God, and all Muslims don't worship the same God. But I think that Muslims and Christians who embrace the normative traditions of their faith refer to the same object, to the same Being, when they pray, when they worship, when they talk about God. The referent is the same. The description of God is partly different.
A key problem in understanding what is going on at Wheaton has to do with how they understand what it means to "do theology." This is a perennial problem within the evangelical community, and one that I've encountered in conversations with conservative Christians time and again. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: from the conservative Christian perspective, theology is not something that takes place in the context of a particular time and place. It is not a response to the revelation of God. It is not an attempt to engage in an understanding of the tradition to which we belong. Rather, conservative evangelical theology is about obedience to and adherence to authoritative texts, whether those texts from the Bible, particular creeds and confessions, or -- as in this case -- your school's statement of faith. This "received theology," is then declared to represent an uncrossable line, and the decision about who has or has not crossed that line winds up residing with authoritative bodies, like church bodies or university administrations. It constitutes a form of dogmatic theological positivism which does not allow allow any room for actual response to the contextual arena in which God is actually live and moving in the lives of believers.
Contextual theology, by contrast, recognizes that theological work is an ongoing and imperfect project, which takes place in the life of the church, in conversation with tradition and scripture, but always in light of the current situation in which it is being done. What it means to think contextually is to ask the question, as James Gustafson has put it: "What is God enabling and requiring us to do here and now?" This requires us to be open to the leading of God into new situations, to be willing to take risks on behalf of our faith in God, and to act confidently in God's grace when we stumble and fall. While the received, dogmatic theology of conservative evangelicalism is rooted in fear -- specifically fear that God will abandon us if we affirm the wrong propositions about the divine nature -- contextual theology reaches out to new situations in love, acting confidently in the knowledge that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). Professor Hawkins was engaged in a contextual theology, rooted in love for her Muslim brothers and sisters, and in recognition that, as the God of Jesus Christ was the God of Abraham, both Christians and Muslims must worship the same God. Her response wasn't a rejection of Wheaton's Statement of Faith, but it also wasn't simply a dogmatic adherence to it. Rather, it was a contextualization of that statement in light of what God is enabling and requiring of us today.
In the final analysis, there is no good reason for Christians to assert that Muslims follow any other God than the one God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, even though they do not recognize our account of that revelation, or what we understand it to be telling us about God. What Wheaton has done is shameful, and as Volf notes, has more to do with Professor Hawkins' attempt to "de-other" Muslims, than with any matter of substance having to do with Christian faith or Wheaton's Statement of Faith. Professor Hawkins has done an admirable thing, and by doing so she has drawn attention to the continuing relevance of this key theological question to the ongoing relationship between Christians and Muslims in the United States. More's the pity that there are plenty of Christians around, happily condemning others to hell, who refuse to see the commonality between us and our Muslim brothers and sisters.
Note: This essay has been updated and expanded.
Posted at 09:49 AM in Academic, Current Affairs, Religion, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
Colorado Springs, San Bernardino, and Why We Keep Ending Up Here
Another day, another mass gun murder in the United States. Of course, we've been here before, many times. Each time, we arrive where we started, but, contrary to T. S. Eliot's poem, we continually fail to know the place for the first time. Rather, our positions get further entrenched, our arguments more vitriolic, nothing changes, and we simply await the next mass shooting.
In the case of the Colorado Springs shooting at Planned Parenthood, we know that the perpetrator was a right wing Christian anti-abortion activist (despite the shameful attempts of some politicians to pretend otherwise), while in the case of the San Bernardino shooting, it is increasingly apparent that the perpetrators were jihadists. In other cases, the shooters have been right wing racists (as in South Carolina), or deranged psychotics (as in Arizona, and Connecticut, and Boulder, etc., etc., etc.). The motives are not always clear, and for the ones who are legitimately crazy, the question of motivation may not really be all that relevant. But in the case of these last two shootings, it was clear that both sets of perpetrators were motivated by religious zealotry and violent fanaticism. In both cases, it's clear that they were acts of religio-political terrorism (although, it's interesting to note, that the FBI has quickly labeled the San Bernardino shooters -- Muslims, with Middle Eastern last names -- as terrorists, while they have yet to do so in the case of the white, Christian Colorado Springs shooter).
And, if we want to widen the lens a bit, we can include the regular acts of violence that take place around the United States that don't qualify as "mass shootings" but still demonstrate the exceptional rate of gun homicide in the United States -- Chicago, Baltimore, every major urban area, and the many less publicized examples that take place in predominantly white, rural areas. We can add to that the many, many examples of people who inadvertently mishandle legally owned firearms and accidentally kill people every day, up to and including toddlers who manage to get their hands on mom's gun and shoot her in the store. It is -- there is no better word for it -- madness.
Given the prevalence of this kind of violence in the United States, why is it that we keep winding up back here at the same place? Another act of gun violence, another mass shooting, and yet nothing is done. The easy answer is that the National Rifle Association as so corrupted American politics on this issue that we have become completely incapable of addressing it. But the issue is more complicated than that. The NRA is able to corrupt politics to the degree that it does because it has so many willing dupes in American gun culture who are totally and completely incapable of recognizing a) that guns are a genuine cause of massive harm in the United States, b) that there are policies that can be implemented to address that and c) those policies need not in any meaningful way impair their much-vaunted "right to bear arms."
Part of this, as an article at Vox points out, has to do with the ideological mindset of conservatives in the United States who see every act of gun violence, not as a reason to limit gun possession, but as a reason to expand it. This is the showdown at the OK Corral approach to gun regulation. They believe, apparently sincerely, that if only more people had, and openly carried their guns, shooters would be less likely to engage in gun violence. This is, the article notes deeply rooted in a particular psychological state that is impervious, or at least resistant, to counter-argument:
To our gun owner, another mass shooting is not an argument for getting rid of guns. It's a confirmation of his every instinct, another sign of moral and societal decay, another reason to arm himself and defend what he's got left.
You can tell him about Canada and Australia until you're blue in the face — the lower rate of gun deaths, the hunting exemptions, the seemingly intact freedoms. You can cite high popular support for restrictions on gun and ammunition sales. You can tell him that not every incremental tightening of standards is a slippery slope, that no one wants to confiscate his guns.
But you're just another self-righteous liberal on another self-righteous crusade, too blind or stupid to see how governments always use people like you to disarm their citizenry. You've taken enough — of his taxes, his freedoms, his culture. He won't give you any more.
So, incidents of gun violence become part and parcel of the argument that gun regulation itself doesn't work. This meme emerged quickly in the wake of San Bernardino, as at least one of my more pro-gun Facebook friends posted something suggesting that, since this happened in California, which has strict state-wide gun laws, this demonstrates that strict gun laws don't work. So the only alternative is to loosen gun restrictions so that everyone can carry all the guns they want, openly and in public if they so desire.
Of course, in the gang-ridden areas of Chicago, where I live, there are plenty of guns, and everyone knows who has them. Far from reducing gun violence there, it simply leads to the kind of in-group versus out-group violence that characterizes gang culture. Gun violence in this context begets more gun violence, and it's not clear what the way out of the cycle of violence might be except to break it entirely (an argument that Spike Lee is attempting to make in a novel Aristophanean way in his latest film Chi-Raq). The solution here is clearly not more guns. We've got plenty of guns. That's the problem.
At the same time, it's necessary to state as clearly as possible the response to these conservative objections to increased gun violence, not because it will change their minds (as the Vox article notes, there is already ample argument to change the mind of anyone who cares to pay attention, if their minds are genuinely open, but they aren't). It's important to state the response so that we are without excuse. So that it's clear that we know the difference between argument and obfuscation, and that we can tell the difference between the corrupted pseudo-argument of the pro-gun lobby and its willing dupes and the actual construction of sound public policy. And in that regard, there are a few things that bear repeating.
First, the goal of gun regulation is not and has never been to take guns away from people who want to use them peacefully for purposes of hunting, or even self-defense. Now, for my part, I think it's abjectly stupid to own a gun. I mean, it's really, really stupid, given that your gun is 17-times more likely to kill someone in your own household than it is to ever protect you from an intruder.* If it were legal to own a tiger, and if it were affordable to own a tiger, and if I had many friends who told me repeatedly that it was my right to own a tiger, and that in fact a tiger could protect me from my enemies, and that owning a tiger was incredibly fun and if only I owned one I would see how awesome and necessary tiger ownership was, I would still not wish to own a tiger, because it's quite clear to me that a tiger is vastly more likely to eat one of my children than it will ever be to protect them. Owning a tiger is stupid, even if you had a right to own one. That's how I feel about guns. Nevertheless, no one wants to pass laws that take guns from the hands of people who know how to use them responsibly (just like no one wants to take Siegfried and Roy's tigers, even after Roy got mauled by one of them).
The goal has never been confiscation, but regulation (and, after all, even a Second Amendment purist can't evade the fact that the phrase "well-regulated" is right there in the text of the Second Amendment). The goal is to keep guns away from those who shouldn't have them. However, the trend that I've noticed since the gun-control debate really re-emerged in earnest in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre is the personalization of the anti-gun control argument. At least, among the people I've been in conversation with, or who have placed anti-gun control memes on their Facebook pages, there is an intense sense that gun owners tout court are being blamed for gun violence. So what I read is a great deal of defensiveness. "I've never harmed anyone with my gun, so why do you want to take it from me?" Leaving aside the fact that no one wants to take their guns, the fact is that there is nothing personal about this. It's not about viewing gun-owners as a group as being morally suspect, it's about ensuring that a potentially dangerous item is secured from those who would abuse it.
Another analogy, similar to the tiger one above. Let's say I was a nuclear physicist. A good, moral, peaceful nuclear physicist, who worked with radioactive isotopes. Assume that I wanted to do an experiment that required access to plutonium. As it turns out, plutonium is incredibly difficult to acquire. And I can't help but think that's a good thing. It's not a moral accusation of me as a nuclear physicist that I have to go through massive background and security checks in order to acquire plutonium. On the contrary, it's a recognition that, no matter how moral I am, the possibility of harm from misuse of plutonium is so great that even very moral people have to be very thoroughly screened in order to have access to it. It would be irresponsible if the Nuclear Regulatory Agency simply gave out plutonium to everyone who asked for it. Because it only takes one lunatic with a bit of plutonium to do enormous damage.
Even if I am a good, moral, and peaceful nuclear physicist, in fact especially if I am a good, moral, peaceful nuclear physicist, I should welcome that kind of scrutiny, not only because I don't want anything bad to happen through the misuse of plutonium, but because I recognize that if something bad did happen that as a nuclear physicist, I could be accused of culpability. In fact, if I were a nuclear physicist who lobbied strongly against the regulation of plutonium, I very arguably would be culpable if someone slipped through the very tattered regulatory safety net I had helped create. I think that this is certainly true by extension of the gun lobby, and the NRA in particular, and I think it is arguably also true of the many gun owners who give them moral support through their money and their resistance to regulation.
However, there is still the matter of the argument that statewide gun regulations such as those in California are actually ineffective as a means of controlling gun violence. Again, I'm reminded of an Onion headline that encapsulates the substance of this argument quite well: "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens." If there were truly no way to prevent this kind of thing, then we'd see it happening all the time in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other modern industrialized countries. But we don't, at least not with the kind of regularity that it happens here. (Pointing to the recent attacks in Paris doesn't get you very far, since, horrid as they were, they were notable among other things for their rarity). So then, what is the response to people who point to ineffective gun laws?
The most direct answer is to agree: Gun laws of the kind we currently have are not effective, precisely because they only function on the state level. If the laws in California are strict, that's alright, because Nevada and Idaho aren't all that far away and the gun laws are much laxer there. Similarly, the very strict gun laws in Chicago are mocked given the degree of gun crime we experience. But anyone who is familiar with the city knows that it's the easiest thing on earth to get from Chicago to Indiana -- where the gun laws are much looser -- and back again in a couple of hours. State and local gun laws are ultimately ineffective precisely because they are not widely replicated in other states. Pro-gun advocates point to this as evidence that gun laws per se don't work. But this is simply fallacious: Poorly implemented local gun laws don't work, but a national law, which sought to both regulate guns at the point of purchase and also reduce the overall supply of guns available throughout the country, would be far more effective at controlling gun violence. The problem is one of easy availability. The solution is to make that availability much more difficult, both by increasing regulatory barriers (more and better background checks, longer waiting periods, etc.) and by decreasing the overall supply (through gun-buy back programs and requiring gun manufacturers and sellers to stop selling certain items, like extended magazines and armor piercing bullets). All by themselves these two policies (which would of course require a great deal more fleshing out than I can do here before they became law) would drastically reduce the possibility of gun violence, without severely restricting the rights of existing gun owners.
I would add another policy, which would undoubtedly be more controversial, but which shouldn't be: I would require a thorough psychological screening before anyone would be permitted to purchase a gun. To buy or possess a gun legally, you should be required to demonstrate to a competent professional that you are not a danger to yourself or others. It's been said repeatedly that the real problem of gun violence is largely a mental health problem. And while I don't think that's the entirety of the story, I am willing to concede that a non-trivial proportion of gun violence is perpetrated by people who are mentally ill. So, how to prevent it? Easily -- require all gun owners to undergo mental health screening. The goal here is not to stigmatize either gun owners or the mentally ill, but to recognize that some mentally ill people, given access to a gun, have the potential to use them violently, and the question must be how we keep the one from the other. Anyone want to take bets on how ready the NRA is to get behind this idea, despite their repeated claims that we should be concentrating on the mental health aspect of these attacks?
I could say a great deal more, but I'll leave it there for now. I will only add two things: First, I'm not claiming that this is an infallible path to the elimination of all gun crime. Certainly there will always bee the possibility that some gun crime will take place. But the goal is to reduce it to the degree that it becomes a rare and horrifying event, rather than the regular news item that it is now. Second, I have not yet addressed the other central aspect of these last two attacks, specifically the religious dimension. That conversation will have to wait for a subsequent post, which I hope to write in the next couple of days, time and jet lag permitting.
*Attempting to verify this statistic, I found studies suggesting anywhere from an 11-fold to a 43-fold increase in the likelihood of someone other than an intruder being killed by a firearm in the home. Difference in studies suggest different methodologies and data sets, but they all pain in the same direction: You are far more likely to see someone in your own home killed with your gun then you ever are to use it for protection. One of the best known studies suggests a factor as high as 43-times more likely.
Posted at 11:16 PM in Current Affairs, Ethics, Gun Control, Political, Society | Permalink | Comments (0)
Religion, Violence, and Rene Girard
Rene Girard, the anthropologist and social critic, died shortly before last month's Paris bombings. Today Religion Dispatches reflects on his life and legacy. A key paragraph on the relationship between religion and violence:
For over three decades, scholars of religion have drawn on Girard to inform their work. Christian theologians and New Testament scholars have found Girard's insights on the scapegoat mechanism of special salience. Girard has argued that myths attest to the scapegoat mechanism from the perspective of persecutors: the victim of mob violence is guilty. By contrast, the Gospels break with myth to present the victim as innocent. Living at a time of social crisis, Jesus is the victim of mob action; but his innocence, attested to by the Gospels, breaks apart the scapegoat mechanism, forever shaking the foundations of a culture built on sacrifice. Even scholars who disagree with Girard about his insights attest to his influence on their work; as a consequence, Girard has had a pervasive impact, especially on scholars who want to understand the dynamics of ritual, the meaning of myth, the origins and history of violence, and the relationship between violence and religion.
For my part, I've always appreciated Giard's ability to interpret and translate the anthropological substance of religious ideas in creative and socially constructive ways. His work has also be extremely useful to me in understanding and interpreting the idea of the atonement in Christian theology. He will be missed.
Posted at 01:44 PM in Academic, Philosophy, Religion, Society, Theology | Permalink | Comments (0)
Are Religious Children More Selfish?
The recent study on the relative altruism of religious and non-religious children has come in for a bit of criticism since it was released a few months ago, to much fanfare. Initially the reporting on the issue was somewhat breathless (and, among my atheist Facebook friends, kind of gleeful). At the time, I withheld judgment, on the premise that a) pretty quickly some criticisms would emerge and that b) regardless, there's not a lot you can determine on the basis of a single study.
Sure enough, criticism began to emerge relatively quickly, including claims that the study overstates the statistical variance between its religious and non-religious subjects, and that its methodology is unclear. Here, for example, is one critique:
P-values are rotten evidence for anything (click here to learn), (2) Regression is deeply flawed and not what you think (click here, here, or here to learn), (3) Probability models do not prove cause (click here, (4) Asinine studies like this are common (click here) or here). And don't forget that altruism was not measured, but that kids sticking stickers in envelopes was. How much influence did the researchers have, especially with the younger kids? I mean, did kids stick stickers because they wanted to prove to the whitecoat they were compliant or because they wanted to be liked or because they wanted to share? Altruism forsooth!
Similarly, critics have noted that the central terms being measured in the article -- "religion" and "altruism" -- are themselves notoriously difficult to define. Added to that, there were a great many variables that the researchers did not control for. And again, the researchers apparently did not account for the fact that the bulk of their identified "non-religious" children were all from China:
How do I know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here's how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were "other."
By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool.
So what the study is picking up on as "non-religiousness" may be better described as a quality of the particular sample pool that was predominantly non-religious, that is, Chinese children from the Guangzhou province.
None of this would really matter that much -- because again, you can't determine much from one study under any circumstances -- if the authors did not try to draw sweeping conclusions from it:
"Nonreligious children are more generous," explained a headline at Science magazine. "It's not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person," Decety told Forbes. "Secularity—like having your own laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books—is better for everybody." Forbes headlined the article "Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists." (Decety tweeted a link to the piece). In the Forbes interview, Decety cautioned that there would be naysayers, at least among the anti-science crowd. "My guess is they're just going to deny what I did—they don't want science, they don't believe in evolution, they don't want Darwin to be taught in schools."
See. Not only are non-religious children more generous, but secularity (defined, helpfully as "reason" over against "holy books") is "better for everybody." And, if you don't believe that this study proves that, it's not because the study is flawed, but because you're the kind of person who doesn't believe in science and wants to ban evolution.
Most of what I've gleaned here comes from an article at Religion Dispatches' The Cubit blog, which deals with issues at the intersection of religion and science. It goes over many of the problems with the study. But I want to stress that I think that the study is suggestive and bears follow up. It could very well be that a better constructed study, that does a better job accounting for independent variables, that has a clearer methodology, a larger sample size, and a more carefully defined central question, could reaffirm what this study does. It actually wouldn't surprise me much, because I don't think that religion of any kind necessarily makes a person better, or that its absence necessarily makes one worse. Religion is one factor among many in the construction of morality, and I'm Augustinian enough to know that sin lurks even in the hearts of the most pious. Yet, that said, I can't help but appreciate the conclusion of the Cubit writer, who writes:
In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and z formulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full-tilt in the direction of more and more grand theories of The Role of Religion in All Humanity.
From my semi-neutral post as a journalist who covers both fields, I'd like to suggest that the social and evolutionary psychologists are more full-of-shit than the humanists. The fact that someone like Decety feels comfortable taking his sticker games and making public comments about the fundamental nature of morality and secularity feels slightly surreal. (It's not just in Forbes interviews. Here's the final line of the paper: "More generally, [our findings] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite.")
The problem is not that Decety and his colleagues' results aren't interesting, or even that they're wrong—for all I know, all the world over, kids who engage more with certain ritual experiences are less kind to their peers.
The problem is that, absent robust evidence for his generalizations about the Nature of all Christians and Muslims, it is difficult to tell where Decety's grand claims emerge from actual evidence, and where they may owe a debt to politicized beliefs about how religion in general, or specific religious traditions (i.e. Islam), motivate people to do bad things.
Posted at 01:27 PM in Academic, Ethics, Religion, Science, Society | Permalink | Comments (0)


Jones, Smith and Konadu to lead Mount Vernon while role players settle in.
The conclusion of Monday's practice included confusion, frustration and a conditioning penalty for the Mount Vernon boys basketball team. Head coach Alfonso Smith watched quietly as players griped, ran out of position and missed an occasional layup.
Sound like a team in disarray? Don't worry, Mount Vernon fans. Smith is still the reigning co-Northern Region Coach of the Year and the Majors are still considered a front runner to repeat as National District champion. The adversity was all part of a learning experience as the team went through the "Liberty" layup drill for the first time this season.
The drill involves players passing and weaving their way to layups at each end of the court. Smith's goal for the Majors was 52 layups in 5 minutes. At first, the uncertainty of some led to the voicing of displeasure by others. But as time went by, the Majors started to work things out and the drill started to flow.
For the most part, Smith stood back and let his players work out their problems . In the end, the team fell eight layups short of its goal, and had to run eight baselines. But in long term, some additional cardio would be a small price to pay for improved communication skills.
Mount Vernon is a talented group. If the Majors can maintain their composure and not beat themselves, there's no telling how far they could go.
"WHAT WE TRY to do is put them in a situation sometimes where we know that they're going to struggle a little bit," Smith said. "I try to give as little guidance [as possible] because I want some of our leaders to [step up]. … [I] just let them work through it [and] allow the frustration to happen. As a coach, part of you wants to stop the drill when you notice that they're a little frustrated. But the reality is we're going to be in battles throughout the season where there's going to be frustration and we're going to have to work through it as a team."
Junior guard Jesse Konadu (5-foot-9) realizes the benefit of players working through their on-court troubles.
"Once game time starts, the coach is not going to be there to walk us through step by step," he said. "It was good to get [the experience] through practice."
Konadu, a two-year starter, teams up with senior Robert Smith (5-10), a three-year starter, to give the Majors an experienced backcourt. Each received honorable mention all-district accolades last season. Mount Vernon also returns National District Player of the Year Skylar Jones, a 6-4 forward who earlier this month signed with Division I Niagara.
"We're the three that have to lead this team," Smith said, "because we have the most experience on this team. [Our teammates are] going to look to us for help during the game."
NOW THE MAJORS have to establish where everyone else fits into the mix.
"Having your starting backcourt returning, as a coach, you feel good about that," Smith said. "Having a Division I player like Skylar Jones, you feel good about that. The key for us is really going to be how well some of the guys step into their roles."
Senior Dylan Bischoff (6-4) will start at center for the Majors during his first varsity season. Smith said Bischoff focused on playing soccer last season. Junior Logan Beougher (6-2) and his solid, 230-pound frame will provide the Majors with additional size inside.
Senior forward Sean Stewart (6-2) and senior guard Stann Hazlewood (5-9) will have increased roles this season.
While several Majors will make an impact, how Jones, the district Defensive Player of the Year last season, handles a new set of circumstances could have a lot to do with how well the Majors fare this season.
"He has to lead in a much bigger way than he's had to in the past," Smith said of the Jones. "The guys on the team are watching what he does. A lot of people in the region know [him] … on a first-name basis, so the expectations are going to be pretty high. He's going to get a lot of attention that he didn't get last year, where teams are going to gameplan for him. So he really [needs] to enlarge his teammates around him to make sure if teams key on him that we have so many other parts that can step up and do what needs to be done."
Mount Vernon went undefeated in district play last season and will likely get every opponent's toughest effort. Also, Hayfield, which knocked the Majors out of the regional tournament on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer, joined the National District this season and figures to challenge Mount Vernon for the title.
"In my four years playing on the varsity, we've never beat Hayfield," Jones said. "Now that they're in our district, it's even more motivation to go out there and beat them."
Mount Vernon opens its season Dec. 2 against Paul VI at Woodson. The Majors' home opener is Dec. 5 against West Potomac.


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Emergency Services Dispatcher I
Recruitment #18-1882-01
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$30.17 - $36.10/hour; $62,753.60 - $75,088.00/year
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Elaine Lemi
READ THIS ENTIRE BULLETIN FOR INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO REAPPLY FOR THIS RECRUITMENT
THIS IS A REOPENING OF AN EXISITING EXAMINATION. If you have previously applied or started an application for the Emergency Services Dispatcher I, Examination #18-1882-01, please contact the examination analyst, Elaine Lemi, at elaine.lemi@acgov.org to reapply. In order to reapply, you must contact the analyst to have your previous application released back to you.
The scores and dispositions of candidates for this examination will be merged with previous exam participants. If you previously submitted an application and choose to reapply, your new score/disposition will replace your current disposition.
Applications must be in the possession of the Human Resource Services Department by 5:00 p.m. on the Last Day for Filing. Applications will only be accepted on-line.
ABOUT THE ALAMEDA COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE
The Alameda County Sheriff's Office is a full service law enforcement agency accredited through the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) for its law enforcement services, its Regional Training Center, and its Dispatch Unit; the American Correctional Association (ACA) for its Detentions and Corrections Division; the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors Laboratory Accreditation Board for its Crime Lab; the Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board for its Explosive Ordinance Unit. Additionally, the agency's health care provider, Well Path, has experience working with the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC).
The Sheriff's Office has a current budget of approximately $444 million and has over 1600 authorized positions, including in excess of 1000 sworn personnel. The agency's Chief Executive Officer is Sheriff / Coroner Gregory J. Ahern, who is assisted in the operation of the agency by Undersheriff Richard T. Lucia, Assistant Sheriff's Casey Nice and Dennis Houghtelling.
The Sheriff of Alameda County is responsible for a vast array of tasks and duties, including the following:
Providing security to the Consolidated Superior Courts
Operating the Coroner's Bureau
Operating a full service criminalistics laboratory
Performing Civil Process
Operating a County Jail (Santa Rita)
Operating the County Office of Emergency Services
Providing patrol and investigative services to the unincorporated areas of Alameda County
Pursuant to contractual agreements, providing patrol and investigative services to the City of Dublin, Peralta Community College District, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum complex, Oakland International Airport, Highland County Hospital, Social Services, and to the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District
Conducting a basic academy pursuant to Police Officer Standards and Training (P.O.S.T.) requirements. [Sheriff's Academy Web Site]
Providing Fish and Game enforcement
Project Director of the Narcotics Task Force
Serving as the Executive Director of the Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Task Force
Operating a Marine Patrol Unit in the San Francisco Bay waters.
For more detailed information about the agency, visit: Alameda County Sheriff's Office
Under close supervision, to receive training in public safety, emergency complaint taking and radio dispatching methods and techniques; to dispatch personnel and equipment for one or more public safety operations, including Sheriff's Patrol, Fire, Medical, Animal Control Services, and Local Government; and to perform related work as required. This is an entry-level classification in the Dispatcher series which is flexibly staffed to the class of Emergency Services Dispatcher II. Emergency Services Dispatcher I incumbents work in the Sheriff's Office Emergency Services Dispatch Center and receive on-the-job training with respect to the performance of public safety, emergency complaint taking, radio dispatching methods and techniques. Incumbents will dispatch personnel and equipment for one or more public safety operations, including Sheriff's Patrol, Fire, Medical, Animal Control Services and Local Government. After satisfactory completion of the training period, employees are expected to qualify for appointment to the next higher class of Emergency Services Dispatcher II.
For more detailed information about the job classification, visit: Emergency Services Dispatcher I (#1882)
Either I
The equivalent of six months of experience in the class of Clerk II or an equivalent or higher level class in the Alameda County classified service. (Non-classified includes District Attorney's Office, Hospital Authority, and the Consolidated Courts.) (Experience must have included public contact.)
Or II
The equivalent of six months of general clerical experience that involved public contact and completion of a public safety dispatch training course from an accredited school.
Or III
The equivalent of six months of general dispatching experience (such as ambulance, service vehicles, etc.).
Or IV
The equivalent of one year of general clerical experience that involved public contact.
1. Hearing must be normal in each ear.
2. Ability to type 40 words per minute.
3. A thorough background investigation will be made of all prospective candidates including a psychological exam.
NOTE: The Civil Service Commission may modify the above Minimum Qualifications in the announcement of an examination.
The most suitably qualified candidates will possess the following competencies:
• The highways, main streets, major buildings and geography of Alameda County.
• Simple record keeping.
• Read, write and alphabetize.
• Follow written and oral instructions.
• Retain oral information.
• Learn the operation of two-way radio and telephone communications equipment.
• Speak clearly and concisely in a well-modulated voice.
• Learn to dispatch public safety equipment in an effective manner.
• Deal tactfully with the public.
• React with sound judgment under stress and emergency situations while doing several tasks simultaneously.
• Learn statutes, rules and regulations applicable to communications.
• Learn to operate electronic data terminals.
• Listen and clarify incoming calls to extract pertinent information.
• Write detailed reports.
• Condense a message into a clear written passage.
EXAMINATION COMPONENTS
THE EXAMINATION WILL CONSIST OF THE FOLLOWING STEPS:
Applications will be reviewed to determine those candidates that meet the minimum qualifications for the position.
Candidates that meet the minimum qualifications for the position will be invited to take a performance examination which is the CritiCall test. CritiCall is a software that tests job-related knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies critical for public safety dispatchers. The following are some of the areas CritiCall will assess (please note, the following is just an example of areas CritiCall tests for and is not necessarily the components candidates will be tested on): reasoning, stress tolerance, decision making & judgment, multitasking, prioritization, map reading, memory recall, comprehension, probability, data entry and decision-making. For more information regarding the CritiCall test, applicants may visit their website at: http://criticall911.com/. The performance examination will comprise of 100% of the candidate's final score.
Candidates that pass the CritiCall performance examination will be put on a list of candidates that are eligible to be referred to a background investigation, the final step in the examination process.
CANDIDATES MUST ATTAIN A QUALIFYING RATING ON EACH PORTION OF THIS EXAMINATION.
We reserve the right to make changes to the announced examination components.
Alameda County utilizes a Civil Service Selection System founded on merit. Such a system is competitive and based on broad recruitment efforts and equal opportunity for qualified applicants to test in an examination process designed to determine the qualifications, fitness and ability of competitors to perform duties of the vacant position. Many of our recruitments are targeted and specific to the needs of a current vacant position, in which case, the eligible list may be exclusively used for that current vacant position. Other recruitments may be more broadly used for both current and future vacancies, or for other alternate jobs with comparable scopes of work.
To learn more about our recruitment and selection process, please visit the "What You Need To Know" section of our website: www.acgov.org/hrs.
Selection Plan
Applicants will be informed via email with reasonable notice in advance of any examination process which will require their attendance. The following dates are tentative and subject to change based on the needs of the Agency:
TENTATIVE SELECTION PLAN
Deadline for Filing:
Tuesday, September 3, 2019, at 5:00 PM
Review of Applications for Minimum Qualifications:
Typing & CritiCall Performance Test
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO MAKE CHANGES TO THE ANNOUNCED RECRUITMENT & SELECTION PLAN
Alameda County and the Human Resource Services Department will make reasonable efforts in the examination and/or selection process to accommodate qualified individuals with disabilities and/or medical conditions in accordance/compliance with the State Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), Federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Alameda County's Reasonable Accommodation Policy and applicable statutes. To request an accommodation due to a disability/medical condition during this or other phases of the examination/selection process, please contact the assigned Human Resources Representative listed on the job announcement before the last date of filing. Alameda County requires applicants to provide supporting documentation to substantiate a request for reasonable accommodation. In order to qualify for a reasonable accommodation, applicants must have a disability/medical condition pursuant to the ADA, FEHA and applicable statutes.
For more information regarding our Reasonable Accommodation procedures, please visit our website: www.acgov.org/hrs
Alameda County offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package that affords wide-ranging health care options to meet the different needs of a diverse workforce and their families. We also sponsor many different employee discount, fitness and health screening programs focused on overall well being. These benefits include but are not limited to*:
For your Health & Well-Being
Medical – HMO & PPO Plans
Dental – HMO & PPO Plans
Vision or Vision Reimbursement
Share the Savings
Basic Life Insurance
Supplemental Life Insurance (with optional dependent coverage for eligible employees)
County Allowance Credit
Flexible Spending Accounts - Health FSA, Dependent Care and Adoption Assistance
Short-Term Disability Insurance
Voluntary Benefits - Accident Insurance, Critical Illness, Hospital Indemnity and Legal Services
For your Financial Future
Retirement Plan - (Defined Benefit Pension Plan)
Deferred Compensation Plan (457 Plan or Roth Plan)
For your Work/Life Balance
11 paid holidays
Floating Holidays
Vacation and sick leave accrual
Vacation purchase program
Catastrophic Sick Leave
Employee Mortgage Loan Program
Group Auto/Home Insurance
Commuter Benefits Program
Employee Wellness Program (e.g. At Work Fitness, Incentive Based Programs, Gym Membership Discounts)
Employee Discount Program (e.g. theme parks, cell phone, etc.)
1st United Services Credit Union
*Eligibility is determined by Alameda County and offerings may vary by collective bargaining agreement. This provides a brief summary of the benefits offered and can be subject to change.
All notices related to County recruitments for which you have applied will be sent/delivered via email. Please add @acgov.org and alamedacountyHR@acgov.org as accepted addresses to any email blocking or spam filtering program you may use. If you do not do this, your email blocking or spam filtering program may block receipt of the notices regarding your application for recruitments. You are also strongly advised to regularly log into your County of Alameda online application account to check for notices that may have been sent to you. All email notices that will be sent to you will also be kept in your personal online application account. You will be able to view all of your notices in your online application account by clicking on the "My applications" button on the Current Job Openings page.
Please take the steps recommended above to ensure you do not miss any notices about a recruitment for which you have applied. The County of Alameda is not responsible for notices that are not read, received or accessed by any applicant for a County recruitment.
NOTE: All notices are generated through an automated email notification system. Replies to the email box alamedacountyHR@acgov.org are routed to an unmonitored mailbox. All notices are generated through an automated email notification system. Replies to the email box are routed to an unmonitored mailbox. If you have questions please go to our website at www.acgov.org/hrs. You may also contact the Human Resources Analyst listed on the job announcement for the recruitment for which you have applied.
Elaine Lemi | Human Resources Analyst
Human Resource Services, County of Alameda
(510) 272-6434 | elaine.lemi@acgov.org
Alameda County has a diverse workforce, that is representative of the communities we serve, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment are based on merit, competence, performance and business need. Alameda County does not discriminate in employment on the basis of, race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factors protected under federal, state and local law. Alameda County celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive, and welcoming workplace environment.
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Flower – Interview with Johnny Stimson
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Critical Acclaim – Avenged Sevenfold
rockyourlyrics November 7, 2014
"Critical Acclaim" is a song by Avenged Sevenfold, released in 2007 as first single from Avenged Sevenfold's self-titled album. The meaning of its lyrics is to...
Lyric of the week205 views 00 min read
HOPE – VIDEO PREMIERE by FLINTFACE
ROCK YOUR LYRICS is proud to announce the new lyric video of FLINTFACE , titled HOPE http://youtu.be/Gk-Y-ESYIBE In a recent interview we had with him, Joe S...
Lyric of the weekNewsRock InterviewsRock Videos259 views 04 min read
California – there is no end to love – U2
rockyourlyrics September 27, 2014
A song about concrete reminiscences and events, this is how "California (There Is No End to Love), part of the new album (Songs of Innocence) of U2 could be def...
rockyourlyrics April 28, 2014
Which is your jungle? the city where you live? where you grew up? According to several Guns N' Roses biographies we can identify the jungle in the city of Sea...
Lyric of the week51 views 01 min read
CLAW – MOTORHEAD
The today's song "Claw" is part of the album Orgasmatron released by Motorhead in 1986. If you think about the title of the song and about some other songs o...
Champagne Supernova – Oasis
"A song about drugs, its music video must be not about them, but the viewers should understand that its all about them" This is the brief that was received by ...
Father and Son – Cat Stevens
One of the biggest successes of Cat Stevens, Father and Son belongs to the patrimony of rock music. Released in 1970 as part of the album Tea for the Tillerman...
Because the Night – Patti Smith
Because the Night is the biggest success obtained by Patti Smith and one of the best rock song ever written. It has been released in 1978 as part of the album ...
I'm Going Slightly Mad – The Queen
Part of the album Innuendo of 1991, "I'm Going Slightly Mad" is considered one of the messages Freddie Mercury left to us before his death. The song has been w...
All My Life – Foo Fighters
rockyourlyrics February 8, 2014
When they wrote "All My Life", Foo Fighters were looking for a different sound, much heavy than the one in their previous albums. In 2002, they released their ...
In My Place – Coldplay
"In My Place" is one of the most known song of Coldplay, it has been released in 2002 as part of the second studio album of the band "A Rush Of Blood To The Hea...
City Of Angels – Thirty Seconds To Mars
Taken from their last album "Love, Lust, Faith and Dream" released in 2013, "City Of Angels" was written by their singer Jared Leto and published as first singl...


In the series on the Global Elite, Part 7, we are examining the relationship of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Sion , Part 2, (We will refer to the document in this article as the Protocols ) to secret organizations whose goal is world dominance. It is our studied opinion that a global elite does exist and has been patiently implementing their plan to usher in a New World Order for many years, perhaps dating back to the 4th century A.D. with the Merovingian Cult Dynasty, which some conspiracy theorists believe is the origin of the Priory of Sion. The 17th – 19th centuries provide a plethora of evidence that documents like the Protocols as well as the secret conclaves of powerful men are actively working and planning to take control of world governments and eventually crown their "King of Planet Earth." This monarch will be the biblical Antichrist, which the books of Daniel and Revelation predict will come from the new world federation. Thus God's Word, the Bible, is the most up-to-date book on the planet, but unfortunately few read it for its prophetic importance except perhaps to find support for an escape mechanism commonly known as the pretribulation rapture. The other unfortunate aspect of globalism is that the majority of professing Christians do not know anything about history either from a biblical or secular perspective. Moreover, they do not understand the relationship of biblical and world history, particularly the prophetic realm. Consequently, they do not recognize past and current events that have and are fulfilling prophecy including the book of Revelation.
Revelation 17 and 18 clearly teach and advance the prophecies of Daniel that a global government is coming. Therefore, the onus is upon us to study and research all the available data that such is in progress and of itself is a major sign the end of the age is upon us. Why Christians cannot get excited about the study of prophecy, and I mean more than getting goose bumps about a pretrib rapture, is a mystery to me. Peter said the prophetic Word was like a light shining in a dark place and we would do well to pay attention (I Peter 1:19). This is the impetus for this series of Newsletters - to shine a light upon the dark places of the modern world that plan to create order out of chaos and in the process, manipulate and deceive mankind into believing the New World Order is the answer to man's dilemma in bringing utopia – world peace. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is our hope that when this series of articles are complete, you will understand that a conspiracy of mind-boggling proportions does in fact exists and is not hocus-pocus or a maniacal joke.
In the previous newsletter, we presented a brief history of the origins of the Protocols (the actual history would take more time and space that we can address in these weekly articles), and need to continue with that before we analyze the actual 24 Protocols. I am convinced that the Protocols are not a relic of the past, but are being used by the globalists to feign their clandestine operation. They are not the least bit bothered by all the hype to discredit the Protocols or brand them a Gentile forgery in order to foment global anti-Semitism. As long as the public domain dismisses them as a fraudulent document perpetrated against the Jewish race as world conspirators, their purpose of disguise and deceit is working. The global elite are using the Protocols to raise the war temperature of the Arabs against the Jews and is the seedbed of World War III. The Illuminists desire and plan a war between the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East in order to gain control over the riches of that realm as well as the city of Jerusalem for the purpose of handing their plunder over to their Masonic Christ. You can read about it in Daniel's prophecy, Chapters 2, 7-9, and 11.
As John Daniel mentions in his book, Scarlet and the Beast, Volume I (third Edition) , "the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail , believe the Priory of Sion, not the Reform Jews" (the reform Jews are anti-Zionists) was behind the Protocols in Russia. In you remember in the previous newsletter, we showed how the Priory of Sion originated in France and probably is the source of the Protocols. Then the Protocols were stolen from a Masonic Lodge in France and transported to Russia, which helped foment anti-Semitism and create the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the communist takeover of mother Russia.
Who do the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (National Geographic has run extensive TV documentaries on Holy Blood, Holy Grail as well as the Protocols and while they titillate the audience with the possibility of a world conspiracy, they leave much to viewer discretion) believe the Priory of Sion was behind the Protocols in Russia and not the Jews? They believe the French Freemasons (Rosicrucian's of English origin) befriended the Russian Czar, Nicholas II, by the likes of Monsieur Phillippe and a man named Papus (code name for Dr. Gerard Encausse, a 33rd degree Freemason) who was the Grand Master of both the Memphis and Mizraim Freemason organizations (both were Rosicrucian lodges that merged in 1875; remember Rosicrucianism is of English Freemasonry as opposed to French Freemasonry).
Nesta Webster, a controversial historian, occultist, and aristocratic author, believed the Illuminists secret societies were communist occultist plotting the takeover of the world using the Jewish Cabala, Masons, and Jesuits, as a patsy to disguise their intent, insisted that Martinist Freemasons inherited from their founder, Martines de Pasqually, several Jewish manuscripts, which were the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Sion . Webster's claim of Judaist origin has never been proven.
Further evidence of the Priority of Sion's involvement with Martinism is seen when a Gentile Freemason named Constant joined the Martinist order and took the Jewish name, Eliphas Levi. According to John Daniel in Scarlet and the Beast , Eliphas Levi had a major hand in compiling the stolen Templar documents from the Vatican by Napoleon Bonaparte. It is believed that Levi had access to the lost Protocols while a member of the Mizraim Lodges approximately a decade before they were found. What is rather interesting is Levi's prophecy that in 1879 "a new political and religious 'universal kingdom would be established and that it would be possessed by 'him' who would have the keys of the East.'" When we examine the Protocols in detail, it will be clear this prophecy is imbedded in Protocols 15, 17, and 24, which bear a striking resemblance to the Priory of Sion in that they claim to be of the seed of David from which the King of Jerusalem will one day sit on his throne in Jerusalem (Note: This not a reference to the Lord Jesus, but to Sion or Freemasonry's Messiah).
Since Levi was a member of the same Martinist lodge as Victor Hugo and Hugo was associated with Adolphe Cremieux and Maurice Joly (Mizraim Lodge) who we learned in the previous newsletter plagiarized the Geneva Minutes into the Dialogues of Geneva (possibly the impetus for the Protocols), the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail believe the evidence is strong, though circumstantial that the Priory of Sion is the source of the Protocols as all these men were Gentiles except Cremieux. Included in this fraternity is Papus whom we have already mentioned was a Martinist and Claude Debussy, Hugo's successor, both Gentiles.
While the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and John Daniel believe the Protocols are real authentic Masonry documents (actually one document comprised of 24 statements) as I do, I disagree that it is not possible the intent was to disguise or cover-up the purpose of a secret society of Gentile origin made to appear as a Jewish conspiracy to control the Goyim (Gentiles). Furthermore, the fact that Reform Jews (those against Zionism) and apostate Jews (secular and Kabbalistic Jews) are Freemasons and part of the global elite, they could easily have been involved in writing the original Protocols. I mean who would believe Jews would be part of any scheme to forge an anti-Semite document. A reading of the history of the Zionist state and the Zionist's terrorist organizations that killed their own people and made it appear the Gentiles were responsible primarily the British, supports the position that Jewish Freemasons may have taken part in the creation of the Protocols, particularly, since Reform Jews hate Zionists Jews and are for assimilation with the Goyim nations.
The truth is that even with all the expert research and documentation supporting the Protocols as either a purely Gentile Masonic text with no intent to foment a Jewish world conspiracy or a Gentile Masonic forgery to foment global anti-Semitism, we do not know for certain the authors of the Protocols. However, as mentioned there is a considerable volume of research that strongly suggests the Protocols were written by Zionist Kabbalistic Jews. One thing we know for sure, the Protocols are alive and well on planet earth and are being used in many nations to stir-up anti-Semitism, especially in the Middle East, which again is exactly what the Zionist Jews desire in order to deflect attention away from their plan to rule the world via their Masonic Christ and establish the new kingdom of Israel that will dominate the Goyim - the Gentiles. The Kabbalistic Pharisees hated Jesus because He was a threat to their plans to establish Solomon's kingdom in Jerusalem according to mystic Kabbalism, which originated in Babylon during the Babylonian captivity. This became the quest of Kabbalistic Pharisaic Judaism and modern Zionism. It has evolved through the centuries and is now the root of Illuministic Globalism that will eventually produce the biblical Antichrist.
In next weeks newsletter, we will trace the Protocols in the nations of the world and show how world leaders are currently influenced by them including the United States and Great Britain, but more so the communist and Arab nations. In fact, the Protocols are school textbooks in some Arab nations. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as Venezuela's Chavez believe the Protocols are a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and is the basis for Ahmadinejad's proclamation to destroy Israel.
From my research, I strongly believe the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Sion is the 'bible" for the global elite and that they are following it toward world governance. As Satan used it to begin Hitler's rise to power and the start of WWII, I believe it is being used today to usher in the Antichrist and WWIII, not necessarily in that order.
As mentioned in the last issue, I am indebted to John Daniel and his excellent book on the origin and history of Freemasonry, Scarlet and the Beast, Vol. I, Third Edition , for much of the research in this newsletter.


This collection consists of John A. Meyer's diaries during World War IIs.
This collection consists of Meyer's diaries during World War II and a typewritten transcript of those diaries.
John A. Meyer was an aerial photographer in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He was stationed in Bangor, Maine,and the North Atlantic Air Bases in Newfoundland.


While some may be wary of the increasing implementation of robotics in the medical realm, the airline industry offers a great mind-easing comparison. In the early days, pilots were entirely responsible for a plane's navigation, and rates of crashes and unforeseen travel errors were higher than today. With the eventual incorporation of computers and navigation tools, pilots altered their skill set to incorporate technology, ultimately resulting in safer air travel. Although they have the capabilities, if needed, to maneuver a plane manually, they are currently taught to utilize technology for more efficient travel. While pilots may use their skill set differently now, technology aids them tremendously — individuals can go farther, faster, and smoother, to the credit of these innovations.
The Fast Company World Changing Ideas Awards recognize trailblazing companies aiming to tackle immense world issues such as climate change or population health, with past winners including a startup with an electric airplane and the Netflix documentary Chasing Coral.
Out of a field of over 2,000 entries, Fast Company editors, writers, and outside judges selected Corindus Vascular Robotics as a finalist in the Developing World Technology and Health and Wellness categories. Our "world changing idea" is redefining telemedicine from strictly a diagnostic tool to a means to treat patients remotely via "tele-treatment." Corindus is paving the way for large-scale, long-distance telerobotic intervention platforms across the globe.
Yash Soni, Assistant Manager of Cath Lab Operations and Chief Technologist at Apex Heart, played a significant role on the core team involved in the Telerobotic Intervention Study. This study marked the first-in-human remote robotic PCI, where interventional cardiologist Dr. Tejas Patel, was located approximately 20 miles away from patients undergoing treatment at the Apex Heart Institute.
Yash and the Apex Heart team became robotic experts after installing CorPath GRX in December 2017, completing over 300 robotic PCI cases. Building a strong foundation of robotic knowledge is the first key step to tackling remote procedures in the future. The team at Apex Heart committed to this philosophy by embracing robotic technology and understanding the impact that remote robotic treatment could have to improve patient care in underserved populations with geographic barriers to treatment.
Learn more about Yash and the robotic program at Apex Heart below.
February is designated as American Heart Month and health organizations like the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) use this time to educate the public about heart disease. Starting in 1963, this annual event is focused on encouraging Americans to battle against heart disease through open communication and proper prevention methods.
WellSpan York Hospital installed CorPath GRX in July 2017 and has completed over 100 robotic procedures. Samantha Lentz, RCIS, and the cath lab team, have been a critical component in the success of York's robotic program.
Implementation of a comprehensive program can push your hospital ahead of the curve by offering the latest in precision medicine for your patients. At the same time, your hospital will be investing in the safety of the physicians and staff who spend their lives devoted to caring for others. We discussed the importance of robotics with Samantha – get to know more about her role and experience with the CorPath System.
Telerobotics, or remote robotics intended for interventional procedures, might one day allow heart attack and even stroke treatment to be readily available in all communities, including rural areas. Faster time to treatment could have the potential to increase patients' chance of survival, and in the case of remote treatment of stroke, reduce permanent disabilities. Currently, cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death worldwide. An estimated 18 million people die from CVD, with 85% dying from heart attack and stroke. We believe that socioeconomic status and the decline of skilled specialist shouldn't be a factor within patient care and have been working to develop remote technology to address these barriers to treatment. In the last 12 months, we've successfully completed feasibility testing, conducted pre-clinical work in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, built a robust platform with strong connectivity and recently, performed a remote PCI test case in a live animal model from over 100 miles away.
We caught up with Michael Fernandez, a seasoned radiologic technologist from Baptist Hospital of Miami, to discuss his experience with robotics and his integral part in their developing program. The facility started their robotic program in 2014 and has since grown.
Implementation of a comprehensive program can push your hospital ahead of the curve by offering the latest in precision medicine for your patients. At the same time, your hospital will be investing in the safety of the physicians and staff who spend their lives devoted to caring for others. Staff members are a critical component to the success of robotic programs.
Read our interview to get to know more about Michael, learn about his experience with the CorPath System, and understand the tech's role during robotic procedures.


We are looking for a data-driven Director of Performance Marketing with expertise in SEM (Google Adwords / Bing Ads) and Paid Social (FB / Insta / Pinterest) to develop new marketing strategies, campaigns, and placements to drive growth while improving acquisition cost. This individual will lead strategic, high-volume experimentation on all key current and potential user acquisition channels. This role works cross-functionally with Finance, Product and Engineering and reports directly to the Head of Acquisition.
Golden Hippo is currently looking for a motivated and dependable Marketing Quality Assurance Assistant to support the day to day operations of our Sales Funnel team. We are seeking an individual who is organized, a natural communicator and resourceful by nature. This role will work behind the scenes as an integral support system for this team. No two days will be the same.
The ideal candidate will have Music or Major Label experience and have experience supporting a high-level executive with discretion and confidentiality. Must be very efficient and highly attuned to the smallest of details. Multi-tasking and working on tight deadlines in a high-pressure environment is crucial. No task is too small and no challenge too great. A "can-do" attitude is essential. In this dynamic position, the Marketing Coordinator will serve as key component of the marketing team, acting as the administrative support point person for Capitol Music Group's marketing department. The ideal candidate will possess strong administrative, organizational, and creative skills. Prior marketing and administrative experience in the music/entertainment field is required. Experience using Photoshop & other photo/video editing software preferred.
We're looking for a VP, Corporate Communications to lead our marketing team as we build our global brand. In this role, you'll drive marketing's vision and develop close relationships with the executive leadership team while working cross-functionally with executive leaders and local marketing managers. As the VP, Corporate Communications, you'll develop and innovate how we tell our powerful, mission-driven story to our unique global audience.


Bryon Powell won the contest to pick the top finishers at the 2005 Bull Run Run. While his pick of Tom Nielsen to win was a bit off, all of his other picks were right on. He was one of the few to see the potential in Leigh Schmitt and Todd Walker whom he picked to finish second and third, only one off. He picked the women finishers right on and picked the correct Scott, Scott McKenzie, for the Seniors title. (Most picked Scott Mills.) Finally, he picked Barb Isom over Vicki Kendall, as did many others. Bryon was only eight minutes off the predicted winning time to complete his win.
The finishing time could get you some major point penalties. Further down is a table without the time penalty figured in.
The process punished those who picked runners who dropped out. For example, if you picked Bryon Powell himself, you picked up a quick 319 points.
The contest was won and lost in the open division. Most pickers got most of the women and seniors picks and, if they didn't, they didn't pick up many points.
We hope everyone enjoyed the contest. Since this is just for "fun," Bryon doesn't get anything, but he has all of our respect! Watch for this contest at MMT.


Several listeners have marveled at how well some older KC material fits the current line-up, as though it were always waiting for this group of individuals to come along and play.
Definitely one of the best reinterpretations by this lineup. The arrangement just goes into turbo for the last few minutes.. sax and drums just pushing it over the edge.Interesting hearing a "flatter" sounding board recording rather than the mix on the new release. Here the drums don't leap out as much losing some of the three drummer conversation, but gaining in just the instrumental punch from the others.
"Abandon concern for hitting the right note.
Then, hit the right note."