From Time Magazine

He used data, evidence and statistics to drive change and make improvements. He admitted his mistakes and wrote and learned lessons in the hopes to prevent those mistakes from ever happening again.

However, a he was a man whose mistakes (with President Kennedy and Johnson) cost over a million lives.

Learning from mistakes and open criticism in a free society how societies grow for the betterment of all.

The NewsHour has two really great segments. First and interview with Robert McNamara and then a debate with John McCain, George McGovern and others about McNamara’s involvement in the war.

And if you haven’t seen it, a brilliant documentary by Errol Morris on McNamara called The Fog of War, is just sitting out there for you. It’s one of my favorite films of all time.

I had an interesting argument with a Christian during my regular Tuesday drunken pool night.

She made the assertion that the Catholic Church is on the “forefront” of advancing human rights.

I don’t deny this gold encrusted establishment, does advance some human rights, such as freedom of religion (at the expense of other rights).

But to say it is the on the “forefront”, I think, would require some evidence.  I am a skeptic after all.  Evidence is my air, food and water.

The evidence for this claim was very spotty indeed.  A generalization about “condemning the atrocities in Africa” and the invocation of some new initiative about charity work “without” borders was given as example of the Churches innovation, which neither Googling nor Bing-ing could find for me.

It’s not that I’m trying to make this person out to be simple minded, (she’s not at all). But as Carl Sagan said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. From my perspective, that is an extraordinary claim.

But perhaps from her perspective the claim wasn’t such a stretch and thus required little or no serious evidence at all.

I say this as advice to all self-declared atheists out there.  To believers your claims will require extraordinary evidence (and it exists) but you better be able to provide it.  It will be expected of you.

From DepletedCranium.com

60 minutes aired their interview with Sully Sullenberger, the captain of flight 1549, which made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, saving all on board.

One of the most fortunate statements in the interview came after Katie Couric asked the question “Did you pray at any moment?” To which he responded, “There were a lot of people in the cabin doing that for me. I had to fly the airplane.”

So I say, thank god Sully didn’t pray to a magical sky man and decided to instead land the plane.

Many people have said that the safe landing of flight 1549 was a miracle. But what even the First Officer acknowledged was that it was due to training and planning and critical thinking by learning from past mistakes.

Thank god, Sully was rational enough to rely on existing human knowledge and not superstition.

For a much better post on this subject see here.