House of Eratosthenes

When I was a 14- or 15-year-old and my adolescent hormones were goin’ at it like a bag of Butter Lover’s Kettle Korn in the microwave, Lydia Cornell immortalized herself in my pubescent memories by strutting around in those kootchie shorts in the first season of “Too Close For Comfort” with those silky, tanned, toned thighs whose gentle curves betrayed the childbearing shape of her goddess-like hips and ass. Whooie. Well, nowadays the silky, tanned, toned thighs are poking out of a cheerleader’s skirt, but only figuratively, and the cheerleader uniform belongs to the Democrats.

Which is okay by me. How many incredibly sexy starlets, both A-list and has-beens, are shills for Democrats? Tons of them; and nowadays, it takes a lot of A-list starlets to make a “ton”. Except Cornell, apparently, is going to plant her own fists on those childbearing hips and get all uppity and cranky with me, if I don’t immediately and uncritically buy into what she’s selling, that she is in fact a Republican:

Dear Ann [Coulter],

I was a Republican for many years, voted for Reagan and still attend Reagan’s former church, Bel Air Presbyterian. I am writing an article about the Alachua Republican Party and wanted to clarifiy something with you. I had heard about your speech in Gainesville and was troubled in regards to your comments on the First Amendment and the stifling of the free speech of Democrats. Do you stand by those remarks? Do you wish to clarify or add anything to them � and do you really feel that stifling free speech and/or violating/changing the U.S. Constitution is the best way help spread democracy to the rest of the world?

There is nothing self-contradictory here, so far. Cornell says she was a Republican, as in past-tense. So it’s logical to conclude she was a Republican when Reagan was running because she liked Reagan’s stuff, and since then has brought her interest in politics to a halt, or jumped over the fence and become a Democrat. Okay fine, I’ll buy that. Lots of “Republicans” have something different in mind for conservatism, besides of what George Bush is selling. Some days, I’m one of them.

But this screed she’s got going, which apparently she posted some eleven days after her query to Ann Coulter, sets the whole thing on its head:

I feel I�m going insane. Right after the 2004 election when You-Know-Who was elected, I actually developed a nervous tic in my left eye, like the Police chief in the Pink Panther, who was driven berserk by Inspector Clousseau. Of course there’s no comparing the lovable Peter Sellers with the witless, war-mongering leader of the free world, but I don’t want my eye twitch to come back so I’m trying to stop hating him so much. I think I figured out a way to talk to Ann Coulter: turn the other cheek and let her hit that one.
:
During my conversation with [Alachua Republican Party Vice-Chairman Bryan] Harman, I was tempted to be confrontational, but made a conscious decision to remain objective and get inside the Republican mind-set.[emphasis mine]

Waitaminnit Lydia! You don’t need to “get inside the Republican mind-set”! You are already there! Or at least you were. At the very least, you once were.

That’s what you said. I’m just taking it seriously, and look what a problem we have here.

You have a nervous tic in your left eye because “You-Know-Who” emerged victorious against Mister Massachusetts Nuance? What policy changes did you, as a former Reagan-voting Republican, want out of Mister Purple Heart Christmas-In-Cambodia Seared-In-Memory Terrorism-Is-Just-A-Nuisance?

I’d really like to know. You start with Ronald Reagan, and take away everything that does NOT look like John Kerry, you get…nothing. You start with Kerry, and remove everything that doesn’t look like Reagan, you still get…nothing.

Is there something I’m missing?

Or are you, with your perfect legs and your perky breasts that look SO appealing under those super-snug, early-eighties sweaters, ready to receive my personal judgment on whether what you have told me is COMPLETE BULLSHIT or not?

I’ll tell you something else that doesn’t quite add up. Ms. Cornell doesn’t think like a Republican, or like anyone who has ever, ever been a Reagan-voting Republican. Look at that post — the point of it is, that Ann Coulter spews hatred and is bad for the Republican party.

I know Republicans who don’t like Ann Coulter. I know Republicans who don’t like her, because they feel she’s a poor representative, a sentiment which Lydia Cornell obviously shares. They do not present their arguments this way. They say “here are the facts…this is how you can get the complete text of what she said…this is my opinion about it, although obviously you are welcome to form your own opinion…and I don’t feel this is acceptable.”

Not so with Ms. Wish-I-Was-A-European Cornell. Lydia Cornell gives us a snippet. She essentially says, like a Democrat union goon, Trust Me, this is what Ann Coulter is all about. Trust me, you don’t need to read her entire speech to make sure I got the context right. And Trust Me, this is what Jesus Christ Himself would have to say about it — it’s my interpretation, and if you’ve got a different one, that doesn’t matter, because mine is the right one.

That’s not what a Reagan-voting Republican does. And a Reagan-voting Republican damn sure doesn’t get a facial tic about politicians he or she doesn’t like. Reagan-voting Republicans, when laboring under the tenure of powerful politicians they don’t like, simply bide their time and wait for the next elections. When they post blogs about those powerful politicians and what those powerful politicians are doing, they create compelling arguments: These are the facts…this is my opinion…these are the assumptions you must make to form a different opinion, from those available facts, and I find those assumptions to be too extravagant to be maintained.

They present compelling cases for what they believe.

They do not tell their readers what they are supposed to be thinking, at least, not without providing factual support. Like some member of the French cabinet. Or some liberal black baptist preacher who violates separation-of-church-and-state at the drop of a hat during a campaign. Or a union thug.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be harsh. But ever since I cast my first vote for a Democrat, way back when Woodrow Wilson was running for re-election against Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, and all the votes I’ve cast for Democrats since then, I’ve never been able to understand this about my own Democratic party. Why, I’m even thinking of leaving it. Believe me. Please, believe me.

No, seriously. In all seriousness. I think Lydia Cornell has voted for Republicans the same way I’ve suffered from menstrual cramps.

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I Speak Of…
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

I Speak Of…

Two hundred years after his famous letter to Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, Stephen Nelson and the Danbury Baptists, in which he defined a “wall of separation between Church & State,” Thomas Jefferson’s treasured wall is threatened by the rise of a fundamentalist religion in the United States of America. This religion threatens to take over this country and seize control of its government.

It is a dangerous, double-talking religion. It has lately come to hide behind science; it pretends to present its beliefs, simply by softly questioning more orthodox cognitions deemed to be contrary. The deception behind this is revealed when this religion regards anyone skeptical of their faith, as walking, breathing, unfinished tasks. Those who practice and promote the religion of which I speak, do not seek to form reasoned opinions from established facts — they seek to proselytize. In short, they pretend to participate in epistimology, but what they really want to do is grow their flock, facts be damned.

Their flock is growing like a wildfire. It is difficult to venture beyond one’s doorstep, or into cyberspace for that matter, without encountering several of these practitioners in the course of a single day. Those practitioners pretend to respect our freedom as individuals to select the religion of our choice, but very seldom do they show this respect. To sum it up, nearly all of them believe, with their faith, they are smarter than someone who practices a different faith. They think the rest of us are just big dummies, and are not afraid to say so at all. There is something about this religion that makes people stunningly rude.

Those who promote this religion, do so by simply questioning whatever doesn’t fit; like all religions that seek to find shelter and comfort in quasi-science, they insist on controling the questions. Questions that are inconvenient to contrary theories are encouraged, and when questions arise that are inconvenient to their own faith, the questions suddenly stop. Promoters of this religion, will not tolerate any hesitation, temerity or abatement in questioning what is contrary, but they also will not tolerate questions directed toward what is friendly.

They have begun to spread the canard that the United States of America was founded on their religious principles. They are frequently heard to say “The Founding Fathers were” part of their religion, as if scores of patriots who championed religious freedom as *individuals*, squabbling endlessly among themselves as they did so, must necessarily have belonged to a single faith.

Their religion pretends to simply be a question. But it is not a question at all, it is an answer. It’s a hard, brittle, absolute answer, tolerating no dissent whatsoever, about something unproven and unrefuted that cannot be proven or refuted. It is blind faith masquerading as a set of reasoned inferences.

Our legal system has been hijacked by this religion. On behalf of no other religion, can a lawsuit be filed, and expect to achieve such stellar success, upward through the judicial levels, all the way to the Supreme Court, where such lawsuits either emerge victorious or are allowed to stand. This happens nearly all the time. File a lawsuit friendly to any other religion, and if you can find a lawyer willing to take it, you should expect to see your case thrown out at the most rudimentary level. Especially if that suit can be inferred to be hostile to the religion of which I speak!

The religion of which I speak has already taken over the hallways of our academic institutions. What we now call “science” will analyze, hypothesize, test, and debate, come what may, offending whoever it must, respecting no sacred cows at all — as science should — until the time comes to potentially offend people who practice the religion of which I speak. Then, what we call “science” will come to an abrupt stop, and in so doing betray all of us. The problem is so bad, that our society has for several years now been practicing something called “science” that isn’t really science.

The religion of which I speak has already been placed at the head of several governments. This religion is more hostile to the concept of individual inalienable rights, than any other religion can be — and so, because of all the countries that have enshrined this religion in our recent history, millions of people have been killed. Perhaps as many as a hundred million men, women and children. If you’re sharp, you already know what religion I’m talking about.

I speak of atheism.

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The Speech He Should Give
Monday, November 28th, 2005

The Speech He Should Give

James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense (1977), puts together a speech President Bush could and should give about what’s going on in Iraq.

To summarize, it’s just a fraction of the endless litany of good things that have taken place there, placed into a template fitting the President’s usual speaking style.

We know now that some of our information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was wrong. But we also know now what we have always believed: That Saddam Hussein, who had already invaded both Iran and Kuwait, had the money, authority and determination to build up his stock of such weapons. When he did, he would have become the colossus of the Middle East, able to overwhelm other countries and rain rockets down on Israel.

We have created a balance of power in the Middle East in which no regime can easily threaten any other. In doing this, we and our allies have followed a long tradition: We worked to prevent Imperial Germany from dominating Europe in 1914, Hitler from doing the same in 1940, and the Soviet Union from doing this in 1945. Now we are doing it in the Middle East.

I have nothing to add to this, save for one thing. Documentation of these encouraging events, and many others, has been circulating around the “innernets” for years now; since shortly after the invasion in Spring 2003. This is seldom discussed, although the events are widely known. The alphabet-soup news networks which so regularly are accused of a politically-leftward tilt, who regularly fret over their eroding credibility, and who regularly get kicked in the ass by their own declining ratings as viewers desert them in droves — they could mitigate all of these problems by mentioning a handful of these things more prominently. To the best of my knowledge, very seldom does that happen.

The most bumptious among our anti-war people cite as the basis for their opposition, the mounting death toll among our brave troops. That toll is supposed to be a great concern to them, as is the mission to make it an overriding concern to the rest of us.

I call bullshit on this alleged concern. If the troops are dying for something, they are dying to make the things mentioned in Wilson’s column happen. An anti-war zealot who was concerned about the lives of these troops, would say “I don’t think freeing a nation the size of California from tyranny, capturing Saddam Hussein, giving Iraqis running water and electricity for the first time, free elections, a constitution (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.) is worth the loss of life in our military” and then such a zealot would give reasons why his cost-benefit equation works out the way it does.

Such a zealot would give evidence that he’s taking these benefits into account, by listing them, and then actually taking them into account. They are, after all, the things for which our troops gave the ultimate sacrifice, whether that exchange was part of the original plan or not.

And the lives and welfare of those troops are supposed to be the objects of all this anti-war concern.

So, no. I don’t think the typical anti-war loudmouth gives a rat’s ass about the dead troops. I should add, of course, that every loudmouth is different. But the paucity of discussion that takes place, about benefits from this military action that are so numerous, is evidence of what I’ve been thinking all along.

Opposition to the war is all about a desired return to our status quo, where we indulge in overwhelming quantity and intensity of discourse about unimportant things. In recent history, that has meant two things: 1) wealthy old people with summer homes and Winnebagos lobbying for greater medical benefits, at the expense of thirty-something apartment rats struggling to make ends meet; and 2) special-interest organizations representing “minority” gender, ethnic and sexual-preference classes, lowering our national pain-threshold every two years so they can find something to complain and litigate about.

Body bags flying in to Dover AFB make it hard to get worked up about those. REAL hard. That is what they want to stop.

So our anti-war loudmouths are really pissed about those bags.

As a group, they generally don’t give a shit about who is IN that bag. You’ll notice they very seldom mention that person — and they mention even less often, the whole point of the noble sacrifice that put that person in there. Evidently, they have an argument that would weaken if they acknowledged anything positive coming from that sacrifice, whatsoever — nevermind that, being a signatory to that sacrifice, the person inside that bag presumably had strong feelings that it was a worthwhile trade.

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Self Help
Thursday, November 24th, 2005

Self Help

I don’t have television, by choice, so what I know about TV comes from traveling and staying in hotels.

This will come as a shock to anyone who reads my blog and regards me as a sage on all human affairs, which of course nobody does. As far as human affairs that take place on the boob tube, I am precisely as well-informed as the timeless conceptual little green man from another planet who monitors our radio and TV signals.

Maybe the little green man if he somehow had access to Google.

Anyway, I couldn’t help noticing something.

The cable TV I have decided I don’t want in my home, is fairly jam-packed with self help programs. Morning, evening, late night. Commercials, infommercials, plugs for infommercials, movie rentals. Self help up the yin yang.

Roughly half of these programs have to do with identifying what you want in life, and going after it, no holds barred, refusing to take no for an answer, and getting in the face of anyone who gets in your way.

The other half has to do with something called “Dealing With Difficult People.”

Hmmmmmm….

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Thanks
Thursday, November 24th, 2005

Thanks

Another “Mobile Blog Post” as I find myself on the road once again. This time I’m visiting family. Aren’t we all.

As we give thanks for what we have in our lives, can we all come to an agreement about the concept of “Thanks”. Like any other emotional sentiment, a Feeling of Thanks is useless until & unless it *culminates* in something — an action, or an inaction.

Let’s face it: If you have a functioning brain and a life to live, not a day goes by that you don’t feel happy, sad, angry, pleased, and grateful — maybe dozens of times. Most of these impulses come to nothing, and a scant few of them have an impact on what we do.

A successful Thanksgiving is one where your feelings of thanks have an impact on what you do.

So what do you do with this feeling of gratitude, once it’s been validated, an felt sincerely? This is an important question. This is America. We have it good — astonishingly good. Our “poor” people are obese, and have cable TV channels in the triple-digits.

In the final analysis, there are only two big possibilities: You can feel guilty, or you can start figuring out what’s going on, as a first step to making more of it happen. These are mutually exclusive. The abundance of our gifts, our commerce, our gadgets, our technology — it’s a glaring problem crying out for a solution, or it’s a manifestation of something going terribly right that calls out for propagation and multiplication. It’s fundamentally bad, or it’s fundamentally good.

There is no home for “moderates” on this question.

And those who wish to feel guilty, have a vexing conundrum to resolve: How *did* America go about getting all this wealth and abundance for which we’re supposed to feel grateful today?

If it is our desire to spread these gifts to people who don’t have them, it seems like a solid logical conclusion that answering this question is the first step.

Some will say we have this high standard of living because we stole it, somehow, from those who we notice don’t have it. Either we plundered these riches, actively, or we intercepted them passively. Either way, if you accept this premise, then the question I asked above becomes moot.

Except then, I would expect, you will not be joining in the celebration today. In which case I hope you’ll donate your turkey and canned goods to those in need.

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You Go First
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

You Go First

I just love activists. Their very name is inspiring. Activist…activist…activist! Someone who takes the initiative. Who sees what needs to be done and does it. Captain of his own destiny. Righter of wrongs! Defender of the defenseless! Punisher of the punishless!

A socially inept control-freak who’s come up with a great way to get laid. By foolish left-wing sluts.

Four decades and some change after social activism became fashionable, there is evidence here and there that, by failing to stand up for itself whenever activists twiddle with its switches and knobs and rabbit-ears, society may be doing the activists more harm than the activists can be doing to it. The harm that is done to the activist, has to do with a gradual unmooring from reality. This is dangerous. Someday, the activist will have to move out of his mom’s apartment, and reality will become a bigger part of his life. His ability to reconcile with that reality, therefore, will become more important.

More important than what?

More important than it currently is to whoever wrote this e-mail to the Hagerstown, MD Herald-Mall, said e-mail appearing to take responsibility for a potentially deadly act of incendiary vandalism:

Last night we, the Earth Liberation Front, put the torch to a development of Ryan Homes in Hagerstown, Maryland (off of Route 40, behind the Wal-Mart). We did so to strike at the bottom line of this country’s most notorious serial land rapist.

We warn all developers that the people of the Earth are prepared to defend what remains of the wild and the green.

We encourage all who watch with sadness while developers sell out the future of us and our children to join us in resisting them in any and every possible way.

The Ents are going to war.

I found this to be particularly interesting where it says We warn all developers that the people of the Earth are prepared to defend what remains of the wild and the green. They took a poll?

Can people of all ideological stripes, agree on this: Activists, by and large, have an unfortunate tendency to remain oblivious to the negative consequences involved in the causes they establish, sustain and for which they recruit.

Could we therefore lend our support to the following proposal: We will find a way to allow the activists to continue with their causes, and with freedom of speech, but we will also find a way to guarantee the activists are the first among those who have to live with the consequences of what they want done. ELF, here, should live in an urban “ant farm” where housing is rare, rents have skyrocketed, homelessness is rampant, but thank goodness there are no town homes. And we will find ways to further this goal throughout all brands of activist zealotry, regardless of how pleasing those activist movements may be to whoever.

Activism, by nature, exists to tell everybody how an elite class of people has decided they all should live, and if they don’t want to live that way, well that’s just tough. It is coercion. Activism is the antithesis of democracy. It is a policy of “You Do This.” We could call my policy the “You Go First” policy.

Gun-grabbing activists get to live in a place where burglars burgle wherever they want, because they know nobody has a gun. Anti-death-penalty activists get to live in a place where murderers walk the streets, secure in the knowledge they’ll never be executed. Anti-capitalists get to live in a place where money is nonexistent, and anyplace you can get a bite to eat, looks like your elementary school cafeteria where you wait in line endlessly to get a big scoop of colorless glop.

That would be fair.

Man, I am rambling. Need to get coffee.

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What Are We Arguing About?
Friday, November 18th, 2005

What Are We Arguing About?

Charles Krauthammer’s article flatly states that Intelligent Design is full of crap. Actually, what he’s saying is something I’ve been saying all along, that we’re making a mistake in assuming different theories logically have to be mutually exclusive from one another, when they don’t.

Newton’s religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein’s was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. “He believed he was doing God’s work,” wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Krauthammer belongs to the “It Isn’t Science” crowd, those who insist that, being untestable, Intelligent Design cannot be a legitimate scientific pursuit. I’ve been reluctant to sign on to that, because if I were to do so then I’d have to support banishing the following from science:

The noise made by a Tyrannosaurus Rex;

The idea that a black hole in our universe leads to a white hole in another;

Extraterrestrial life forms;

The notion that time is made of particles, equal to or lesser than one unit of Planck Time;

All questions of history that evidence has left unanswered, such as for example, did Henry II deliberately order the assassination of Thomas a Becket?

Krauthammer has inferred that Intelligent Design proponents — all of them? most of them? some of them? I don’t know! — are pushing the theory of the constantly-intervening God. Sorry, Chuck. I find it to be dishonest to link “you have opposable thumbs because Someone designed you that way” to “when you put your right leg into your pants first this morning, it’s because God decided that six thousand years ago.”

It pains me to say this, but Krauthammer has blundered significantly in the arena of clean, organized, critical thinking, which is where he has been known to contribute the most in confounding disagreements like these. The delta between those two assertions he has welded together is not only significant, but it cuts to the quick of religio-scientific principles upon which this republic was founded. When atheists protest against “In God We Trust” being inscribed on our money, they are frequently heard to assert “The Founding Fathers were not Christians, they were Deists!” Little do the most passionate among them realize, that the most accepted definition of Deism is the proposition that the world was created by a non-intervening God.

That a Supreme Being is responsible for creating us, but not for intervening with our day-to-day operations, is absolutely critical to acceptance of the twin assertions that 1) we “are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; and 2) it is our “Right, it is [our] Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for [our] future Security.”

Which is to say, we may very well have grown here through a process unguided by any intelligent force, but if that is proven (or accepted) to be the case, then the document I have quoted has been made utterly groundless; and similarly, if we were put here by an intervening Higher Power, that decides for us if we are to part our hair on the right or the left, then it isn’t up to us to do anything at all — let alone overthrow our government — and the document is again made utterly groundless.

Krauthammer is effectively stating that a Higher Power that put us here, by definition, is a Higher Power that, as he puts it, “steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, ‘I think I’ll make me a lemur today.’” How can these be synonymous? He’s trying to make the argument that science and religion aren’t enemies. One of the most potent suppositions for supporting that, is the concept of a non-interfering Higher Power that uses evolution as a tool, which is put in motion and then left alone. Much like the little old lady and the tomato seeds.

I’m afraid Charles Krauthammer has lost track of what we’re arguing about. But haven’t we all? Find me a thousand loudmouth idealogues extolling their opinions of Intelligent Design, on one side or the other, and I can find large numbers therein of folks who will sign on to many, a whole bunch of, or most, of the following perceptions of the disagreement:

1. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the Judeo-Christian God created everything, opponents assert this is not so.
2. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that some Higher Power created everything, opponents assert this is not so.
3. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that some Higher Power created everything and is watching over it all now, opponents assert this is not so.
4. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the complexity of nature proves that some Higher Power created everything, opponents assert it does not.
5. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the complexity of nature surpasses what can be explained by evolutionary theory, opponents assert this is not so.
6. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution is a fact, not a theory, and proponents assert that it is a theory, not a fact.
7. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that they can explain everything in nature with the theory of evolution, without the intervention of any designing agent, proponents assert this is not so.
8. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the earth is not much older than six thousand years, and opponents assert this is not so.
9. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that man shared the earth with dinosaurs, even using them as beasts of burden like Fred Flintstone, and opponents assert this is not so.
10. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that it is a violation of the Establishment Clause to teach Intelligent Design in the classroom, and proponents assert this is not so.
11. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that it is outside the realm of science to even consider Intelligent Design, and proponents assert this is not so.
12. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert #11 because Intelligent Design is “untestable.”
13. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert #11 because it might prove there is a God, and religion is an enemy of science.
14. Opponents of Intelligent Design stand guilty of telling everybody else what to think, about something that is unprovable.
15. Proponents of Intelligent Design stand guilty of telling everybody else what to think, about something that is unprovable.
16. #14 and #15.
17. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution is a canard, and all species were created in the form we observe them today, opponents assert this is not so.
18. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution is at work only with non-human animals, that man was created in the form we observe him today, opponents assert this is not so.
19. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution had a hand in creating all animals, including humans, but that a Higher Power is also at work in nature, opponents assert this is not so.
20. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that nothing in the evolutionary theory can ever be proven, opponents assert some things can be.
21. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that some things in the evolutionary theory can be proven, and some things can’t, opponents assert all things can be.
22. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that Intelligent Design can be proven, opponents assert that while it’s conceptually possible, it can’t be proven.
23. Proponents of Intelligent Design have a hidden agenda to inject Judeo-Christian religion into public schools.
24. Opponents of Intelligent Design have a hidden agenda to enshrine Atheism as the state-sanctioned religion.
25. Proponents of Intelligent Design do not assert Intelligent Design itself, quite so much as desire discussion about Intelligent Design.
26. Opponents of Intelligent Design do not dispute Intelligent Design itself, quite so much as desire to muzzle any discussion about Intelligent Design.
27. Proponents of Intelligent Design desire to muzzle any discussion about Natural Selection, since religion is an enemy of science.
28. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that students should not be taught Intelligent Design if their parents don’t want them to be taught that.
29. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that students should not be taught the Theory of Evolution if their parents don’t want them to be taught that.

So here’s my point: Isn’t it a rather abundant waste of energy, to start proselytizing one’s own point of view, or to insult and denigrate others, without first arriving at some agreement of what we’re arguing about?

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Imitation is the Sincerest Form IV
Friday, November 18th, 2005

Imitation is the Sincerest Form IV

While staying in New York on Monday, I made some observations about Norman Podhoretz’s column that appeared that morning in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Podhoretz himself didn’t say as much, but I was noticing that his article was on the “hard” side. That is to say, his article fell woefully short on the “this is what I am instructing you to think about x” stuff, and ran kind of long on “This is Exhibit A, this is Exhibit B, this is Exhibit C, etc.” I was making the point that there’s a certain asymmetry to the exchange of facts vs. opinions in the debate about Should The United States Be In Iraq. The “Yes, we should” side can use facts and opinions, whereas the “No, we shouldn’t” side can only use opinions:

What if you wanted to smear President Bush’s decision to invoke military action against the old Iraq regime, and you shied away from incendiary speculation, treading only upon established, indisputable fact?

Let us give it a try:

“This administration led us into a war, based mostly (not entirely) on Iraq’s continuing efforts to acquire (not possession of) weapons of mass destruction, which, once we took control of that country, it turned out at that particular moment not to have any.”

Doesn’t have the same punch as “He LIED!!!” now, does it?

Kind of leaves something out when the next sentence is “so let’s impeach him!”, doesn’t it?

This says something. In the inflammatory debate we’re having now, one side can afford to stick to established, indisputable facts, whereas through this exercise the other side would be utterly devastated, losing the bulk of its shock value, persuasive power and emotional punch.

I don’t know if White House counselor Dan Bartlett reads my blog. I would expect hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in the Washington Post yesterday morning.

“What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly using their positions and playing politics,” [President George W.] Bush added. “That’s exactly what is taking place in America.”

[Vice President Dick] Cheney’s speech was part of a GOP effort to push back against criticism on Iraq that presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said will continue.

Traveling with Bush, Bartlett said: “There’s a bright line there that the Democrats have crossed. They have no facts on their side.”

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

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More Timely Than It Looks
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005

More Timely Than It Looks

This is a lot more timely than it looks, which doesn’t say much because it doesn’t look timely at all. It looks like a rehash. What it is, is a recital of the facts about how the United States got into the war in Iraq. And it’s a little on the long side, so why chew over it again?

To answer that, we have to get into, once again, the difference between an established, undisputed fact, and a reasoned but debatable opinion. The noisiest people who “debate” things in our society today, think they know the difference between the two. Very few of them do.

This article sticks to facts. And it does have an agenda of supporting President Bush. Some people have an agenda of attacking the President; those people don’t stick to facts, because they can’t.

Think about THAT for a minute or two. What if you wanted to smear President Bush’s decision to invoke military action against the old Iraq regime, and you shied away from incendiary speculation, treading only upon established, indisputable fact?

Let us give it a try:

“This administration led us into a war, based mostly (not entirely) on Iraq’s continuing efforts to acquire (not possession of) weapons of mass destruction, which, once we took control of that country, it turned out at that particular moment not to have any.”

Doesn’t have the same punch as “He LIED!!!” now, does it?

Kind of leaves something out when the next sentence is “so let’s impeach him!”, doesn’t it?

This says something. In the inflammatory debate we’re having now, one side can afford to stick to established, indisputable facts, whereas through this exercise the other side would be utterly devastated, losing the bulk of its shock value, persuasive power and emotional punch.

Read up, folks; this is re-emerging, again, as a heady and current topic of controversy. Congress is stepping up the pressure for withdrawal, and Democrats therein are asserting there have been shenanigans going on in selling this war. The President is fighting back, accusing his critics of rewriting history and sending mixed signals to the troops and to the terrorists. Neither side is backing off.

“Fact” means something is beyond the realm of dispute, or at least should be, unless someone is speaking out of ignorance and/or a deliberate effort to deceive. Yet the facts are what are in dispute.

So regardless of your opinion — and you’re keeping in mind what an opinion is, right? — if you want to corner that obnoxious neighbor or co-worker with a different opinion at the next cocktail party, you’d be well advised to read up. In executing the ambush without first brushing up on recent history, even if you think you have a command of what’s been happening here, you risk making a “Hugh Jass” out of yourself.

And my recommendation is that if you find Mr. Podhoretz’s litany a little too long to merit this expenditure of your time, keep your mouth shut. Because you’re the kind of person who should. That’s *my* opinion.

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Veteran’s Day
Friday, November 11th, 2005

Veteran’s Day

Nobody ever reads this blog, but among those who happen to trip across it, consider this. If you’re part of the great crushing mass of independent thinkers who oppose the War on Terror in general, and/or the War in Iraq in particular, because you have been flabbergasted, flummoxed, overwhelmed and just plain knocked-flat-on-your-ass by the incredible personal sacrifices made by our troops who serve overseas, thank a vet today.

Some other time, we’ll pick up the debate about whether logical sincerity has been betrayed, or is being adequately serviced, by the hair-splitting exercise of “supporting the troops while opposing their mission.” We have time to do that, tomorrow, next week, next year, thanks to those folks. For today, we can agree that regardless of how that debate turns out, these people deserve thanks. Drafted or not, wounded or not, having-seen-combat or not.

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For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types IV
Thursday, November 10th, 2005

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types IV

I’m glad this girl has lived, so far, and I’m glad that she appears to have been somewhat pretty. I’ve noticed those among us who oppose the death penalty, do so out of concern that “civil liberties” be accorded to “the least among us” and respected once they are so accorded. As if, when you make sure some malt-liquor-gulping, woman-beating, puppy-kicking piece of scum can enjoy his constitutional rights, you’ve somehow ensured we all can, and every man, woman and child from sea to shining sea can rest easy. Or that, if you defend the right of a very wealthy corporate executive to keep his money, you have defended that man alone; in the fight to defend freedom for everybody else, this was just a waste of time.

Ah, except people who think that way have an unfortunate tendency to be excited into passion, action, or noisemaking only when pretty girls are abducted, beaten, raped or murdered. So maybe what happened to this poor girl, will cause our anti-death-penalty types to re-think a thing or three.

Her name is Lauren Huxley. She’s 18, and remains unconscious in critical condition after having been beaten, tied up, doused with fuel ~~and set on fire~~ at her home.

Lauren Huxley’s parents and sister Simone today pleaded for information about what they say is an “inexplicable” attack on the teenager.

“We have no idea who did this to her and we have even less idea as to why anyone would do this,” her mother Christine Huxley said.

“She’s turning 19 on Christmas Eve. She is the most beautiful girl, so innocent and she’s never confrontational, we are at a complete loss as to why anyone would hurt her.”

I recognize that phrases like sick twisted fucks incorporates strong language that is not fit for a diverse and uncontrolled Internet audience. But there is no phraseology suitable for mixed company, that can adequately describe what is happening here. Some people are born with the wrong wrinkles in their brains to safely exist alongside the innocent, who in turn have a God-given right to be protected. That’s not a logical leap at all, nor is the supposition that whoever did these terrible things to this poor girl, has that wrinkle.

Killing is wrong, you say, even when you kill someone for having killed? Yeah, sure. I’d like to see you say that, after someone close to you suffers a horrible attack like this, and then, God forbid, expires from it. Letting people like this live, is really no different from letting them go. And letting them go, is condemning yet more innocent people to burn to death in puddles of flaming gasoline.

Who is really in favor of that? I would hope nobody. Okay then, you people suffer from delusions. That doesn’t make you bad people, but I see no reason why the innocent have to keep suffering because of your delusions.

Update (11-11-05): For whatever it is worth, thanks to the superior writing in this article, it is seems established that Ms. Huxley is not a burn victim.

Lauren Huxley, 18, was found by fire-fighters when they were called to a blaze at her Northmead home, in Sydney’s west, about 4.30pm (AEST) on Wednesday.

They found her tied up and unconscious, with serious injuries and covered in petrol.

Ms Huxley was last seen getting off a bus, from Baulkham Hills TAFE, just around the corner from her home about 2pm on Wednesday.

Police, who are treating the attack as an attempted murder, said it was thanks to the rapid response by fire-fighters that the blaze had not spread to the garage and to Ms Huxley on the floor.

This has no bearing whatsoever on the viciousness of the attack, certainly not on the intent of the individual or individuals responsible for it. They were sick twisted fucks yesterday, they’re sick twisted fucks today, and they possess vital organs that could be put to good use in much more worthwhile individuals.

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The Fifth Division
Thursday, November 10th, 2005

The Fifth Division

Last month I had offered my thoughts about the one-dimensional blue-state/red-state spectrum, and my opinion that it was inadequate for describing the issues that are really dividing America right now. Believing, still, that we have disagreements about principles in this country, not about whether George W. Bush is a big doo-doo head, I further offered my encapsulation of what these principles are. I came up with five, four of which I listed, the last one of which I kept under wraps with the promise I’d discuss it later. This fifth division amongst us, I said, is more important than the other four.

The fifth division is Abiding By The Contract: Should individuals in our society be bound by it, or not?

Let’s review what The Contract is.

1. You perform services and make X money;
2. You demand services of others and compensate them with Y;
3. You get to keep Z, which is the difference between X and Y;
4. If you want Z to be bigger, you provide more to others or demand less from others;
5. If Z is less than 0, you must diminish your savings, or else cede your personal decisions to other people because they are no longer entirely yours to make.

This is a gross oversimplification, because today we have all kinds of things in America that help to corrupt this contract. Taxes represent one corrupting factor; social safety nets represent another. In divining one’s political philosophies, it is a far more accurate technique to keep in mind The Contract, than to simply listen to the philosophies word-for-word. For example, a social program exists to keep people of modest means out of trouble. But we have a lot of people of modest means who get into trouble because of tax issues. So it makes little or no sense that the people who want a more robust social safety net, are the same people who like to make taxes more punitive. That is, until you keep in mind The Contract. These people simply don’t like it. They want it to be corrupted.

This is proven by the abundance of very wealthy individuals who favor more confiscatory taxes, and brag about this position in spite of their comfortable position in life — and by the paucity of these individuals who then brag about paying surplus taxes. Very few people say “The IRS didn’t charge me enough, so I cut a bigger check and that’s the end of the issue until next year as far as I’m concerned.” These people never seem to want to do that. They want everybody else along for the ride. If Bob is rich and Bob doesn’t think he’s been charged enough, and he simply leaves a “tip” to the treasury, The Contract remains relatively uncorrupted. The impact of this decision is felt o

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Too Close For ComfortTuesday, November 29th, 2005

I Speak Of…Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

The Speech He Should GiveMonday, November 28th, 2005

Self HelpThursday, November 24th, 2005

ThanksThursday, November 24th, 2005

You Go FirstTuesday, November 22nd, 2005

What Are We Arguing About?Friday, November 18th, 2005

Imitation is the Sincerest Form IVFriday, November 18th, 2005

More Timely Than It LooksTuesday, November 15th, 2005

Veteran’s DayFriday, November 11th, 2005

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types IVThursday, November 10th, 2005

The Fifth DivisionThursday, November 10th, 2005

Too Close For Comfort
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

I Speak Of…
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

The Speech He Should Give
Monday, November 28th, 2005

Self Help
Thursday, November 24th, 2005

Thanks
Thursday, November 24th, 2005

You Go First
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

What Are We Arguing About?
Friday, November 18th, 2005

Imitation is the Sincerest Form IV
Friday, November 18th, 2005

More Timely Than It Looks
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005

Veteran’s Day
Friday, November 11th, 2005

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types IV
Thursday, November 10th, 2005

The Fifth Division
Thursday, November 10th, 2005