dangerous liberty

CSPAN has the video of the FL gubenatorial debate held Monday October 30, 2006.

Read the rest of this entry »

A must read Hitchens: Plamegate’s ridiculous conclusion. By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

He is not easy on David Corn of The Nation. Nor should he be. It was Corn who started the whole 16 words imbroglio so many moons ago, based on Wilson’s lies. At best his judgement is suspect, at worst he deliberately misled, as he has accused Bush for many years. Hitchen’s explains:

In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any irony here is only at the authors’ expense. It was Corn in particular who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction—that:

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation’s counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone (”thuggish,” “gang”) is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was “seized on by administration critics.”

The fact that Corn doesn’t disclose outright that he was one of the ‘adminstration critics’ says a great deal about his journalistic ethic.

President Bush’s recent interview with Brian Williams in New Orleans is up at MSNBC. Watch it here.

Ha! Quite funny…

Casey Luskin of the Discovery Instintute will be producing a 10 part response to Barbara Forrest’s take on Kitzmiller v Dover. She was an expert witness on the winning side of that case. He is the author of Traipsing Into Evolution, which exposes the fallacious reasoning employed by Judge Jones.

A Discovery Institute talk on the book was recently aired on C-SPAN, watch it here.

Coyote Blog: A Skeptics Primer for “An Inconvenient Truth”

I’m halfway through, it is well done. (even handed, as well)

Check out this picture of a tornado illuminated by lightning. Snopes says it is the real deal.

Dan of Migrations asks Are all IDers inane creationists?

He says up front most creationists are intellectually dishonest. That fits arguments I’ve heard made by Young Earth creationists. But I wonder, is an intellectually dishonest creationist one who believes God somehow is the cause of reality as we perceive it or are they of the YEC variety, which requires science be founded first in their interpretation of the biblical creation myth?

I don’t know which case Dan is using the term, but I’ve noticed blurring distinctions between the two cases to confer illegitimacy to the former is a very common tactic (intellectually dishonest as well) among darwinism’s defenders.

He praises Mike Gene because “because he takes the first step and admits the blatantly obvious: that the existence of God is not a scientific issue, but a theological one.”

First, this is technically innacurate. the existence of God is a metaphysical issue, not theological. Theology considers the nature of God and his laws - God’s existence is assumed.

Second, the non-existence of God is also metaphysical. Science doesn’t prove or disprove God. In fact, science is by its very nature limited to describing the mechanics of reality. The ultimate questions cannot be answered by science (to believe otherwise is sitll belief), so we look to philosophy to give meaning to observation. It’s a human thing and based in belief, whether you start with the premise the material/natural is all there is or not.

I have this in mind when he concludes, pointing to this post at Telic Thoughts as proof of ‘where the interests of IDers lay’:

Thus far at least, all of the books mentioned are either explicitly dealing with religious concerns, and/or are very misleading about science

Funny how he can draw such a conclusion from 4 posts (including the blog entry)! All the books mentioned (’thus far’) are either explicitly religious or misleading about science, according to Dan. Has he read all the books listed which he claims are misleading about science or does he just assume it?

My own entry, which immediately preceded Dan’s trackback, had 3 which touched on matters of faith, 4 on economics and/or political theory and 4 children’s books (they are important to me, becuase they are important to my 5 year old!).

The post before mine had half touching religion and the remainder related to computer programming. The other two posts were largely religious/phisosophical.

Now, is Dan deliberately misleading or being lazy? I’d say the former, consiidering the way he used the ‘creationist’ slur throughout.

Had me cracking up, enjoy!

Is It Raining Aliens?