With any tavern, one can expect that certain things that get said are out-of-place. But there is one place where almost any saying or scribble can find a home: the bathroom wall. This is where random thoughts and oddments that don’t follow the other entries at the Panda’s Thumb wind up. As with most bathroom walls, expect to sort through a lot of oyster guts before you locate any pearls of wisdom.
The previous wall got a little cluttered, so we’ve splashed a coat of paint on it.
In reply to Gav, comment 6747, I must admit that as an atheist I am somewhat underwhelmed by Matthew 10:29
In reply to Wayne, comment 6750, my little tirade was against Theistic Evolution.I was suggesting that you can have one or the other but not both. Of course if God has been given (by believers), the attribute of being able to do anything at all, including the impossible and the illogical, then we can’t discuss the matter sensibly; because then the simple answer to all problems is that God-did-it, like a sort of blanket cure-all. If on the other hand, God can only do what is possible, then 1. he is not Omnipotent,and 2. As we already have genetic Algorhytms and naturalalistic Evolution,-these provide a much more intellectually satisfying explanation than a kind of Paul Daniell, or Robbie Williams in the sky.
I’ll take Steve’s place of being the first post to say Creationist suck.…ok I really don’t think that way. I just feel sad that people can often be so willfully ignorant.
I didn’t post it on the Bathroom Wall because the thread was too long and it would have gotten lost. So Reed very politely moved it there…and then closed the thread to further comment! So I’m posting it here on the new wall so everyone can see it. Like I said, now is not the time to be timid. And with all due respect, this has everything to do with your objectives. You know what’s happening in Ohio, right? http://ecology.cwru.edu/ohioscience/ Ohio is a battleground state and efforts to elect John Kerry might go a long way towards neutralizing these egregious attempts to sneak creationism into the schools.
For a good time, call Ed Conrad and MurphyInOhio at 800-555-WERNUTZ.
Good morning, Charlie. Right on.
Thanks, Bob. You can help, you know. The key in Georgia is to get the black vote out. There’s a hell of a lot of democratic votes there. If you have any black friends or relatives urge them to vote. Georgia is becoming a very different place than it used to be, like North Carolina, and it doesn’t have to stay “red”.
http://members.cox.net/fweil/NYT001029.html
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I remember coming across a copy of “2001 Insults for All Occasions” when I was about twelve years old.
I grew up and got over it.
It’s weird to have to agree with Charlie. It’s even weirder as a Republican to have to agree Charlie is dead on right that we have to fire the current WH. I feel so…unclean…
There is a cure for Republicanism: come over to the better party.
The irony of the Swift Boat Vet thing is that these guys are so obviously full of crap, contradicting each other when they’re not contradicting their previous statements, and yet … our wonderful media insists on presenting “their side of the story” as if their story was discovered by journalists and investigated and shown to have some merit (and not just fabricated by some vengeful vets and planted in the media’s face with the help of giant wads of Republican cash).
Does any of this sound familiar? In the context of, say, biological science, can anyone recall a similar group of hidden agenda-driven self-contradictory dissembling fakers who fabricated a bogus issue and presented it to the public as if it were a genuine controversy of great importance?
Notice how Kerry has chosen to respond to these charges: not by trying to “prove” that the incidents took place according to his version of events (can’t be done), but by demonstrating that the Swift Boat Veterans are UNRELIABLE LIARS who are PROPPED UP and funded by partisans.
Atrios posted a great transcript from the Daily Show which makes the point succinctly:
Wayne, Purgery is when you stick your finger down your throat, a reaction the current WH occupant should cause in anyone who cares about, or fears for, the future of this country. Perjury is what he may or may not have commited. And there were never more than unsupported allegations, with no corroboration, of sexual harrasment.
reposting this here.
ps–Creationists suck.
There is a cure for Republicanism: come over to the better party.
Believe me Gary, I’ve considered doing just that. I feel the party has been sort of taken over by a neocon cabal and that if the present weak leader could be ejected there could still be hope for future admins … And there is some value in being able to truthfully Blog and honestly comment that I’m a Republican, but that I’m voting for Kerry. It’s frustrating that I sometimes get attacked, and I mean viciously, by either side when I do so. But I think it does some good.
Sorry Bob, I’m a self proclaimed bad speller. :/
I agree there but then if your sister gets felt up by her boss when they are alone in the office that is nothing more then unsupported allegations by your sister isn’t it. It is just her word agianst his. Now if multiple people start independently accusing your sisters boss then a picture starts to get painted. Note that Clinton had complaints when he was governor.
I do not see how you can say he didn’t commit perjury. He said he didn’t have sexual relations with her. He did. He lied to them about the time of the affair, as confirmed by his own book. Pretty black and white. Unless you also don’t believe that oral sex is sex. Guess that makes a lot of the priests charged with pedophilia because the priest is not having sexual relations with the chior boys.
I’m with you ~DS~. I’m a republican because I believe federal government doesn’t need to be as bloated as it is. Saddly I don’t see the republican party pushing that anymore. I don’t care what people think about my political views. They don’t have to agree with me. Agian Clinton was a good president. He shouldn’t have lied to congress.
It makes me sad when I think about the politics in the USA. So many people trying to push their religion and morality on others. While I’m a proud American I am not proud of many of the current Americans walking the face of the earth.
I’ll be voting democrat this time…maybe living in Australia has softened me a bit :)
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That’s ‘Scuba Steve’, to my friends (who are bigger fans of Adam Sandler movies than I am, apparently).
Instead of reading more about Dembski’s Clogged Filter, you might want to read Descartes and Aquinas instead. Their mathematical attempts to prove god, though also failures, were much more subtle and clever.
Actually, Wayne, he didn’t have “sexual relations” with Lewinsky. The term refers specifically to intercourse, which did not occur. I expect he carefully crafted that statement to avoid telling the truth without actually lying.
Exactly bob. So the next time a priest performs oral or anal acts with a choir boy we can say “well thats ok its not a sexual relation”
The actual final agreed definition was
which means Clinton had to “interpret” in a manner of
For the purposes of this deposition, I W.J. Clinton, engage in sexual relations when I W.J. Clinton knowingly engages in or causes:
1. Contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any other person, with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person ie not myself;
Contact means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing
So despite the fact that he had many incidents of direct skin to skin contact with her breasts and genitalia he can claim he wasn’t doing it with “intent to aruouse or gratify the sexual desire” of Lewinski.
I have to agree the fault is on the prosection for being vague in their questioning and definition.
I’m trying to track down the actual statements that he did lie. It has to do with the times of contact where in his autobiography he contradicts the his testimony and agrees with other testimony given at the hearings.
Personally I don’t care if he had sex with 20 willing adults at one time. I knew about Clinton’s seedy record before he became president. That doesn’t mean he was a bad president overall. Is record stands in that regard. But to defend him on points like the one above is crazy and you would not defend any man off the street the same way. Point is even the president should not be subject to different rules then the common man. If a rapeist ever gets off using the same type of defense I’d hate to think you would defend them as you did clinton, note I’m not saying he raped Lewinski.
Ah! found it
In Clinton book he confirms it was in November of 1995. So either he committed perjury or he’s lieing in his book along with everyone else.
Maybe you can come up with some interpretation where March 1996 = November 1995.
Agian this tap dance doesn’t paint a picture of him being creedible in the Jones v. Clinton sexual harassment lawsuit and actually points out that he did indeed commit perjury if the details within his book are correct.
The details are in the starr report and the Jones v. Clinton case. I’ll see if I can provide some online links to both and see if I can get the references from his book where he confirms the relationship started in November in contradiction to his testimony.
Clinton’s worst crime: justifying enough odium to get W (almost) elected in 2000.
Wayne, anything which is testified to under oath, which is untrue, is perjury. No quarrel there at all.
The “sexual relations” episode, which you pointed to, occurred at a news conference, so it wouldn’t be perjury no matter how false it was. My point was, and is, that, generally speaking, the dictionary definition of “sexual relations” is “intercourse.” Again, generally speaking, most people who point to that episode wrongly claim he said, “I did not have SEX with that woman - -.” His statement was, in my opinion, carefully crafted to leave a specific impression without lying. It should have been obvious to anyone.
Jones’ lawsuit wasn’t a Sexual Harrasment suit - the statute of limitations had run out on that avenue. Peripheral testimony from others - Trooper Danny, etc - cast some doubt on Jones’ claims. Haven’t read his book, don’t intend to, don’t know what he says about it and don’t care. It’s over. What remains is the haunting spectre of the (how many?) millions of dollars spent by that Republican witchhunt of an impeachment.
I don’t understand why you accuse me of defending him. I voted for him in ‘92 with great hopes, and was so sorely disappointed that I voted for the Libertarian in ‘96 as a protest.
My concern is more with pointing out and defending against the misuse and corruption of our language. “Nuculer” and “pundint” also come immediately to mind in this regard. As a lover of Rottweilers, I cringe every time I hear “Rockweiler.”
The bottom line is, vote Democratic in November, if only to prevent the Shrub from giving us an Inquisition for a supreme Court and naming Clarence Thomas Chief Justice. That’s my rant.
I love it. First we have the theory that there is a level playing field for ID in terms of publication. A theory that is manifestly false. As if to make my point for me, there is the De Rerum Natura trackback to this post, which states
There you have it in a nutshell. The publication was a mistake. Peer review failed. After all, it’s an ID paper.
I really like Great White Wonder’s comments:
Does GWW review submissions, by chance?
Too bad you didn’t follow the trackback. I never said that peer review failed because it is by an aideeist. In fact, I never mentioned anything about ID, creationism, the Discovery Institute, etc. I say peer reivew failed because of the poor scholarship and research that has been documented in this thread.
Reed, the point is that any ID paper (even this one that slipped through the cracks) will be deemed by the establishment to consist of “poor scholarship”.
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Notice how the criticisms in Wesley’s et al. post is about the content and not any ID sympathies of the paper. They did not “deem” it to be poor scholarship, but went into detail why it was. Probably the simplest example of the poor scholarship was Meyer’s citation of only the lower probability bounds. That is not just poor scholarship, but close to academic fraud in my book.
This paper didn’t slip through the cracks; it appears to have been snuck in the back door.
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David: Your speculations as usual remain unfounded in much evidence. In this case ID submitted a paper and it seems that it has a lot of problems. Perhaps when ID proposes its hypothesis rather than a negative argument, it may gain some respectability.
That carnivorous plant study is way cool.
The link is: Holding, Cathy (2004). “Pitcher plants are all wet.” The Scientist, September 21, 2004.
The original study is:
Holger F. Bohn and Walter Federle (2004). “Insect aquaplaning: Nepenthes pitcher plants capture prey with the peristome, a fully wettable water-lubricated anisotropic surface PNAS published September 21, 2004, 10.1073/pnas.0405885101.
This animation about RNAi is great. Creationists should love it, too–it’s full of oversimplified purposeful-looking elements.
http://www.nature.com/focus/rnai/an[…]_res_avi.avi
For those familiar with the social history of trust, and its importance to science, it isn’t surprising that the ID movement has formed its own journals and started “peer reviewing” its own material. It parallels, and I say parallels, the way real science often works - where people who practice a discipline start their own journal because it is difficult to get peer review in regular journals.
The irony is that in science such a sub-discipline launches journals not because it is too difficult to get published, but because it is too difficult to find people who can review. That is, it isn’t that it is too hard to get published, it is that it is too easy to get published.
With ID, of course, it is the complete reverse. What they have is not a theory but a “notion”. Evolution was once a notion - an motivating explanation for how people felt things ought to work. A theory is a very long way from a notion, requiring a volume of observations, some of which are deep truth - observations which simply don’t fit into another notion. Interference of light is such a deep truth, it simply doesn’t fit into a corpuscular theory of light, the photo-electric effect is another, it doesn’t fit into a wave theory of light.
The problem with ID is not really that it doesn’t have a theory - before there are theories there have to be notions - it is that the “deep truths” that they propose are so feeble, and so easily seen as being explicable, if not easily fit into current verions of evolutionary theory. They attack particular manifestations of evolution, while not getting at the heart of the notion of evolution - and it is the notion that they want to destroy, not merely the theory.
Which, as has been pointed out, means they want to attack virtually all of modern science, because the notion that systems evolve based on internal rules, and that all of the complexity in a system can be explained by the evolution of the system under those mechanical rules - is inherent not only to biology, but to physics as well. A simple example: starting from hydrogen, all other elements are produced by fusion, or bombardment, of earlier atoms. This gives us the relative abundance of elements on the periodic table - those up to iron being created by fusion which gains a star energy, those above only created by neutron bombardment within a star, or, more abudantly, in supernova explosions which generate higher stages of endothermic fusion. Which, in turn, creates a theory of stellar evolution - early stars without metals, later stars with more metals, still later stars with more metals, and so on.
Which is why the formation of an “ID” Journal is feeble. They don’t just need a few glitches with our understanding of evolving systems, then need a series of observations which drill down to the heart of physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy. I wish them luck, seriously, in their quest - because they are going to need it.
However, if they were intellectually honest, they would admit they don’t have a theory, or even anything closely resembling a theory.
You should put up a thread on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/m[…]BIOLOGY.html
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Check out these great scans from the Christian textbook “Biology: God’s Living Creation”, courtesy of Religion Related Injuries.
Tonight, don’t let George Bush’s henchmen steal another victory. We need your online help immediately after the debate, so save this message, print it out, and have it ready with you as you watch the first Presidential debate tonight.
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Immediately after the debate, we need you to do three things: vote in online polls, write a letter to the editor, and call in to talk radio programs. Your 10 minutes of activism following the debate can make the difference. Vote
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And be sure to check the websites of your local newspapers and TV stations for online polls. It is crucial that you do this in the minutes immediately following the debate. Write
Immediately after the debate, go online and write a letter to the editor of your local paper. If you feel John Kerry commanded the debate and had a clear plan for fixing the mess in Iraq, put it in your letter. If you feel George Bush dodged tough questions on Iraq and didn’t level with voters, put it in your letter.
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And after the debate, check johnkerry.com for a very special message.
Thank you,
While they might be conducting a pole don’t expect the results to be accurate. For a “news organization”, and I use that term very lightly, they are far from the “Fair and Balanced” that they claim to be. Even as a, normally, republican voter it makes me sick to the stomach to watch programs from this channel. Where the reporter will interview someone and if they don’t like the responses the person gives, ie it puts the conservative Christian republicans in a bad light, the reporter often yells at the person to “SHUT UP” and if they continue orders the new crew to “turn off his microphone”. I’m not talking about someone swearing or anything like that. I’m talking about normal opinions like “I don’t think we should have gone into Iraq”
Personally I’d say boycott this channel.
I respect where you are coming from Charlie but lean a little less biased. I’m sure both sides will have some good in the debate. I encourage people to write about what they liked and disliked on both sides. Show where your view is. By all means support Kerry if that is your wish but be objective about your comments.
For me this election is not about Iraq. For me it is about the bias this administration has to Christianity while trying to seem tolerant of all religions.
Lets take White House Faith-Based and Community Initiative
While it is supposed to be
Full article at The Washington Post (2 June 2004)
One has to be stupid to think it is fair to all religions when of the 100 million dollars handed out not 1$ has been given to charities run by Jewish, Muslim or other non-Christian faiths’ Full article at Chicago Tribune (2 May 2004) (registration required)
Its clear that GW Bush is aiming to support all religions in helping those who are in need.…so long as all those religions are Christianity based.
Bush makes a mockery of what our forefathers fought for and established. A land where people are free from a government with religious bias.
Wayne wrote:
Absolutely, 100% true. Large numbers of people are voting for Bush for no other reason than “he’s a Christian”
Months ago I posted about an experience I had, almost tutoring a kid in his bio class at a local baptist private high school. I talked about how remedial and idiotic the textbook was, how it was unfit for any classroom, and did nothing but list facts and preach. Well my friend, Biology: God’s Living Creation was the book in question. Glad you found that. It’s a very amusing stroll down memory lane.
Update