And just for Linz, here’s another post to push Wed…

And just for Linz, here’s another post to push Wednesday’s futher down the page. It doesn’t say much, but given all the space the headers and footers take up, I’m sure it does the job. 🙂

From Jay Leno via Bill from Portland Main’s Cheers…

From Jay Leno via Bill from Portland Main’s Cheers and Jeers on Daily Kos (how’s that for a trail of evidence)

“Today a Texas grand jury indicted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme. This is the most embarrassing thing to happen to the Republicans since yesterday.”

Well put. Crooks, crooks, crooks. “The Republican Party: Making Kleptocrats and Mafia Bosses Look Clean by Comparison”. Ok, so I lose the slogan competition.

Educational standards? Somehow I managed to miss …

Educational standards?

Somehow I managed to miss the news that a graduate student at Ohio State was about to defend a dissertation looking at the effects of teaching ID creationism and evolution to high school students.
The first question one should raise in such a situation is how is it ethical for the university to be involved in teaching students something that is scientifically unsupported. What sort of lapse was made by the human subjects oversight committee?

The second question is more subtle. Two of the student’s committee members were the only two OSU facility to have come out in favour of ID. Ok, fair enough – people can constitute their own committees. But, the School of Teaching and Learning requires that two committee members must come from the science education programme, and that the committee members should reflect the expertise needed for the dissertation. Neither of these were true – none of the committee members met either criterion.

It makes you wonder – was it an underhand scheme by the student, or was it a cynical ploy by the committee members? You see this more and more – dishonest actions by ID’ers to try to claim scientific credentials. They (mostly) claim to be Christians, but they turn out to be using lies and deceit to further their agenda. Makes you wonder what side they’re really on.

To quote kos "Holy fucking shit." Tom Delay indic…

To quote kos “Holy fucking shit.” Tom Delay indicted. Cool.

Finally, some good news.

Saw Eugenie Scott speak last week. Most of what s…

Saw Eugenie Scott speak last week. Most of what she had to say was not new to me (although she put it well) but she finally explained the whole “methodological naturalism”/”philosophical naturalism” thing.

It’s interesting to see what Phillip Johnson has to say about defeating materialistic science. Methodolical naturalism (= methodological materialism) is the basis of science – that you have to limit yourself to “materialistic” explanations in science. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the supernatural or not – as a scientist you need to limit yourself to known or knowable physical processes. Sure, you can propose new processes, hopefully they will be something you can measure (which is the problem with string theory, of course, because there may not be any way to measure strings). But if you move beyond methodological materialism, into the type of science Johnson wants, you create irrefutable hypotheses. Which means, you have no science, no medicine, know way to distinguishing truth from fiction.

Imagine your doctor including the supernatural in his diagnosis. If you can’t rule out demonic possession, or a curse, you need to attack the matter on all fronts. Which means, I suspect, that every hospital would have to hire a few pundits (given the number of Hindu doctors). If Johnson was serious about this, he should be advocating this. I’d love to see that.

Why Baton Rouge is Still Bush Country – WaPo I su…

Why Baton Rouge is Still Bush Country – WaPo

I suppose not every Rethuglican is a racist or a nut. Some of them are driven by something very different – a fear of change, failure to adapt to a changing world. Much like What’s the Matter with Kansas, the question of why the working class, acting against their own interests, go out of their way to support the crooked Bushite kleptocracy. Being adrift in a world you can’t control, you look for a ‘regular guy’. Of course, why they choose the elitist, draft-dodging Yalie is another question. But they see him as their man, for some incomprehensible reason.

How do you drag people out of their holes? This dissociation from reality is widespread. People follow leaders who lie to them and tell them what they want to hear, rally them behind the flag and jingoistic nationalism, tell them that they can embrace the simplicity of the biblical creation story as if it were the literal truth…drawing the lines in the culture war between progressives and regressives. The made-up idealised 1950s, when black people could be freely lynched, when women were not people, when my marriage and the marriage that produced me would have been illegal in parts of the US… These are the things that progressives must deal with.

We dodged a bullet. For a while it looked like Ri…

We dodged a bullet. For a while it looked like Rita was coming our way.

I wish I had tried to contact Anson beforehand. I don’t know where he was. I sure hope he was home, and not in the Gulf or Indonesia or somewhere like that. I’m sure there were people in from Houston who were halfway around the world drilling for oil while their families were left alone to face Rita. It’s tragic for the towns that Rita did hit, but I am glad that it did not hit one of the bigger cities where so many more people would have been affected.

That’s not a reassuring way of looking at things really. I remember talking to Gus on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. To me, death and destruction on that scale is horrible, without any redeeming factor. And then Gus said that the bombing saved his life…he was a prisoner in a Japanese camp in Indonesia, and was scheduled to be shipped off the next day to a forced labour camp…a mine, I can’t recall the name…that was simply a black hole, a place where no one survived. It gives you perspective. Rita not hitting Galveston and Houston means ruined lives elsewhere.

And there we have it. The way forward. Only prob…

And there we have it. The way forward. Only problem is, while Daou outlined the problem, that the netroots need to go after the Democratic party establishment and the press, I don’t have any idea how I can contribute to that effort…all the more since I just live here, I’m not an American or anything…

The Big Questions I suppose I write here out of a…

The Big Questions

I suppose I write here out of a desire to be read. I’m not sure if I have anything worth saying, but that’s entirely beside the point. The medium allows anyone to “publish” – without editors, without a need to have anything to say. But if you want to be read, shouldn’t you try to get people to read what you write? There’s the rub. The only way that I could reasonably generate traffic my way would be to post a link on my Wikipedia user page. Wikipedia being what it is, and my standing in the community being what it is, I know I would get at least a few readers. Unfortunately, it would serve to draw my Wikipedia identity closer to my real-world identity. And that might not be good. Safe to hide behind the cloak of anonymity I can be as outspoken as I want to be. Breach that security, and I become that much more visiable.

Why does it matter if my Wiki-identity is matched with my real-world identity? One reason is the whole job-search idea. Someone has posted as the Chronicle a piece entitled “bloggers need not apply”. The idea that blogs are likely to hurt your job search. If blogs might hurt, then who knows how my Wikipedia contribution might be viewed…

Bill Maher tells it like it is: America must reca…

Bill Maher tells it like it is:

America must recall the president. That’s what this country needs. A good, old-fashioned, California-style recall election! Complete with Gary Coleman, porno actresses and action film stars… but seriously, Mr. President, this job can’t be fun for you anymore. There’s no more money to spend. You used up all of that. You can’t start another war because you also used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people.

You’ve performed so poorly I’m surprised you haven’t given yourself a medal. You’re a catastrophe that walks like a man.

Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes.

On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two Trade Centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans…Maybe you’re just not lucky!

I’m not saying you don’t love this country. I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you, and what he’s saying is, “Take a hint.”

Before the 2000 elections, the NYTimes published a story about how Bush had run seven companies into the ground. Now, as predicted, he has run the country into the ground too. Granted, I never imagined he could have done so spectacular a job. I remember when Reagan was a corrupt, war-mongering failure who ran the country into recession and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. But at least Reagan had the excuse of Alzheimer’s. And, at a fundamental level, Reagan still had something of a connection with ordinary people. He was not the imperious one – he had Maggie to fill that role. Hmm – I never thought of that – George Bush combines the worst of Reagan and Thatcher, and has none of their good qualities. Well, I suppose Blair just doesn’t have enough of a spine left to have anyone’s bad qualities…