You’re either with us or you’re with the O’Reillyists.
…I should add that these guys are pretty out there. But hey, so was Uzbekistan.
The War On Christmas: Ground Operations CommencePost + Comments (33)
Archives for 2005
Lost
Just watched the first two episodes of Season One of Lost. So far, so good. Quick notes:
1.) I hope if I am ever a survivor of a plane wreck, it is on a desert island with a bunch of hot 20 year olds who like to run around in the surf in their lace underwear.
2.) Funny how incestuous tv is. The creator, JJ Abrams, made Alias. A lot of writers from Alias also wrote for BTVS and Angel. I have seen a bunch of actors/actresses who have been in both Alias and Lost, and one who was in Angel.
Intelligent Design Arguments Failing…
To evolve into real science:
Intelligent design posits that the complexity of biological life is itself evidence of a higher being at work. As a political cause, the idea has gained currency, and for good reason. The movement was intended to be a “big tent” that would attract everyone from biblical creationists who regard the Book of Genesis as literal truth to academics who believe that secular universities are hostile to faith. The slogan, “Teach the controversy,” has simple appeal in a democracy.
Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement’s credibility.
On college campuses, the movement’s theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.
“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
Nor will they, no matter how often their proponents pretend publicly that this is really a competing scientific theory and not just warmed over creationism.
(via Mark Kleiman, with whom I agree that this article has one of the best headlines I have seen in a long time.)
Go Vote For US
Balloon Juice is nominated in the “Best of the Top 250” category at Wizbangblog. We were up for best Conservative Blog (a category we no longer really fit), but now seem to be un-nominated. I am not suggesting perfidy, just we were there and now, well, isn’t. Beats me.
All the categories can be found here.
DeLay Update
One of DeLay’s indictments has been dismissed:
senior district judge today dismissed one felony indictment but upheld another against U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, dashing DeLay’s hopes for a speedy resolution to his case.
A quick ruling in DeLay’s favor from senior state District Judge Pat Priest throwing the case out of court was crucial to the Sugar Land Republican’s efforts to regain his post as U.S. House majority leader. He was forced to step down when he was indicted in September.
Priest dismissed charges of conspiracy to violate the state election code but upheld a money laundering indictment against DeLay and two of his associates: Jim Ellis and John Colyandro. They were charged in connection with spending corporate money in the 2002 legislative races.
DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden portrayed the ruling as a major legal victory over Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle.
“The court’s decision to dismiss a portion of Ronnie Earle’s manufactured and flawed case against Mr. DeLay underscores just how baseless and politically motivated the charges were,” Madden said.
Make of it what you will. I am sure the Powerline will explain to us that this means DeLay is completely innocent of everything while ThinkProgress will explain that this is a sign how strong the other indictment is against DeLay. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.
At any rate, this looks like the end of DeLay as Majority Leader, as elections will be held in January for new leadership.
Unmotivated
Guys- I am sorry for the lack of blogging. I am just swamped with end of the year stuff and unmotivated to blog, really. I need a few days off.
Intelligent Design
Why are prominent conservative ‘thinkers’ defying reality to support the concept of intelligent design? Ron Bailey at Reason has some speculation in this old piece:
What’s going on here? Opponents of Darwin traditionally have been led by biblical literalists, whose “arguments” on the subject have been generated mostly by the Book of Genesis. Now their camp includes some of the most prominent thinkers in the conservative intellectual movement.
As a matter of historical curiosity, this new turning of neocon eyes toward heaven comes just as Pope John Paul II has officially recognized that “the theory of evolution is more than an hypothesis.” Indeed, it comes as evolutionary thinking itself is shedding considerable light on an array of questions and problems, from brain growth to the development of immune systems, from sociobiology to economics, from ecology to software design. Such research is yielding anti-designer results. F.A. Hayek long ago recognized the phenomenon of “spontaneous order” and described how it arose in markets, families, and other social institutions. Now, ingenious computer models are confirming Hayek’s insights. It is increasingly obvious that social systems, from commerce to language, evolve and adapt without the need for top-down planning and organization. Order in markets is generated through processes analogous to Darwinian natural selection in biology. In other words, we can indeed have apparent design without a designer; the world is demonstrably brimming with just such phenomena.
But the neocon assault on Darwinism may not be based on either science or spirituality so much as on politics and political philosophy. That is the view of Paul Gross, a biologist and self-described conservative. Gross is much concerned with the interplay of science and politics–he is the co-author of the 1994 book, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science–and is puzzled by the attacks on evolutionary biology by people whose political views he largely shares. Regarding Commentary’s anti-Darwin article, he says he is mystified that the magazine “would publish the damned thing without at least passing it by a few scientists first.”
Gross believes that the conservative attack on Darwin may be a case of tactical politics. Some conservative intellectuals think religious fundamentalists are “essential to the political program of the right,” says
Ugh. I came by this old piece via the Corner, and thought it worthy of a read. At any rate, Derb is over there pissing off the entire joint by saying nasty (not really, at least by Balloon Juice standards) things about Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Just click the link and star scrolling down to read the last day’s exchanges in reverse chronological order.
I think Ramesh Ponneru is about to cry.