Author: RB

An Act of Deception

Intelligent Design is a deceitful critique of Darwinian descent with modification that attempts to undermine the commitment of science to find natural causes for natural phenomena. Its apparent goal is to have public school science classes teach Divine Intervention as an alternative to natural causes. One of the favorite complaints of Intelligent Design advocates is that they’re persecuted and denied free speech whenever the absence of any rational basis for their claims is exposed, and their favorite method is deception. Once again, the deception has come to the surface in a story in the New York Times on their upcoming film “Expelled.” The film’s producers obtained interviews with several prominent scientists by claiming to be doing a documentary on the intersection of science and faith rather than a propaganda piece for anti-scientism.

As the Times correctly surmises, there isn’t really any great scientific controversy over the subject matter:

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”

Hence the claims of persecution are groundless. But we Americans love the underdog, so some will root for the ID’ers anyway.

Sad.

See Volokh and Reason for more.

Predictably, the ID response is riddled with falsehoods. The Discovery Institute claims there’s an active scientific dispute over descent with modification (there isn’t) and that Richard Sternberg and Guillermo Gonzalez suffered reprisals from the science establishment for their support of creationist ideas, Sternberg at the Smithsonian and Gonzalez at Iowa State University. In fact, Sternberg was never employed by the Smithsonian and Gonzalez’ failure to win tenure was based on his thin publication record.

But we already knew that.

Only on the Internet

From the annals of modern technology:

A Bosnian couple are getting divorced after finding out they had been secretly chatting each other up online under fake names.

Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, from Zenica, poured out their hearts to each other over their marriage troubles, and both felt they had found their real soul mate…

“To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.”

What can I say?

Something for everybody

I’ve got to see the latest bin Laden video, it sounds seriously funny:

An address that contains less than 2,500 words mentions “large corporations” eight times, and blames all the ills of the world on them and the “capitalist system” they represent. The warmongers killed Kennedy for trying to end Vietnam and they’re keeping America in Iraq, he claims. Capitalists are melting the polar ice caps, miring hard-working Americans in debt, and have even got the Democratic Party in their deep pockets, he suggests. And the only one who’s crying wolf in America is, according to bin Laden, American linguist and left-wing political activist Noam Chomsky.

Swings For The Stands

At this point — with 95 percent of the American public hopelessly lost in his video address — bin Laden the anticapitalist unveils the only solution that could possibly alienate the remaining 5 percent: religion. Your mistake, he tells Americans, is that “you have separated church and state.” The way out of this problem is conversion to Islam.

Here, bin Laden swings for the stands of transpartisan weirdness and connects, combining in a single sentence religious fundamentalism, anticapitalism, and a nontax flat tax: “Islam will deprive [the war profiteers and owners of large corporations] of the chance to swindle the people out of their money through arms deals and such, for Islam has no taxes and only limited alms that stand at 2.5 percent.”

There’s something for everybody in this: low taxes, anti-capitalism, and religious fanaticism. What a deal.

My pet goats

Wary of flying third world airlines? You shouldn’t be scared of Nepal Airlines, where they’re willing to make any sacrifice:

KATHMANDU (Reuters) – Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.

Some frequent fliers on Air India nicknamed its flagship “Emperor Ashoka” the snarky “Emperor Asukham” (sick emperor) because it broke down all the time. Clearly, they were too stingy with the goats.

H/T Nancy Rommelman.

Cuban ruffles feathers

Mark Cuban is both entertaining and insightful, the latest example being his remarks on the dead and boring Internet:

A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

Cuban is right, of course, and even Om Malik (broadband cheerleader extraordinaire) admits as much:

But the bigger question Cuban is asking is whether the Internet’s infrastructure is sufficient to keep the innovation cycle moving forward. And the answer is no.

And why? Om quotes Nortel’s CTO:

John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel (NT), is of the same school of thought. “If you look at the progress made from 300-baud modems to 10-Gigabit Ethernet,” said Roese, “the cost per bit has declined by a factor of 22 million to one. But that isn’t reflected in the consumer Internet experience.”

The fault is in the asymmetric nature of the Internet. The downstream speeds are getting higher, but upstream speeds are still being controlled in a miserly fashion by ISPs, thus acting as a break for truly interactive applications.

An asymmetric Internet is good for disseminating information – after all pulling down information (or YouTube videos) moves packets in one direction. This is perhaps the point Cuban is trying to make when he says that the Internet is like a utility and therefore boring. Electricity, after-all, also works as a one-way service — it comes into our house and we use it for everything from stereos and air conditioners. Today’s Web and Internet applications are doing precisely the same on our desktops.

I don’t know that a symmetrical Internet is any less boring than the one we have, as it’s probably just harder to administer. Today we upload our videos to services like You Tube to asymmetrically distribute them, and I don’t see them getting more interesting if we distribute them directly from our homes and offices. Maybe somebody can explain that to me.

Speaking of Craig and sex scandals

Barney Frank puts the latest Republican gay sex scandal in perspective, urging the Larry Craig character not to resign:

“What he did, it’s hypocritical, but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes,” Frank told the Associated Press.

“I think people should resign when they have clearly done the job in a way that is dishonest.”

Frank went on to tell the AP: “It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself.”

Pressure has been mounting, particularly within the GOP, for Craig to step down, after he admitted this week to pleading guilty earlier this month to a charge of disorderly conduct following his June 11 arrest in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.

I’m not even sure it’s hypocritical, as the Republican attitude toward sex seems to be “women for duty, boys for pleasure.” Craig opposes gay marriage, not gay sex, so where’s the hypocrisy?

I’d prefer he not cruise public washrooms, for the sake of the children, so somebody should teach him about Craig’s List. And Slate is to be congratulated for coining the term “Craig’s Lust,” it’s awfully cute.

Michael Vick is misunderstood

Everybody in the world is piling-on poor Michael Vick about his unique attitude toward his animal compansions, so this balanced news story deserves some play:

ATLANTA–Michael Vick’s attorney, Billy Martin, spoke today at length about the dog-killing allegations leveled against his client and insisted that Vick ate “every single dog” that was killed on his property, dispelling the notion the dogs were killed merely for sport.

“Michael would never just kill an animal for the sake of sport,” Martin told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “That’s wrong and it’s disgusting. The fact is, he ate all those dogs after he killed them. He cut them up and cooked them on his grill. They’re actually quite delectable if you apply the proper seasoning. So Michael’s really no different than your average hunter.”

Martin did admit that Vick’s methods of killing the animals were slightly different from those used by hunters, but contended that the methods were “merely a technicality.”

Indeed. Now read the whole thing or I’ll have Instapundit pay you a visit with his puppy-blender.

Win Ben Stein’s Integrity

Speaking of pimps, Ben Stein has a new docudrama coming out in February that seems calculated to pander to the persecution complex prevalent among religious fundamentalists. It’s called “Expelled” and it deals with Intelligent Design from the standpoint of the intolerance of the scientific establishment. You know, the unwillingness of scientists to accept “what if” arguments, rank speculation, and supernatural causes on the same level with hypothesis, evidence, and experiment (all the boring stuff that real science does.)

Interviews were obtained with top scientists through the duplicity of telling them the film was to be a balanced portrayal of the cultural conflict between science and literal-text religiosity, as you can see from this entry at The Panda’s Thumb.

Ben Stein is playing up the victimization angle on a blog post for the movie, and is soundly whacked by commentors for his dishonesty.

So once again we find religious fundamentalists playing fast and loose with the Ninth Commandment in order to advance their cause. Lucky for them, God isn’t watching because blasphemy is a victimless crime.