Toast442.org

Over on Salon there is an interview (account or ad-watching required) with Richard Dawkins, author of the classic book The Selfish Gene. Among other things, he explains why America is slipping back into the Dark Ages - an idea with which I strongly agree. Check this out:

Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?

It comes, I’m sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.

Yow.

Tom DeLay (R-LaLa Land) has got more problems than you can shake a pointed stick at, and he’s not helping himself based on his latest rumblings. Yes, he’s finally apologized for calling for the impeachment of federal justices with whom he disagreed with regarding the Schiavo nonsense. And while the press is slobbering over these statements, he goes off again on the judiciary:

“I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.(Italics mine)”

Yes, you read that right: Tom DeLay thinks that your right to privacy shouldn’t exist; wouldn’t exist except for those activist judges. What kind of crack is this guy smoking? Who the hell is against privacy? At least the first two items he quoted has some semblance of support from some loony portion of the population. But privacy? I doubt you’d find many people outside some power-hungry politicians and nutjob law enforcement types that just can’t stand the fact they can’t go through your mail legally that would endorse stripping citizens of their right to privacy. (Well, that is, definitely not in such a bold way, anyhow. Small erosions of our privacy are happening every damn day.)

This guy is seriously dangerous. He sees his way out of the countless ethics violations heaped on him: he’s directing everyone’s attention to some non-problem that few people support but that can severely damage our government. In fact, check out this incredible non-denial of his own problems. He doesn’t give a shit, really (from the Salon War Room):

DeLay also answered a couple questions about his alleged ethics violations, saying, “This stuff that’s in the press is frivolous.” But when Washington Times reporter Charles Hurt pressed the issue and asked if DeLay had ever “crossed the line of ethical behavior,” DeLay turned a bit more demure. “Ever,” he said, “is a very strong word.”

I saw someone wearing the shirt pictured at right yesterday in a store. I thought it was pretty funny due to the head-in-the-sand attitude the shirt exudes. I especially like the fact that they just plastered an image of Darwin on the front. I tracked down the makers of this thing on the web - and if your think that shirt’s bad, you ain’t seen nothing baby. Check out some of the other whoppers they have available:

Ahhh - yes - the requisite Terri Schiavo exploitation selection. I see the “blame the judges” meme has penetrated everywhere. “We will not forget!” - well not until this shirt stops selling, anyway. I give it a week. And man can these guys keep current: They have three or four shirts about the death of Pope John Paul II. Yeah baby - profiting from someone’s death is cool.

Allright! Let’s get high! Oh wait, it’s one of those clever word tricks where they say one thing but they ACTUALLY mean something else. Very clever. In the verses referenced by the shirt, Paul is stoned and carried out of a town and left for dead. Except he’s not really dead yet and comes back for more. “Stand your ground for CHRIST!” Great - that’s what we need - more martyr mentality. “Bitchin! Lets go get ourselves killed for Christ!”

And here we have the nicely offensive (to Muslims anyhow) claim that everything will be just fine in the Middle East just as soon as those damn furriners except Jesus into their hearts. You know, I bet the minority nutjob radical Muslims think the same thing about those nutjob radical Christians. If they’d just see the error of their ways…

Of course, no self-respecting crazy shirt site would be complete without a couple of self-serving out-of-context quotes from the enemy of the unborn, the founder of of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Read about all the stuff those wacky right-to-lifers have attributed to poor Margaret here. I can’t believe that anyone still repeats these lies, but reality was never a challenge to these folks.

And someone needs to tell them that if they want to sell more shirts, perhaps they could come up with some better design software than the “Word Art” feature of Microsoft Word. Seriously, most of these look like they hacked them up in five minutes.

If you need to have one of these shirts, just hop on over to: http://www.christianshirts.net

It’s pretty sad when this sort of thing is actually news: Teresa Heinz, wife of Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry announced at the “Pittsburgh 2005: Health and the Environment” conference the she’s firmly on the side of the scientists when it comes to evolution:

Heinz told about 300 participants at the conference that just as scientists are attacked when they offer evidence of global climate changes, teachers and school board members are being intimidated for teaching evolution.

“This abandonment of science is happening…without any fanfare at all,” she said.

I’m glad to have the support, but you know it’s getting bad when stuff like this is necessary (and almost refreshing.) Thinking about it, it’s like someone stating that they categorically believe the Earth to be spherical - not flat.

I’ve posted many times about engaging the proponents of intelligent design; how it lends them undeserved legitimacy. Well, from the DADAHEAD blog comes the following quote. It’s about engaging certain divorced-from-reality political pundits, but it fits the ID nutjobs just as well:

In a civilized society, you don’t listen quietly to demons like Buchanan and Horowitz spewing their madness, waiting politely for your chance to rebut like it’s a high school debate team match. The very act of engaging them in discourse lends them a legitimacy that they haven’t earned; it is unconscionable to allow them to present themselves to society as rational human beings with opinions and beliefs and arguments when they are not. They are not just people we disagree with, for the sake of fuck. They are not playing our game–they are not making a good-faith effort to make sense of the world and do what they can to make things better–and we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

Finally: some people with the stones to do what needs to be done - refuse to participate in the debates that the proponents of Intelligent Design set up. Conservative members of the Kansas Board of Education had put together the hearing to debate ID vs. evolution. They lined up 23 “experts” on ID, and only one unconfirmed evolution proponent. This is what needs to occur: a refusal to participate in the charade that these ID morons want to put forward. It doesn’t do science any good when people debate the relative merits of ID. There is no real research, no real theory, nothing that can be debated that hasn’t already been said. When thoughtful scientists show up to defend evolution against these nutcases, it just lends credence to the falsehood that ID is a potentially valid theory.

Harry McDonald, from the Kansas Citizens for Science said it best: “Intelligent design is not going to get its forum, at least not one in which they can say that scientists participated,” McDonald said. “We have learned too much to continue participating in this charade.”

Bravo, Mr. McDonald. Keep up the good work.

Link to Kansas City Star article.

The super-geniuses in the Congress have added an amendment to an energy bill that would extend daylight saving time another two months, ending in the final week of November. They claim that doing this will save 10,00 barrels of oil a day for each of the additional days it’s in effect. However, someone should let these jokers know that we’ll spend all that energy reprogramming the world’s computers so they know the new daylight saving time parameters. Not to mention the inevitable headaches that will result from continually updating the clocks on those machines that don’t recognize the new time. It will be a disaster. If they want to change it, make it year round. That’s at least easier to change existing computers to support.

Does anyone think about this crap before they go opening their mouths? Seriously, what a bunch of idiots.

Link to CNN article.

China Miéville has had some great books in the past: Perdido Street Station was very good, and his imagination and ability to create whole consistent worlds where his stories take place is unbelievable. However, this new book in this New Crobuzon universe leaves something to be desired. The story just seems to limp along, held up by the non-stop creation of new and weird sights the characters encounter. This gets really tiring after a while. It’s just page after page of “Gee! Lookee there!” type stuff that’s of little value to the reader or the plot.

He is also holding on to his ridiculous thesaurus fetish. In his previous books, you’d occasionally come across a word dropped casually into a sentence that would send you scrambling toward the dictionary. Not necessarily a bad thing, but they were used in contexts that made them seem out of place - like he discovered the word one day and purposefully created a situation where he could insert it into the story. I thought that he’d grow out of that. But unfortunately, it continues and just drags the book further into the toilet.

The plot centers around a group of characters seeking out the “Iron Council,” a rogue people with a locomotive that continually travels on a set of rails that are constantly pulled up and put down. It is a great premise, but most of the book is taken up by tedious travelogues of the various protagonists, again filled in by random encounters with the fantastic. This is mind-numbing stuff. By the “climax” of the novel, you’ve given up caring about the characters involved, the cause they are pushing, or what their motivations are. It just becomes a race to the end of the book so you can shelve it and move on to something else.

This is some old news (from March 23rd) but it highlights some positive goings on in the “debate” between Intelligent Design and the theory of evolution. A talk was held at the Bovee University Center Auditorium in Michigan on whether ID should be taught in the classroom or not. A quote that is rather pleasant to see:

Panelist and Philosophy and Religion Chairwoman Joyce Henricks, said she’s concerned that people in favor of teaching intelligent design or who are opposed to evolutionism because of their religious beliefs, may have an impact on science curriculums in the future.

“American students, Americans in general, are ignorant to science,” she said. “If we start diluting what goes on in the science curriculum, we’ll increase our ignorance.”

Nice. Some reasonable people here. However, I still see the creeping “validity” of ID toward the end of the article:

“It was a fairly good debate, but most of it was a little less on whether this should be taught in schools,” he said. “It ended up being which one was the more plausible theory than whether (creationism) should be taught in schools.”.

This is the danger in the current push of ID: that there is a debate going on to show which point of view is more valid. There is no real debate about this junk “science” anywhere. Any attempt to frame this as a debate is very dangerous, as it has a tendency to somewhat validate the views of these loonies. As we can see from this article, what happened here was that the talk degraded from “should it be taught” to debating the relative merits of ID versus evolution. Until ID gets any real scientific backing, any discussion over which is more valid is pointless - there is nothing to talk about.

De-orbited or, more succinctly, crashed into the ocean somewhere. It’s too bad - NASA has determined that the cost and complexity of doing a tele-robotic repair mission to the scope far outweigh the science that it would do in the next few years. Hubble is aging, and in need of it’s 15-billion mile oil change. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen now.

An automated liquid-fueled rocket will be flown to the telescope and fired up to plunge the thing into the sea in 2008. Until that time, scientists are working on limping the scope along with fewer gyros and other failing parts. They claim they may be able to get reasonably good observations out of it until then.

The real bummer is that it appears that there is no immediate replacement for Hubble. Nothing is scheduled for launch to take its place, and there isn’t the equivalent ground equipment available.

Link to CNN article.