Archives 2008

Friday Playlist

Waiting for
Hanna to hit edition.

  1. Gabriel Yared, Des orages pour la nuit
  2. Rush, The Way the Wind Blows
  3. The Doors, Riders on the Storm
  4. Assemblage 23, Let the Wind Erase Me
  5. Duran Duran, Hold Back the Rain
  6. Eurythmics, Here Comes the Rain Again
  7. Assemblage 23, I Am the Rain
  8. XTC, 1000 Umbrellas
  9. Deep Purple, Stormbringer
  10. Neil Young, Like a Hurricane
  11. Scorpions, Rock You Like a Hurricane
  12. KMFDM, Sturm & Drang
  13. Jimi Hendrix, Still Raining, Still Dreaming
  14. They Might Be Giants, Stormy Pinkness
  15. Peter Gabriel, Here Comes the Flood
  16. Nitzer Ebb, Floodwater
Webster Cook Removed from Office

Webster Cook, the University of Central Florida student who
precipitated
Crackergate
by failing to eat[1]
a piece of bread he was given, has been
removed from his post on the SGA,
the university’s newspaper reports.

[1] Since Cook’s “crime” was that of not eating, I’m
amused at the fact that the UCF Associate Campus Minister’s name is Swallows.

The only thing that could make this better would be if his colleague’s
name were Spitz.

Elitist Bastard Language

Christopher Hitchens
It’s one thing to act like an elitist bastard, but quite another to
speak or write like one. You can walk the walk, but can you talk the
talk? Here are some rules to help make sure you don’t lose bastard
cred.

Read More

“I don’t want to explain”

I’m going to pick on
a random freeper
(via
FSTDT)
because he makes an argument that I’ve seen elsewhere: in response to
a question about how gay marriage might possibly affect him and his
own marriage, he writes

er it’s forcing me to explain to my kids why two men or two women are doing what they are doing.
I have to explain that nature did not intend for two of the same sex to be together and that they like to be together for perverted sexual acts

So people’s freedom to marry whomever they love should be restricted
because you don’t want to explain it to your children? Puh-leeze!

I hate to break it to you, honeycakes, but explaining the world to
children is what parents do. It’s part of the job description. Oh,
and when I say “explaining the world”, I mean the world as it is, not just as you would like it to be.

(Thanks to Fez for letting me borrow his sarcastic endearment set.)

Logic Fail

BarryA at Invisible Science Uncommon Descent:

I will demonstrate that under very clear United States Supreme Court precedent, the subjective motives of a policy maker are simply irrelevant in determining whether the policy violates the Establishment Clause.

Let us begin at the beginning – the Lemon test. In Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) the Supreme Court established the following three-part test for determining whether a governmental policy violates the Establishment Clause: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose;

(emphasis added)

Creationist logic:

Fail
Call Me Father

I am now a minister. Whee!

I just got a certificate from
Universal Life Church
saying that I have been ordained and “[have] all rights and privileges
to perform all duties of the Ministry.”

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Word O’ the Day

Found while looking up something else1:

misogallic adj. characterized by hatred of the French.

1: In case you were
wondering, the thing I was looking for was another word for
“homophobe”, since homophobes sometimes say that the word doesn’t
apply to them, because they’re not afraid of homosexuals. I haven’t
found anything better, so may I suggest “misohome”?

Another ID Argument Doesn’t Stand Up to Scrutiny

Over at casa de Dembski,
DaveScot tries to debunk a debunking of an ID argument. It goes
something like this:

Michael Behe: The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly
complex, that is, all of its components need to be in place before
it’ll work. It can’t have evolved by gradual addition and improvement,
because none of the subparts do anything until they’re all put
together.

Nick Matzke: Ah, but the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS), a
sort of bacterial syringe, is made up of proteins that look an awful
lot like ones used in the flagellum. That is, you can build
something useful using just some of the parts requied for a
flagellum, and that gives natural selection something to work with.
For instance, the flagellum could have evolved by adding parts to a TTSS.

DaveScot:
Ah, but I have here a paper about a species of bacterium that started
out with a flagellum, but lost most of its parts through natural
selection, leaving only the parts needed to construct a TTSS.

To which I reply below the fold.

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QOTD

Source

The conflict in Georgia also upended Bush’s travel plans. He decided to postpone by one or two days a planned vacation beginning today at his ranch in Crawford, Tex.

Yeah, I’m sure he remembers how bad it looked when hurricane Katrina struck while he was on vacation. Then again, most New Orleans residents are black. Georgians are Caucasians.

Badoom-sha! Thank you, I’m here all week.

Election Math

One cluster of reasons people sometimes give for not voting is that
“none of the candidates represent my views, and I’m tired of voting
for the lesser of two evils.”

(Another, of course, is plain old apathy. A coworker of mine is very
straightforward about not caring about who gets elected. He knows
he’ll catch shit from the rest of us if we catch him complaining about
the government that he didn’t bother to help elect, and he doesn’t.
For people like him but who aren’t quite out of the closet, here are
some tips on
pretending to give a shit about the election.)

Read More