Andrea commented on my recent post on Intelligent Design (ID) and asked:

“Do you believe that it is an idea better off ignored, or is it too dangerous of an idea to leave untouched? I can’t help but think that we are feeding into the movement by validating their right to a position in the evolution debate.”

If this were a philosophical debate, I would agree. Just like we don’t argue with white supremacists, we needn’t argue with people that think science should look to the Bible for answers to the questions of biology or cosmology. In a philosophic debate we could easily just write them off as people so clueless as to be ignored.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a philosophical debate, it’s a debate over curricula — what we teach in schools. When the ID folks manipulate their agenda to more closely masquerade as science, we need to take the offensive lest people confuse their philosophy with actual science. We need to soundly crush the notion that you can introduce supernatural beings into science and still call it science.

As an ex-Catholic, it would be like me going into church every day and publicly arguing with the priest that he did not, in fact, turn that piece of bread into the body of Christ. Science has no business introducing itself into the mystical faith of Catholics. Nor do Christians have any right to introduce their faith into science textbooks.

To conclude, I don’t have any problem with people believing in creation as an explanation for matters biological or cosmological. I have a serious problem when they try to introduce it into science curricula.

Bill O’Reilly said, and I quote: “I’m declaring war on the ACLU. I think they are a terrorist group. They are terrorizing me and my family. They are terrorizing me. I think they are terrorists.”

Right-wingers bitching about the ACLU is nothing new but I am still stumped by it. The ACLU’s mission, according to their web site, is as follows:

The ACLU is our nation’s guardian of liberty. We work daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our job is to conserve America’s original civic values – the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Raise your hand if you are against that mission. Raise your hand if you are annoyed that people are out there defending the civil liberties of the American people.

What. The. Fuck.

We’ve all heard of the ACLU defending some stuff that stretches our sensibilities, let’s say. They are pretty ballsey in that they do not avoid issues that will be unpopular. Al Franken, on his show, mentioned that the ACLU sued on behalf of some neo-Nazis that wanted to have a parade or something. It sounds nuts until you think about it: do you want the government to decide which points of view are allowed parades and which points of view are not? We, the American people, decided on this funny thing called the First Amendment that protects our right to express even the most looney and wildly unpopular ideas. This is the same amendment that lets Bill O’Reilly say all the stupid and often untrue shit he says. It’s the same ones that lets Christians preach everyday on the campus where I take classes.

When Bill O’Reilly says insanely stupid shit like I quote above he is saying that the government should not grant rights to people he disagrees with. Bill O’Reilly is against liberty! How else can you interpret that statement?

I really encourage you to read about the ACLU’s mission. It is a necessary and honorable one.

The right is wrong, as usual.

The Intelligent Design (ID) folks are trying really hard to characterize their agenda as science. They are even distancing themselves from the creationists a bit. Their point is not completely irrational: good science should not exclude design as a possible explanation. They think that evolutionary science is biased because it does not include design as a possible method for what we see in terms of the intricate complexity of organisms.

So, shockingly, let me agree with the ID folks on this one thing: I agree that science should not exclude design as a possible explanation.

If I could, though, I want their agreement on something in return: design should be the very last thing that science ever considers. As soon as science turns to design as an explanation it is basically saying that you can’t explain the phenomena naturally. This in turn implies that the “designer” who is normally called God in every other context, broke the laws of physics at various points in the evolution of the earth and its creatures.

I can illustrate why it is imperative that design is the very last explanation that should ever be relied on from an example from a talk I was at recently by Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, entitled “Intelligent Design and the Creation/Evolution Controversy”.

There are things called faerie rings which are perfectly circular mushroom patches that appear overnight. You’ll go out in the forest one day and where there was nothing the day before is a perfect circular ring of mushrooms. These are called faerie rings because in the olden days people thought that the faeries had a party there the night before and created and danced around in this ring.

When the speaker showed a picture of a faerie ring the very first thing that popped into my head was design: this did not look like something created naturally. My suspicion was that someone had planted whatever you plant to create mushrooms years or aeons ago and occasionally they spring up overnight, which mushrooms can easily do.

The truth is much more simple. The particular kind of fungus grows underground concentrically, like the roots of a tree. The circular pattern seems immediately very natural when you thing about it this way. The fungus grows out from the center and when conditions are right all of the “roots” of equal age (i.e. equal distance from the center) bloom at once.

If one were to focus on the explanation which involves design (this had to be people who created this) you would completely miss the more simple and natural explanation. The science stops the second you invoke design and instead of looking for a natural explanation the quest turns to a search for the designer.

Thus, if we are to practice good science, we can never invoke design as an explanation unless there is overwhelming proof of such design. I suspect that such proof can never exist because even if we watched some unexplainable magic happen right before our eyes, scientists would still seek a natural explanation. This is because that is what science is — natural explanations of natural phenomena.

Look — there might be a God and he might do magical stuff every now and then. I don’t exclude that possibility. From the vast, deep, broad and thorough body of science we have, there is no proof of this. This does not in any way mean that science says there is no God, it means that God, if he exists, works through science and not outside of science.

This is the inexplicable core of ID that we science types just don’t get. The ID and creationist folks want to live in a world where you can prove the existence of God. They want science to go: wow, look, this must mean there is a God. Science ain’t ever gonna do that. Science says: wow, look, something we don’t understand, let’s try understand it. Scientists would love to get their hands on the water Jesus walked on, do tests on Lazerus or get Jesus to turn water into wine in the laboratory. There would be some fascinating science there. That’s our job — look for the science and exclude the magical.

So as the ID folks desperately try to craft their agenda as science it just can’t be. As soon as you introduce the supernatural, by definition, it ain’t science anymore. If God exists and there is scientific proof that God exists, science will look for the science behind God. They will never just say: oh well, looks like God did it. I don’t get why the ID folks want them to say that.

It would be easy to assume if you read some of my blog posts that I am a proponent of class warfare and I hate rich people. I don’t at all. I try not to judge people on things like race, sexual preference, religion or “class”.

Yet I do have a serious problem with the war that (many) rich people wage against taxes. I can see how if you make a lot of money and you pay a lot of money in taxes and you look around and see a lot of people paying far less taxes that you wonder if that is fair. I have paid a lot of taxes in my day, too, and it sucks.

Or it would if I didn’t believe we live in a great country that has a great government that does a lot of great things. (Note I am saying this proudly even though I think the current administration is appallingly lame.) I love my country. I am a patriot, a capitalist and a small “D” democrat. All of this, to me, means that I should see the money I pay in taxes as a good and necessary thing.

I believe we have a struggle in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The haves want a small government because they know that they have to pay for it. Yet they want a large military because they have the most to protect. The have-nots want a big government so that concentrated wealth does not concentrate into a plutocracy. The haves see anything remotely socialist as a threat to their wealth and the have-nots see laissez-faire capitalism as a road that ultimately leads to plutocracy.

This is a struggle that really always has been and always will be. The fundamental test of fairness is when you walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes. If we all can do this we can find the right balance between these two seemingly opposing ideologies. Rich people should not want a plutocracy. Not-rich people should not want a government to strip wealth from individuals. There is a proper balance but we don’t get there by tending towards the extremes. We get there with a willingness to compromise.

We all do better when we all do better.
  –Paul Wellstone

(A tip o’ the hat to Ben for the “grain of sand”…)

The oh-so important and serious fellows over at Powerline wrote an essay about taxes. I quote their conclusion:

In other words, the top 10 percent of tax filers were responsible for two of every three dollars paid in income taxes in 1999, while the bottom half of all those who file tax returns paid essentially no income taxes.

For the bottom half of tax filers who receive hundreds of billions of dollars in government benefits but pay essentially no income taxes, political debate about taxation has little personal meaning except insofar as they may aspire to earn higher incomes in the future.

Many Americans would see the present system of federal income taxes to be unfair if they knew the facts. These facts, however, are almost never reported in the mainstream media. The so-called progressivity of the federal income tax system is both fundamentally unfair and inconsistent with the principle of equal rights that underlies the Constitution.

I.E. more rich people complaining about the fact that it is not effective to tax poor people, as I write in my essay Progressive Taxation, from which I quote:

Bottom line: we should tax progressively because it is fair. It puts most of the cost on those who have benefited most and who will be impacted by it least. It is a tactic to fuel economic growth by turning people who are tax burdens into people who are tax payers. Any strategy which puts more of the tax burden on the poor ultimately hurts the rich, too, because we hobble our biggest potential of economic growth.

I agree with their facts — the rich pay more of the taxes than the not-rich. I personally don’t think this is at all unfair. But even if you agree with them that it is unfair, what is the solution? They do not prescribe a solution, but the math is pretty straightforward — to make the system “fair” you’d have to significantly raise taxes on everyone but the rich. The alternative is, of course, slashing spending to the point that we have a burnt out shell of a government.

Why are people who have better lifestyles than 99.999% of the people that have ever lived always bitching about paying taxes? They should be proud of their additional contribution and instead they bitch. Shut up you rich bastards. There is nothing wrong here.

OK, I’m getting the feeling that people think I am a rather unhappy, frustrated and pissed off dude. I’m really not. I just tend to write about things that piss me off. This is probably why mopsa calls me the “rant man”. Yes, my job here is to rant. In general, I am often misunderstood in electronic communications because I come across much more blunt or emotional than I am. I’m actually not very emotional at all.

So, on to some good things then.

1. Single Malt Scotch. I am an Islay guy. I like the really smokey scotches. My favorites are Lagavulin and Ardbeg. I also like Bowmore and Laphroaig. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but once so acquired, the shit rocks.

2. I am a bit of a gamer. Currently I’m playing World of Warcraft. I also have Far Cry and Half-Life 2 going right now. It’s kind of funny that a guy who is a father and studies astrophysics plays video games, but I do and I like it. It’s what I do when my wife zones out in front of the TV.

I’ll just mention those two for now since I should probably pepper something positive in here every now and then lest you all think I am an ever cursing ogre.

Smiles, people, smiles!

While this probably has no chance in hell of going anywhere, it is still funny/sad/scary that right-wingers want to censor college professors. It’s no secret — academics are overwhelmingly liberal. Big deal. Big business guys are overwhelmingly conservative. Should we muzzle them from speaking their minds? You think big business guys don’t have enormous influence over people? I’d say they have a hell of a lot more influence than a college professor.

You know what, Mom and Dad? Your kid may grow up someday and have different values than you. That’s called good parenting. Brain washing your children to believe exactly what you believe is bad parenting. Admire your kids for thinking on their own and be proud of them for their willingness to disagree with you. You have succeeded.

(Addendum — Oh no! It looks like this is closer to home than I thought! Check out this at Pharyngula.)

I’ve been thinking about what bothers me about the post below. Imagine a web site that said “Tired of black people answering your personal ad? Come to Whites-Only Singles.” We’d call that racism. Is there anything wrong with a white person wanting to date another white person? Not necessarily. Is there anything wrong with a conservative wanting to date a conservative? Not necessarily. Yet if we saw a web site like my example above we’d all probably have a problem with it. It may even be illegal. We have this notion in this country that discrimination is wrong. As a raging liberal white person, I would happily date a conservative and I’d happily date a black woman. No problem at all. Do I care if others are not so open minded? Not really. I do care when they are as blatantly offensive about it. The implicit statement is that liberals aren’t worth dating. We’ve taken our lame polarization out of politics and put it in everything now. How long until employers will only hire conservatives? How about a McDonalds that only serves Christians?

This is not a statement about conservatives or Christians, it’s a statement about people who are so close minded that they can’t even leave open the possibility of loving someone with a different political ideology. We are lame and getting lamer and apparently we are proud of it.

I’ll say it again, a Liberals-only singles site would be just as lame. A pagan-only web hosting provider would be lame. It is disrespectful, discriminatory and, I’ll say it again, lame.

The chosen ones are finally getting more serious about separating themselves from us heathen scum. You can now make sure you never have to date a stinking liberal ever again. That not enough for you? You can also host your web site with a Christian web hosting provider! Don’t let some pagan sinner touch your HTML.

There is not a big enough shitter in the world for me to barf into.