Paris Hilton is the perfect symbol of the Hamster Creation Exhibit:
1)Fame purchased with a lot of money, sans achievement.
2)Ignorance flaunted.
3)All flash and no substance.
4)Laughable cries of persecution.
5)Far more interesting to the more childlike among us.
Let's hope they both fade into oblivion real soon.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Marvin Olasky's not-so-desperate Atheists
Over at Townhall, Mavin Olasky has written a typically clueless analysis of some of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens), the kind we've come to expect from Christian apologists. It remains one of the great mysteries of the universe that the same people wearing WWJD armbands are so comfortable lying about atheists and misrepresenting science to push their theocratic agenda. The Jesus I studied in Catholic school would not approve.
The dishonesty begins right away with Olasky's title. Atheists are desperate? In an an era where the number of nonbelievers is at an all time high, where science has pounded religion into esoteric near irrelevancy, and out-and-proud atheists are populating the bestseller lists like never before, we are desperate? Can anyone say "projection"? This is akin to the Intelligent Designers declaring victory after Dover, and it is no surprise that Olasky dabbles in a bit of ID dissembling in his article (more on that later). But hey, Alister McGrath said so, and so in typically authoritarian religious style, Olasky treats it as fact. Unimpressive.
It is interesting to note how throughout his article, Olasky presents quotations from the featured atheists, but never gets around to providing any evidenciary refutation. He does, however, engage in a lot of equivocating and flawed reasoning:
"Concerning 'The God Delusion,' even Publishers Weekly noted, 'For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe...'
Yes, and Dawkins lays out his reasons for that scorn in excruciating detail. Dawkins' criticism of religious intolerance is based on the sheer arbitrariness of it all. No one, Dawkins especially, thinks we should be tolerant of everything. The question is: does religion deserve that scorn? Olasky gives us no reason to reject that. He simply assumes that all scorn is bad, at least in this one instance where that favors his view.
[more from Publisher's weekly] "Even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is 'psychotic,' Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are 'fatuous' and religion generally is 'nonsense.'"
Notice the intellectually dishonest poisoning of the well with the phrase "confirmed atheist", which is just a slightly nicer version of "admitted atheist", as if it were primae facia something that needed to be hidden in shame. As for his point, so some atheists don't care for Dawkins' style. So what? The willingness to criticize each other is one of the strengths of atheism, and of science. This stands in stark contrast to religious tradition, which is all about eliminating dissent. Thus, evolutionary scientists will do battle over the exact proportions of the influence of sexual selection and natural selection, whereas on Intelligent Design sites, discussion of the vast differences in opinion (among creationists) on the age of the earth are forbidden.
And once again note that Olasky does not offer a counterargument to Dawkins' claims, or of those of Harris or Hitchens. He simple plays the Ad Hominem Gambit over and over again. This is the insipid claim that any inflammatory words used in an argument invalidate the argument. This is a distortion of the Ad Hominem fallacy, which is when one dismisses another's argument based on irrelevant personal failings. "You're wrong because you're an idiot" is ad hominem. "You're an idiot, look at all this evidence that refutes you" is a valid argument, albeit with an unnecessary insult. In doing so, he completely misses Harris' points:
"Harris also prefers exclamatory words such as 'preposterous' to either reason or evidence. He asserts certainty about what he admits not knowing: 'How the process of evolution got started is still a mystery, but that does not in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all.'"
Here we see the standard attempt to shift the burden of proof to the atheists. The burden is on those claiming gods exist. All we atheists need do is point out the lack of any evidence. Calling belief in the unevidenced "preposterous" hardly violates reason.
Roll the tape boys: where does Olasky refute Harris' claim about abiogenesis? Nowhere. Olasky misses Harris' point entirely, which is not, as Olasky would have you believe, that Harris is certain no god was involved. What Harris is certain of, and with solid reason, is that the existence of a mystery, any mystery, abiogenetic or not, does not imply the existence and/or involvement of a deity. Olasky's god is one of the gaps, just as the IDers' god, er, designer, is.
On that note, what would an anti-atheist screed be without some creationist ignorance:
"Yet Harris, for all his attacks on Intelligent Design, does not even understand the distinction between macro-evolution -- one kind of creature changing into another -- and micro-evolution. One of his proofs of theistic obtuseness is that 'viruses like HIV, as well as a wide range of harmful bacteria, can be seen evolving right under our noses, developing resistance to antiviral and antibiotic drugs.' No one claims that viruses don't evolve; the debate is whether they turn into something else. "
[Yawn] Learn some basics Olasky. The mechanisms of macro evolution and microevolution are essentially the same. The scientific categorization is in terms of study, the same way one might study local walking vs cross country walking. Both are walking, just measured over different distances.
Were Olasky to actually familiarize himself with bacterial evolution, he would note that the genetic variance among bacteria and viruses are far far greater than that between humans and the apes. So unless he is going to claim that gorillas aren't "something else" compared to humans, he has impaled himself on his spear of ignorance.
And for the uninitiated, speciation (the change in subgroups of a group from being able to successfully interbreed to not being able to) has been documented both in the wild, and in the lab. A visit to www.talkorigins.org is highly recommended for all the "pathetic detail" with which the IDers can't be bothered.
Speaking of theistic obtuseness, Olasky treats us to some in his criticism of Hitchens:
"Hitchens calls 'the whole racket of American evangelism a heartless con' -- but I've met hundreds of compassionate evangelicals who must be dumb, because they've spent their lives in a racket that's yielded them almost no money. They've adopted hard-to-place children, built AIDS orphanages in Africa, helped addicts and alcoholics turn their lives around, and much besides.
The idea that people taken in by cons are by definition dumb is simplistic in the extreme. People are also taken in by cons because they put trust in the wrong people, are desperate, or need a sense of community. That describes classic cults, but to a lesser degree describes a lot of mainstream Christianity. The orphanages also double as recruiting centers to bring in the flock, and as I've already documented here and here, religious drug and alcohol recovery programs basically force the attendees to adopt religious precepts. How noble they are to take advantage of people at their most desperate.
As far as AIDS orphanages go, one can hardly be given great credit for coming to the aid of peope you yourself had a large hand in injuring, and the near universal resistance of religious organizations to even the most cursory and simple of birth/disease control (ie condoms) has been a huge problem with the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Until this changes, the religious groups stand stripped of any claim of moral superiority in these areas.
Finally, as if to hit the Fallacy Trifecta, Olasky concludes with the obligatory, and entirely fictional, claim that he was once one of us:
"So pity the atheists: They're cornered and desperate. But God can break through and change their lives and thinking, as He changed mine in the 1970s when I was saying what Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens say."
Sure you were. That's why your current arguments show no understanding of the atheist position at all. Show me some documentation of that claim and I'll stand corrected. Until then,
you are just another liar for Jesus. It's not we atheists who are desperate. Our epistemology (science) has given us this incredible technological and comfortable society, including the computer on which Olasky wrote his screed. The irony is rich.
Science also keeps refuting religious claims of the material world, to the point where a huge proportion of religious people live indistinguishably from atheists, with the exception of that wasted hour of chanting every Sunday, and their psychological ethereal security blanket of a god. We, not the pious prevaricators, are winning the culture war, slowly but surely, in places like Dover, and every day a child gets on the internet and reads something like Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens. The fact that the arguments presented against them are typically as ignorant and ill-conceived as Olasky's only makes the case that much stronger.
The dishonesty begins right away with Olasky's title. Atheists are desperate? In an an era where the number of nonbelievers is at an all time high, where science has pounded religion into esoteric near irrelevancy, and out-and-proud atheists are populating the bestseller lists like never before, we are desperate? Can anyone say "projection"? This is akin to the Intelligent Designers declaring victory after Dover, and it is no surprise that Olasky dabbles in a bit of ID dissembling in his article (more on that later). But hey, Alister McGrath said so, and so in typically authoritarian religious style, Olasky treats it as fact. Unimpressive.
It is interesting to note how throughout his article, Olasky presents quotations from the featured atheists, but never gets around to providing any evidenciary refutation. He does, however, engage in a lot of equivocating and flawed reasoning:
"Concerning 'The God Delusion,' even Publishers Weekly noted, 'For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe...'
Yes, and Dawkins lays out his reasons for that scorn in excruciating detail. Dawkins' criticism of religious intolerance is based on the sheer arbitrariness of it all. No one, Dawkins especially, thinks we should be tolerant of everything. The question is: does religion deserve that scorn? Olasky gives us no reason to reject that. He simply assumes that all scorn is bad, at least in this one instance where that favors his view.
[more from Publisher's weekly] "Even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is 'psychotic,' Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are 'fatuous' and religion generally is 'nonsense.'"
Notice the intellectually dishonest poisoning of the well with the phrase "confirmed atheist", which is just a slightly nicer version of "admitted atheist", as if it were primae facia something that needed to be hidden in shame. As for his point, so some atheists don't care for Dawkins' style. So what? The willingness to criticize each other is one of the strengths of atheism, and of science. This stands in stark contrast to religious tradition, which is all about eliminating dissent. Thus, evolutionary scientists will do battle over the exact proportions of the influence of sexual selection and natural selection, whereas on Intelligent Design sites, discussion of the vast differences in opinion (among creationists) on the age of the earth are forbidden.
And once again note that Olasky does not offer a counterargument to Dawkins' claims, or of those of Harris or Hitchens. He simple plays the Ad Hominem Gambit over and over again. This is the insipid claim that any inflammatory words used in an argument invalidate the argument. This is a distortion of the Ad Hominem fallacy, which is when one dismisses another's argument based on irrelevant personal failings. "You're wrong because you're an idiot" is ad hominem. "You're an idiot, look at all this evidence that refutes you" is a valid argument, albeit with an unnecessary insult. In doing so, he completely misses Harris' points:
"Harris also prefers exclamatory words such as 'preposterous' to either reason or evidence. He asserts certainty about what he admits not knowing: 'How the process of evolution got started is still a mystery, but that does not in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all.'"
Here we see the standard attempt to shift the burden of proof to the atheists. The burden is on those claiming gods exist. All we atheists need do is point out the lack of any evidence. Calling belief in the unevidenced "preposterous" hardly violates reason.
Roll the tape boys: where does Olasky refute Harris' claim about abiogenesis? Nowhere. Olasky misses Harris' point entirely, which is not, as Olasky would have you believe, that Harris is certain no god was involved. What Harris is certain of, and with solid reason, is that the existence of a mystery, any mystery, abiogenetic or not, does not imply the existence and/or involvement of a deity. Olasky's god is one of the gaps, just as the IDers' god, er, designer, is.
On that note, what would an anti-atheist screed be without some creationist ignorance:
"Yet Harris, for all his attacks on Intelligent Design, does not even understand the distinction between macro-evolution -- one kind of creature changing into another -- and micro-evolution. One of his proofs of theistic obtuseness is that 'viruses like HIV, as well as a wide range of harmful bacteria, can be seen evolving right under our noses, developing resistance to antiviral and antibiotic drugs.' No one claims that viruses don't evolve; the debate is whether they turn into something else. "
[Yawn] Learn some basics Olasky. The mechanisms of macro evolution and microevolution are essentially the same. The scientific categorization is in terms of study, the same way one might study local walking vs cross country walking. Both are walking, just measured over different distances.
Were Olasky to actually familiarize himself with bacterial evolution, he would note that the genetic variance among bacteria and viruses are far far greater than that between humans and the apes. So unless he is going to claim that gorillas aren't "something else" compared to humans, he has impaled himself on his spear of ignorance.
And for the uninitiated, speciation (the change in subgroups of a group from being able to successfully interbreed to not being able to) has been documented both in the wild, and in the lab. A visit to www.talkorigins.org is highly recommended for all the "pathetic detail" with which the IDers can't be bothered.
Speaking of theistic obtuseness, Olasky treats us to some in his criticism of Hitchens:
"Hitchens calls 'the whole racket of American evangelism a heartless con' -- but I've met hundreds of compassionate evangelicals who must be dumb, because they've spent their lives in a racket that's yielded them almost no money. They've adopted hard-to-place children, built AIDS orphanages in Africa, helped addicts and alcoholics turn their lives around, and much besides.
The idea that people taken in by cons are by definition dumb is simplistic in the extreme. People are also taken in by cons because they put trust in the wrong people, are desperate, or need a sense of community. That describes classic cults, but to a lesser degree describes a lot of mainstream Christianity. The orphanages also double as recruiting centers to bring in the flock, and as I've already documented here and here, religious drug and alcohol recovery programs basically force the attendees to adopt religious precepts. How noble they are to take advantage of people at their most desperate.
As far as AIDS orphanages go, one can hardly be given great credit for coming to the aid of peope you yourself had a large hand in injuring, and the near universal resistance of religious organizations to even the most cursory and simple of birth/disease control (ie condoms) has been a huge problem with the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Until this changes, the religious groups stand stripped of any claim of moral superiority in these areas.
Finally, as if to hit the Fallacy Trifecta, Olasky concludes with the obligatory, and entirely fictional, claim that he was once one of us:
"So pity the atheists: They're cornered and desperate. But God can break through and change their lives and thinking, as He changed mine in the 1970s when I was saying what Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens say."
Sure you were. That's why your current arguments show no understanding of the atheist position at all. Show me some documentation of that claim and I'll stand corrected. Until then,
you are just another liar for Jesus. It's not we atheists who are desperate. Our epistemology (science) has given us this incredible technological and comfortable society, including the computer on which Olasky wrote his screed. The irony is rich.
Science also keeps refuting religious claims of the material world, to the point where a huge proportion of religious people live indistinguishably from atheists, with the exception of that wasted hour of chanting every Sunday, and their psychological ethereal security blanket of a god. We, not the pious prevaricators, are winning the culture war, slowly but surely, in places like Dover, and every day a child gets on the internet and reads something like Dawkins, Harris, or Hitchens. The fact that the arguments presented against them are typically as ignorant and ill-conceived as Olasky's only makes the case that much stronger.
Do Women Talk More Than Men? A New Study Says No, Doubts Linger
Via Zuska comes this study proporting to rebut the stereotype of women chatting more than men.
Alas, I find great fault with this study's methodology and conclusions. They spell out the obvious limitations in their study in the concluding paragraph.
"A potential limitation of our analysis is that all participants were university students. The resulting homogeneity in the samples with regard to sociodemographic characteristics may have affected our estimates of daily word usage. However, none of the samples provided support for the idea that women have substantially larger lexical budgets than men. Further, to the extent that sex differences in daily word use are assumed to be biologically based, evolved adaptations (3), they should be detectable among university students as much as in more diverse samples. We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded. "
There are so many logical errors in this I don't know where to begin. The question they were investigating was whether women do or do not, in fact, talk more than men. The question was not whether women talk more than men due to a biologically based evolutionary adaptation. Further, even if this study did conclusively show the lack of any such adaptation, that does not refute the claim that women talk more than men per se. Thus, that final sentence above is a non sequitor.
There is also the issue of their interpretation of the stereotype. It has been my experience that one's perception of "who talks too much" is highly inversely correlated with one's interest in what is being said. And since men and women have different interests, and men for so long had more power to influence stereotypes, it seems reasonable to conclude men perceive women to talk too much because the men weren't very interested in what the women were saying. Even if the women were just as disinterested in what the men were saying, it wouldn't make much difference in the stereotype, because of the privledged status of men relative to women in society until very recently.
To make matters worse, because of the discrimination that went on against women for so long, particularly with regard to education, it seems hardly a stretch to suggest that the average woman was a little less interesting to listen to talk than the average man, again until very recently when the sociological disparities have narrowed or been eliminated entirely. Slaves in the old south were far more interested in the discussions the men had.
To put the finishing touch on my armchair sociology, it's been my experience that uneducated people do in fact talk more than educated people, which implies women would have historically talked more than men in the past, for all the same reasons enumerated above. This is in part due to the more frequent use of filler words and phrases like "like", "you know", "he said", etc., in the speech of the uneducated. Having to wade through that verbal clutter wears down one's audience, further adding to the perception that one talks too much.
In summary, this study dodges the plausible, and fairly obvious to me anyway, potential historical and sociological causes of the stereotype that women talk more than men. They equivocate on what "women talk more than men" means, focus on a very narrowly defined potential biological cause, and draw unwarranted conclusions from their arbitrarily limited data. I suggest they use this study as their first data point in another study on another stereotype: the one that says psychology researchers construct their experiments and interpret their data to fulfill those views to which they were predisposed.
Alas, I find great fault with this study's methodology and conclusions. They spell out the obvious limitations in their study in the concluding paragraph.
"A potential limitation of our analysis is that all participants were university students. The resulting homogeneity in the samples with regard to sociodemographic characteristics may have affected our estimates of daily word usage. However, none of the samples provided support for the idea that women have substantially larger lexical budgets than men. Further, to the extent that sex differences in daily word use are assumed to be biologically based, evolved adaptations (3), they should be detectable among university students as much as in more diverse samples. We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded. "
There are so many logical errors in this I don't know where to begin. The question they were investigating was whether women do or do not, in fact, talk more than men. The question was not whether women talk more than men due to a biologically based evolutionary adaptation. Further, even if this study did conclusively show the lack of any such adaptation, that does not refute the claim that women talk more than men per se. Thus, that final sentence above is a non sequitor.
There is also the issue of their interpretation of the stereotype. It has been my experience that one's perception of "who talks too much" is highly inversely correlated with one's interest in what is being said. And since men and women have different interests, and men for so long had more power to influence stereotypes, it seems reasonable to conclude men perceive women to talk too much because the men weren't very interested in what the women were saying. Even if the women were just as disinterested in what the men were saying, it wouldn't make much difference in the stereotype, because of the privledged status of men relative to women in society until very recently.
To make matters worse, because of the discrimination that went on against women for so long, particularly with regard to education, it seems hardly a stretch to suggest that the average woman was a little less interesting to listen to talk than the average man, again until very recently when the sociological disparities have narrowed or been eliminated entirely. Slaves in the old south were far more interested in the discussions the men had.
To put the finishing touch on my armchair sociology, it's been my experience that uneducated people do in fact talk more than educated people, which implies women would have historically talked more than men in the past, for all the same reasons enumerated above. This is in part due to the more frequent use of filler words and phrases like "like", "you know", "he said", etc., in the speech of the uneducated. Having to wade through that verbal clutter wears down one's audience, further adding to the perception that one talks too much.
In summary, this study dodges the plausible, and fairly obvious to me anyway, potential historical and sociological causes of the stereotype that women talk more than men. They equivocate on what "women talk more than men" means, focus on a very narrowly defined potential biological cause, and draw unwarranted conclusions from their arbitrarily limited data. I suggest they use this study as their first data point in another study on another stereotype: the one that says psychology researchers construct their experiments and interpret their data to fulfill those views to which they were predisposed.
Friday, August 3, 2007
The Psychology of Verbally Abusive Poker Players
If you have spent any time at all playing poker online, you know the guys I'm talking about. They lose a hand in poker to a draw (In the popular internet poker community-card games hold em and omaha, this usually consists of players filling a straight or flush draw on the last, or river card), or just lose generally, and get verbally abusive about it. They call everyone at the table donks, and accuse the site of being rigged, though how exactly the site would be rigged, and what value there would be in rigging it in that particular way, is never discussed. And they come back day in and day out, keep losing, and keep complaining.
I often wonder what sort of person would behave this way. Are they just the sad sacks of life, with nothing to support their ego other than a perceived brlliance at poker? Ironically, they come across almost as egomaniacs, unable to consider even for a moment that maybe the reason they lose consistently is because they have a lot more to learn about the game. Often times they are pure pot-odds players, not understanding the importance of bluffing to playing profitably.
It is also interesting to note that accusations of nonrandomness in computer generated games almost always consist of the claim that low probability events are happening too often. Not coincidentally, this is what psychology tells us we willl perceive. The routine and expected elude our recollection, while the outlying results stick with us.
But don't tell the brilliant losers that. Their perceptions are always reality. Just ask them.
I often wonder what sort of person would behave this way. Are they just the sad sacks of life, with nothing to support their ego other than a perceived brlliance at poker? Ironically, they come across almost as egomaniacs, unable to consider even for a moment that maybe the reason they lose consistently is because they have a lot more to learn about the game. Often times they are pure pot-odds players, not understanding the importance of bluffing to playing profitably.
It is also interesting to note that accusations of nonrandomness in computer generated games almost always consist of the claim that low probability events are happening too often. Not coincidentally, this is what psychology tells us we willl perceive. The routine and expected elude our recollection, while the outlying results stick with us.
But don't tell the brilliant losers that. Their perceptions are always reality. Just ask them.
Michael Behe on Colbert
Michael Behe made an appearance on The Colbert Report tonight (see the video here). You have to give Behe credit for having the guts to go into situations with people he has to know are not exactly in his corner. Of course after the pasting he got at the Dover trial, I guess Colbert didn't seem too intimidating.
Another thing to take into consideration when evaluating this exchange is that Colbert wants people to enjoy their experience on his show (see an interesting conversation with Charlie Rose here). So he takes it easier on people like Behe than he would someone used to dealing with antogonistic press like a journalist.
Nonetheless, Colbert skewered Behe in ways only he can. He began with Behe's book THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION, which seeks (and fails) to show the limits of what evolution can do, and asked Behe if all science should begin with looking for how to limit a theory. Behe scrambled to his feet with the Einstein gambit, noting how Isaac Newton thought he had worked out all the laws of motion, and then here came Einstein with his theory of relativity to show that Newton's laws were essentially limited. It's a decent analogy, except for one little glaring flaw that Colbert jumped all over:
"So, you are saying you are Darwin's Einstein?"
Behe was a little taken aback by this, but really, it is the appropriate response. Behe might as well claim it is reasonable for him to be expect to be a professional athlete without working out because Shaquille O'Neal* can. If you are going to draw a comparison to Einstein, you need to have demonstrated that you are in that league, and Behe clearly isn't.
The rest of the interview had Behe prattling on about the usual issues: irreducible complexity, and the supposed increasing pressure against evolution from biologists (all in hiding for fear of reprisals from the Evil Darwinian Establishment of course). The predictability of the IDer/creationists is really remarkable. He even had the audacity to bring up the analogy to the mousetrap again, despite it being refuted. This refusal to deal honestly, if at all, with criticism, is what makes Behe just another crank.
*Nothing against Shaq. For all I know, he is the hardest worker in the NBA. The point isn't that he's lazy, but that he could be and get away with it.
Another thing to take into consideration when evaluating this exchange is that Colbert wants people to enjoy their experience on his show (see an interesting conversation with Charlie Rose here). So he takes it easier on people like Behe than he would someone used to dealing with antogonistic press like a journalist.
Nonetheless, Colbert skewered Behe in ways only he can. He began with Behe's book THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION, which seeks (and fails) to show the limits of what evolution can do, and asked Behe if all science should begin with looking for how to limit a theory. Behe scrambled to his feet with the Einstein gambit, noting how Isaac Newton thought he had worked out all the laws of motion, and then here came Einstein with his theory of relativity to show that Newton's laws were essentially limited. It's a decent analogy, except for one little glaring flaw that Colbert jumped all over:
"So, you are saying you are Darwin's Einstein?"
Behe was a little taken aback by this, but really, it is the appropriate response. Behe might as well claim it is reasonable for him to be expect to be a professional athlete without working out because Shaquille O'Neal* can. If you are going to draw a comparison to Einstein, you need to have demonstrated that you are in that league, and Behe clearly isn't.
The rest of the interview had Behe prattling on about the usual issues: irreducible complexity, and the supposed increasing pressure against evolution from biologists (all in hiding for fear of reprisals from the Evil Darwinian Establishment of course). The predictability of the IDer/creationists is really remarkable. He even had the audacity to bring up the analogy to the mousetrap again, despite it being refuted. This refusal to deal honestly, if at all, with criticism, is what makes Behe just another crank.
*Nothing against Shaq. For all I know, he is the hardest worker in the NBA. The point isn't that he's lazy, but that he could be and get away with it.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
States Visited
create your own visited states map
That's my map. You can make your own on the same site. As far as standards are concerned, I don't think bopping in and out of airports and conference rooms counts. If you haven't touched the earth there, you haven't been there.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Republican Hypocrisy on Medical Marijuana Laws
Over at Townhall, Jacob Sullivan has an excellent article exposing the Republican hypocrisy on medical marijuna laws. The Republicans like John Boehner, Michael Steele, and Michael Reagan keep telling us they are the party that believes the best government is the government that governs the least,
that they are for limited and accountable government, and are the party of independent thought and new ideas. Yet when a state government passes a law that respects all those principles, but it cconflicts with the will of Republicans (and to be fair, many Democrats as well) on Capitol hill, then it's just a big case of "we were just kidding". Send in the clowns, er, the DEA goons to raid people doing nothing more than attempting to ease suffering, and improve health. Way to go GOP.
At least there is some hope. The Democrats all seem lukewarm at best about the raids, and as for the Republicans:
"Three of the nine remaining Republican candidates -- Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Tommy Thompson -- oppose the DEA raids. But the rest of the Republicans, including the leading contenders, either have taken no position (Mitt Romney) or have said they would continue the current policy (which, it's worth remembering, has roots in the Clinton administration). "
It is also worth noting that the Commerce Clause is once again the culprit here. I am surprised there is not more discussion of how that part of the Constitution basically undermines the entire document, allowing the federal government to run roughshod over states's rights any time it wants merely by declaring it commerce. The founding fathers probably did not forsee asociety as interconnected as this one, and had no idea just how huge a loophole they left in their great document.
that they are for limited and accountable government, and are the party of independent thought and new ideas. Yet when a state government passes a law that respects all those principles, but it cconflicts with the will of Republicans (and to be fair, many Democrats as well) on Capitol hill, then it's just a big case of "we were just kidding". Send in the clowns, er, the DEA goons to raid people doing nothing more than attempting to ease suffering, and improve health. Way to go GOP.
At least there is some hope. The Democrats all seem lukewarm at best about the raids, and as for the Republicans:
"Three of the nine remaining Republican candidates -- Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Tommy Thompson -- oppose the DEA raids. But the rest of the Republicans, including the leading contenders, either have taken no position (Mitt Romney) or have said they would continue the current policy (which, it's worth remembering, has roots in the Clinton administration). "
It is also worth noting that the Commerce Clause is once again the culprit here. I am surprised there is not more discussion of how that part of the Constitution basically undermines the entire document, allowing the federal government to run roughshod over states's rights any time it wants merely by declaring it commerce. The founding fathers probably did not forsee asociety as interconnected as this one, and had no idea just how huge a loophole they left in their great document.
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