The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

"Duck and Cover" FTW!

Barack Obama: who or what is he?
 

Is he (a) a wimp; (b), clueless; (c) jive artist; (d) all of the above?

Me, I'm disappointed. How disappointed? I'm so disappointed that this Yellow Dog Democrat just put a Palin bumper sticker up beside his old Obama 08 one. Granted, Palin may be a loose cannon -- but at least a loose cannon might shoot in the right direction.

(Full disclosure: for me the issues are trade and immigration.)

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Woohoo! Glad that worked out. In hindsight, I'm sad we didn't get to really dive deep into the mechanics of the Huntsman appeal to the grunge/flannel crowd - could have also yielded great diavlog titles.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

"Obama's first real scandal?" [cue laughter]

Dood had scandals before he was even elected (Rev Wright, wife with fake $300K/yr job, Rezco, Bill Ayers etc) but the press was his willing accomplice. The way the Journolisters got on message re Rev Wright was a microcosm of his treatment since he climbed on the national stage.

Since then everything from Cash For Clunkers, bribes to pass Obamacare, Operation fast And Furious, Solyndra etc etc etc.

Thankfully even the liberals are catching on to a guy who took three years to fail at almost everything and now demands we let him use taxpayer money to fund his re-election campaign. If we ask him to consider the private sector or sound economic principals we are deemed racist or we don't love him enough (shades of N Korea).

Just imagine if they went after him with even half the zeal they go after conservatives. This huge amount of deceit, failure and corruption could have been averted.

Change You Can Believe In!

Perry and backing down
 

I don't think Perry will be hurt in the least if he backdowns on his support for the Vaccines or flip flops on immigration or social security. As shown by Romney's popularity and McCain's nomination in 2008, Republicans are simply uninterested or too stupid to care about changes in positions.

As long as Perry starts singing the right song on the right issues, no one will care two months from now.

I think 2012 is shaping up to be similar to previous Republican nomination battles. You have the establishment/moderate in Romney & you have the leading conservative - that a lot of conservatives have doubts about - in Perry. And you have a bunch of conservative also-rans that are splitting almost 40 percent of the votes. These minor candidates have no chance of getting elected and most will drop out after South Carolina in which case it will become a 2 man race. Given Perry's support in Texas and the South I don't see anyone stopping him, unless Palin gets in.

Bachmann problem is she doesn't really differ from Perry that much on the issues and there's no reason to nominate a relatively obscure Congresswomen when you can nominate the Governor of Texas.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Democracy Now has a report today about Solyndra. The inevitable partisan bickering is overlooking an important angle.
Some day, we are going to run out of oil. Already, the available oil is more and more difficult to extract. Whoever finds the best way to provide energy for the future will be incredibly wealthy.
Right now, China is eating our lunch on this issue. The Chinese government is subsidizing the production of solar panels. If China can provide a way to power the future through solar energy, then China will rule the world.
There are many reasons for the failure of Solyndra. Politically based financing may prove to be a factor. The tragedy will be if we allow China to own the future, because of political shenanigans.
chamblee54

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Solyndra = Obama Epic Fail #342. Such. A. Joke. Where is BJ? Where is Franco? Come on, let's here the denials and spin, boys!

Bill: excuse me? batting 1000? There was a "Going Concern" note in the auditor's opinion (PWC), before the DOE even invested. That means Solyndra was on the ropes when these rubes dumped in their cash. Can't believe that Obama's investment banking experience (sarcasm) didn't help him steer clear of this dog. I guess he let green jobs czar, Van Jones, review the financials.

Blind leading the blind. I don't think even Jimmy Carter could have pulled this off. Romney said it best, "to create jobs, it helps to have had a job."

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

You've got a lot of catching up to do.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Right: When the price of oil makes alternative energy viable is when alternative energy will get cheaper. In the meantime, we already have "magic alternative energy", called nuclear power.

I wouldn't worry about that. China is spending money because it has to park it. A lot of what China spends money on doesn't pan out.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

yes, but to my knowledge, Obama believes in evolution.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

A one issue voter?

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Does Obama believe in the Resurrection? Has he ever explained how someone rises from the dead? Has anyone ever asked? Why doesn't Obama believe in Almighty Science?

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

This religion thing is complicated. Suffice it to say, giving a nod to evolution will exempt you from further annoying questioning.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Bill points to the "private" side of "public-private partnership". But I can see how a new venture could play both sides, hyping up how much money it has already raised privately to the govt so as to get the loan, and on the other side presenting the govt back-up to raise even more money. This extra money is not an indication of "better" fore-sight on the part of the investors, it doesn't mean that their plans are any better than they were to begin with. It's what you would call a "bubble". It's exactly what happened in the housing market with people being able to sell govt-backed garbage (triple A securities) to million of investors.

Not the same
 

I do care if a candidate believes in evolution. If (s)he doesn't or doesn't at least admits (s)he has no direct knowledge but that if it was somehow pertinent to some policy decision (s)he would trust the experts on the Science then this is a negative in my book. I really wish this would stop coming up though. It get's old every-time I am visiting my wife's family and I am overheard mentioning anything vaguely scientific in any field I have to immediately defend why I believe that but don't believe in the Bible. Over time it's become crystal clear that this is a direct outgrowth of a perceived assault on their faith revolving around the evolution issue. Do I believe verbal plenary inerrancy is one of the most stupid ideas of our time? Yes, but the blow back in terms of distrust directed not only at evolutionary biology but all science by a large contingent of the population makes this not a worthwhile issue to go after.

Anyways ...

Believing in the Resurrection and not believing in evolution are totally different. Questions revolving around the Resurrection are not scientific in nature. Science has nothing to say on this. How could it? The whole thing is predicated on magic changing the rules for a specific instance. How various species came to have their current form is a scientific question. We can study it through various means.

So one is believing in something that science has nothing to say about. The other is directly contradicting science. Total false equivalence.

Re: Not the same
 

Personally I have never understood why people have such an adverse reaction to religious folks. At times on the very board the hatred is palpable. But maybe that's because I was raised in a liberal Jesuit Catholic tradition. It wasn't sinful to question and if you are willing to suffer the pains of eternal damnation you were pretty much allowed to believe any old thing you wanted. No one would bring it up at family gatherings either.

This is where you and I differ. I have this aversion to people who criticize the fundamentalist who doesn't believe in the descent of man, and say that they are religious but in some superior way. How can you criticize one person's inconsistent, tortured explanation of why the humanity exists and at the same time hold up your tortured explanation that includes some combination of God and evolution as somehow superior? It's way too elitist for my taste.

And actually science does have something to say about the resurrection... never before observed, goes against the laws of biology and therefore, highly unlikely.

Re: Not the same
 

There aren't many people who hate religious people qua religious poeple, and even fewer who post here (i.e., unless Richard Dawkins is here in disguise and exercising an amazing level of restraint).

Re: Not the same
 

yeah and now that apple has been banned, you might be right. My hyperbole was inaccurate...that's 1!

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

All this worry about the idea of state funding certain industries is missing a key point: these industries are vital to the national interest. The most obvious example of this is military contracting. No one ever argues that military industries shouldn't be supported by the state. The same logic applies to things like environmental, health or infrastructure industry. There are many area of life in which there exists no natural market.

Aside: the upset of the auto and bank bailouts was wrongly assumed to be another example of the government interfering in the market. Yet these were highly unusual cases in which the market had broken down, and the government had a national interest to uphold. In neither case was the government interested in entering these markets more than temporarily - a fact proved shortly thereafter. You can argue the counterfactual that it was bad policy, creating moral hazard and we would have been better off. But as it stands the interventions stabilized both areas in which we intervened. Will automakers and bankers be more reckless, assuming that they might get bailed out in the future? I see no evidence of this. Automakers have gotten severe concessions from unions, and banks have tightened lending considerably.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Good ponts Eli. What really irritates me about the whole "govt-shouldn't-be-bankrolling-X" argument, is the lack of consistency. Conservatives have no problem with govt funding, so long as it goes to the things they like.

With regards to Solyndra, Ezra notes:

Re: Not the same
 

I'm afraid I don't see as much difference as you. Clearly Creationism assumes magic; for example, aren't women supposedly crafted from the rib of a man? Isn't clay involved? The thing is done in six days. There are talking snakes, and fruit invested with DNA altering properties.

There is no substantial difference between this and Resurrection. It isn't as though biology isn't as much a science as geology. People don't rise from the dead according to medical science. The human body isn't capable of it. Nor is it a specific instance; Jesus had previously brought someone back from the dead.

Modern medicine is pretty clear on the impossibility of a virgin birth before IV fertilization. It is also pretty clear on transubstantiation. It is fine for religious people not to believe in creationism; it is pretty hypocritical for religious people to be waiving science in the face of creationists though.

Science has a lot to say about mortality. And water walking, wine transformation, virgin births, healing touches, the spontaneous generation of fish and bread, and foretelling the future.

Re: Not the same
 

Yes, true. The issue is an instance where magic intervenes vs. everything as we know it.

What they have in common is unfalsifiability, but an unusual instance, even a miraculous one, is easier to fit into a scientific framework than a claim that everything on this planet came into being through magic. There's a reason why no one is trying to push for Resurrection Science to be taught in schools.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

If Perry wins the Republican nomination - Obama will win in 2012. With the Goldwater mentality of the GOP, I believe this will come to pass.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

The Left always says this sort of thing, no matter who the GOP nominates.

Re: Not the same
 

Except that as I pointed out, it isn't an instance. Jesus resurrected someone else earlier. Besides, I don't think dying and being resurrected is one of those things that is within the odds of scientific possibility as we understand human biology. Of course, cross reference that miracle with the others performed by Jesus and you have no scientific explanation. That is why it is a religion. And because this religious belief is held by more people (For now), the media and elites seem to treat it with more respect (Again, for now). I suspect that this remains dependent on number of adherents.

You note that there is no "Death Class". There is no class that says death happens in all cases of man, it is irreversible, and that there is no afterlife. If there was such a class, people who believe in the Resurrection would believe it was an attack on their religious beliefs.

This isn't to say that I believe in teaching creationism; I just don't like the gratuitous insults lobbed at those people. I don't believe in the theory, but I'll happily go on record as saying it is more plausible than either Mormonism or Scientology or Hinduism, or dare I say it, Islam. It is a creation myth. Why do people get so exercised about it?

Re: Not the same
 

Because they try to push it into science curricula. Because they want to mandate public support for their irrational religious beliefs and pollute intellectual bedrock (empiricism, rationality, epistemic humility...) with nonsense.

Re: Not the same
 

It is one of those inevitable conflicts between modernity and religion. The solution is to be respectful to the religious, as they are the anchors of culture, and to allow them to home school their children. Or indeed, to raise a very brief three line sentence akin to "Some people believe in intelligent design, the idea that a supernatural force intervened to create complexity" in yada yada.

There is no sanctity to science. It is ok if people choose not to believe in science's explanation for the origin of our species. People choose to believe in all sorts of things we invest no great emotion in; tarot cards, astrology, "the Secret", "karma".

I do admit a bias in this matter. I feel as though one of the more important subjects in education has been politicized for about fifty years now, History. I suppose if I must hear every human event boiled down to some juvenile Marxist conflict theory, my political opposites can stand to listen to someone chide them on the savage heresy of Darwinism. ;)

Re: Not the same
 

You surely don't hear me implying anything about "sanctity" in regard to science. "Epistemic humility" seems to me to be the opposite of sanctity. People have a right to believe anything they want to believe. Ideas, however, don't all have the same value. There are qualitative standards by which they can be measured. And if being "respectful" means ignoring those standards, then it's the wrong answer.

Re: Not the same
 

Here's what I see as the difference:

On the questions of specific miracles (resurrection, water-walking, water-"wine-ing"), religious people accept the relevant science, and claim that the scientific laws were, on some occasions, suspended.

On creationism, though, an entire field of science is rejected. They don't merely believe that while evolutionists have the right story (i.e. have a theory that properly identifies the laws governing speciation), God intervened on specific occasions in violation of those laws. Creationists make specific disputatious claims about natural laws in a way that "resurrectionists" do not.

Even Intelligent Design, a significantly less radical view, says that evolutionary biology is wrong; indeed the whole argument is premised on the position that the current scientific consensus can't possibly be right.


I'm not really interested in wading too far into the original debate over what either of these positions say about a politicians who hold them, but the distinction is relevant there:

People who flat out deny the scientific consensus on an issue like evolution are (almost always) people who believe that mainstream science is involved in a mass conspiracy to mendaciously push a false position on the rest of us. This is almost literally insane. (Even people who don't believe there's a conspiracy show a disregard, if not contempt, for evidence and the consensus of experts. Either way, this is cause for concern from someone making policy choices.)

People who believe in the miracles of Jesus have no conflict with any work that is being done in science today: yes, a virgin birth is impossible, yes, rising from the dead is impossible, etc., and "impossible" just means "in violation of natural laws". But God, by definition, can act in violation of these laws, and when he does, nothing in science is undermined.

Re: Not the same
 

Look, I think we should try to have the very best people in office. (wouldn't that be nice?) However, there are so many ridiculous beliefs amongst our entire population, how can you point to people who don't believe in the evolution of the species as being quantitatively worse than someone who believes in Keynesian economics? At least the guy who believes in Adam and Eve and thinks the mainstream is involved in a conspiracy won't be absconding with part of your paycheck.

And as for 'scientists' I think there is a fair number of doctors who are also fundamentalist Christians and it probably doesn't affect the way they practice medicine.

But then God, by definition, can have made the earth look like it's 4.5 billion years old in order to test the faith of his people. How does believing that people can rise from the dead not undermine science? It's nice to put brackets around some religious beliefs and say they are acceptable because they don't undermine science but, in fact, they do.

Re: Not the same
 

Keynesian economics doesn't have the same epistemic status as evolution. You can argue about the evidence in economics forever. That's simply not true when you're talking about the existential case for evolution. (There's plenty to argue about in the margins.) People who can't or won't understand that have disqualified themselves from rational debate. That's a serious failing and ought to be noticed.

Re: Not the same
 

I have yet to see how believing that man was formed from the dirt and Eve from his rib has much effect on the character of a person. Do you think that athiests or enlightened Christians are better people than those who think that the earth started spinning six thousand years ago? What does your atheism add to the quality of life in contrast to the guy who goes to a holy roller church?
(I hope holy roller is not an offensive term.)

And as for rational debate...don't debate. I doubt they want to debate with you so you won't be bothered. And there's nothing to debate about anyway. You won't be changing their minds.

Re: Not the same
 

That's beside the point. If you're that far off the reservation, then you shouldn't be granted the benefit of the doubt. That really ought to be viewed as a significant handicap.

Re: Not the same
 

Correct. But that's not what Creationists (or ID theorist) contend. They are engaged in a dispute with the scientific consensus regarding where the evidence points. Someone who takes the position that the Earth was created 6000 years ago (or yesterday, for that matter) with every molecule arranged such that it would be indistinguishable from an Earth that was 4.5 billion years old (on which life evolved as scientists think, etc.) is not engaged in a dispute with science.

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Yes and whose money is it they are spending?

Re: The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)
 

Mine. What of it?

Re: Not the same
 

I'm not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm just being tolerant of people who don't believe as I do.

Re: Not the same
 

What does that have to do with anything?

Re: Not the same
 

Both your posts here are exactly what I was trying to get at.