The PZ Myers Memorial Debate update II

Announcing the judges:

Christian: cl aka The Warfare is Mental

Agnostic: Alex Amenos

Atheist: Scott Scheule

Dominic has confirmed that he is fine with all three of them. So, while Dominic and I compose our initial pieces, which we will send to each other in order to allow for the writing of the initial responses, it would be a good idea for the judges and everyone else to discuss how the scoring system will work.

To recap, Dominic and I are each writing an initial piece, then will compose a response to the other’s initial piece. Those four pieces will then go to the judges, who will score the initial round as per the system decided here. Judges, please email me to confirm that you are good to go so that I’ll have your email addresses and can provide them to Dominic as well.

UPDATE – Okay, my initial piece is done and off to Dominic. I’m not sure it won’t convince anyone I’m not off my rocker, but at least it should prove interesting.

Drugs are terror

The real nature of the Patriot Act:

Dinh was an assistant attorney general under John Ashcroft and was tasked on the morning of September 12 with writing a bill to fix whatever laws might impede investigation. The scholarship provided little guidance for how to make terror investigations easier, so Dinh sent an e-mail to the nation’s U.S. attorneys and FBI agents, asking for ideas. G-men are not constitutional lawyers, and excesses were rife: Someone wanted to send neighborhood watches in search of sordid types. The attorneys at Justice made piles, winnowing as they went: “Crazy Ideas,” “Quarter-Baked,” “Half-Baked.”

In those patriotic weeks, partisan conflict dissipated easily. The Democratic Senate and the Republican House each had their own bills, and Ashcroft, smiling, said every idea in each of the drafts would be adopted unless it conflicted with another provision. Jim Sensenbrenner, the bombastic, rotund Wisconsin Republican, leaned back in his chair and said his bill was called the USA Patriot Act. There were no conflicts with that; the name was in.

Delayed Notice Search Warrants

1,618 Drugs
122 Fraud
15 Terror

Of course, the average neocon will look at that and assume that 15 9/11 attacks were stopped or averted, therefore it was worth it! Of course, surely we can solve all of the nation’s pressing problems at once by declaring the War on Anthropogenic Drug Poverty Terror Change stimulus package.

Disturbed gang-bangs Taylor Swift

This is Game set to music, the perfect juxtaposition of naive young female delusions about bad boys and the predatory male perspective. One cringes at the lovely little lamb’s attitude about how it will safely lie down with the poor, misunderstood, and very hungry lion. Disturbed and Taylor Swift are like one of those couples where you look at them and figure she’ll be lucky if she ends up in the hospital instead of the morgue. It’s also unusual in that the mash-up is arguably better than either song that goes into it. If whoever put it together could have only somehow pulled a Rock Sugar and mixed in the psychopath’s manipulative line from Decadence as well, it would have been perfect.

“If I scare you now, don’t run from me. I’ve been hiding my pain you see.”

The insurmountable gap in understanding between these interwoven lyrics had me laughing out loud:

Swift: If you could see that I’m the one who understands you. Been here all along so why can’t you see, you belong with me?

Draiman: Come inside now I implore, do you think you can restore the crucial pieces missing from my brain.

Swift: Hey, isn’t this easy!

Draiman: What seems to be the matter dear? Why do you cry and shake with fear?

Quelle surprise

The Magic Mustache decides he won’t run; NRO and VP are the only two sites to even notice:

NR favorite John Bolton, a former United Nations ambassador, has decided against a presidential run. “It was a very difficult decision,” he said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. “My view has not changed one iota that we need a much more robust discussion of national-security issues as part of this presidential campaign.”

The assertion that John Bolton was electable as U.S. president while simultaneously claiming Ron Paul is not is arguably the single dumbest argument to ever appear in National Review. It seriously raised the question about whether the magazine had not only devolved into mindless neoconservatism, but outright retardation. John Bolton not only has a smaller following than Ron Paul does, he has a smaller following than I do. He has a smaller following than the average high school cheerleader.

As for foreign policy, it doesn’t mean jack squat when you’re bankrupt. Foreign policy is entirely irrelevant now, except in the sense of European sovereign debt bailouts.

Questions for evolutionists

It should be interesting to see the answers to these questions presented by the Question Evolution campaign, assuming of course that an evolutionist who is capable of responding to substantive questions with answers that do not boil down to “you are stupid and ignorant of science to even ask me such a thing” can be found.

How did the DNA code originate?

How did sex originate?

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years, if evolution has changed worms into humans in the same time frame?

How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence?

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

The last question is of particular interest to me. It is my contention that evolution is, from a scientific perspective, an almost totally irrelevant sideshow. The number of scientists who have actually used evolution for anything over the last 150 years is dwarfed by the number of scientists who are still desperately trying to provide a scientific foundation for TENS. The only reason evolution is assumed to be of such presumed importance is due to its philosophical usefulness to materialist philosophers and pedopropagandists like Richard Dawkins.

Germany chickens out

Faced with a clear and open violation of the German Constitution, the German Supreme Court unsurprisingly caved rather than risk undermining the supports that are propping up the banks of the European Union:

In a widely followed ruling on Wednesday, Germany’s Constitutional Court upheld the legality of Berlin’s rescue packages for debt-stricken euro zone countries, but said any future bailouts must be approved by a parliamentary panel…. The court rejected three appeals against the legality of earlier bailouts, which have stirred a furious political debate among Germans. The suits had been brought by a coalition of German lawmakers, economists and business executives who argued that Germany’s participation in loans and support funds for Greece undermined Parliament and infringed constitutional provisions underpinning the country’s democracy.

In other words, there is no longer any more law in Germany than there is in the United States. That should work out well. All this worldwide government kowtowing to the banks in a futile and desperate attempt to keep them from going under has done is to make it perfectly clear to all and sundry that there is no law. The law is now a transparent fiction. All of the words written down on paper are entirely meaningless. Read the English translation, it is a masterpiece of legal weaselry.

The world is rapidly entering into a literally Satanic state where do what thou wilt truly is the whole of the law.

And clearly, going to mark-to-fantasy should fix the whole thing. After all, it has worked so well in the USA. “My gnome, high above the Alps is hearing that the EU is considering suspension of bank mark to market acctg.”

The PZ Myers Memorial Debate update I

While I can’t say many of the atheists who have been demanding that I make a positive case for the existence of gods for literally years have exactly covered themselves with glory in their willingness to step into the intellectual Octagon and take their chances, I have to give due credit to Gay Germ, Mark DiStefano, Roffle, and Thrasymachus, who, unlike the rest of their fellow non-believers, were willing to publicly defend the atheist position.

However, since Dominic Saltarelli did not hesitate to step up to the plate, and because he is known and respected as an intelligent commenter who originally hails from richarddawkins.net, I have decided to accept his challenge as the atheist champion. Just to make it interesting, Dominic and I have decided that the first round will be in English, the second round in Italian, and the third round in Latin.

The first PZ Myers Memorial Debate features Dominic Saltarelli vs Vox Day and concerns the evidence and logic for the existence or nonexistence of gods.

Now, as to the judges, we appear to be rather light on agnostics, which I suppose isn’t all that surprising because agnostics are naturally less interested in the subject and can’t be bothered with it. Here are the proposed judges, and I invite the relevant groups to discuss them. Please do not suggest any new names now, as everyone has had sufficient time to come forward.

Christian: Markku, Ms Pilgrim, cl, Stilicho, Josh, Gene, Gregory, Salt.

Agnostic: Crowhill, Alexamenos

Atheist: Mark Di Stefano, Thrasymachus, Roffle, ScottScheule

Now is the time to for discussion among the three groups in order to settle upon a judge who is deemed to be representative, impartial, and intelligent. I have no preference on either the agnostic or atheist judges, but for the Christian judge, I suggest that cl might be ideal because he is not a reader of this blog. However, I leave that for the Christians here to decide. After the three judges are selected, I will ask Dominic if he has any objection to any of them, and then we can move onto a discussion on how the scoring will be done. After that, Dominic and I will send our first round submissions, (which will consist of an initial statement and a response to the other’s statement), to the judges; the following day all four pieces will be posted here for general perusal. The judges will be expected to post their scores, along with any relevant comments supporting those scores, within two days of receiving the submissions.

E se non è gia tutto chiaro, la cosa delle lingue era solo un scherzo. Naturalmente faremmo tutto il dibattimento in latina, come i clàssici.

To protect and be serviced

No wonder walking the beat is so exhausting:

Combining data on police arrests from the Chicago Police Department and the results of the authors’ own survey, the study estimates that prostitutes are arrested only once in every 450 tricks, but only one in ten of these arrests will lead to a prison sentence. Johns are arrested even less frequently, with only one john arrested for every 1,200 tricks.

But perhaps more striking is the rate at which a police officer can extort free sex from a prostitute. Levitt and Venkatesh found that about one in 30 tricks performed by a prostitute is a freebie to the police in return for avoiding arrest. In other words, a prostitute is more likely to have sex with an on-duty police officer than to be arrested by one.

You know, it’s remarkable that all those good men on the police force never appear to notice that tiny number of bad apples in their midst boffing all the hookers.

They can’t read, they can’t write

Naturally, it’s the perfect time to teach them quasi-scientific myths:

Children as young as five should have lessons in the basic principles of evolution, a leading atheist has said. Professor Richard Dawkins claims Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is so important that every primary school in Britain should have it on their curriculum, he told The Times.

The evolutionary biologist believes youngsters are able to grasp the basic principles of the theory which underpin the study of biology.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear an evolutionist posturing as a critical thinker. This should remove any last vestiges of doubt that Dawkins is no longer even pretending to be a scientist, but is nothing more than a full-fledged pedopropagandist for atheism and scientific materialism. It’s also amusing to see his insistence that children who can’t read can grasp the basic principles of the theory while his acolytes insist that university educated adult Mensans cannot.

Even if it is 100 percent true, evolution isn’t important at all. Even if every single transition from amoeba to homo sapiens sapiens could be mapped out precisely, this will have literally zero material impact on anyone, except for a very small number of professionals working in the field. But it is somewhat amusing to think of what the graduates of schools in which 12 years of what passes for education are dedicated to recycling, gay indigenous women’s studies, and evolution in lieu of reading, writing and math would look like. Only one thing is certain. A more sanctimonious and less useful collection of little bastards would be hard to find.

Anyhow, neither evolution nor science, except a single course on general science, should be taught in high schools. Teaching science is a complete waste of time at that level, much less doing so any earlier, and it is quite obvious, from talking to any high school graduate, that practically none of the students who are presently forced to sit through science instruction retain any as much as a genuinely interested ten year old.

You know, I always liked her

But after seeing this, I have to say that if it weren’t for SB, I’d be forced to conclude Mila Kunis is, in fact, the Platonic ideal of woman:


Lots of women pretend to like games and sports since it’s an easy and intelligent way of winning favor with men. But it’s never hard to tell who is serious and who isn’t. It is interesting how your guild gets to know you over time without having to meet you. My old guild used to refer to me as Shakespeare after the incident when I happened to offer a some appropriate commentary concerning the amusingly panicked flight of a gnome from an Ursan village.