Vox Popoli

A Mad Biologist sticks a philosophical gun to his forehead and splatters the room with what previously passed for his brain:

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don’t do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Buckingham, who declared, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

My response was, “In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him.”

The moral case for evolution? The EMOTIONAL and MORAL case for evolution? You can go ahead and write off TENS now, because what was once merely worthy of skepticism is rapidly approaching utter farce. With defenders like this, one need not even pay any attention to those openly attacking the theory, however credible or crazy they might be. So much for the claims to be objective science, this is most remniscent of Richard Dawkins’s howlingly ludicrous conclusion of his “unrebuttable” central argument of The God Delusion:

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

In summary, because Richard Dawkins believes we should not give up hope that something we do not currently know might possibly exist because we have some partial explanations for other things that we do know exist, we must therefore conclude that God does not exist. This is total logical incompetence on a grand scale, which the Mad Biologist approaches in abandoning all claims to the scientific method in order to make a moral case for the meaningless transition of one form of organic material into another. He might as reasonably assign color ex nihilo to the fate of the bacterially infected deceased as assign any meaning to it, let alone attempt to build a moral case for a “scientific” theory from it.

Needless to say, PZ Myers actually thinks both Dawkins’s and the Mad Biologist’s lines of “reason” are brilliant. It’s simply astonishing. And by all means, I should very much like to see these clueless fetishists attempt this line of biological evangelism, it should make for extraordinarily amusing blogfodder.

Flicka reviews The Wrath of Angels:

Theodore Beale describes himself as a writer of Christian Fantasy, and certainly The Wrath of Angels can fit into that category. I think that if you do not consider the Bible to be absolute truth then you will enjoy this tale as fantasy. But any student of God’s word will immediately recognize within the characters and story a comprehensive theology through which the doctrines of angels, sin and forgiveness are illuminated, fleshed out, and animated. And as such The Wrath of Angels is more Christianity-Imaginatively-Expressed than Christian Fantasy.

I enjoy Beale’s wonderfully descriptive style. His narrative is like the fluff of beautiful imagery sandwiched between hard slices of fast-paced action scenes. He has an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable vocabulary and brandishes words as deftly as The Lord Of Chaos does his sword. Thankfully, missing from his style are the ubiquitous fragmented sentences just to make a point, and the one sentence paragraphs as though every statement were a profundity, and the italicized sentences to reveal the mind of the charatcter that litter so many pages in contemporary fiction. Out of the midst of the many references from sources as varied as archaic literature to contemporary rock bands, along with the thoughtful, observant unfolding of his tale, emerges a unique and strong voice.

Flicka wrote this review a while ago, but I hadn’t seen it, so it was a nice surprise on the Original Cyberpunk’s shiny new site. I’m quite pleased with how Wrath has been received, although it seems I may have been a bit too clever for my own good in burying the subtext too deeply for anyone to notice. The plot point that Flicka mentions as not being explained might be a little more obvious if one understands my background in economics and my interest in currencies… there is a whole level to the novel that literally no one has noticed despite a few – quite clearly ineffectual – hints about its existence.

Remember this challenge?

According to the “scientific” forecast, housing prices were to stabilize in late 2007 and hold firm in 2008. Here’s the November 2007 forecast for 2008: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300. Wow, what precision! To a tenth of a percent! The February report comes out this week… let’s just say that instead of $218k, I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year. But what do I know, I’m not an “expert” paying close attention to the “science” of the housing market, after all.

From the February 2008 NAR report: “The national median existing-home price for all housing types was 195,900 U.S. dollars in February, down 8.2 percent from a year earlier when the median was 213,500 U.S. dollars.”

At this rate, we could get down to 175k before August.

The Lizard Queen on Alan Greenspan:

But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street — don’t ask me why because I never understand what he’s saying — but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach.

Hillary really is an idiot. Not because she doesn’t understand the first thing about economics – we already knew that – but because the correct thing to do when you don’t understand the very simple monetary policy that he is discussing is to laud his “masterful” performance in soothing the troubled waters of the markets.

Confirmation of what I wrote about in yesterday’s column, as if it was needed:

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

A cow emotes fearfully about insufficient herd immunity:

Of course, I recognize that people have a right to abide by their conscience, and I would not want public health officials to force children to be vaccinated. I just think that people who are unvaccinated, unless they have a legitimate medical reason for same, should not be allowed to use public roads, public sidewalks, or public services. They have a right not to vaccinate their children. But they do not have a right to risk my health.

But your health isn’t at risk if you’ve been vaccinated, right? What a loathsomely liberal fascist little cow! I truly don’t know understand why Instapundit likes McArdle so much, she never writes anything even remotely intelligent and regularly coughs up hairballs of asininity like this. If the vaccine industry wasn’t hiding so much information about the children being harmed by vaccines, if Congress wasn’t indemnifying both the industry and the medical personnel who inject vaccines into non-consenting children, if millions of dollars weren’t being paid out by VAERS, if there weren’t very good medical reasons to avoid going along with the insane U.S. vaccination schedule, she still wouldn’t have a point.

Her health is not my concern. Or anyone else’s. At all. End of story. If she wants to live in a cave so that no one can ever infect her with anything, she is free to do so. Life lived in contact with others implies risk. Deal with it. McArdle’s claim to be a libertarian is as ludicrous as Bill Maher’s; vaccinated or not, she has no more right to the public roads than an unvaccinated Amish child. Ironically, she is also an advocate bringing in more disease-ridden third-worlders to use those very public goods and services that she wishes to deny bad citizens she deems insufficiently injected with foreign substances.

If people really want to get serious about avoiding the spread of childhood diseases, then close the day care centers and the public schools and shop online. I’m amazed at how often kids who go to day care are sick. And there is no more evidence that vaccines are safe than there is that they cause autism, since the vaccine industry has resolutely resisted proper double-blind scientific studies into the safety of its products in favor of population surveys and metastudies of those surveys.

Don’t get me wrong, vaccines aren’t inherently bad. A limited and voluntary schedule of individual doses at a somewhat older age, spread out over time, is a perfectly reasonable program… in fact, that’s how most adults over thirty today were vaccinated. But pumping infants full of toxins that have never been tested in combination with each other, 19 shots in the first six months, isn’t just asking for trouble, it’s demanding it.

Some of you will probably be amused to note that this is one of the rare occasions when you will find me staunchly supporting Michelle Malkin’s stance on an issue.

While atheists love to whine about Christian wars that took place nearly a thousand years ago, you can always count on them to remain silent whenever atheists are occupied with killing religious people around the world today:

Hundreds of monks, nuns and local Tibetans who tried to march on a local government office in western China to demand the return of the Dalai Lama have been turned back by paramilitary police who opened fire to disperse the crowd.

The only time you’ll ever hear an atheist mention the ongoing atheist persecutions of Christians and Buddhists in China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam is to try to explain that the atheists doing the persecuting are No True Atheists, and therefore it’s really religion’s fault when an atheist kills someone.

Scott Hatfield defends the Age of Enlightenment and a few of the modern myths about it:

There are positive values that come out of the Age of Enlightenment. Some of them are religious in nature, some are not, but they are characteristic of that age, not of the age of the Magna Carta or the tradition of English common law.

Very well, specifically what are these positive values? One of the most annoying things about discussing the Enlightenment, especially with its would-be restorers, is that they simply don’t know enough about it was to be specific about what it is they are defending. In almost every case, what is purported to be a positive “Enlightenment value” can be easily proven to be nothing of the sort, as we saw with Kelly of the RRS’s bizarre example of “democracy”. The level of historical ignorance is shocking.

If things would just arrange themselves neatly into Christian and non-Christian intellectual movements the world would be a simpler place, but that’s not how things are. Cherry-picking the past to serve a present agenda is not the right way to do history, and that goes for both the secularist and dominionist takes on the Founding Fathers, I think.

First, I am no dominionist, my amusingly inaccurate Wikipedia entry notwithstanding. Second, it is not cherry-picking to point out that the religious intellectual tradition of the Christian Founding Fathers which led to the separation of church and state – for the good of the church – had nothing to do with the Enlightenment, but rather stemmed from the pre-Enlightenment Reform tradition that was hugely influential in England.

Don’t play games. The notion that God places temporal rulers in their position is a clear teaching found throughout the Bible. The idea that people should rise up against their God-appointed rulers to seek political liberty is not clearly taught. It has to be teased out of the text by someone whose sensibilities are modern, rather than medieval. That idea emerged in the period known as the Age of Enlightenment. It is not an anti-Christian idea, but neither is it the one, true, historic ‘Christian’ position. If it were, there would innumerable examples in the 17 centuries that proceeded John Locke of Christian nations with elected rulers.

Don’t play historically ignorant. There is a small, pre-Enlightenment movement called “Protestant” which even in its name suggests that people should rise up against those claiming to be their God-appointed rulers. I note that you can’t possibly argue a distinction between spiritual and secular ruler here, because that would depend on applying a concept that you are claiming did not exist for another 200 years. And in addition to the rebellious pre-Enlightenment traditions of the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, medieval England also gave us the limited government concept of the Charter of Liberties, which dates back to 1100. The Enlightenment was merely a short-lived and perverse offshoot of this combination of Christian intellectual movements in the spiritual and secular arenas.

I should like to know, Scott, were you aware of the existence of the pre-Enlightenment English Bill of Rights when you declared the American Bill of Rights to be a product of the Enlightenment?

As for the example of Christian nations with elected rulers, I would point to the Prince-Electors of Germany, who made up the electoral college responsible for selecting the Holy Roman Emperor from 1125 until 1806 when Napoleon ended the practice, along, one might add, with the Enlightenment itself. Moreover, the cantons of Switzerland long had a Christian tradition of elected rule, dating back prior to the establishment of the confederation in 1271. This Swiss tradition was extremely influential due to Geneva being the heart of the Reform church, in fact, John Calvin’s biography notes: “Calvin was the first of the Reformers to demand complete separation between Church and State, and thus he advanced another principle which has been of inestimable value. The German Reformation was decided by the will of the princes; the Swiss Reformation, by the will of the people; although in each case there was a sympathy between the rulers and the majority of the population. The Swiss Reformers, however, living in the republic at Geneva, developed a free Church in a free State, while Luther and Melanchthon, with their native reverence for monarchial institutions and the German Empire, taught passive obedience in politics and brought the Church under bondage to the civil authority.”

Now, it seems probable that the reason the two Reformations happened to occur where they did is primarily due to pagan Germanic tribal traditions that survived the conversion to Christianity, although it’s worth noting that the establishment of the democratic Icelandic Althing closely corresponds to Iceland’s conversion to Christianity. But regardless, the concepts that came out of this process of Reformation clearly became Christian ones that long preceded the Age of Enlightenment and it is absurd to attempt to retroactively assign them to a profoundly anti-democratic, anti-individualistic tradition such as the Enlightenment.

I don’t follow college basketball very closely, although watching the Georgetown-Davidson game was fun, as it was sort of like time-travel to watch Coach Thompson directing a Ewing in a Hoya uniform. My grandfather and I used to watch Georgetown hoops when I was visiting Virginia during the winter, so while I’m not a big fan, I’m still somewhat of a Hoya sympathizer in his memory. And any enjoyment of Davidson’s exciting comeback and eventual upset was further lessened by the fact that towards the end of the game I learned they’re not in Patriot League anymore, although I distinctly recall them being in it at one point or another in the hazy days of my ill-spent youth.

And when did American join? Needless to say, I don’t pay much attention to the old alma mater, but it’s a bit jarring to realize just how out of it one happens to be. I’m so out of it, in fact, that I had the Hoyas reaching the Final Four and Duke losing to UNC in the final.

The Magic Negro threatens the nation:

Obama, in an interview, said that “a lot of these old labels don’t apply anymore.” He said he was a progressive and a pragmatist, eager to tackle the big issues like health care and convinced that the Democrats could rally independents and disaffected Republicans to their agenda. Only then, he said, could the party achieve what it has so rarely won in modern presidential elections – a mandate to do big things.

Doing big things. Progress towards… doing big things. That pretty much sums up exactly what I don’t want the government to be doing. On the plus side, I shouldn’t lack for material no matter who wins.

UPDATE – VDH has a cogent summary of Obama’s post-speech situation:

Even elites will wake up to the fact that they’ve been had, in a sense, once they deconstruct the speech carefully and fathom that their utopian candidate just may have managed to destroy what was once a near-certain Democratic sweep in the fall.

I have to admit, this is the first time that I’ve felt the need to rethink the chance that McCain could win. Hillary would crush him, of course, but if the Magic Negro somehow manages to defy my expectations and grab the nomination, he’d get absolutely buried under a blizzard of quotes from his black supremacist pastors. I think he’s done after a Pennsylvania landslide.