Anthropic Principle

I got to hear Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind talk on the subject on MPR via the net. Yet another great feature of the modern world, the net allows us to listen to what we want to when we want to.

I have blogged on his recent book and as I said, really enjoyed it, as I did his talk on the radio. What struck me as I listened was something from "Change or Die", a short little somewhat self-helpish / business sort of book that I picked up and read through recently that ties back to "Frames", ala a series of posts that I made on a George Lakoff book back in December '05 and January '06.

We humans run around with tiny time-delayed models in our heads that are less reliable because everything even manages to be perceived in those models must be filtered through a set of "frames", which are "meta-models" that tell us what conclusions are the most "beneficial" for us to "jump to". "News at 11", all experience is SUBJECTIVE, and "meaning" is even MORE biased!

It is completely unsurprising that a physicist that seems it as a "grave weakness" to "fall into" belief in God and realizes that we are even wired naturally to believe in a "higher power" would seek out nearly ANY explanation to justify how we could just "happen" to live in a Goldilocks universe "tuned" to 10 to the -120th accuracy to allow us to exist.

 The "Anthropic Principle" is essentially Descartes "I think therefore I am" writ large. "We are here and able to comprehend the universe, therefore it is obvious it would have all the parameters for us to be here".

How about folks like me that believe that God DOES  exist?

It is certainly an open issue if a finite brain can even "imagine the transcendent", but **IF** we have any hopes of escaping the "frame" of physical reality, the path would seem to have to lie in that direction. Our ability to have pure thought, mathematics, religion, love and I'd even argue boolean logic and computer programs takes us as close as we can come in this life to "slipping the surly bonds and touching the face of God". To even attempt to envision escape from the models, frames and incompleteness of the material world seems to me to give a HOPE for a "better perspective".

"Near Panic"

CNN Headlines

As I struggle to write cogent prose, it always strikes me as odd when a major media outlet titles something "Trial Shows White House In Near Panic", and then when one goes out to the linked article, there isn't a single thing about any sort of "panic" ... near or otherwise. What would the line be between "panic and NEAR panic"? Where is the line between either of those phrases and "angry because a person hired by the CIA turned out to not be covered by a non-disclosure agreement and has leaked false information in an article". Subsequent testimony BY Joe Wilson himself shows that in fact his own trip ADDED credibility to the "attempt to purchase uranium in Niger"

I held my nose and watched the video. It as amazing orgy of analogy and emotionally laden terms ... have "Tactic" over and over, "Cheney as puppetmaster", "damage control turned to circle the wagons", "Libby was being thrown to the wolves", "one guy asked to stick his head into the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others". No news, just a lot of accusation in prose. Might be decent fiction writing.

The VERY funny part about all of this is that the current media state secret is that this whole trial is WAY more "about nothing" than the Clinton follies ever were. The media COMPLETELY avoids making it clear that any of the supposed intrigue here is completely wasted, since the source of the leak was Richard Armitage, admitted by himself and reported by CNN!

This is one of those stories that would be impossible to make up if one wanted to prove that the MSM is so biased that they make Rush Limbaugh and even Sean Hannity actually seem "unbiased" in comparison. At least those shows will STATE the facts ... although they often slant them once they do. The MSM has decided to just "leave off" the fact that this whole special prosecutor probe has been known to be bogus for 5 months, and all we are left with is a parody of "justice" in an attempt to prosecute a minor functionary for political purposes because he may have gotten a proven to be unimportant date / name wrong under oath.

It is amazing how important "perjury" can suddenly be to the same people that previously thought it was no crime at all.

Late Night Book TV

Stayed up late last night and watched Sam Harris (End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation), Reza Azlan ( No God But God ) and Jonathan Kirsch ( History of the End of the World )
debate on "Religion and Reason" on Book TV CSPAN-2. I ought to have Tivoed it, but it was kind of fun to stay up late for a change on a cold night. I discovered while I was watching that Chris Hedges was going to be on discussing his new book "American Fascists" about the scourge of the "Christian Right" in the US.

So we had a VERY liberal Muslim and a Jew discussing with the guy that wrote "Letter to a Christian Nation" for an hour and 1/2. They were all agreed that ANYONE that believed in the virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, diety of Christ would be "scary and out there" ... but of course according to Azlan and Kirsch, nobody sane DOES believe in that anymore. Religion is a "sophisticated social thing" ... it changes all the time, doesn't really have any fixed morals, so they were able to dispose of Harris pretty well. It had me almost pulling or Harris. I guess the conclusion would have been that at least a religion that isn't really a religion is "reasonable".

None of these folks seem to want to consider what I consider the fundamental question; "Is there a God beyond materialism that wants to be connected with us?". While I was watching, I was reloading my brain on the Knuth "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" book. Interesting that Donald Knuth is clearly one of those "unreasonable people" that is a practicing Lutheran. Guy Steele, a Fellow at Sun Micro Systems takes part in a panel and sounds quite Christian as well. A REAL discussion would be about the issue of REAL religion, the kind that changes lives and saves souls being "reasonable". At one level, the answer is "of course not". Is love "reasonable"? Beauty? Consciousness? Can human beings transcend their material existence? Harris along with Dawkins would argue "NO, and the price of keeping love, hope, faith, etc is "too high"" ... we "reasonable people" have to throw those items out and worship the material universe only.

Then Chris Hedges got going. I suppose I have to read what sounds like a hate-filled tome that he has written at some point. The bottom line is that one takes the results of massive rates of divorce, promiscuity, abortion on demand, drug use, and lives wrecked by the hoplessness of of the Godless culture, and "blame it on a Republican plot". Then use the "What's the Matter With Kansas" logic to say that the Republicans have "created the "religious right" and moved all those poor folks that they "disenfranchised" into a "magic world outside of reality with virgin birth, 6-day creation and Noah's Ark" on the way to making them "Brownshirts". According to Hedges we are "one more 9-11 short of a facist takeover".

Throw in a bit more conspiracy theory and some "parallels" with Nazi Germany, and you have a "clear and present danger" ... again, it sounds like he doesn't say what REALLY has to be done, but when one is faced with the immenent takeover by "Brownshirts", one would think that almost anything would be justified. In the bookstore discussion, nobody talked for the other side. Could it ever be possible have someone calling people "Fascists and Brownshirts" "hate speech"? Of course not ... I really don't believe in labeling speech like that on EITHER side, but note how unlikely such a thing is when applied to Christians.

The Great Divorce

Having to suffer through Dawkins for the good of Christendom was a bit of a burden, and I felt that I owed my soul a bit of C. S. Lewis, so I dug out "The Great Divorce" that I had first read out west in like the late '90s, and had ended up thinking of and quoting rather badly to others at times. It is a very short little fable, 125 not very dense pages, and well worth the time.

It is a Lewis vision of heaven, hell, earth, and maybe purgatory. "Hell or purgatory" are a somewhat "always nearly dark city" that spreads on to what seems like infinity when you are there, but is really only like a little crack in the "ground" when you are in heaven. You can "get on a bus" and go up to the outskirts of heaven, but in order to enter, you have to accept both sovereignty and grace of God. There is just "no other way" ... without it your soul isn't strong enough exist in the light of ultimate truth.

There are a number of little vignettes when the authors character encounters various souls that are "visiting". One is the classic hard-bitten realist that "has seen it all before" and "knows the score".

"Anyway," said the ghost, "who wants to be rescued? What the hell would there be to DO here?"
"Or there?" said I.
"Quite," said the ghost. "They've got you either way".
"What would you like ot do if you had your choice?" I asked.

"There you go!" said the ghost with a certain trimph. "Asking ME to make a plan. It's up to the Management to find something that doesn't bore us, isn't it? It's theri job. Why should we do it for them? That's just where the parsons and the moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking US to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and so powerful, why don't THEY find something to suit their public?".

How well that captures so many. It is always "the folks in charge", "the big shots". They were given the gift of life, but they abdicated the honor of being responsible for living it to some mysterious "them". Few things are sadder, and Lewis captures the sadness of the inability to move to even a positive eternity because of a life lived not wanting to be "anyone's patsy".

This little gem is worth pulling out of context:

"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words; "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven". There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy-that is to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends."

Apparently, he ran into Dawkins making a visit (according to physics, it is possible that everything that happens is happening all the time and always has been).

There were materialistic Ghosts who informed the immortals that they were deluded: there was no life after death, and this whole country was a hallucination."

It is a tiny book, well worth just picking up and reading. Two of the characters that I especially love are the book-ends of one a moralist, who can't enter heaven because a guy that he knew as a drunken murderer is forgiven and there. The other is a liberal minister that just won't accept the ultimate truth and reality of God. He believes that those that "honestly disagree" have to be saved as well.

Were our society just "balanced", rather than a secular cultural wasteland, C. S. Lewis would be one of those names held up very highly. Another name that I realize that Dawkins somehow failed to mention is that of Donald Knuth, who wrote a book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" That oddly enough, I seem to have, and read before I started blogging. Perhaps I need to return to this, and of course such things can always be borrowed. For those of you NOT of exactly the computer scientist persuasion, Donald Knuth is the author of The Art Of Computer Programming which is as close as there is to a "Bible" in computer science.

Somehow Dawkins failed to mention him while denigrating the idea that one could really be "scientist" and believe in God.

Explaining Perjury

Yes, yes, I realize that Ann is almost as bad as Dawkins, but she is A LOT funnier! Oh yes, her wit is full of acid, but she is so darned smart, and a tiny bit cute too, in her own overly skinny blond way. Anyway, ann does a great job of explaining perjury here.

I find it hard to imagine how they can seriously go on with the Libby "perjury" trial at this point, she explains if the only way that it would seem that it can be explained. It is always OK to persecute Republicans, there really doesn't need to be "a reason". Her "what is perjury, what is not" descriptions pretty much restore common sense to the issue, which is actually what I think the law intends.

The law is another one of those things that I know almost enough about to realize that I know nothing about it. I work reviewing invention disclosures at my job, so this weekend I buzzed through a number of those, and am also reviewing the patents at our site from last year for potential extra awards, so I'm looking at "100's" of patents and disclosures this month and next. Other than some odd twists of language; "those schooled in the art", "a plurality of ...", etc a lot of it actually does come rather close to "common sense" at times, although always with enough "mystery and judgement" to keep it somewhat interesting.

Anyway, Ann is wishfully thinking that conservatives are EVER going to "protect their own" like Democrats. The core of liberalism is being amoral, which certainly isn't the core of conservatism. Yes, having the order of when you talked to whomever wrong is really NOT perjury, but conservatives tend to be MORE likely to follow the rules and they don't make exceptions for "their own". In fact, usually they ESPECIALLY don't make exceptions for their own since they view it as "a test", and realize that were they to do so, then they would have no more standards and consistency than the left. We all know that conservatives are just as human as everyone else, so they DO fail, and when they do, that is NEWS! The MSM and the left loves the show of "hypocrisy", but of course one has to have some sort of standard to be a hypocrit! At least that is one thing that neither Bill or Hill will ever be accused of!

Biden is a "D"

CNN covered the Biden remark. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

My view is the only reason that this got covered at all was because he made it to the NY Observer, a conservative outlet, and I don't agree with the "Right Wing Media" (RWM?) making something of it. It seems obvious that nothing was intended by this. To the extent that there gets to be more RWM, they will have the opportunity to be just as awful and unfair as the MSM ... unfortunately, probably the best that we can hope for.

HOWEVER, were he an "R", it would be the complete end of his canidacy. It shows how black Americans have veto power when someone states something that can be taken out of context and "construed" to be racist. If Obama, Sharpton and Jackson responded with; "Well, it raises questions, one has to look at it in the context of the canidates overall actions on programs for minorities and other groups that he works with ...", then the piling on begins.

When you are a Republican, even misspelling "potato" is enough cause to end your career. With the MSM, it is important to "get your mind right", and the only way to do that is with a "D".

Conservatism Is A Disease

Hey, it has all been explained. The good folks in academia have figured out that "being conservative" is really just a personality defect tied to "hard times". I'm thinking that would mean that they would be inclined to not hold it against folks with an "R" next to their name because maybe us poor folks were just "born that way" like homosexuals, pedophile or  murderers. All of those folks have "no control", so what they do shouldn't have any "judgment" applied to their acts.

Conservatives though, as we see below are authoritarian, dogmatic, can't tolerate ambiguity, need a lot of control, are anxious over death, not open to new experience, risk averse, fraidy cats, etc. I guess the problem is that conservatives are just "bad to the bone" and probably "not fixable". It is clear that when it comes down to i liberal standards are quite high!

Say a nice pedophile though that rapes 8-10 little kids and kills them in some horrible way. Obviously, they are more "open, willing to tolerate ambiguity, not prone to any fixed standards, not worried about any sort of dying or certainly not judgment" ... basically good liberal folks that anyone would be proud to know. Sure, molesting and killing kids could be seen as a "mistake" (at least by the "rigid and close-minded"), BUT, since the liberal mind is so adaptable and willing to change, a short conversation with say a therapist, and anybody but someone that has that irredeemably horrible "R" next to their name would say "good to go"!

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure,regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r .50); system stability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification
of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system
that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational
concerns having to do with the psychological management of
uncertainty and fear. Specifically, the avoidance of uncertainty
(and the striving for certainty) may be particularly tied to one core
dimension of conservative thought, resistance to change (Wilson,
1973c). Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be linked to
the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of inequality
(Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Although resistance to change
and support for inequality are conceptually distinguishable, we
have argued that they are psychologically interrelated, in part
because motives pertaining to uncertainty and threat are interrelated
(e.g., Dechesne et al., 2000; McGregor et al., 2001; van den
Bos & Miedema, 2000).

I'm not going to give up hope though. I'm thinking if those brilliant liberals can do this kind of research, then a cure has got to be just around the corner! If we could ALL just be flexible, risk taking, open minded, non-judgmental, easy to get along with, able to handle complexity, etc, then things would be GRAND! Actually, I'm pretty sure that they already have it, they may have just forgot for some strange reason. Something around 6-10oz of Scotch over a fairly short period, and I think almost anyone can think EXACTLY like a liberal!

Edwards House

Do I care that Edwards has a big house? No, not really, but wouldn't one think that the MSM and the Democrats would care? I mean he is one of those "class warfare guys". As long as his "heart is in the right place" it is OK for him to do everything in his power to insure that I remain a tax slave into my 70's while he lives in a 28K sq foot home with millions taken from the medical industry while channeling dead babies in a courtroom?

Let's see, we are supposed to all be up in arms over CEO pay. Why does a guy with great hair making millions off all our medical bills earn the complete respect of the left and the MSM while living like a potentate? I know, I know, consistency isn't an issue. Sometimes it just gets a little glaring though.

Clear Thinking On Iraq

The following is excerpted from Tony Blankley at Real Clear Politics:

Now is a good time for clear thinking and speaking. If we intend to succeed (and it is vital that we do), then we must persist. If the "surge" doesn't work, then more troops and different strategies should be employed.

If we are going to throw in the towel, then we should bring the troops home promptly, lick our wounds and prepare for the inevitable Third Gulf War, which we will have to fight under far worse conditions than currently. Either of those options are at least honest (although the latter is dangerously foolish).

But the current mentality in Washington -- to pretend that there is a third way between victory and defeat -- is morally despicable. Washington politicians of both parties are trying to salve their consciences for the ignominy of accepting defeat by fooling either themselves or the public into believing they are doing otherwise.

Perhaps they can fool their own flaccid minds, but history grades hard and true. And history may enter its ledger with shocking promptness.

The most popular form of current thinking seems to be "wishful thinking". Once we declare defeat in Iraq, then what? We continue to train the world that "we can be beat" ... Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, and if the left has their way, Iraq. The objectives of the other side are very clear, as they were in the days of the USSR. If you want to be an evil empire, the only game in town is world domination, it really doesn't do to have a rich, free, and fun alternative on the globe. Neither gulags or burkas are all that attractive in comparison to living in the US. Be it "decadent capitalist" or "decadent infidels", the proper state that our adversaries approve for us is either dead or obedient, take your pick.

Classic Kerry

Powerline has a great post on Kerry at Davos. Why does anyone ever listen to this guy?

John Kerry disgraced himself yet again earlier today, when he launched a salvo against the Bush administration at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (What is it about Davos that brings out the worst in temporarily expatriate Americans?) This Power Line Forum thread addresses Kerry's latest folly. You could spend a long time taking apart Kerry's attack on President Bush, but let's just focus on one aspect of it:

“When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don’t advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy,” Kerry said.

Speaking of duplicity and hypocrisy...Kerry himself has actually had the opportunity to vote on the Kyoto carbon emissions treaty. Forum member ironman administers the coup de grace:

this says it all…

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 105th Congress - 1st Session

Vote Date: July 25, 1997, 11:37 AM

Question: On the Resolution (s.res.98 )

Declares that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997 or thereafter which would: (1) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex 1 Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period; or (2) result in serious harm to the U.S. economy.

YEAs 95
NAYs 0
Not Voting 5

Kerry (D-MA), Yea

Duplicitous and hypocritical: that pretty well sums up John Kerry.

The God Delusion

I finished the subject book by Richard Dawkins this week, it is currently #4 on the NY Times Bestseller list, and has been as high as #2 on the Amazon best seller list. This book talks quite frequently about how the US is very close to a "theocracy", and the "Christian Right" is "the American Taliban".

Yes, the US is so close to all of this that Dawkins can be a best selling author in this awful country with a book that is hostile to religion beyond belief. Lest you think I jest; Page 317: "horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place". Page 318: "I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell."

Make no mistake, Dawkins finds Christianity (and all religion) to be a form of child abuse, and while he doesn't DIRECTLY called for children to be taken from their parents if the parents are going to "indoctrinate" them, he does everything but. Page 339: "Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents". Like most liberals, he doesn't say what to DO about this "horror", but it doesn't take much imagination. In the "liberal" world, freedom is never for anyone but those that agree with your point of view.

What Dawkins and Sam Harris have in common is that they see 9-11 as an opportunity to "do in religion". One simply needs to declare all religions the "same" (irrational, delusional, unsupportable, etc) and DANGEROUS. The fault is RELIGION, all religion, and what we need to get rid of is FAITH, and then people will be "rational".

Right off, I'd argue that Dawkins and everyone else has an awful lot of "irrational faith". We have faith we will draw our next breath, clearly a belief that is obviously going to be very wrong in an extremely short period of time on any sort of even a moderate historical scale. We tend to think that the model of the universe running around in our head is "accurate", even though we know it is delayed by an eternity in computer time (what we "see" took at least 13 milliseconds to register in our brain)  and incomplete in the extreme. To the extent that we are "scientists", we have faith that this universe is ordered enough so that measurements and experiments done yesterday or tomorrow can be compared with each other by known principals.

For the believer in random creation, that is a HUGE leap of faith, since all that order "just happened" ... without meaning or purpose. A pure random event.

While on that subject, apparently Dawkins can't even CONCEIVE of anything being "beyond material" or "eternal". God can't be postulated, because he would HAVE to have been formed by something even more complex than the universe we see. Really? It seems very hard to see any basis for that "rule". Why again should there be "something" rather than "nothing"? Since we seem to be agreed that there is "something", then is postulating that there is "something beyond" REALLY that big a leap? Both cosmology with the "inflation theory" and evolution with "punctuated equilibrium" have their "creation spurts", the difference is that they want to be clear that from their POV it "just happens".

1st Corinthians 13:13 "But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.". Page 185, Dawkins "Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love?". This section of the book makes it clear that Dawkins doesn't find love to to be a good thing either ... a bad piece of evolution that apparently makes us susceptible to religion. How about hope? Well, of course not, that would be "infantile". page 354, ...Jefferson more than once wrote to friends that he faced the approaching end without either hope or fear. This was as much as to say, in the most unmistakable terms, that he was not a Christian.". Yes, Dawkins believes that a better world is a world without faith, hope, or love.

It IS however a world with as much "pleasure" as one can get. The only part of the Catholic church he has sympathy for is the pedophiles. Naturally homosexuality, abortion on demand, and euthanasia are all to be encouraged. He quotes Dr puppy-love Peter Singer of Princeton a couple of times, but doesn't explicitly mention some of Peter's more moral stances (eating meat is immoral, sex with animals is moral, infanticide is moral, killing "unfit elderly" is moral). He views Hitler as more moral than bad guys in history, "Hitler seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time". Why even the horror of Donald Rumsfeld is only in comparison to the "enlightened" standards of today; "Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War." (p268)

I'm sure that some will ask "why do I put myself though this"? Dawkins sits in a tenured chair at Cambridge. This book is high on the best seller lists and is getting RAVE reviews in the popular culture. The same culture that bleats every day or so about the "American theocracy" that happens to have an openly gay congressman as the chair of the house ways and means committee. Try that in a REAL theocracy (like Iran or Saudi Arabia).

Dawkins won't say it COMPLETELY directly, but it is clear that he is in favor of removal of religious freedom, and the creation of a country without faith, love, or hope as rapidly as he possibly can. Christians need to be aware that the forces that seek to use them as lion food are still afoot.

However, that country WILL have faith -- faith that a "reasonable government" that persecutes Christians (because you have to in order to stamp them out) is "good" ... like the USSR, Communist China, Nazi Germany ... the godless demand that you and your children worship the totalitarian state.

Clipmark of Islam for Peace

As I surf the web, sometimes for just a couple minutes, I run into things that I want to save and maybe blog on later. I installed something called "Clipmarks" into FireFox that allows me to create and save "snippets" or "clips" of the web and to comment and share with others. I've been experimenting with a number of these "Web 2.0 Technogies" over the break and after.

Here is a Clipmark on the subject of "why we fight". It is CNN/MSM, so lefties can trust it. Lots of peaceful sentiments, looks like we we are overreacting in the War On Terror.

At a recent debate over the battle for Islamic ideals in England, a British-born Muslim stood before the crowd and said Prophet Mohammed's message to nonbelievers is: "I come to slaughter all of you."

"We are the Muslims," said Omar Brooks, an extremist also known as Abu Izzadeen. "We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere. That is Islam and that is jihad."

"All of the world belongs to Allah, and we will live according to the Sharia wherever we are," said Choudary, a lawyer. "This is a fundamental belief of the Muslims." (Watch a call for Islamic law Video)

Asked if he believes in democracy, he said, "No, I don't at all."

"One day, the Sharia will be implemented in Britain. It's a matter of time."

Clipmarks clip on religion of peace

"Peace" is always easy, just like with the USSR. We could have saved a lot of defense dollars if we just signed up to be members of the Communist Party and did it the Gulag way. Same deal today, oddly the left seems to be OK with Burkas and stoning Gays as long as a group that is anti-American does it.

Church / State Connection "Chilling"?

I've seen and heard a number of references to Evangelicals signing on to "care for the environment", and going to encourage government and politicians to be responsible with "Gods Creation". Here is an article from the NYT in case you have missed it.

So what gives? I thought that the proper term for any mixing of church and state was "chilling"? We just aren't about that here because we are a "secular country", and any time that church leaders try to get involved with the morality of the nation, or science for that matter, we are "basically a theocracy".

What is up? Can it be that the press is so biased that as long as "the church" is doign what they want, it is just FINE, even so far as referring to the earth as "God's Creation"? Wouldn't that smack of the horrors of Intelligent Design?

Guess not, or maybe they are just 100% factually oriented, and it is GREAT that this is "chilling", because what we are talking about here is global warming ;-)

Race Doesn't Exist

It showed up in the paper last week, and I heard a segment on MPR. You may think that there is such a thing as racial difference between humans, but according to the current politically correct view, that would make you a racist. You just have to get your mind right.

The following captured from the MN Science Museum Exhibit Site.

Everyday Experience of Race
Race is embedded in virtually all aspects of American life. Explore social and personal experiences of race in familiar settings such as home and neighborhood, health and medicine, and education and schools. Discover that race and racism is not inside our heads, but in fact is built into our laws, traditions, and institutions.

The Science of Human Variation
Racial and ethnic categories, which have changed over time, are human-made. We now know that human beings are more alike genetically than any other living species. Scientifically, no one gene, or any set of genes, can support the idea of race. This section focuses on what current science knows about human variation and our species' history.

History of the Idea of Race
Race has not always existed. Sorting people by physical differences is a recent invention, only a few hundred years old. Discover how the development of the idea of race is closely linked to the early development of the United States.

There you have it! You probably think that Kevin Garnett looks differently from Brett Favre for reasons of race, but that just shows that you are prone to racist imposed stereotypes! There is no such thing as race in the real world, it is all a "social construct"!

Kevin Garnett is an oppressed minority, forced to live off $15 Million a year do to the oppressive constructs of our racially charged society!

Does the Press Like Obama?

Let's see, is the Pope Catholic? We know very little about Obama, certainly nothing about where he stands on issues, or much at all about his character or personal life. He is good looking, he is young, he is black, he is a good speaker, he tells us that he isn't "partisan". Are there any "partisan Democrats" according to the MSM? I thought that was another of those things that only applies to Republicans.

I happened to hear on the evil Fox news the other day that he is a "closet smoker", and "nobody has a picture of him smoking yet, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in it". Of course, we all know that "Faux News" can't be trusted, so here it is from the Chicago Trib, they are a nice liberal paper, so it MUST be the truth!

One thing he has tried to do for his children--quit smoking--is among his biggest struggles. "The flesh is weak," he said. "It's an ongoing battle. I have my gum, my patches and all that stuff."

The Obamas moved into a $1.6 million house in June, trading their condo near Hyde Park for a historic home nearby. The royalties from his first book and an advance of nearly $2 million for future books allowed the family to pay off debts from law school and past political campaigns.

Part of the package of being a liberal is that you get to make millions of dollars off book deals as a "public servant", live in a 1.6 Million dollar house, and that is A-OK. It is certainly A-OK with me as well, but I live in the odd world where it ought to be INDEPENDENT of what political party you subscribe to. Odd view of "fair" though that may be.