Intelligent Disdain

In Missouri and Indiana this month, bills have been put forward in the legislature to return "intelligent design" to the classrooms. Because their children are apparently not stupid enough yet.


I occasionally hang out on a blog called Stone the Preacher (it's run out of Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, CA); I ended up there rebutting one of the standard canards of the fundamentalists (I think it was "atheists have no morals," but at this late date, I'm really not sure), and I kept going back, probably because I thrive on conflict. And run-on sentences. And recently, Pastor Steve, a young-earth creationist, made the mistake of mentioning "intelligent design."

I've always loved that phrase because of its inherent idiocy. "Intelligent design" is creationism wearing glasses and a clown nose, and the adjective is so clearly in conflict with the noun that people should be unable to avoid stuttering when they say it. Every attempt to sneak it into schools gets thoroughly destroyed in the courts, but that doesn't stop them from trying over and over again (for example, in Missouri and Indiana - and probably in some other state any day now).

Let's be honest: evolution explains why some of the ridiculous design flaws exist in the world. There is no "intelligence" in the "design" of the world, and examples are everywhere. Comedians have been pointing them out for years.

"God is a mechanical engineer! Look at this marvelous collection of joints and levers!"

"No, God is an electrical engineer! Look at the intricacy of these neurons and synapses!"

"No," said the city planner, "God is obviously a civil engineer. Sometimes, when nobody's looking, it's just easier to run a sewer pipe through a recreational area."

But fundies, being fundies, keep soldiering on, like particularly pious zombies on a quest for children's brains.

Let's consider the evidence. And remember, the people who believe this silliness also believe that God doesn't make mistakes.

1. As we develop in the womb, we form three sets of kidneys. The pronephroi ("forekidneys") appear in the fourth week; they degenerate pretty quickly, but the ducts are recycled to build the mesonephroi ("midkidneys"). And then those degenerate and the tubules are recycled in the metanephroi ("hindkidneys"), which are our permanent kidneys.

This almost seems like an elegant bit of engineering, but really, it's more like building an Eiffel Tower as scaffolding for another Eiffel Tower, which is used as scaffolding for a final, bigger Eiffel Tower, and you rip down each one as you go (I don't remember where I saw that metaphor, but it's perfect). It's an unnecessarily complex process, and it's just evidence that evolution had a number of false starts along the way, and had to go back and refigure what it was building.

(On the subject of kidneys, why is the gene for polycystic kidney disease dominant? Why make it 50% likely that you'll inherit a painful, life-threatening condition?)

2. The female quoll (an Australian marsupial) has only six teats, but gives birth to a litter of 18, meaning that the 12 slowest or weakest die of starvation. A 66% death rate makes sense to you? Was God weeding out the weak ones? Why didn't He just build them right to begin with?

3. While you’re in Australia, look up the mystery of a kangaroo’s teeth, for that matter. The grasses they eat are tough, and wear down the front teeth of the 'roo. So, to make up for this, they evolved were designed with an unusual ability: as the front teeth wear down, they fall out and the back teeth move forward to replace them.

Which sounds great, except that they don't have the ability to grow new teeth. So by the time they're 15 or 20, they run out, and starve to death. Apparently, God hates kangaroos, and wants to see them suffer.

4. Birds of the family Sulidae (boobies and gannets)...

...heh, heh... I said "boobies"...

4. Birds of the family Sulidae are diving birds, plunging into the water from the sky. One of their adaptations to this is that they don’t have external nostrils – the water would get shoved up their noses on impact. But even without external nostrils, they have everything else that makes up a nasal airway inside their beaks. It’s just that the nostrils are sealed off at the outside. Having nasal airways that can’t work is pretty pointless design. Although evolution tells us why they’re there, it makes you wonder why God would choose to install a completely pointless structure inside the bird's beak. Did He build it from spare parts from another bird?

If these things, and so many others, are designed, that’s some pretty shoddy craftsmanship.

Maybe God occasionally gets drunk on sacramental wine while He's working?

Bully for Teddy

It's a funny thing, the conservative American mind. Talk about quotidian things, work, the weather, and they can be charming, witty, companionable and seem intelligent, but stay away from politics if you don't want to have to discard many friendships. Beneath the mask can lie a morass of anger and ignorance as deep and foetid as hell itself.

I've very often had people express nostalgic longing for a president like Teddy Roosevelt - a hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman, soldier, adventurer and writer of books; a man not afraid to conquer and not likely to apologize for it. A conservative's conservative. Someone who stood, square jawed and well armed astride the American horizon in a time of unlimited freedom, opportunity and prosperity when the lower orders knew their place. Thus are the dreams.

Of course Teddy was often denounced as a Communist Agitator. Today his opinions would have the Sarah Palins and Joe who isn't a plumber flapping in a frenzy like decapitated chickens. He espoused a graduated income tax and more government regulation of financial markets. He advocated more government social programs such as housing for immigrants. Of course there were no Nazis then to be falsely associated with American progressivism and no way to compare him to Hitler as today he inevitably would be.

Roosevelt's time had seen the effects of economic booms, panics and busts in rapid and relentless quick step. Economic inequality was growing, monopolies were tightening their grip on free markets and massive accumulations of private wealth were threatening democracy. His vision didn't include doing nothing or faith in the power of doing nothing or blind trust of the altruism of the very, very wealthy.

"Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism "

said Roosevelt in a famous 1910 speech calling for a "New Nationalism" One wonders what bizarre grotesqueries of accusation would emerge had it been given today. Would people be carrying weapons to his speeches, would he be called a tyrant, would there be hysteria over the way he was "dismantling freedom?" Would they question his citizenship, his patriotism; accuse him of murder? It's hard to tell but surely Barack Obama has suffered worse for less radical statements.

Of course Teddy had to remind his audience after he said

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration"

that he was quoting Abraham Lincoln because he was regularly being called a totalitarian himself - as well as a Communist. Perhaps such things never change, but the perception of an America that's sliding irretrievably down a slope toward the antithetical perdition of communism and fascism because sentiments such as those of Lincoln and Roosevelt are essentially "far-left" and "liberal" and we're being assured of it daily by mindless maggots with megaphones.

It seems that the Niebelungs of negativity have been crying wolf for a very long time, but look at how well the average man lives today compared to how he lived a hundred years ago when poverty consumed most of us and faith based laws restricted huge numbers to certain neighborhoods, certain jobs, certain levels of education, certain expectations of justice in an essentially Hobbsian society.

Somehow I cannot believe that a hundred years of progress toward more liberal goals have made us justifiably disgruntled. We live longer, live better, cleaner, healthier and have far more freedom to alter our circumstances for the better. The slope has not been slippery, the slope never existed. Progressive income tax has not stifled entrepreneurship which has thrived even in times of over 80% top brackets and in fact it seems to dampen economic cycles. It seems the only wolves that have shown up were wearing conservative clothing and warning us of wolves.

Isn't a new nationalism what we need today? The old kind and the old attitude and the old maxims and the old and vicious, dishonest and hate-filled rhetoric has never done us any good and have now brought us to the brink.

Say no to drugs!

I guess I've been doing drugs all my life and I'll bet you have too. My thanks to the FDA for letting us all know. Take Oats for example, there's evidence that eating oat cereal helps keep your bad cholesterol low and that's something the health howlers everywhere have been telling us to do 24 hours a day for decades. Cheerios are, of course, made with oats and General Mills is happy to tell you they provide a good way to eat those oats that seem to be good for you. Our friends at the FDA however, you know those guys who always seem to have been looking the other way when the e-coli, melamine and rat turds got into our food supply aren't about to tolerate promoting a healthy diet without their permission.

Cheerios are drugs because they can help treat a medical condition according to the Food and Drug Administration. Of course if nobody told you that broccoli or spinach or exercise or a good night's sleep -- or oats -- were good for you, that would be all right with the Feds. Health benefits, no matter how credible can only be talked about with their approval it seems. So never mind what your mother or Sanjay Gupta or the Surgeon General tells you about a healthy diet and lifestyle, don't listen to those damned drug pushers, listen to the FDA.

Of course you can apparently sell almost any placebo or stimulant as a weight loss drug that has been proven not to work or in some cases to kill you. We can't go half an hour without some machine or pill or diet plan being shoved in our faces on TV, but fruits, grains and vegetables as part of a heart-healthy diet? DRUGS!!!!

Hey, last thing I want to do is be a druggie - so I'll have a double bacon cheeseburger with extra mayonnaise and a big Bucket O Super Sized Fries and a milk shake too of course -- it's all FDA approved!

REVISIONISM REDUX

Yesterday, Charlie Gibson interviewed George W. Bush about his term as President, one highlight as follows:

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

How does an “intelligence failure” explain the administration’s attempt to discredit and smear former Ambassador Joe Wilson, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, and other critics of administration policy?

How does an “intelligence failure” justify the 50,993 Iraqi civilian casualties (as counted by the Shiite government since April 2005)?

How does one explain “intelligence failure” to the 30,634 wounded soldiers now neglected by a government-on-the-cheap, just like the Vietnam era vets who were abandoned a generation ago?

How does an “intelligence failure” explain why our government failed to secure 250,000 tons of missing ordinance spread around Iraqi weapons sites … veritable shopping malls of explosives left for looting by would-be insurgents?

What intelligence justified the dismissal of 350,000 Iraqi Army personnel who, after being turned out of their jobs and unemployed, had little recourse but to join the ranks of the insurgency?

How can one so easily dismiss the “tactical errors, thousands of them,” admitted by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice during a visit to Blackburn England in 2006?

How can one justify the loss of 4,207 American lives since the beginning of the Iraq War? On screen, the number 4,207 looks something like this:

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After the WMD argument proved bogus, the Bush administration advanced yet another false premise to justify themselves: The “pied piper” argument. The one that states: “We are fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” When intelligence fails, “staying the course” is the cowardly way to avoid owning the mistake.

Overall, the Administration rushed our soldiers into an ad hoc, itchy-trigger-finger war predicated on false intelligence, errors in judgment, gross mismanagement, and no exit strategy. When citizens demanded truth and accountability, the administration countered with subterfuge and smear.

Finally, here is George Bush at a White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004 cracking jokes about his “intelligence failure:”

"Those weapons of mass destruction gotta be somewhere. Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here."

Only a roomful of sycophants and sociopaths could find this amusing.

Now the War-Criminal-In-Chief intends to spin his own history. Over my dead body!