Posted by Norm at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

RICHARD DAWKINS TOPS PROSPECT'S LIST OF BRITAIN'S TOP 100 PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS via 3 Quark Daily

Dawkins Interview in Colorado

Simon Blackburn on Truth

Mighty Mice Regrow Organs

Mad Kane It's Another Bush Crisis

and get your Judy Scooter coverage here

From the comments, thanks Techer

The morning session included several light moments. Dr. Pennock testified that referring to a "designer" rather than "God" is like referring to "Ambassador Wilson's wife" rather than "Valerie Plame Wilson." As the gallery laughed, Judge Jones chuckled and said, "As an example."

More Kitzmiller v. Dover trail coverage at ACLU of Penn. and The Panda's Thumb.

Posted by Norm at 1:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Click on the picture to view the video

Posted by Norm at 1:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Progess in Iraq

The number of Iraqi battalions capable of combat without U.S. support has dropped from three to one, the top American commander in Iraq told Congress Thursday,

Anti-evolution Attacks on the Rise is your state safe?

Kan Do Karl Marf Fiore (flash)

I Can't Afford My Gasoline (flash) from atom films
Camera phone enters new creative territory

NEW YORK--Billboard magazine has learned that rock band the Presidents of the United States of America shot its latest video using only mobile phone cameras. The video for the track "Some Postman," culled from the band's last studio album, "Love Everybody," was filmed in Seattle in just one day using a variety of Sony-Ericsson mobile video phones. Director Grant Marshall of Film Headquarters said he had spent 18 months looking for a band willing to go along with the mobile-only film concept. The band currently is playing limited U.S. dates and is planning to tour in Australia in October.

Here is the Video Quicktime 7 via Lisa

Cramps

Mind the Gaps
Intelligent design as an answer to all life's great conundrums.

We'll all be able to huddle around our radios and listen to Car Talk as a family. After the question is posed, we can all yell out in unison with Click and Clack that the mysterious drut-drut-drut coming from that lady in Vermont's carburetor is … "God!!"

How many times have you read War and Peace? I think a better question is how many times have you started to read War and Peace?

Literature Map cool via Splinters

Posted by Norm at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

TBogg writes of the sweet Christian gal, Ashely Smith, who saved her ass by talking faith and sharing her meth.

Then she read to him from "The Purpose Driven Oh God I'm So Fuckin' Ripped You Wanna Go Get Slurpees Hey Turn It Up That Fucking Song Rocks I Haven't Slept In Two Days Life".

Don't allow the Republicans to get away with

Operation Offset it, calls for an astounding $949 billion dollars in cuts over 10 years to vital national services [6].--almost five times the full cost of reconstruction. To further put that in perspective, it's also more than 4 times what we've spent in Iraq.

This plan is not about "offsetting," or rebuilding--it's about exploiting this crisis to push their longstanding goals for America. As conservative movement leader Grover Norquist has often put it, the goal is to get government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This proposal is their latest attempt to drown the public sector.

Rx the party party dot com a new new mix, George Bush doing "White Lines" Download here be sure to visit the site for all the great mixes. Rx does it best.

Posted by Norm at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

DeLay Indicted in Texas Campaign Finance Probe

House Majority leader temporarily steps down from his post.

WASHINGTON -- A Texas grand jury today charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post.

DeLay attorney Steve Brittain said DeLay was accused of a criminal conspiracy along with two associates, John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay's national political committee.

"I have notified the speaker that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County district attorney today," DeLay said.

GOP congressional officials said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., will recommend that Rep. David Dreier of California step into those duties. Some of the duties may go to the GOP whip, Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri. The Republican rank and file may meet as early as this evening to act on Hastert's recommendation.

The charge carries a potential two-year sentence, which forces DeLay to step down under House Republican rules.

Posted by Norm at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Oh my, Brownie gets no respect.

Posted by Norm at 1:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Bag News Notes has some great black and white photos of the Katrina aftermath shot by Alan Chin. Why black and white, the photographer explains:

I shot it in black-and-white because we live in America, so no matter what happens, we always have visual elements that are very distracting.  I was one of the only people who did this in black and white.  I felt it should not be distracted by color, by the fact someone might have been wearing a hot pink t-shirt.  I didn't want that irony in it.  I wanted to get to the heart of the matter -- to the crucial thing.

Posted by Norm at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory
Pa. Trial Will Ask Whether 'Alternatives' Can Pass as Science

By Rick Weiss and David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 26, 2005; A08

When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins.

But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.

If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.

"That's a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.

Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.

Their analysis was just the latest of many in such disparate fields as genetics, biochemistry, geology and paleontology that in recent years have added new credence to the central tenet of evolutionary theory: That a smidgeon of cells 3.5 billion years ago could -- through mechanisms no more extraordinary than random mutation and natural selection -- give rise to the astonishing tapestry of biological diversity that today thrives on Earth.

Evolution's repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists and others are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with "alternative" explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.

Today, in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa., a federal judge will begin to hear a case that asks whether ID or other alternative explanations deserve to be taught in a biology class. But the plaintiffs, who are parents opposed to teaching ID as science, will do more than merely argue that those alternatives are weaker than the theory of evolution.

They will make the case -- plain to most scientists but poorly understood by many others -- that these alternatives are not scientific theories at all.

"What makes evolution a scientific explanation is that it makes testable predictions," Lander said. "You only believe theories when they make non-obvious predictions that are confirmed by scientific evidence."

Lander's experiment tested a quirky prediction of evolutionary theory: that a harmful mutation is unlikely to persist if it is serious enough to reduce an individual's odds of leaving descendants by an amount that is greater than the number one divided by the population of that species.

The rule proved true not only for mice and chimps, Lander said. A new and still unpublished analysis of the canine genome has found that dogs, whose numbers have historically been greater than those of apes but smaller than for mice, have an intermediate number of harmful mutations -- again, just as evolution predicts.

"Evolution is a way of understanding the world that continues to hold up day after day to scientific tests," Lander said.

By contrast, said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Intelligent Design offers nothing in the way of testable predictions.

"Just because they call it a theory doesn't make it a scientific theory," Leshner said. "The concept of an intelligent designer is not a scientifically testable assertion."

Asked to provide examples of non-obvious, testable predictions made by the theory of Intelligent Design, John West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based ID think tank, offered one: In 1998, he said, an ID theorist, reckoning that an intelligent designer would not fill animals' genomes with DNA that had no use, predicted that much of the "junk" DNA in animals' genomes -- long seen as the detritus of evolutionary processes -- will someday be found to have a function.

(In fact, some "junk" DNA has indeed been found to be functional in recent years, though more than 90 percent of human DNA still appears to be the flotsam of biological history.) In any case, West said, it is up to Darwinists to prove ID wrong.

"Chance and necessity don't seem to be good candidates for explaining the appearance of higher-order complexity, so the best explanation is an intelligent cause," West said.
Simple and Hard

The controversy that has periodically erupted around evolution can be attributed at least in part to the fact that it is both simple to understand and hard to believe.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, working independently in the early- to mid-1800s, each came up with the concept of "natural selection." Each sought to explain the astounding diversity of life he found in exotic places, Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and Wallace in Brazil.

Their idea was this:

By some accident of nature whose workings neither man could explain, an organism may exhibit a variation in shape, color or body function new to the species. Although most of these new traits are damaging -- probably lethal -- a small fraction actually help. They may make it easier to hide from predators (like a moth's coloration), exploit a food source (an anteater's long tongue), or make seeds more durable (the coconut's buoyant husk).

If the trait does help an organism survive, that individual will be more likely to reproduce. Its offspring will then inherit the change. They, in turn, will have an advantage over organisms that are identical except for that one beneficial change. Over time, the descendants that inherited what might be termed the "happy accident" will outnumber the descendants of its less fit, but initially far more numerous, brethren.

There are two important consequences of this mechanism.

The first is that organisms will tend to adapt to their environments. If the planet's atmosphere contains lots of oxygen but very little methane gas, living things are going to end up tolerating oxygen -- and possibly even depending on it. But do not expect to see many methane-breathers.

This appearance of "perfect fit" makes it seem as if organisms must have been the product of an intelligent force. But this appearance of perfection is deceiving. It gives no hint of the numberless evolutionary dead ends -- lineages that, according to the fossil record, survived for a while but then died out, probably because changes in the environment made their once-perfect designs not so perfect anymore.

The second result of Darwin and Wallace's mechanism is that over time it will create species diversity. As additional "happy accidents" alter an organism's descendants over millions of years, those descendants will come to look less and less like other organisms with which they share a common ancestor. Eventually, the descendants will be able to mate only with each other. They will be lions and tigers -- each a distinct species, but both descended from the same ancient cat.

What is hard to understand about this process is that it is essentially passive. The mechanism is called "natural selection" because the conditions at hand -- nature -- determine which accidents are beneficial and which are not. Organisms do not seek ends.

Giraffes do not decide to grow long necks to browse the high branches above the competition. But a four-legged mammal on the savannah once upon a time was endowed with a longer neck than its brothers and sisters. It ate better. We call its descendants giraffes.

That a mechanism driven by random events should result in perfectly adapted organisms -- and so many different types -- seems illogical.

"Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise, natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere," Jacques Monod, a French biologist and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in 1970 in the book "Chance and Necessity."

Natural selection was really hard to accept in Darwin's day. But it has become easier with the discovery of genes, DNA and techniques that have made it possible to watch natural selection happen.

DNA is a stringlike molecule made up of paired beads called nucleotides. It carries the instructions for making proteins and RNA, the chief building materials of life. Individually, these instructions are called genes.

The random changes Darwin knew must be happening are accidents that happen to DNA and genes. Today, they can be documented and catalogued in real time, inside cells.

Cells sometimes make errors when they copy their DNA before dividing. These mutations can disable a gene -- or change its action. Occasionally cells also duplicate an entire gene by mistake, providing offspring with two copies instead of one. Both these events provide raw material for new genes with new and potentially useful functions -- and ultimately raw material for new organisms and species.

Richard E. Lenski, a biologist at Michigan State University, has been following 12 cultures of the bacterium Escherichia coli since 1988, comprising more than 25,000 generations. All 12 cultures were genetically identical at the start. For years he gave each the same daily stress: six hours of food (glucose) and 18 hours of starvation. All 12 strains adapted to this by becoming faster consumers of glucose and developing bigger cell size than their 1988 "parents."

When Lenski and his colleagues examined each strain's genes, they found that the strains had not acquired the same mutations. Instead, there was some variety in the happy accidents that had allowed each culture to survive. And when the 12 strains were then subjected to a different stress -- a new food source -- they did not fare equally well. In some, the changes from the first round of adaptation stood in the way of adaptation to the new conditions. The 12 strains had started to diverge, taking the first evolutionary steps that might eventually make them different species -- just as Darwin and Wallace predicted.

In fact, one of the more exciting developments in biology in the past 25 years has been how much DNA alone can teach about the evolutionary history of life on Earth.

For example, genome sequencing projects have shown that human beings, dogs, frogs and flies (and many, many other species) share a huge number of genes in common. These include not only genes for tissues they all share, such as muscle, which is not such a surprise, but also the genes that go into basic body-planning (specifying head and tail, front and back) and appendage-building (making things that stick out from the body, such as antennae, fins, legs and arms).

As scientists have identified the totality of DNA -- the genomes -- of many species, they have unearthed the molecular equivalent of the fossil record.

It is now clear from fossil and molecular evidence that certain patterns of growth in multicellular organisms appeared about 600 million years ago. Those patterns proved so useful that versions of the genes governing them are carried by nearly every species that has arisen since.

These several hundred "tool kit genes," in the words of University of Wisconsin biologist Sean B. Carroll, are molecular evidence of natural selection's ability to hold on to very useful functions that arise.

Research on how and when tool kit genes are turned on and off also has helped explain how evolutionary changes in DNA gave rise to Earth's vast diversity of species. Studies indicate that the determination of an organism's form during embryonic development is largely the result of a small number of genes that are turned on in varying combinations and order. Gene regulation is where the action is.

Consequently, mutations in regulatory portions of a DNA strand can have effects just as dramatic as those prompted by mutations in genes themselves. They can, for example, cancel the development of an appendage -- or add an appendage where one never existed. This discovery refuted assertions by Intelligent Design advocates that gene mutation and natural selection can, at most, explain the fine-tuning of species.

"The mechanisms that make the small differences between species are the same ones that make the big differences between kingdoms," said Carroll, author of a book, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful," that describes many of these new insights.

Although the central tenets of evolution have done nothing but grow stronger with every experimental challenge, the story is still evolving, Carroll and other scientists acknowledge. Some details are sure to be refined over time. The question to be answered in Harrisburg is whether Intelligent Design has anything scientific to add for now, or whether it belongs instead in philosophy class.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted by Norm at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

note: correlation is not necessairly evidence of causation, that said
further update: pdf of the study

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.

He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.

“The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.

“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

Posted by Norm at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)

Don't go near the water Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina via Swedes for Obama
The Year of Magical Thinking
 

quot;Life changes fast.
   Life changes in the instant.
   You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
   The question of self-pity."
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.

Mad Kane has some thoughts the Judge Roberts nomination.

Bill For First Lady Thanks to Liz for the link.

Evolution vs Intelligent Design from Natural History Magazine

The Talk.Origins Archive exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy and for those of you who get tired of refuting the same tired old arguments from your creationist friends try this Index to Creationst Claims with answers. (hat tip to Techer for pointing to these in the comments to my last post about evolution.)

Chess World Championship who will win.

Posted by Norm at 6:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man's tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn't a box of Cheerios they buried last week."

Posted by Norm at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Guardsmen Sense Ghostly Presence In New Orleans
If religion wasn't the underlying explanation for this bizarre behavior, this entire group would considered mentally ill and in need of treatment. They are of course in need of treatment, but you have to recognize there is a problem before you look for a solution. The problem is an addiction to Gerin oil. Fortunately most people who are on this drug are able to compartmentalize their irrational beliefs and function more or less normally most of the time. The problem is when the poison leaks out of the box and contaminates the rest of society. Until things change however, laughter is the best antidote.

Posted by Norm at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

Michael Sprague at Philosophy of Biology discovers an old 'friend' of ours and rips him a new one in Worst Trackback Ever We too have enjoyed the Anal one in the past but soon became bored and haven't posted on him in a long time, but there is much to enjoy in the archives such as Analphilospher No Hyphen or here where Keith Burgess-Jackson comes clean and acknowledges his bullshit but then excuses it with an 'everybody does it'.

Here are a couple more interesting encounters with Anal here and here or here where he demonstrates what it is to be butt-stupid

Here is a video from the archives, Last Laugh 2004 several readers have pointed me to this video on other sites unaware that I had posted it here in December of 2004, but worth linking to since many seem to have missed it the first time around. I recently killed the category file on the different videos. When someone would load an archive it would load all the entires and with graphics it was one monster file and used a lot of bandwidth. I'm considering creating a separate page to list videos with one line descriptions to avoid the problem and at the same time provide a way to browse old videos. In the mean time if you do a search for Quicktime all videos will come up most recent first with an excerpt you should be able to find what you're looking for that way.

Jon who? The Daily what?

My Evacuation Experience from a onegoodmove reader

A 90 Part History of the British Empire

Rumsfeld's Wisdom

At a February 12, 2002, news briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained the limitations of intelligence reports: "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." Rumsfeld's logic may be tongue-twisting, but his epistemology was sound enough that he was quoted twice at the World Summit on Evolution.

Unqualified Success of George W. bush's Two Terms in Office (So Far).

Posted by Norm at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

President Bush was supposed to land here on Friday afternoon on the first stop of a tour intended to make clear that he was personally overseeing the federal government's preparations for Hurricane Rita's landfall. But the weather did not cooperate.

It was too sunny.

Stormy was testy.

He had put aside the guitar and packed his slicker.

The First Weatherman was working hard, man, harder than he had in years, even spending nights away from home - and Barney - in strange places.

And still the pesky press was painting him as a storm groupie, racing Rita to Texas just to score a windswept backdrop to recapture his image as protector.

Stormy preened for the cameras at FEEBLE FEMA headquarters in Washington yesterday. On CNN, a bilious image of a hurricane spun next to his head. You could imagine the little hurricane trailing him through the rest of his presidency, like the storm cloud with a lightning bolt that always trailed Joe Btfsplk in "Li'l Abner."

He said he was jetting to San Antonio to check out "the prepositioned assets" and then riding out the storm watching "the interface" between the military and state and local authorities at Northcom in Colorado.

But David Gregory at NBC quizzed W. on what good he could really do in Texas: "Might you get in the way, Mr. President?"

Stormy didn't like that. "One thing I won't do is get in the way," he snipped. Mr. Gregory, part of a newly amped-up press corps, followed up: "Isn't there a risk of you and your entourage getting in the way?"

Now Stormy let off a little high pressure. "There will be no risk of me getting in the way, I promise you," he said dismissively.

The smart aleck reporters didn't understand how crucial it was for the president to intertwine, inter alia, with the interfacers. So W. explained it again: "See, Northcom is the main entity that interfaces - that uses federal assets, federal troops, to interface with local and state government. I want to watch that relationship."

But soon the San Antonio leg of the trip was scotched amid fears that Stormy would really be interfering more than interfacing. And besides, the weather was too sunny there for poses in foul-weather gear.

Stormy is like his dad, Desert Stormy. They both love wardrobe calls: cool costumes, sports outfits, presidential windbreakers, "Top Gun" get-ups, weather gear.

Posted by Norm at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Here is the audio of Richard Dawkins reading from his book The Ancestor's Tale from the Seattle Science Lecture in November of 2004. If you're a Dawkins fan you won't want to miss this one, and if you're not a Dawkins fan you will be after listening to this program.
Link

Posted by Norm at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"You may decry some of these scruples and protest that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there are in heaven or earth."—N. Goodman

Posted by Norm at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bill Maher on the Estate Tax

Related Information: The Estate Tax: Myths and Realities

Posted by Norm at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Bill O'Reilly and Phil Donahue going at it. Bill is either feigning outrage or he's a couple of tiny steps away from a complete breakdown. Please note this video is encoded in h.264 and requires Quicktime 7 which is now available for both PCs and Macs. If you haven't upgraded yet now is a good time. I'm going to start encoding more videos with this codec in the future. If you don't want to upgrade now Crooks and Liars has versions both in Quicktime and Windows Media. Note that his Quicktime version is smaller and the file size is nearly double what I was able to obtain using h264, which explains why I'm asking that you upgrade. Less bandwidth use for me and faster loading for you.

Posted by Norm at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (62)

Avery Ant One (flash)

Age cannot wither him

On the brink of turning 80, Gore Vidal - aristocrat, intellectual and prolific novelist, playwright, and essayist - is as outspoken as ever. He talks to Emma Brockes about the corruption of the Bush administration, his ongoing radicalism and the benefits of speaking in complete sentences

Researchers Create Functioning Artificial Proteins Using Nature's Rules

More Dawkins Audio from Jason Crane

>Operators are Standing By Bush in New Orleans

This is today's Morning Smile from the Globe and Mail
Q: What is George W. Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't give a damn how people get out of New Orleans. -- Lili Little, Toronto

Posted by Norm at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Instead, he told the volunteers that when they encounter religious fundamentalists they should emphasize that science museums live by the rules of science. They seek answers in nature to questions about nature, they look for explanations that can be tested by experiment and observation in the material world, and they understand that all scientific knowledge is provisional - capable of being overturned when better answers are discovered.

"Is it against all religion?" he asked. "No. But it is against some religions."

“I plead alliance to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a married cow, and to the republicans for which they scam, one nacho, underpants, with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.”

by Matt Groening

Posted by Norm at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (29)

Thanks to Fletch for the video but especially for his inspired choice of music. Bush on the wing, a New Orleans Katrina video montage to Pink Floyd's "Pigs on the Wing" If you didn't care what happened to me,/And I didn't care for you,/We would zig zag our way through /the boredom and pain/Occasionally glancing up through the rain./Wondering which of the buggars to blame/And watching for pigs on the wing.

Posted by Norm at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

K-Otix and others are not happy with Bush response
Texas hip-hop group K-Otix have released a song called "George Bush Does Not Care About Black People," playing off of Kanye West's now infamous outburst from a live Hurricane Katrina telethon (see "T.I., David Banner Get Behind Kanye's Bush Comments"). The group's two MCs rap over an instrumental of Kanye West's "Gold Digger," criticizing Bush throughout the song: "Five damn days, five long days/ And at the end of the fifth, he walkin' in like, 'Hey'/ Chillin' on his vacation, sittin' patiently/ Them black folks gotta hope, gotta wait and see/ If FEMA really comes through in an emergency/ But nobody has a sense of urgency."
Video from The Black Lantern
Here is another video using the same music. another video using the same music.

Posted by Norm at 2:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (32)

Endgame Great Video

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

An interview with the Prophet Bobby Henderson, the voice of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Faith Based Disaster

French psychiatrists don’t take Freud criticism lying down

A WAR of words has erupted among French psychiatrists after the publication of a “black book” that lambasts the teaching of Sigmund Freud and blames his followers for setting back mental health care in France by decades.
In a country that is one of the last redoubts of pure Freudian psychoanalysis, the book has been like shock treatment for many in the white-coat establishment who accuse the authors of grovelling to the “Anglo-Saxon” trend towards behaviour-based mental therapy.

Brits free their own from Basra Jail. It just keeps getting better. That's sarcasm for our right-wing friends.

I’m leavin’ on a jet plane/Don’t know when I’ll be back again/Oh New Orleans, I hate to go

Posted by Norm at 1:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A Wimp on Genocide

President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.

It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.

One group, , www.beawitness.org, prepared a television commercial scolding the networks for neglecting the genocide - and affiliates of NBC, CBS and ABC all refused to run it.

A call to the 700 Club from the beast (audio) the Buffalo Beast that is. (thanks Brian

Arts world unites for plea to pull troops out of Iraq

We are saying that the war is a disaster and has failed in every way and is continuing to fail. Personally I'm saying I do not want to be associated with a bunch of red necks with big guns and small minds.&mdash Brian Eno Musician

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr

Niebuhr argued that "religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."

I linked to this Big Ad a while ago and now we have A Small Ad

A Limerick from Mad Kane Rebuilder in Chief

BAGnews Notes is on a roll check out the last couple of weeks of posts .

Posted by Norm at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Richard Dawkins is undoubtedly the best there is at explaining evolution. As part of a New Scientist article on The World's 10 Biggest Ideas he explains the basics in six of the best written paragraphs I've ever read on the subject.

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.

Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is indeed orders of magnitude too improbable to have come about by chance. But only if we assume that all the luck has to come in one fell swoop. When cascades of small chance steps accumulate, you can reach prodigious heights of adaptive complexity. That cumulative build-up is evolution. Its guiding force is natural selection.

Every living creature has ancestors, but only a fraction have descendants. All inherit the genes of an unbroken sequence of successful ancestors, none of whom died young and none of whom failed to reproduce. Genes that program embryos to develop into adults who can successfully reproduce automatically survive in the gene pool, at the expense of genes that fail. This is natural selection at the gene level, and we notice its consequences at the organism level. There has to be an ultimate source of new genetic variation, and it is mutation. Copies of newly mutated genes are reshuffled through the gene pool by sexual reproduction, and selection removes them from the pool in a way that is non-random.

What makes for success in the business of life varies from species to species. Some swim, some walk, some fly, some climb, some root themselves into the soil and tilt green solar panels toward the sun. All this diversity stems from successive branchings, starting from a single bacterium-like ancestor, which lived between 3 and 4 billion years ago. Each branching event is called a speciation: a breeding population splits into two, and they go their separately evolving ways. Among sexually reproducing species, speciation is said to have occurred when the two gene pools have separated so far that they can no longer interbreed. Speciation begins by accident. When separation has reached the stage where there is no interbreeding even without a geographical barrier, we have the origin of a new species.

Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the sceptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life. Design is as bad an explanation as chance because it raises bigger questions than it answers. Evolution by natural selection is the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life, and it does so brilliantly.

Posted by Norm at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

Heckuva job Brownie now take your medicine

Posted by Norm at 1:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In case you hadn't noticed they're at it again Riots for 'recognition'

Durst has me chuckling with these outstanding shots across the bow of the ship of state.

Between 2001 and 2004, 4.1 million more Americans slipped into poverty while the upper 2% of the the country’s richest became 55% wealthier. So, say what you will about Bush’s policies. They’re working.

The good news is, closed circuit videos in and around New Orleans have allowed us to identify the looters: Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil.

Senator Rick Santorum thinks there should be tougher penalties on people who decide to ride Hurricanes out. I guess he means worse than drowning.

The uses of invention

The novelist and Nobel laureate VS Naipaul has said that fiction is dead, vanquished by our need for facts. But, argues Jay McInerney, imaginative storytelling has the power to reveal underlying truths in a turbulent world.

Posted by Norm at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Frank recently wrote about his purchase of an iPod and now has penned an update. A PC man to the core, it was more than a leap of faith for him to embrace an Apple product. But the Apple Gods, like Santa watch you when you're sleeping and they know when you've been good or bad. Your comments about Macs are recorded in the big book in the sky, and the day of accounting does come. It arrived for Frank earlier than he expected. On a flight to California, disaster struck. Frank stuffed his new iPod in his pocket, sat back and began blissfully listening through his Sony noise canceling head-set to 'The Dead', only to discover upon arrival that the coins in his pocket had scratched the faceplate of his new iPod. Was it punishment for not giving his extra change to that poor man panhandling at the airport before his departure, or perhaps just bad Karma. He visited an Apple store in Palo Alto only to find that repair was not possible. I don't know if Frank has repented. I don't know if the Apple Gods have forgiven him. I don't know if redemption is possible for Frank. I do know that the PC crowd is always ready get their hands dirty, to open up the box, to tinker inside. Well the question is are you ready Frank. His experience raises an important question, how hard would it be to design a product that is repairable, certainly Frank isn't the first to suffer this fate. I'd send a letter to Apple admonishing them to make it so, but then I do have a new Mac and Apple karma is important. So hey Frank you're on your own, but you might want to try something like this.

Posted by Norm at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

The boogey man is you.

Posted by Norm at 1:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

It's Boxcar friday, Boxcar is a standup comedian who regularly appears at the Comedy Underground in Seattle.

Click on the picture to view the video

related story: God Talk

Posted by Norm at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Galloway and Hitchens rouse New York crowd

audio and video at Democracy Now!

Operation Blue Blood Quicktime Video. The government is ready to help. This message is only for you know who.

Cognitive Science and Moral Reasoning

Galileo, Therefore I'm Right

Be honest: Objections faith-based "Teach the controversy."

The evidence against an intelligent designer is staggering. Do the "teach the controversy" crowd really want their little darlings subjected to criticism of their god. I don't think so.

. . .I don't believe ID advocates are sincere about wanting to teach the controversy. If they are, they simply haven't thought through the implications.
A controversy, remember, has two sides. And if alleged weaknesses in evolution theory are to be taught in our schools as science, then scientific evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer or God must be taught, too.
That's how science works. If you propose a theory, you issue an invitation to others to shoot holes in your theory.

Posted by Norm at 1:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Republican candidate Jerry W. Kilgore asserts his stance on abortion in the first televised debate of the 2005 governors race, and moderator Tim Russert takes his head off, his opponent Tim Kane had to be lovin it. Video here the quality was so bad I decided to just put up the audio (hat tip to Carly) The good part is the last minute.

Posted by Norm at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I recently purchased a new iMac 2ghz G5 to replace the G4 800mhz iMac I've been using for the past four years, but that is not the reason I'm taking time out to post on my new aquisition. The reason is my amazement at how easy Apple made the transistion from my old machine to my new machine. I've changed machines any number of times both at home and at work. A wide selections of PCs and Macs but never has it been so easy. Start the new machine and when asked if you want to transfer data from an old machine to the new answer yes. You are instructed to attach a firewire cable between the old machine and the new and start the old machine while holding down the T key. The new machine shows you what is on the old machine. After you choose what you want to transfer to the new machine click continue the process automatically begins. A little over an hour later it had transferred everything on my old machine, about 50GB of applications and data, and I was ready to go. I had to update the apple applications and operating system to the most current versions, but other than that it was like I had never changed machines except the new machine creates the quicktime movies over twice as fast and I now have a 400GB harddrive and lots more memory.

Even this diehard PC user is learning to appreciate,IPod schmiPod? Apple® products.

Posted by Norm at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (53)

Judge: School Pledge Is Unconstitutional

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was declared unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge ruling in the second attempt by an atheist to have the pledge removed from classrooms.

Karlton, ruling in Sacramento, said he would sign a restraining order preventing the recitation of the pledge at the Elk Grove Unified, Rio Linda and Elverta Joint Elementary school districts, where the plaintiffs' children attend.

Looking Good

I’ll be taking some time off as I recover from a botched nose job. The cute little button of a nose that came with the last surgery fell off the other day while I was swinging a five iron. My golf partner stepped on the old nose with his cleats so the surgical team had to construct a new nose for me from some calluses on my feet. The new appendage isn’t as smooth as I would like, and athlete’s foot on my nose is now a distinct possibility, but I think that I look hot.

Blanco didn't goof on state of emergency

Are you kidding. It's interesting those on the right-wing that suggest not rebuilding New Orleans have no problem with the fact that we rebuild Iraq every day.

Mad Kane has a John Roberts Limericks to share.

Bush Approval Drops again.

Bill Moyers Soul Freedom recommended by Carly. If anyone knows of an available audio of this let me know.

Posted by Norm at 2:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Note the expression on the soldiers faces when Bush claims to be working. As onegoodmove reader Mark put it, priceless.

Posted by Norm at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Bloggers Speak, Part 1 of 2 -- Audio Mini-Interviews With Lefty Bloggers

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there,
and them look down and hear me. That might take some of
the shine off their bliss.
~ Samuel Beckett ~

Clash in Cambridge
Science and religion seem as antagonistic as ever

What, if anything, determines the meaning of words?

ROBERTSON BLAMES HURRICANE ON CHOICE OF ELLEN DEGENERES TO HOST EMMYS

Bush Takes Responsibility for Failures in Storm Response
"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do it's job right, I take responsibility"

Is this a first and just what exactly does Bush mean by taking responsibility. Would it be too much to expect the 'hari kari' George Carlin suggested on Bill Maher's show. As for me, I'd accept a simple resignation. I like John Kerry's comment on Dub's moment of responsibility "The President has done the obvious, only after it was clear he couldn’t get away with the inexcusable."

Here is a little mp3 techno remix of the Katrina news coverage you can download from Forrestt

Posted by Norm at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

You can visit a recruiting center, or hey we can come to your place. You just dodged a hurricane you're perfectly suited to dodge a bullet or two. Besides there are no hurricanes in Falluja, at least no natural ones.

"Ten U.S. Army recruiters are offering volunteer help for Katrina evacuees at Houston's Astrodome. But the recruiters, struggling to keep enlistment up during Iraq war, are also available with options for the jobless. "Our intent is to approach the evacuees at the right time for them,'' says Army spokesman Douglas Smith." Source Wall Street Journal

Posted by Norm at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (33)

Is Barbara Bush a heartless queen as Bill Maher claims or the silver douche bag George Carlin calls her.

Posted by Norm at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (29)

A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

Yours,
Michael Moore

Posted by Norm at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (58)

Mayor Nagin from last week's Nightline. The Mayor talks about the Crescent Connection bridge issue that Digby and others have been writing about. This American Life: After The Flood segments Act 1 and Act II also tell the tragic story. Darrell Plant has provided a partial transcript. Darrel put up the original video but has bandwidth limits, so I'm posting a copy here. Here are more recent comments by Nagin

Posted by Norm at 1:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)

This American Life: After The Flood Ira Glass captures the heart and soul of the story. You don't want to miss this. This will be available as streaming audio here next week, or you can purchase a copy at Audible dot Com (hat tip to Mark)

Posted by Norm at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Bill Maher making the case that Dub would welcome a recall. I kid, but seriously Mr. President, this job cant' be fun for you anymore. There's no more money to spend. You used up all of that. You can't start another war because you also used up the army, and now darn the luck the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare, helping poor people.

Posted by Norm at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Hey everyone, thanks for all the kind words about onegoodmove both in the comments and in the many emails I'm receiving. I enjoy hearing from you. I'm not doing a very good job of responding either in the comments or to all my email, but I do read them. Thanks for your support.

The Program You Are Watching Has Been Prerecorded

I don't read philosophy for answers to the meaning of life or any of the other ridiculous questions that have caused lunatics to bang their heads against the wall for as long as humans have been able to babble. What attracts me again and again to books of philosophy is the marginalia, the odd biographical details and digressions and just plain absurd minutiae that these old fools cough up on such a regular basis. The best biographies --hands down-- are of the philosophers. The unhappy little hunchbacks who waddled around the streets of their towns and endured the taunts of rock-throwing children (Kierkegaard). The closet gnomes, martyrs, and maniacs. Empedocles wrote, "Wretches! Utter wretches! Keep your hands from beans!" Three of Ludwig Wittgenstein's eight siblings committed suicide. Kant wrote a treatise on rainbows. And the great master of gloom Schopenhauer took issue with Spinoza's Ethics over what he perceived to be their disregard for the virtue and dignity of dogs.

God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again Onion weighs in on the hurricane named Katrina and the aftermath.

A Hurricane Katrina Rap

Limbaugh calls Nagin Nayger audio

Flash from Avery AntThe Church of the Unionized Christ
Are disasters really good for the economy?

Early assessments of Katrina illustrate 'fallacy of the broken window'

Economists have been living up to their reputation as “dismal” scientists in recent days, predicting that despite the devastating human tragedy, Hurricane Katrina ultimately could have a positive impact on the economy.

The broken window fallacy

The basic flaw in the logic behind such accounting was attacked a century and a half ago by French thinker Frederic Bastiat who referred to the “fallacy of the broken window.”

This is not the first time we've disucssed this at onegoodmove here is video from a previous hurricane and a dumb shit making the same argument.

Posted by Norm at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It's a trajedy for me that he's president of my country. You know, my book is called A Man Without a Country,I still have a passport, but if I showed this now in Portugal or Spain or Italy or Germany of France or Denmark or Japan or even communist China, what it would say about me is that I'm not only from the richest country in the world but the dumbest country in the world. Is our President a tragic figure, perhaps, but he doesn't know diddley squat about economics or history or science even how to speak well.

Posted by Norm at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

It's Boxcar friday, Boxcar is a standup comedian who regularly appears at the Comedy Underground in Seattle. I consider it hurricane relief, something to get our mind off one disaster and on to another one.

Click on the picture to view the video

Posted by Norm at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Brown's Resume a Sham?

update: FEMA Director Brown pulled off Katrina relief That's a start it will be fun to watch how they ease him out of the job completely. I think with the resume lies he's a gone. Good job Brownie, heckavu job!

Brown a Good Job (hat tip to Jeff for the link)

A loving God helps in the relief No that's not right he wiped out a good chunk of sin and didn't kill everyone in the process. The proper tool for the job God once again looked in his tool chest and takes a hammer to New Oreleans. The bright side he wiped out some sin and din't kill everyone in the process.
Why Ebooks still Suck

A FEMA Detainment Camp

Another onegoodmove reader with a blog go say hi

Judy will she talk. Is she getting tired of her 3 squares and a bunk? Maybe.

Digby writes The Single Worst Decision

This is the group that Shepard Smith was freaking out about on O'Reilly last Thursday night. I wonder if he knew what happened after he made that report.

I think we can all understand the overwhelming nature of this disaster. And there should have been more adequate planning and a better response, no doubt about it. But the decision to deny immediate aid to people in the city is the worst decision of all. Read that story. These tourists were treated like shit by the authorities everywhere they went, just like the locals. Whoever made the decision to deny those people relief and then deny them the ability to leave when they tried to save themselves has blood on his or her hands.

Posted by Norm at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

David Gregory does a number on Scotty with a little help from his friends

Click on picture to play video
Quicktime Video 4.7MB 2'24
Related: Sadly No has a pythonesque take on the McClellan Gregory exchange.
McClellan: "Mr. Gregory, is this the five-minute argument?"
Quicktime Required (free download)

Posted by Norm at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Click on picture to play video
Quicktime Video 1.3 MB '32

Quicktime Required (free download)
related: from the Washington Post

Posted by Norm at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (44)

Posted by Norm at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Three FEMA limericks from Mad Kane

A Katrina Time Line The debacle documented.
Another excellent time line here

Hurricane Katrina proves the relevance of the m-word

Here is part of an email from Lee, who is currently in Sweden on business, and also provided the above link.

Over here in some of the pubs and restaurants, the Swedish people can be heard calling the NOLA disaster "Bush's ethnic cleansing" ... I'm not joking.

My Swedish bartender lastnight speculated that NOLA will be the site of the largest eminent domain land grab in American history once the water is pumped out. "They will just turn that valuable land into some very high price houses."

Maybe "economic cleansing" is a better term?

I hadn't really thought about it, but that same scenario may be going through the minds of those who are reluctant to leave. Bush may be planning a little land grab for the rich. Stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. He's been doing it in one form or another since he took office, so it certainly wouldn't be a surprise.

Voters will remember disaster response, Hitchens says

Quite a juxtaposition. Bush is back to Washington in a flash for a dead women, but can't quite muster the same enthusiasm for the living.

TONY JONES: Even more astonishing, wouldn't you think, that President Bush himself claimed only last Thursday that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" - when of course that's what was being anticipated by the disaster planners all over the country.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Absolutely. It's one of the two or three best-known risks to the United States, is that the levees protecting New Orleans could break. I know that and I live in Washington. It's also, I'm afraid to say, the only thing the President has said about this that anyone can remember. I mean, he didn't get there - it isn't that they didn't fly to the city beforehand, which he could easily have done on that kind of warning, and say, "Look, I'm the President of the United States, we can't lose or even risk losing one of our great historic cities. I have come to make sure that all the state and city officials have got everything they could possibly want in advance." For example, a few piles of bottled water wouldn't have come amiss if there's going to be suddenly too much water but none of it drinkable. Elementary things like that. He didn't do that. Then he did a fly-by from his holiday retreat, and then he got there too late and then he said something completely idiotic. So I really can't see there is any forgiveness for that. And remember also, that he did interrupt his holiday not very long ago to pay attention to something that was none of his business at all as President. Namely, the alleged living condition of an actually dead woman named Terri Schiavo.

Posted by Norm at 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Posted by Norm at 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Journey to the Bayou (thanks to Robert for the link)

Students travel to Big Easy, help Katrina victims

Four days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast Aug. 29, unleashing her winds and floodwaters into the Big Easy and surrounding areas, Buder said he saw plenty of television coverage of the disaster but no relief in sight for the survivors.

“CNN is there, but the National Guard can’t get there? There’s something wrong with this,” Buder said, adding that he called Byrd to tell him, “We’ve got to go, we just gotta go.”

But the trio said a military blockade was preventing people from driving into the city. Knowing that press officials were allowed to pass, however, Byrd said he came up with the idea of pretending to be members of a media organization to gain access. “I walked back into the news station and found a press pass, so I just yanked it off the desk,” Byrd said. He added that he swiped an official news station shirt as well.

“For $11.68 at Kinko’s, we made press passes and business cards,” Hankla said.
After making the drive to New Orleans, Hankla explained that the National Guard was turning away car after car in front of them at the military checkpoint at the entrance to I-10—the freeway that leads into the city. When it was their turn to show identification, the boys said they held up their Kinko’s press passes to the guard and waited.
To their surprise, the trio said, the guard waved them past. “‘Can you believe that?’” Buder recalled them asking each other.

“People stayed four, five days with no food, no water, little girls getting raped in bathrooms, dead bodies lying all over place,” Buder said. “[The U.S. government] could have driven trucks in. I mean, we drove a Hyundai.”

Posted by Norm at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The president can't say "good job Brownie" without the appropriate sarcastic tone. You listening George? You know, like he just spilled his drink in your lap, or he just wrecked your car, or like he just stepped in a pile of shit and tracked it in your living room, because that's what he did George. He made you look bad and that's something you don't really need any help doing. Give him a medal Mr. President, but this time do it right. Give him a medal, pin it to his ass, tell him GOOD JOB BROWNIE, and then kick his ass out the door. Are you still listening George? And then for the sake of the country pray that someone does the same for you.

Posted by Norm at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

George Lakoff on the The Post-Katrina Era and you really should go and read the entire article. It defines why our progressive worldview is the correct one and why the Bush's "I've got mine" view is bankrupt.

Katrina's tragic consequences were not just due to incompetence, natural disaster, or Bush policies (though he is accountable). This is a failure of moral and political philosophy.

The Katrina tragedy should become a watershed in American politics. This was when the usually invisible people suddenly appeared in all the anguish of their lives -- the impoverished, the old, the infirm, the kids and the low-wage workers with no cars, TVs or credit cards. They showed up on America's doorsteps, entered the living rooms and stayed. Katrina will not go away soon, and she has the power to change America.

The moral of Katrina is mostly being missed. It is not just a failure of execution (William Kristol), or that bad things just happen (Laura Bush). It was not just indifference by the President, or a lack of accountability, or a failure of federal-state communication, or corrupt appointments in FEMA, or the cutting of budgets for fixing levees, or the inexcusable absence of the National Guard off in Iraq. It was all of these and more, but they are the effects, not the cause.

The cause was political through and through -- a matter of values and principles. The progressive-liberal values are America's values, and we need to go back to them. The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy (caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives. In short, promoting the common good is the central role of government.

The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. The only common good is the sum of individual goods. It's the difference between We're all in this together and You're on your own, buddy. It's the difference between Every citizen is entitled to protection and You're only entitled to what you can afford. It's the difference between connection and separation. It is this difference in moral and political philosophy that lies behind the tragedy of Katrina.

A lack of empathy and responsibility accounts for Bush's indifference and the government's delay in response, as well as the failure to plan for the security of the most vulnerable: the poor, the infirm, the aged, the children.

Posted by Norm at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

This is so incredibly fucked up I don't even know where to begin. Brown waits for hours after the hurricane had struck to dispatch employees and then he wastes firefighters to hand out fucking fliers and and to be props for that asshole George Bush.

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA

"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Fema Chief Waited Until After Storm Hit

Time to fire Michael Brown and his boss and his boss. There that ought to do it.

The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000

Homeland Security employees to the region — and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.

Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged.

What is it Rick Santorum is suggesting here, stricter penalties for those who stay and die.

Wolf Blitzer So Poor, So Black he must be listening to Barbara Bush

Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history.

Visit the KGB before they visit you.

Posted by Norm at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Americans don't sleep in tents, no they die in attics.

Tim Russert: We do know the following, that as this hurricane began to bear down on New Orleans that people understood that there was a very high probability it was going to be a three, four or five category storm and it was going to hit and hit hard. And so an evacuation began then come the unanswered questions why weren't troops prepositioned why weren't supplies prepositioned, in a way, in a capacity, that could deal with hundreds of thousands evacuees. I think there-- the one thing the government is supposed to do the reason we have a government is to protect its people. And the local, state, and federal government has failed miserably in protecting its people. No one can question that. Now we have find out exactly who did not fulfill their responsibility. The perception is that after September 11th we created a department of Homeland Security because we we're told its not a matter of if but when there would be another terrorist attack, and this time we would be better prepared. There would be command and control, there would be communications, and there would be preparations. Guess what, no command and control, no communications, no preparations. The state, locals, federals couldn't talk to each other nobody was in charge and we've talked to the head of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University who one year ago Don did a simulated computer model, table top exercise called Hurricane Pam in which they predicted this almost to the letter and he called FEMA and said, on Saturday or Sunday, you have to have tent cities set up outside of New Orleans outside the state. You're going to have hundreds of thousands evacuees you have to be able to absorb them or they're going to die in the streets and FEMA said to them Americans don't sleep in tents. That is what went wrong and that's what we have to find out who is accountable. This notion that we're all too busy now to look forward if we can't look back we can do both because to ignore what happened in New orleans is to guarantee it will happen again.

Posted by Norm at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Bush to Tour Mansions Ravaged by Estate Tax

President George W. Bush is encouraging Congress to focus on perhaps the most dire issue facing the nation today: the estate tax and its devastating impact on the richest Americans. Mr. Bush said that repealing the tax could aid tens, even dozens of Americans. Former FEMA chief and Arabian horse expert Michael Brown has been tapped to reach out to the victims of the tax.

Cargo planes arrive carrying fois gras and veuve cliquot

Time Magazine asks the question How Did This Happen?

Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media? The BBC making the same point Bill Maher was trying to make with Cooper Anderson the other night.

The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.

But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.

onegoodmove reader Lisa starts a blogA Part of the Solution go say hi.

Posted by Norm at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Now I wouldn't want to accuse Barbara Bush of being insensitive, but that arrogant, haughty, mother of an asshole in chief, has crossed the line. What is even worse is I'm sure she had no clue how offensive a statement this is.

photo from Billmon

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overhwlemed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle)--this is working very well for them."—Barbara Bush

Posted by Norm at 1:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (35)

Dodged a bullet my ass. They're in my crosshairs and it looks like they're in Keith Olbermann's crosshairs too. What a lovely bit of writing by our friend Keith on Katrina and Michael Chertoff's slip of the tongue. "Louisiana is a city that is under water," indeed.

SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Well there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.

Posted by Norm at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (47)

When I opened the paper on Tuesday morning I saw headlines... then I lied my ass off

Posted by Norm at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Ah, even with all his warts, this interview makes me pine for the days when we had a president

Posted by Norm at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

School board: Intelligent design isn't

To borrow a line from Dorothy: We're not in Kansas anymore.
    Unlike the Kansas School Board, which earlier this summer approved allowing educators to teach theories in addition to evolution that explain life on Earth, the Utah Board of Education on Friday unanimously approved a position statement supporting the continued exclusive teaching of evolution in state classrooms.

"By definition, science does not attempt to explain the world by invoking the supernatural," University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark told the board.
   "Intelligent design fails as science because it does exactly that - it posits that life is too complex to have arisen from natural causes, and instead requires the intervention of an intelligent designer who is beyond natural explanation. Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."

Posted by Norm at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bill Maher and Stephen Schneider discuss global warming and Katrina

Posted by Norm at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (49)

Sir, they were told like me. Every single day. The cavalry is coming. On the federal level. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. I have just begun to hear the hooves of the cavalry. The cavalry is still not here yet, but I have begun to hear the hooves and were almost a week out.

Three quick examples. We had Wal-mart deliver three trucks of water. Trailer trucks of water. Fema turned them back, said we didn't need them. This was a week go. We had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a coast guard vessel docked in my parish. The coast guard said come get the fuel right way. When we got there with our trucks, they got a word, FEMA says don't give you the fuel. Yesterday, yesterday, fema comes in and cuts all our emergency communications lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in. he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards said no one is getting near these lines.

The guy who runs this building I'm in. Emergency management. He's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said. Are you coming. Son? Is somebody coming? And he said yeah. Mama. Somebody's coming to get you.. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. And she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The Secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For god's sakes, just shut up and send us somebody.—Aaron Broussard

Posted by Norm at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (50)

"If one person criticises them or says one more thing including the President of the US, he will be hearing from me. One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely punch him, literally"&mdash Sen Landrieu

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Landrieu Blasts Bush on Katrina Response

U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., issued the following statement this afternoon regarding her call yesterday for President Bush to appoint a cabinet-level official to oversee Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts within 24 hours.

Sen. Landrieu said:
“Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA, now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.

“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

“Mr. President, I’m imploring you once again to get a cabinet-level official stood up as soon as possible to get this entire operation moving forward regionwide with all the resources – military and otherwise – necessary to relieve the unmitigated suffering and economic damage that is unfolding.” Today’s aerial tour of the 17th Street levee will be featured tomorrow on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Later, Sen. Landrieu will also appear on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Posted by Norm at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Kayne West ignoring the teleprompter spoke his mind the the MSNBC rund raiser last night. "I hate the way they portray us in the media... George Bush does not care about black people" The lack of a timely response to this national trajedy is taking its toll. The second video is Mayor Ray Nagin's response to a question about his efforts to get more assistance into the city of New Orleans. "The CIA could come in any minute and wipe me out"

update: Mike Myers and Kayne meet again


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Kayne West Video via Kayne West on Bush

Posted by Norm at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)

BM: Well you've been to the middle east. How does that compare with what you see from the streets of New Orleans

FZ: Well, if you remember after the first few weeks of the occupation in Iraq. There was looting and there was disorder and Don Rumsfeld's response was stuff happens. I think that the American people at least are adopting a slightly higher standard with regard to their own country, and saying you know you what you do actually make sure that this doesn't happen.

Posted by Norm at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Bill O'Reilly and the blame game, it didn't take long. "If you're going to blame it on Bush it's just hollow, it's hollow." So tell us Bill, who shoulders the blame.

Bush administration funding cuts forced federal engineers to delay improvements on the levees, floodgates and pumping stations that failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday.

The former head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that handles the infrastructure of the nation's waterways, said the damage in New Orleans probably would have been much less extensive had flood-control efforts been fully funded over the years.

"Levees would have been higher, levees would have been bigger, there would have been other pumps put in," said Mike Parker, a former Mississippi congressman who headed the engineering agency from 2001 to 2002.

"I'm not saying it would have been totally alleviated but it would have been less than the damage that we have got now."

Posted by Norm at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Bill Maher's take on disaster relief. He even throws in a Clinton joke that had me laughing out loud.

Posted by Norm at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

"Mr Bill knew, why Mr. President did you claim you didn't. We heard you when you said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees" It's a bad habit George. Lie after lie, do you even know the difference anymore. I doubt it.

Posted by Norm at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Michale Moore's Open Letter to George Bush
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore

Posted by Norm at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

"Ted Koppel asked the tough questions and didn't let Mike Brown (Director of FEMA) get away with anything. It now looks like they have finally started to do their job. How many died due to their incompetence will be revealed in the days to come. Heads should roll. Thanks Ted, and a big thanks to David for providing the video

Posted by Norm at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

Mayor fed up with slow response:
In an interview with WWL Radio's Garland Robinette, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin expresses frustration and anger at the federal government.  (12:09) MP3 and here is another link from CNN Thanks to Russel and Tommy for the links.

Questioning Bush's Sacrifice for a 'Noble Cause'

The ongoing saga of the Cindy Sheehan show has raised the specter of service and sacrifice and what it means to give to a "noble cause."

If the sacrifice is so noble, has the president urged his own children, or enlistment-age nieces and nephews - of which there are eight - to join the military and fight in Iraq?

I called the White House to pose this question and was somewhat surprised to learn that none of the supposed liberal baddies in the White House press corps had ever asked the president or any of his spokespersons that question.

So here's a question I think a White House reporter should ask the president: President Bush, if your own two daughters won't enlist, how can you expect anyone else's children to join the military?"

The president's children are grown and free to do what they want. It seems absurd to criticize them for not enlisting. But that's not the point, the war's critics say. The question is whether the president urged his daughters, or his other enlistment-age relatives, to join a cause he has described as noble. And the answer to that question is still unknown.

Life in the Bottom 80 Percent

Life in the Top 5 percent

Fema Directing Donations to Pat Robertson

Posted by Norm at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Boxcar is a standup comedian who regularly appears at the Comedy Underground in Seattle. He's a big fan of Jon Stewart and like Jon Boxcar's comedy focuses on politics and society. Boxcar will be providing onegoodmove a weekly video taken from his act. Here is the first installment.

Click on the picture to view the video

Posted by Norm at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

"Well, I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday... I mean, I understand the anxiety of people on the ground... I don't think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees"— George W. Bush on Good Morning America

On the convention center disaster
"We just learned about that today."—Mike Brown Federal Emergency Management Director

Chertoff said he didn't know so it must not be true

"I'm not angry"—Senator Mary Landrieu

Related: Hurricane Katrina: Blaming Bush, Being Pro-Looting and More
Canadian Help Video Thanks to Michael for the link

Posted by Norm at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Learn More About Evolution Here

One side can be wrong
Accepting 'intelligent design' in science classrooms would have disastrous consequences, warn Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Thursday September 1, 2005
Guardian

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.
One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.

Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.

Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?

So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.

What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.

The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.

Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.

There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.

The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.

Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

Arguments worth having ...

The "Cambrian Explosion"

Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.

The evolutionary basis of human behaviour

The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.

Sexual versus natural selection

Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.

The target of natural selection

Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.

Natural selection versus genetic drift

Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.

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