Interesting title for a book on Bush

(Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media (Hardcover)
by Bill Sammon)

I haven't read it. Despite the hyperbole typical to book titles it seems to me that there is a case to be made for giving Bush at least a little more credit than he generally gets. Perhaps like Reagan, Bush won't be given credit for anything good that he's done by the "mainstream" until he's dead.

That would be interesting.

Pope may embrace intelligent design

Pope Benedict XVI may reportedly embrace the theory of intelligent design, possibly heralding a fundamental shift in the Vatican’s view of evolution.

(Link from Uncommon Descent)

If that happens then expect a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment among Leftist intellectuals, with many invoking the Flat Earth myth or mythic narratives surrounding Galileo. Mythic narrative: "Once upon a time such and such happened, here is the Hero and there is the Villian, and here's the little lesson to be learned from it all." If the pope does embrace ID I'm not even sure it would be a good thing for ID given that most people seem to believe myths about a long benighted, if not downright evil Catholic Church.

The problem with the myths that progressives tend to invoke in editorials and the like about the "war between science and religion" is that they often have little basis in history. For example, historians have traced the Flat Earth myth back to the writings of progressives in the 1800s who apparently invented it for political purposes even when history shows that it was known in the West that the earth was round all the way back to the times of the Greek philosophers.

Why they did it:

There was some hope, Draper felt, that science could live with Protestantism, because liberal Protestantism was yielding its moral authority to the secular state and its epistemological basis to science. But science could never live with Catholicism, which under Pius IX condemned liberal progressivism in the "Syllabus of Errors," opposed the union of Italy into a secular state, and declared the pope's infallibility. [...] Draper saw the secular national state as the protector and steward of liberal progress, and he admired Bismark's "Culture War" (Kulturkampf) against the church in [proto-Nazi] Germany.

(Inventing the Flat Earth: Colombus and Modern Historians
by Jeffrey Burton Russell :38)

It was political, although by the time a political propagandist is done he may actually believe that he's seeking or telling the truth.

It is typical to progressives to lie about or attack the level of intelligence of any who oppose them, while conservatives typically attack the morals of any who oppose them. So it is not surprising to find that their myths are structured to suit their own psychological dynamics. But note the ignorance that the promulgation of progressive myths rely on, in this case they rely on ignorance with respect to basic facts of history that clearly prove that educated people knew the earth was a sphere. On an ironic note, it was the scholastics and monks who learned at the universities of their day who were most likely to have that knowledge and to protect it through the Dark Ages, yet they are the religious people that progressives tried to attack by inventing myths about them.

Generally, there are also bits of knowledge and possible lines of evidence* that go against the entire progressive belief system in which it is believed that human beings were once generally stupid but now progress on towards becoming a New Man based on intelligence and knowledge.
*E.g., the maps of the ancient sea kings (Who seemed to know the shape of the earth.), the Great Pyramid contains many lines of evidence about ancient knowledge in itself and so on and so forth. (E.g. "Reference to any equal-area projection map of the Earth's surface reveals that the chosen site of the Great Pyramid lies on the longest land-contact meridian on the Earth's surface, and is also at the geographical center of its whole land mass, including the Americas and Antarctica.") It may be that some lines of evidence cannot be proven to the same extent as the historical fact that educated people knew the earth was a sphere back in the Dark Ages, yet all it takes is a single instance to puncture the grand myths of Progress that reject the ancient notion of a progression drawn forth by Providence.

The way that Leftists tend to view science and progress is ironic given that chemistry came from alchemy, astronomy from astrology and so on only as the result of changes in religious beliefs and philosophical patterns of thought. Murmuring about science and progress now is ironic because if things were left to the smothering immanence typical to the Leftist mind we'd probably be back in the Dark Ages of the Druids with their Nature based paganisms trying to suck at the teat of Mommy Nature. I.e., we'd be practicing astrology instead of astronomy, alchemy instead of chemistry, the charlatanism of the snake oil salesman instead of medicine, and so on.

Perhaps logocentric forms of thought are a victim of their own progress, thus the apparent cyclic nature of the rise and fall of civilizations. That is to say, when people become fat and happy (or morbidly obese and depressed, for such is progress!) as the result of the systematic forms of thought typical to science and technology they begin feeling that the illogic of Nature based paganism defines progress or has brought them science, technology and "progress" as they know it.

ID booklist...

To be read:
In the Beginning Was Information: A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature, by Werner Gitt

Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design And the Kitzmiller V. Dover Decision by David K. Dewolf

Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution by David Stove

A Meaningful World: How the Arts And Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature by
Benjamin Wiker

I'm not really interested in the one about political and legal issues having to do with ID because I don't really care about what the American Judiciary has pulled out of its own penumbra lately. Lawyers have killed language while asserting that they protect a living Constitution. Of course they do not protect anything but their own acts of will and power because the Constitution was constituted with and can only live by the definition of language. American legal culture rejected the designed capacity for adaptation that was built into the Constitution and instead shifted to mutating it to fit their own acts of will and power, all the while portraying themselves as protecting others against acts of "imposition."

If the Constitution was once "living," it is now a cadaver.

Saving Lady Liberty by banning bras...

Gel Bras Prohibited, Then Permitted Aboard Flights

Women said to complain that airport screeners seem titillated by the possibility of boobytraps.

In the interest of equality: Airport Embarrassment Could Lead to Jail

A Republican conspiracy at the News Journal?

Possible evidence is here.

A sample of the conspiracy: Here we are watching another terroristic plot to destroy our way of life, just in time for the elections. I don't want to feed into conspiracy theory, but doesn't it seem strange that every time we are about to go into an election period, terrorists are going to blow something up in the world? --Paul Keffer, Newark

I don't want to feed into conspiracy theories but it seems strange that this letter would show up now, just when it will help Republicans once again portray Democrats and their supporters as too ignorant and kooky to be trusted on the issue of terrorism. The Big Secret is that editorials like this are just part of Karl Rove's Master Plan. The poor Democrats, just when they don't want to look like mush-minded kooks that can't judge an actual line of cause and effect* even if their lives (and our national security) depend on it, letters like this are being planted in papers by Republican operatives like this fellow. You see, it's all part of the type of vast plan typical to the vast right wing conspiracy.

Just kidding. But if many Leftist kooks attack Republicans based on the mildly schizophrenic forms of paranoia that some Leftist minds tend to lose themselves in on certain issues then that will probably do more political damage to the Democrats than any Vast Conspiracy on the Right.

Anyway, a person of marginal knowledge and reasoning ability can pick apart what this poor fellow is trying to say based on a few basic facts combined with logic: "If what this fellow says is true, then why this?" Etc. And if you don't begin to subtley use your own imagination as evidence and fall into pattern invention instead of pattern recognition as conspiracy theorists typically do, then the Grand Narrative that the conspiracy theorist is trying to weave together based on disparate facts tends to fall apart.

*A lack of ideological judgment that is too typical to the Leftist mind these days, e.g.: "Don't look at what is being taught to the Muslim youth at madrassas, look over here at the so-called 'smudge' on this one picture of 9/11. That's probably the missile that Bush used to blow up the Trade Towers! Besides, focusing on the fact that Muslim youth are being taught to be terrorists is Islamophobic...which means that I'm being tolerant just like I am to gays or somethin'. How nice I am!"

Related posts: Dopey WNJ Letter of the Week at Collossus (He takes this letter seriously. I suppose one should take it seriously because like Holocaust denial and the Vast Jewish Conspiracy, a lot of people choose to be mentally retarded when it comes to terrorism/fascism.)

An interesting film about the IRA

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is interesting, although those with a historical perspective will probably reject seeing things from the perspective of terrorists, which is good.

To those who argue that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter I would note that there are ways of defining terrorism and terrorists as opposed to soldiers or "freedom fighters." Terrorists are like fascists in that they usually rely on notions of victimization by an Imperial power to justify any and all means of fighting at the moment while the ends for which they fight are utopian and remain in grand visions of the future. Usually if they do get in a position to govern they still maintain the same vision of a supposed future utopia that justify any means in the present, so they still govern by terrorism because even if their victimization propaganda has less and less foundation in reality they can still fall back on their notions of utopia as the end that justifies their means.

Because the Leftist mind has never met a distinction or definition that it will not attempt to blur away some on the Left have argued that the American Founders were "terrorists" because "One man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist." and so on. Nothing can ever be totally and utterly clear, so the Leftist mind usually has a point, yet on the other hand it usually takes the blurring typical to it too far. It's probably not necessary to point out some differences in this case but for those who may be feeling their way along to this type of blurring: "Say, George Washington was like a terrorist because he fought for what he believed in just like terrorists do...that's fundamentalist or somethin'. Fundamentalist, terrorist, Taliban...Christian, Christian Taliban fundamentalist, all difference is all the same, I says!" here are a few historical and philosophical distinctions.

The Founders were distinct from fascists and terrorists because the Founders had fundamentally reasonable ideas about what they were fighting for when fighting an Imperial power. They were far from justifying their means in the present based on notions of future utopia or past victimization, instead they layed out what they were fighting for based on reason in reasonable ways. In contrast, when terrorists begin a war based on past victimization then immediately a vicious cycle begins that will not end because terrorism brings down the established order upon those who practice it, thus feeding victimization propaganda and so on. Similarly, if you are supposedly fighting for some type of socialist or Islamist utopia then the methods typical to terrorism will always be justified (even after winning power to govern) because the supposed utopia never comes.

*In the case of Islamic terrorism I would argue that the cycle of violence that terrorism generates is irrelevant because radical Islamic clerics have found ways of generating victimization propaganda to feed into their culture no matter what anyone does. You can know this because all possible positions have been taken all over the world and throughout history, yet Islamic clerics whose motivation is a utopian vision of Islamic law governing the world still use victimization propaganda as a justification to work towards that end.