The ground of all being....

I've noticed that Intelligent Design tends to be linked to Deism, not Theism. It comports with Theism and could be reformed but often it leads to the view that God set the universe up to run like clockwork somehow and then left. This is based on a mechanistic view of cause and effect which extends into the past. Tick tock! But it's interesting to note that a study of cause and effect leads to the same type of philosophical questions here and now, not events in the distant past created by a distant God. For example, the fact that you're reading this sits on chains of cause and effect as your eyes see, your optical nerve sends signals to the brain, certain brain events are taking place, the brain is composed of the same fields of energy and matter and so on as everything else, etc. We know that things are linked in causal patterns, yet they cannot extend infinitely so what is it that is at their end? Aristotle would answer that instead of an infinite regress there must be an infinite Being, an unmoved Mover or an unchanged Changer. Christian philosophers like Aquinas would go on to point out that this is God and go on to derive many conclusions about God such as omniscience.

Obama on abortion

Here's a detailed post at Two or Three. I didn't know much of it, although you would figure that he must be pretty radical because he failed to support protection for babies born alive. His argument in the last debate was that they were already protected but what would be wrong with making sure given what was happening? It's telling that even people like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy supported some of the bills that Obama is still capable of rationalizing his failure to vote for.

Interesting point....

Cal Thomas on William Ayers and the Old Press:

William Ayers is not somebody who just did evil things when Obama was eight years old. They have an adult relationship and Ayers has been a booster of Obama's and they have worked together on 'education issues' in Chicago. Let's have some perspective here. What do you suppose the mainstream media reaction would be had McCain been associated with an abortion clinic bomber?

Related post: The Messiah once again uses the "this is not the person I knew" excuse by Hube

Windsurfing

Old videos:

Windsurfing1
Windsurfing2

Related posts: Gone Windsurfing, My Vacation and Windsurfing at the Keys

Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac

Interesting arguments in video here and here. The second is a little more propagandistic than the first.

The Medieval...

An excerpt from a book I'm reading, I'll probably archive a few more excerpts because progressives tend to believe in mythologies that they imagine about Progress more than historically based views on how progress as we know it has happened:

In many ways the term "Scientific Revolution" is as misleading as "Dark Ages." Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a "Scientific Revolution" has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Colombus and the flat earth.* First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science. Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been nurtured by devout Scholastics in that most Christian invention, the university. As Alfred W. Crosby pointed out, "in our time the word medieval is often used as a synonym for muddle-headedness, but it can be more accurately used to indicate precise definition and meticulous reasoning, that is to say, clarity" (his emphasis). Granted that the era of scientific discovery that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was indeed marvelous, the cultural equivalent of the blossoming of a rose. However, just as roses do not spring up overnight but must undergo a long period of normal growth before they even bud, so, too, the blossoming of science was the result of centuries of normal intellectual progress.... Copernicus provides an unsurpassed example of this point.
(For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark :134-135)

*See also: (Inventing the Flat Earth: Colombus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Russel