"No WMDs," over and over....

Besides the underground laboratories with prisons for human testing of bioweapons as well as vials of bioweapons that were found which were of a type that could be surge produced, the objective facts about Saddam's WMDs are there for anyone to research.

What is most interesting to me is when there is an opportunity to study how the Old Press supports its templates regardless of facts as in the case of the report written by the weapons inspector David Kay. The text of his report is available to anyone who knows to look for it. Yet in the Old Press there are thousands of headlines and reporting that read like this: Kay: No weapons yet, but evidence of intent. That's not what he said, simply read it for yourself to see. This is why blogging and other forms of New Media are undercutting the Old Press. It's simple really, they are lying. The Old Press lied and people died and continue to as terrorists work to manipulate journalists and journalists use their standard of if it bleeds it leads. What is truly amazing is how they sometimes snivel that the New Media has no accountability. As opposed to what? As if their form of accountability to liberal editors, ratings or money leads them to write stories closer to the truth?

Some perspective about "no WMDs" and what story is close to the truth on the issue:

The US has revealed that it removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq in a secret operation last month.

"This operation was a major achievement," said US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a statement.

He said it would keep "potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists".

Along with 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, about 1,000 "highly radioactive sources" were also removed.

(US reveals Iraq nuclear operation, BBC News)

BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 -- U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.

Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said in Baghdad.

(Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered, The Washington Post)

Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday.

Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw.

"We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads and offered $5,000 apiece," Dukaczewski said. "An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine. All of our activity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads."

Dukaczewski refused to give any further details about the terrorists or the sellers of the munitions, saying only that his troops thwarted terrorists by purchasing the 17 rockets for a Soviet-era launcher and two mortar rounds containing the nerve agent for an undisclosed sum June 23.

(Chemical munitions found by Polish soldiers were being pursued by terrorists SFGate, the AP)

And so on, this is just what has been reported in the Old Press itself. So do these stories mean that they are actually doing their job? Far from it, and in the Information Age it can be proven how they spin things and just lie or comit fraud if they have to. One good example is the actual Kay text vs. the thousands of headlines and reporting easily found through Lexis-Nexis. I used CNN as the same source for both the report: "Here are the weapons and weapons programs that we have found so far." vs. the headline: "Kay says, no weapons found!" Although I research these issues myself at times, one does not have to. There are others who have already done the job of deconstructing the Old Press over and over.

E.g., see: (Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media
By Brent Bozell)

It seems that the job will have to be done over and over, as mental incompetents, i.e. journalists, cling to their canards. As far as its impact on the Herd I am reminded of Karl Kraus's comment on Nazism: "The Press created National Socialism." as well as Shirer's comment on the impact of Nazi propaganda that continued day in, day out, regardless the facts. It does seem to impact the mentality of the mass, even if the Herd is often too busy feeding to care.

Wasting time...

We all waste it sometime for no rhyme or reason. Maybe if I found reason in rhyme then I'd be saving time.

I waste time playing real time strategy games sometimes. This will probably be the only time I post about it. I hadn't played in about a year until last week.

These are shots from a game of Age of Mythology with my younger brother as an ally.

So, it's two vs. one on my colony. Lil' brudder doesn't seem to be winning against his man:




He farms away when he should be hunting animals for food. "Why don't I have food, man! Man!":


His guy uses god powers on me:


Fortunately, my brother sent in the calvary...all five of them:


His guy gets his titan out:



The End.

(I'm kidding, my younger brother isn't bad at it. Although he was pretty bad that game in some ways. I have bad games too but I also have l33t skillz. Oh yes.)

[Related posts: Asians stuck in feudalism work as serfs....inside computer games and He's a pinball wizard, Blind Teen Amazes With Video-Game Skills)

Why support for winning in Iraq is necessary.

I never had doubts in the hidden intentions of those in Iraq who keep saying that multinational troops must leave Iraq soon; they say their demands are essential for national sovereignty coming out of their patriotic feelings for Iraq while I see them as far as they could be from patriotism. [Note, English is his second language.]

If those people put Iraq’s and Iraqis’ interests first, they wouldn’t have asked the US to leave Iraq while the troops missions are yet to be accomplished and the Iraqi national forces are still not capable of protecting the country and the citizens.
We all know why some insist that US must leave or keep calling the presence of these troops an occupation. The problem is that the ordinary citizen here cannot talk about this in public for fear of being labeled as an agent or collaborator with the occupation and what can an unarmed citizen do to face such an accusation coming from this or that militia.

What pushes these politicians and militias to take this attitude is their dream of regaining sovereignty but not national sovereignty; it is their sovereignty over Iraq.

What is keeping these liars from making a large scale coup over the democratic change is the presence of coalition troops that are protecting the new Iraq.

(Iraq the Model)

I was watching C-Span as the new war critic Murtha was apparently arguing for withdrawal. He's a war hero and an expert on national security so at least he is a much better spokesman than a mother who lost her son. Yet he was answered in stentorian tones by a Republican war hero who demolished everything Murtha said to the point that Democrats were whining about it on the floor. Yet they didn't actually speak up to silence him when he ran out of time and asked for more. A sample:

Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, a 29-year Air Force veteran who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly seven years, called Murtha's position unconscionable and irresponsible. "We've got to support our troops to the hilt and see this mission through," he said.

(SFgate)

Most Democrats seem to believe as their moveon.org fringe does, yet in the end they failed to support Murtha and did not even muster a single objection to silence his critic. I think that despite their fringe beliefs some may see that stability just may increase in Iraq, as many Marines on the ground believe that they are winning and Iraqis like the writer above seem to resolve to see things through no matter what. So I wonder what the Old Press and the Democrats are going to do if Iraq does get to the point that they cannot fit it into their template that it's another Vietnam and so on.

And the public opinion that they've shaped among the masses, how quickly it may evaporate if the Herd senses that things really are going against the terrorists and the old order in Iraq and towards a new Iraq. Perhaps that's why Democrats will not tie themselves down in history with an actual vote on the record for withdrawal, despite all their rhetoric. They fear the Herd, as it tramples politicians sometimes. The Herd is fickle and stupid, so it is better just to make a decision on principle, stick to it and try to herd the Herd along. That way if you are trampled then at least it was for standing for something.

I respect Murtha for standing for what he believes in, although he did believe the opposite when he voted for the war. I didn't see his whole speech, I wonder if he took personal responsibility for that or tried to blame-shift to "It was the Bush manufactured intelligence!" like other Democrats have. I suspect that he would be one to take responsiblity, unlike others.

In the end, it seems that the American Left would have done nothing but rely on the U.N. with respect to 9/11 and the new conflict that it represents* and since the U.N. is notoriously corrupt and inept, worse than nothing would have been done.

*Yes, there are links between it all when it comes to global terrorism. Duh.

Theodicy

...though Darwin made repeated references to the Creator, he never needed to define his terms, for the modern view of God was widely accepted.

In constructing the arguments for his theory of evolution, Darwin repeatedly argued that God would never have created the world that the nineteenth-century naturalists were uncovering. Shortly after going pub lic with his theory, Darwin wrote to a friend: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.”
[...]
Nature seemed to lack precision and economy in design and was often “inexplicable on the theory of creation.” In addition to this growing list of imperfections and mistakes, Darwin questioned the way the various species were designed. He observed, on the one hand, that different species use “an almost infinite diversity of means” for the same task and that this should not be the case if each species had been independently created by a single Creator. On the other hand, Darwin observed that different species use similar means for different tasks.” This too, he argued, does not fit with the theory of divine creation.

What exactly did Darwin expect God’s creation to look like? We may never know, but for our purposes the point is that Darwin was significantly motivated by nonscientific premises. He had a specific notion of God in view, and as it had for Milton, that view defined the framework of his thinking. Though biology was young and little was known about how organisms actually worked, Darwin believed he had sufficient evidence to show that God would not have created this world. God’s world had to fit into certain specific criteria that humans had devised.

This view was not peculiar to Darwin. Philosophers and scientists had become quite confident in their knowledge of God. This attitude developed over many centuries, and by Darwin’s day it was internalized and needed no justification. Today this view continues to be evident in evolutionary literature, from popular presentations of the theory to college level textbooks.

(Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil
by Cornelius G. Hunter :12-13)

Eventually, it seems that some may as well argue: "We have to go to the bathroom. Yet I find that icky. So God does not exist...and therefore, uh, evolution is true or somethin'." (Typically, all one has to do about this is to question the level of abstraction that this sort of argument exists in and the pride and arrogance that it is based on. For what excretory system for a self-replicating and self-healing automata that runs on plant and animal products would they devise? E.g., applying this type of refutation to Darwinist arguments on God and the mammalian vagina.)

But back to those wasps and things, is Darwinism really a valid scientific explanation? E.g.

The work of Chrystal demonstrates that the larva of the wood wasp Sirex is also peculiarly accommodating towards its predator, the parasitic wasp Ibalia. Sirex bores a hole in the trunk of a conifer, in which it deposits its egg. The egg yields a grub which feeds on the wood. As the grub feeds on the wood it gradually bores a tunnel. After some years the grub turns into a pupa which finally yields the adult wasp, which, using its powerful jaws, bites its way out of the tree. The Ibalia using the hole bored by the Sirex lays its egg in the Sirex grub. The Ibalia grub gradually consumes the tissues of the Sirex grub but does not eat the vital organs until last, thus ensuring a fresh supply of meat until its development, which takes three years, is complete. The presence of the italic;">Ibalia changes the behaviour of the Sirex. Normally the Sirex larva bores deeply into the wood but when infected by the Ibalia it bores towards the surface. This is a vital behavioural change for Ibalia because it has comparatively weak jaws and would be unable to bore as far through the wood as Sirex to escape from the trunk. Yet another example of interspecific altruism? What conceivable value [for natural selection to operate on] can the Sirex grub gain by changing the direction of its boring? By what curious sequence of small evolutionary steps did the Ibalias’ predatory habit induce this vital behavioural change?

Even bacteria provide examples of complex systems which pose a challenge to gradualistic explanations. Take, for example, the bacterial flagellum. This tiny microscopic hair...

(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
By Michael Denton :223)

Enough, if I read about that tiny microscopic hair one more time...

It is odd though, that there's all these little things swimming around inside you right now. It's enough to make one's tiny microscopic hairs stand on end. Even "your" cells are moving around to make you and enough are dying and being replaced that in about seven years you'll have a new body even if information is saved in its scars. I suppose that one could say that in the fullness of time your body is born again. After all, if you didn't have a body then you'd be nobody, and everyone needs somebody.

Parasites need some body to eat and maybe somebody might say come and eat ye all of me. The parasites are not good, yet that doesn't mean that natural selections as applied to "random" mutations explain the parasites that need to eat somebody to live:

As described in Chapter Seven, in the case of certain types of insect such as butterflies, beetles, bees and ants, which undergo what is termed complete metamorphosis during a quiescent pupation stage, the transformation involves virtually the complete dissolution of all the organ systems of the larva and their reconstitution de novo from small masses of undifferentiated embryonic cells called the imaginal discs. In other words, one type of fully functional organism is broken down into what amounts to a nutrient broth from which an utterly different type of organism emerges.
[...]
The life history of some parasites, which are in themselves astonishing enough, often involve what amounts to a number of metamorphoses. Consider the life cycle of the liver fluke. The adult lives in the intestine of a sheep. After the eggs are laid they pass with the faeces onto the ground. The eggs hatch, giving rise to small ciliated larvae which can swim about in water. If the larvae are lucky they find a pond snail: they must do this to survive, for the snail is the vehicle for the next stage in the life cycle of the liver fluke. Having found a snail the larvae finds its way into the pulmonary chamber or lung. Here it loses its cilia and its size increases. At this stage it is known as a sporocyst. While in this condition it buds off germinal cells into its body cavity which develop into a second type of larvae known as rediae. These are oval in shape, possessing a mouth and stomach and a pair of protuberances which they use to move about. The rediae eventually leave the sporocyst, entering the tissue of the snail, after which they develop into yet another larval form known as cercariae which appear superficially to resemble a tadpole. Using their long tails these tadpole-like larvae work their way through and eventually out of the snail and onto blades of grass, where each larva sheds its tail and encases itself in a sheath. Eventually they are eaten by a sheep. Inside the sheep they find their way to the liver where they develop sexual organs and mature into the adult state. They finally leave the sheep’s liver and migrate to the intestine where they mate and so complete their extraordinary life cycle.

In the case of many of the more dramatic invertebrate metamorphoses not even the vaguest attempts have been made to provide hypothetical scenarios explaining how such an astonishing sequence of transformations could have come about gradually as a result of a succession of small beneficial mutations.

(Ib. :220-222)

That failure is common, not even the vaguest hand waving. It's ironic, those who write the hypothetical/mythological narratives of Naturalism often fail to actually write them. Instead they tend to be content with: "God didn't do it because it seems evil." Probably because engaging in that type of natural theology was almost all that Darwinism was about in the first place.

An interesting point...

[The Pope] Urban VIII acted precisely as scientists wish for current Popes to act on the issue of evolution. They want the church to side with the scientific majority that stands on Darwinian evolution against a small minority of scientists who favor a design model of origins. Siding with the scientific majority was precisely what the Church did in the seventeenth century. So why do people believe that this incident demonstrates that science and religion are natural enemies?

(Uncommon Descent on the rhetoric of science, science!)

The rhetorical tactic of invoking the myth of inevitable progress through time that progressives tend to believe in and combining it with Galileo as an example shows up often. That's an interesting answer to use for it. It is an accurate answer, as well. Now some of the Catholic Church is soft on "evolution" and tends to want to side with the scientific majority, perhaps they need another Catholic like Galileo to engage in some scientific rhetoric for the minority. The Mommy Nature types and the Mother of God types tend to fit together psychologically, so it would probably have to be some good rhetoric making some discriminations and separations to pry some little fellows on out of the womb.

[Related posts: Narratives and Galileo Galilei]

Homologous?

I wasn't going to do a post tonight but I was just reading some news: (Jolie, Pitt to Visit Quake-Hit Pakistan for U.N) and came across this morphological similarity:





I think a workable hypothesis might be able to be developed. But the notion that Angelina Jolie's lips may have had some intelligent designing combined with natural selections throws a wrench in it.