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Speaking of Bush speeches, get ready for a “significant” one, according to this article. Yeah, I’m sure it’s going to be erudite, persuasive, and chock full of talking points we’ve never heard before. It seems that Condoleeza “Guru” Rice and “a senior Bush administration official” have even given us a little preview. Condoleeza: “If we abandon future generations in the Middle East to despair and terror, we also condemn future generations in the United States to insecurity and fear."I see. So, continuing to shoot at, blow up, torture, and intimidate Iraqis will avoid “abandoning [them] to terror”? Building permanent military bases over there will ensure future security here? Cowardly “official”: “If you think by going home, you buy peace, it is wrong-headed."But it’s not wrong-headed to think that keeping the military there and continuing to shoot at, blow up, torture, and intimidate Iraqis–um, dare I say, continuing the “war”?–will “buy” peace? Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell

I’m sure this is a tired argument - but then again, what argument isn’t tired when you’re dealing with creationists? Take a look at these optical illusions. On the one hand, they’re fun and kinda neat, but on the other hand, they’re profoundly disturbing. Most importantly, however, they are persuasive evidence against any sort of “intelligent” designer. For me, the second one (the one with the blue and yellow boxes) is particularly compelling. What kind of intelligent, all-powerful, loving God would make motion detection color-blind? In thinking about this, the problem extends well beyond visual perception. Why would an intelligent designer make our memories so imperfect? For example, I can recall absolutely nothing about second grade–and much of what I recall about first grade is probably wildly inaccurate (hell, much of what I recall about last week is probably wrong). Why is that (assuming a loving God, I mean)? I bet I know the answer already: we “fell from grace” and we’re being punished because of it. Right? (Hat tip: Steve’s No Direction Home)

I don’t know precisely what to call this. A sad irony? A mindless contradiction? Sickening? Here we have a guy with a “Commies aren’t cool” T-Shirt on, and yet he is engaging in the most brazen form of state-worship I could imagine - short of blowing the president, perhaps. This is why I can’t stand conservatism - “neo” or “paleo”, it doesn’t matter. ...

When I read this article today, I couldn’t help thinking to myself that this tune sounds a little bit familiar. Then I remembered President Bush saying this just slightly more than 3 years ago: Today Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year."Dee doo doo doo, dee da da da" is all I want to say to you. ...

Don Boudreaux, chairman of the George Mason University Department of Economics, weighs in - tangentially - on the housing bubble with this entry in his blog at www.cafehayek.com. R. Chapman (2006-12-09): I have a challenge for the Lippard Blog:To help increase the content and quality of our blogs, would you be interested in engaging in a dialogue on various issues in philosophy of religion?I propose to have mini-debates of 200 words or less on topics like "Is the Universe Designed" "Does the Soul Exist" "What Caused the Universe" and other issues.One of us could start with an opening statement, followed by a reply by the other, and a final statement by the opener. Each contribution just being 200 words.We could alternate who starts the various mini-debates, so no one gets the overall advantage in the dialogues as a whole.Are you guys interested? ...

Chris Roller’s web site (www.mytrumanshow.com), aside from being a guided tour through a profoundly disturbed–though mostly harmless–mind, is immensely entertaining. He updates it often, so it pays to visit it every couple of months. Especially funny is the clip he’s provided of a segment (an amazingly long one, considering the ridiculous subject matter) that some Entertainment Tonight clone did on his $50,000,000 suit against David Copperfield for “using his Godly powers” without his permission. You can tell they were skirting along the edge of blatantly making fun of him. Roller must be a real trip to be around. ...

I’ve become somewhat of a fetishist regarding President Bush’s speeches, starting from around January, 2002, up to the present day. They’re all available at the White House web site in transcript form, with many also in video. For some reason I find it fascinating to watch his mind-numbingly repetitive talking points evolve over time. It’s also fascinating to read his stammering–faithfully transcribed, mind you–when he gets asked that oh-so-rare “tough” question by one of the press corp. Reading his words like that, you wonder (or I do, anyway) why his lies weren’t immediately clear to everyone. So I found this little Daily Show video essay particularly enjoyable. It’s hard to imagine a more brilliantly funny parsing of presidental spin. I keep half-seriously wondering when that show is going to get yanked off the air and Jon Stewart sent to Guantanamo Bay. ...

Ever been walking along somewhere, when suddenly you wonder, “If the bomb went off now, would I be vaporized instantly, or would I be one of the unlucky ones? Could I ‘duck and cover’ and be okay?" Well, wonder no more! This site has come to your rescue! Now you can know your minimum safe distance from, e.g., a 50 Megaton thermonuclear detonation. In my case, if we assume the Capitol building as Ground Zero, then out here in Reston, VA, I’m just outside the “widespread destruction” radius, but well within the “3rd degree burns” radius. Uh oh. Or, just for fun, plug in the historical values for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fission blasts (a quaint 0.15 and 0.22 Mtons, respectively). You’ll gain a new appreciation of Seizo Yamada’s picture of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, taken at about 7 km. Or, perhaps even better, this shot of the “Buster Dog” troop test in Nevada, 1951. These guys are roughly 13 km away. ...

In spite of the evidence that Lew Rockwell seems intent on sullying the name of Ludwig von Mises with his antics, I can’t help but admit that the Rothbard/Hoppe Institute’s daily articles are almost always interesting and informative. Today’s article, on oil’s price fluctuations over the past 35 years, I found especially good. My favorite quote is this reminder of the beneficial role that speculators–selfish money-grubbers, all–play in the health of a complex economy: Of course, all speculators render a useful service by conveying the market’s evaluation of scarcity. Their activity also evens out price movements over time: in the case of oil, they buy now, when prices are lower (in their expectations), in order to sell later, which will bring future prices down. As usual, greed is useful. ...

I can see that the combination of work, calculus, and an attempt at having some sort of a life is going to make it difficult for me to contribute to this blog all that often, but after Jeff Downs put up the link to a Greg Bahnsen article on Tom Wanchick’s The Good Fight, I just had to say something. Calculus can wait a few minutes while I riff on some of the stupider things in the article. [The Apostle] Paul asserts that all men know God so inescapably and clearly from natural revelation that they are left with no defense for their unfaithful response to the truth about Him. Well, then, if Paul said it, it must surely be true! After all, it’s in the Bible! This argument is so bald-faced in its arrogance (what the hell does Paul–or anyone else, for that matter–know about my beliefs and mental states?) and stupidity (it assumes, after all, what it is trying to prove) that it makes me want to… well… beat up a Christian fighter! Christianity can be shown to be, not ‘just as good as’ or even ‘better than’ the non-Christian position, but the only position that does not make nonsense of human experience…. Christianity is proved as being the very foundation of the idea of proof itself. [my emphasis] The first question that comes to mind, here, is: Which “Christianity”? The second one is this: If the whole of logic and epistemology is dependent on the fact that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose from the grave 3 days later, then wouldn’t it be possible–in fact inevitable–that people engaged in philosophical or scientific inquiry would be able to derive Jesus’s sacrifice entirely independent of exposure to the Bible? Has such a thing ever happened in the history of science or philosophy? And how, then, does one account for the inconsistencies between the 4 gospels? The article goes on for a considerable stretch after that. It would be tiresome to attack the rest of it, since its foundation is entirely baseless, anyway. Calculus awaits. ...