Is it the 9/11 cranks saying it? Of course not. Instead it’s the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page featuring Peter Hoekstra.
And you wonder why we call the WSJ editorial page a denialist organization?
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Author: MarkH
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Environmentalists caused 9/11!
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60th Skeptics Circle
In particular I like Conspiracy factory’s anecdote about anecdotes.
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Reading Comprehension – it's important
Not to harp on Uncommon Descent today, but their seeming inability to see words that they don’t like gives the appearance of no reading comprehension skills whatsoever. Take for example their read of this New Scientist article on cute little marsupials.
Let’s first quote from the article:
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Don't Screw with T.J.
DaveScot, crank extraordinaire at Uncommon Descent, has made the mistake of talking about Thomas Jefferson now that there is UVa representation on the Scienceblogs.
He makes the argument that because the constitution only dealt with federal separation of church and state (before the reconstruction amendments of course) that established religion was perfectly ok in the states.
You see, the intent of declaring that inalienable rights are bestowed by a Creator is not just ceremonial. It’s a core principle. It’s what makes the rights inalienable. Governments exist only to secure these rights not to grant them for if governments are the source of these rights then governments can rightly take them away. Thus it is important to remember that a higher authority exists that grants these rights so that no government can take them away.
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So you see, when Jefferson and a few other founders talked about a wall of separation they were only talking about a wall between federal government and churches. State governments could do whatever they wanted with laws regarding religion. I mention the 14th because it adds crucial context to the early use of the phrase Jefferson coined i.e.; it was only about federal laws at that time. None of them were arguing that state and local governments couldn’t do as they saw fit and this ties neatly back into the articles I wrote about preambles in state constitutions. States weren’t nearly as bashful about God and government as the federal government was in the early days.
Now, you can’t hope to win by citing Jefferson here, all UVa students are required to defend Jefferson from false representation. Further, if these guys actually bothered reading anything after the preambles you see that many states not only forbade establishment of religion but forbade clergy from even participating in government!
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Beware the bashers of peer review
I’d like to hear from some other sciencebloggers and science readers what they think reform of peer-review should look like. I’m not of the opinion that it has any critical flaws, but most people would like to see more accountability for sand-bagging and other bad reviewer habits. Something like a grading system that allows submitters to rate the performance of their reviewers, then editors of magazines would tend to only consult with reviewers that authors felt were doing a fair job of evaluating their paper.
The drawback of course would be that reviewers might start going easier on papers just because they don’t want bad grades.
One thing I do know for sure though, we shouldn’t take advice about peer review from HIV/AIDS denialists…
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Evil evolutionists have power over space and time!
Hey PZ, when do I get access to the time machine! I’m so jealous.
Apparently sites like Talk Origins and Panda’s thumb have been subverting the study of transposons because of their Darwinist bigotry. And they’ve been doing it since 1956!
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Bronze Dog gets it
Visit the Bronze Blog for a very thorough list of woo justifications, or Doggerel as Bronze Dog puts it, and help him think of more examples.
My favorite so far they once thought the Earth was flat.
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Who's the bigger liability for ID?
I thought Michael Egnor was the DI’s biggest liability for stupid arguments. Now I’m thinking based on Aferensis’ posts that it’s probably Dave Scot based on his suggestion that “All the hominid fossils we have wouldn’t fill a single coffin.”
But my favorite part of how embarrassing he is for humanity is how people, sometimes inadvertently, make predictions about his stupidity.
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This reminds me of a joke I once heard…
Dembski misses the point as always with his recent post describing why the vertebrate eye is again evidence of design. You see, the big bad Darwinists used the structure of the eye, which has its photoreceptors in the back behind all the layers of the retina, as evidence that our eye isn’t designed, because what kind of designer would have the light pass all the way through the layers of the retina to reach the receptor cells?
I’m interested in talking about these cranks today because I think this argument is one that exposes the fundamentally deceptive nature of the DI and proponents of the ID movement.
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