Unclear About The Concept

It seems some folks in England are not too keen at the thought of Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer taking controlling interest in Manchester United. However, these fans need to do a little work when it comes to the intellectual force of their arguments, as these pictures can attest.





It seems to me you can say a lot of things about a publically held company on a major world stock exchange, but you cannot say it's "Not For Sale."

I'm Going To Be Vicious & Unfair

...you've been warned.

It's getting harder to read headlines like this from the Daily Kos:

Entire Marine squad wiped out

And not read it as if Kos and his readers view it as:

Entire Marine squad wiped out (Hooray!)

Maybe it is just me, but if I were to write about this incident on this site I think I would entitle it something like "Tragedy in Iraq" or "Heartbreak for the Marines."

Maybe making rhetorical points on your blog is more important than I realized.

Academia's Great New Idea: Prohibition!

They are engaged in a great moral crusade out at Berekley. Damn you Budweiser!

Growing concerns about alcohol-related incidents have led the University of California, Berkeley, to enact a ban on alcohol consumption at all events hosted by campus fraternities and sororities, officials announced today (Monday, May 9).

The ban goes into effect immediately. It applies to all fraternities and sororities and all activities hosted by the campus's Greek community.

---

The last time the campus banned alcohol in the Greek community was April 2002. That moratorium was limited to fraternities and sororities with chapter houses and to social events. A gradual lifting of that ban took place at the end of the fall 2002 semester as chapters demonstrated responsible actions at parties and other events.

UC Berkeley has 70 fraternities and sororities with more than 2,500 members. Under a current and longstanding campus policy, hard liquor is banned. Beer and wine are permitted for students of legal drinking age, but are prohibited if served from kegs or other bulk containers. In addition, all alcohol use is banned during fraternity and sorority recruitment weeks.

Obviously the laws of the state of California are not near good enough for the folks in the People's Republic. Lord knows how many other leagal activities they have deigned to ban, or will in the future.

Will there ever be a generation of people like the Baby Boomers again? I sure hope not. I'm not sure any nation could survive quite that much hypocrisy twice in it's history. They have gone from being "You don't have to live by YOUR laws, man" lefties to "Do as we say (not as we did)" oligarchs. They don't even have the simple common human decency to be abashed about the change.

I've often said that in dealing with alcohol our entire nation seems to be unable to learn from history. There have been prohibitionary schemes since colonial times and they have never succeeded in changing people behavior except for the worse. Yet such schemes keep coming back like some sort of Hydra, and often in the silliest of forms. For example, the prohibition against "hard liquor" but not beer and wine sounds exactly like the kind of thing you would expect to find in some quaint Victorian backwater circa 1880. That it exists as the law of the land in Berekeley today would be hysterical if it weren't so damn pathetic. Believe it or not it is just as possible to get blindingly drunk on Coors Light as it is drinking Cutty Sark. (Although why one would voluntarily ingest either of those beverages is beyond me...but thats a different issue.)

Now I don't have anything against Berekeley encouraging responsible behavior. The problems are A) We generally do not expect responsible behavior from younger folks so we tolerate more lower intensity bad behavior than we should, B) We overreact when something bad happens (e.g. an alcohol related death or violence) in a way that actually promotes further bad behavior by removing youth drinking from the public eye, and C) We ignore the fact our basic problems with alcohol stem from the terrible set of laws we have set up to govern the practice.

There is no ratonal explanation for setting up a system that encourages the development of 21-year-old kids who have no postive experiences with alcohol, who have no history of drinking responsibly, and who are treated as pseudo-adults even after they turn twenty-one. No wonder they keep acting like dumb children long after they should know better. Everything about our culture tells them that is normal.

How Dare You Be Fuel Efficient!

This bit of news comes via the Wall Street Journal: Soak the Green:
Oregon mulls a new tax that environmentalists and privacy advocates will hate.

As gas prices continue to top $2 a gallon, all those drivers of fuel-efficient cars may not have reason to gloat for much longer. Oregon is worried that too many Honda Insights and Toyota Priuses hitting the roads will rob it of the cash it expects out of its 24-cent-a-gallon tax. So the Beaver State is studying ways to ensure that "hybrid" car owners pay their "fair share" of taxes for the miles they drive. That means allowing the taxman to catch up to hybrid owners just as often as he catches up to gas guzzling SUV drivers. And if Oregon goes ahead, it won't be long before other states follow.

Oregon won't complete its study until 2007. But it's already clear the state is looking to influence behavior in addition to raising revenue by implementing a "vehicle mileage tax." Under a VMT a motorist would pay a tax for each mile driven, probably around 1.25 cents. To administer this tax, a global positioning system would be mounted in each car. As a driver fuels up, the device would relay mileage information to the gas pump, which would calculate the VMT. A simple electronic odometer-reading device would do the trick, but Oregon is looking at GPS devices because they would also allow for charging higher VMT rates for miles driven in "congested" areas during rush hour or to exempt miles driven out of state.

It amazes me that a left-leaning place, as Oregon surely is, could seriously contemplate such a system. These are many of the same folks that couldn't abide by the Patriot Act because of its supposed vulnerabilities for governmental abuse. Yet they will now sanction governmental monitoring of your every movement by automobile? Can you forgive me for thinking this position is more than inconsistent? It is positively incoherent. ("Public safety is one thing, but, good God man! we are talking about TAX REVENUES HERE! Civil liberties be damned!")

Here is QandO's take on this proposal:

So imagine: the state will know where you are at all times, charge you for every mile you drive, and charge you a bit more if you have the temerity to drive in "congested" areas, perhaps because you've gone into a "congested" area every day to do something silly like work. And you'll pay for it. Oh, how you'll pay...

And how long do you think it'll be until the police have regular access to real-time information on your location?

Now, perhaps you're an environmentalist, who think people should be taxed for driving around too much, even if they do have a Toyota Prius. OK, but think about this: if the government collects more money through mileage tax revenues, why would they ever build reliable public transportation to reduce fossil fuel use even more? After all, public transportation costs far more than the money it takes in from fares, because it is always subsidized. So, why spend all that money on public transportation when, by having bad public transportation, you can force more people to drive, and capture more revenue for the state? It's called the law of unintended consequences.

Once again I have to ask the question: Do you think the government exists to serve the needs of its citizens? Or do you believe that citizens exist to provide government with tax revenues?

"We Dance When'ere We're Able"

I was pleased to see Monty Python's Spamalot clean up on Tony nominations.

As musicals go it's got the lot: King Arthur, knights of the round table, knights who say "Ni", an armour-clad chorus of tap dancers, and killer rabbits.

Now Spamalot, the musical based on the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has 14 Tony award nominations.

The hit musical which pokes fun at medieval Britain led the hopefuls for Broadway's top honour after it wowed critics and audiences in the US. Since opening at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway on March 17 it has smashed box office records for a Broadway theatre.

Long time readers of the Iconic Midwest will remember I got a chance to see Spamalot in January while it was in previews in Chicago. (See my review here.) I found it terribly entertaining, especially for a Monty Python fan such as I am. It is nice to see that the material has found an even wider audience.

This being said I'm under no illusion about the relative artistic merit of the work. Broadway, like Hollywood or the music industry, loves to reward big box office successes. But I cannot bring myself to really begrudge Spamalot. When it is all said and done it is damn funny, and that is a difficult enough thing to do.

How Dumb Does He Think We Are?

Every so often I read some egregious bastardization of history that really gets me going. Courtesy of Jacob Heilbrunn and the L.A. Times: Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie

During his visit to the Baltics over the weekend, President Bush infuriated Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin by declaring the obvious: that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was "one of the greatest wrongs of history." But it was what he said next comparing the Yalta accord among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1945 to the Hitler-Stalin pact that should cause outrage here at home.

How so? The original Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was denounced as illegitimate by FDR (among many others) when it was enacted in 1939. In 1945 the very same FDR legitimized the exact same agreement (and more) at Yalta. Granted, there wasn't much the U.S. or Britain could have done about it (short of using Atomic weapons against the communists), but that does not make FDR's actions suddenly honorable. The fact that FDR didn't even bother to make the rhetorical case for freedom is damning, even if his other options were severely limited.

The slander against Roosevelt that Bush has taken up dates back to the early 1950s, after Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had supposedly "lost" China to communism. That's when the American right first decried what it viewed as a consistent pattern of "appeasement" in the Democratic Party. The right contended that Roosevelt "sold out" Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference by promising the Soviets an unchallenged sphere of influence in the region.

One element of the right-wing mythology developed in those years was that Alger Hiss, who served during the war as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. and who was charged in the years that followed with being a Soviet spy and was convicted of perjury was instrumental in getting Roosevelt to collude with Stalin against Churchill.

Jesus Christ...not the Alger Hiss stuff again. Here is a news flash to anyone who bases anything on the old (& tired & stupid & useless & decrepit & BORING) "Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers controversy": NO ONE CARES!!!!!!! It's akin to going on an on about the Spanish Civil War or something. Today, and the last time I checked it was 2005 and not 1957, this sort of thing looks simply childish and moronic. Please, for the love of all that's holy, stop.

With a straight face Heilbrunn states:

[At Yalta they] discussed postwar borders and issued a "Declaration on Liberated Europe" calling for free elections in Poland and elsewhere.

And then adds in the next paragraph:

Stalin had made clear his plan to take over as much territory as possible back in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which carved Poland in half and gave the Soviets the Baltic states. The discovery in 1943 of the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet army in the Katyn forest was further evidence of Stalin's malign intention to exterminate the leadership of Poland. Then, in 1944, during the Warsaw uprising by the Polish Home Army, Stalin halted the advance of his army on the banks of the Vistula River and allowed Nazi SS units to return to slaughter the Poles.

This supports FDR's legacy how exactly? This just underscores the fact FDR went along with the Yalta declarations on "Free Elections" with full knowledge that they were nothing more than a fraud and mere propaganda for the Soviet regime.

Heilbrunn seems to realize that his case is incredibly weak here so he attempts to spice it up with a few lies.

Theoretically, Churchill and Roosevelt could have refused to cut any deal with Stalin at Yalta. But that could have started the Cold War on the spot. It would have seriously jeopardized the common battle against Germany (at a moment when Roosevelt was concerned with winning Soviet assent to help fight the Japanese, which he received).

This is simply false, and anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Second World War knows it is false. Let's look at the calendar:

February 1945: Yalta conference

April 3, 1945: The Soviet Union finally renounces its non-aggression pact with the Empire of Japan. The Soviets had been the nominal ally of the United States for over three years at this point.

August 6, 1945: Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

August 8, 1945: The Soviet Union (finally) declares war on the Empire of Japan.

August 9, 1945: Soviet forces attack Japanese forces in Korea and Manchuria. Second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

August 14, 1945: Japan surrenders.

The suggestion that the grand total of six days of combat operations by the Soviets against Japan somehow validates the Yalta agreement is grotesque. In truth, by August neither the U.S. or the British, who had both been slogging it out against Japan since 1941, wanted the Russians involved in the Pacific war at all. Heilbrunn's suggestion to the contrary is nonsense.

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower was happy to let the Soviets bear the brunt of the fighting as they marched toward Berlin, and he was unwilling to expend American troops on storming the German capital.

This ignores the fact Stalin had already told the U.S. and British that he wanted Soviet forces to be the ones to take Berlin.

Roosevelt was hardly perfect at Yalta. He was naive about Stalin's intentions and believed he could cajole the dictator into following more moderate policies. But FDR's approach was not particularly different from that of Churchill (who had declared that he would "sup with the devil" to win the war, which is what he and Roosevelt, in effect, did).

This could only make sense if Germany still had the capability to win the war in February 1945. Germany, of course, did not have the ability to win the war in February 1945. (Just try and find an historian to gainsay that point.) Heilbrunn's suggestion otherwise is fatuous. The notion that the Soviet Union might have quit the war in March 1945 and, as a consequence, left the post-war settlement entirely up to the U.S. and U.K. is equally fatuous.

What gets me about all of this is, this country being the way it is, there are a lot of people that do not know their history very well. Such folks can be easily swayed by the fact Heilbrunn acts like he knows what he is talking about. He doesn't know what he is talking about, and he doesn't mind lying to disguise the fact. Please fell free to ignore him for now on.

I know I will.

Rock Solid Science

From QandO: Global Warming the Result of Clean Air?

Could be. Or it is at least enhanced by that per a new article in Nature:

Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

Note the last sentence. I've been saying all of this is so difficult to predict that perhaps the dire predictions of the "global warming" crowd aren't as scientifically valid as some would like to claim they are. This is just another in a long line of indicators that I'm probably right.

It is fairly ironic though that cleaning up our air is now seen as a problem.

UPDATE: Commenter "anondebus" reminds us that just a recently as January of this year, scientists were convinced we had exactly the opposite problem:

We are all seeing rather less of the Sun, according to scientists who have been looking at five decades of sunlight measurements.

They have reached the disturbing conclusion that the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface has been gradually falling.

Paradoxically, the decline in sunlight may mean that global warming is a far greater threat to society than previously thought.

[...]

Dr Stanhill called it "global dimming", but his research, published in 2001, met a sceptical response from other scientists.

It was only recently, when his conclusions were confirmed by Australian scientists using a completely different method to estimate solar radiation, that climate scientists at last woke up to the reality of global dimming.

Dimming appears to be caused by air pollution.

When you cannot even agree on how much sunlight we are getting, which is of course the engine driving our climate, it seems a little dubious to be making a whole lot of other claims about climatology. (But dubious claims can bring in the research money. Ca-Ching!)

To claim that you know what is driving climate change at this point in time is akin to the alchemist claiming he knows how to make gold; it is simple nonsense. Now, it needn't always be nonsense (as the poor alchemist is forever doomed), but at present there is no other way to view it.

Are You A Blind Partisan? Question 1

Welcome to the first of these semi-occasional efforts to help define the political middle ground in America. It has been inspired by reading blogs like The Moderate Voice for a few months now. At least once a week Joe Gandleman over at TMV will take some position or other that cause people (including myself I admit) to post comments about how un-moderate Joe has suddenly become. Many of the commentators seem to be laboring under the false impression that being a moderate means not holding lefty/righty tendencies. This is simply impossible. There is no way to define a middle policy position on every issue, so every true moderate will hold a morass of opinions that will probably skew to the left or right. This is how it has to be. To discover that TMV has a center/left view of the world simply describes him. It does nothing to discredit his claim to be a moderate. The fact the Iconic Midwest is center/right in orientation doesn't harm my own claim to moderateness. Simply put, the claim to moderateness does not lie in any specific policy prescriptions. There is no "Centrist Manifesto" out there laying out a precise moderate program to follow. What really defines moderateness is less specific and more negative. Moderateness stands in distinction to blind ideological partisanship of the lefty or righty variety. Moderates are those individuals that are less ideologically inclined (at the minimum) or actively anti-ideological (at the maximum.) Moderates will often disagree with each other on this or that issue, but that is no problem because being a moderate means not expecting uniformity of opinions (aka ideological purity.)

There are some folks out there who may be unsure if they are moderates or not, and it is for those people that I will be posting these questions. Being a moderate means not being a blind partisan or an easy hypocrite. If you find yourself thinking that taking hypocritical positions is inevitable in political matters, you are probably a blind partisan of one stripe or another. The following will illustrate, hopefully.

Question 1:

Note your impression to the following statements:

A) Strom Thurmond's segregationist and racist past should have precluded him from any influence or position of power. The Republicans should feel ashamed to call him one of their own.

B) Robert Byrd's time in the KKK should have precluded him from any influence or position of power. The Democrats should feel ashamed to call him one of their own.

C) Bill Clinton's marching against his country as a younger man proves that he didn't have the judgment needed to be President of the United States.

D) George Bush's arrest for drunk driving as a younger man proves that he didn't have the judgment needed to be President of the United States.

Results:

If you find yourself agreeing with A & D, but making excuses for B & C you are a blind partisan (and in this case a hypocrite.)

If you find yourself agreeing with B & C, but making excuses for A & D you are a blind partisan (and in this case a hypocrite.)

If you find yourself agreeing with all of them you are not a blind partisan (or a hypocrite.)

If you find yourself disagreeing with all of them you are not a blind partisan (or a hypocrite.)

If you find yourself agreeing with A & B AND disagreeing with C & D you are not a blind partisan (or a hypocrite.)

If you find yourself disagreeing with A & B AND agreeing with C & D you are not a blind partisan (or a hypocrite.)

If your impressions do not fit any of the above categories, you are an iconoclast, which is a form of idiosyncratic ideology. You'd do best to get over yourself.

You Have To Love The British Elections

I'm sitting here watching the BBC coverage on the UK elections, and loving every second of it. I always do. It is half a political junkies dream, half a Monthy Python sketch.

GO RAVING LOONIES!!!!

Our Uncivil Civilians

I just want to point folks to a great piece by David Harsanyi in the Denver Post: Rhetoric Not As Radical As You Think


Freedom is a funny thing. It means not always getting what you want.

When the liberal radio network Air America airs a "comedy skit" that threatens the president with assassination, it's all in good fun.

But when Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson, a man with millions of peaceful followers, flexes his political muscle, he's the "anti-Christ," hijacking Christianity, a religious nut, a crusader for the new theocratic state.

How dare he speak?

When three "progressive" political activists are, quite properly, thrown out of President Bush's Social Security rally (too many "progressives" confuse the nasty act of throwing things at speakers and shouting malicious slogans as genuine debate) they're heralded as martyrs of The Good Cause.

Yet, when religious conservatives congregate to complain about unconstitutional and unheralded filibusters, they are portrayed as a bunch of retrogrades who want to turn the Capitol into a cathedral.

One recent Post letter writer opined that with Dobson, "The very values and principles on which our democracy and liberty are founded are threatened."

This is a hyperbolic talking point, wholly unsubstantiated and unreasonable. It only seeks to obscure debate.

My initial reflex has been to pile on Dobson, with whom I disagree on social issues. After reading his words, however, I discovered not a single sentence that promotes a theocracy.

Instead, what I found out was that progressives believe separation of church and state means that anyone involved in religion should avoid involvement in politics.

The whole thing is worthwhile reading.

Opinions In My Mail Box

Power Line has some thoughts on declining newspaper circulation:

Howard Kurtz reports the latest statistics on newspaper circulation, as provided by Editor and Publisher. They show some astonishing declines from just last year:

The Sun in Baltimore dropped a staggering 11.5% in daily circulation and 8.4% in Sunday circulation. The Chicago Tribune was down 6.6% daily and 4.6% Sunday. The Rocky Mountain News experienced a decline of 6.6% in daily copies and The Denver Post lost 6.3% in daily copies as well. The Miami Herald was down 3.7% in daily copies. Sunday slipped 3.9%. The Washington Post reported daily copies down 2.6% and Sunday was down 2.4%. The Cleveland Plain Dealer lost about 5% daily. The Los Angeles Times dropped 6.4% daily and 7.9% Sunday.

The Wall Street Journal has a rambling piece about the causes of the decline and what newspapers are doing in response. It seems pretty clear to me that you don't lose 5 percent or more of your readers in a year because young people like the internet. You lose 5 percent or more of your readers in a year because you've alienated lots of readers. That certainly explains why I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post in 2004. Indeed, I wonder whether the Editor and Publisher numbers have more than a little to do with the 2004 election. If so, newspapers have two options -- hope that future elections are cancelled or try to become less biased.

I'm not the "you pissed me off, cancel my subscription" type of guy. That doesn't mean I don't notice things. In my household we subscribe to the following publications:

The Washington Post (weekly edition)
The New York Times Book Review
Wine Enthusiast
The Atlantic
The Progressive Populist
The American Prospect
First Things
Time

Now, if we could do some sort of DNA testing on these publications to determine how alike they were to one another we would first find three completely unrelated publications (Wine Enthusiast (obviously), The Atlantic and First Things.) The other five would reveal a certain amount of in-breeding (if you like.) The Book Review would prove to be more of a distant cousin to the remaining four publications. It is these four (The Washington Post, The Progressive Populist, The American Prospect and Time) that most closely resemble one another.

In fact I'd argue that the closest relationship, say that of siblings, would be between The Washington Post and The Progressive Populist, with Time and The American Prospect holding the posts of first cousins. Part of the close resemblance of the Post to the Populist can be chalked up to their use of the same editorial cartoons that are sprinkled throughout both publications. (The Post doesn't publish Tom Tomorrow or Ted Rall, but otherwise they often pick the exact same ones.) I'd argue, however, they have much more in common editorially than that. There is a certain Democratic Party chauvinism that animates The Progressive Populist, which is fine for them (it is their raison d'etre after all.) That the same could be justly said of The Washington Post should be more troubling for any newspaper that prides itself on its independant character.

The American Prospect is an obviously left of center publication that has no trouble in being independant, and if I could honestly say the Post was most like it it would be a healthy sign for the Post. As things stand today I cannot say that the weekly edition of Post seems healthy at all.

I won't cancel my subscription because they have ticked me off, but it is increasingly difficult to justify keeping that subscription instead of subscribing to something else, like The Economist.

Got A Big Backyard?

Get a greyhound! (From InstaPunk via Doug Petch)

In June of last year, InstaPunk posted an entry from a sometime contributor to the site about greyhounds. It was a touching and very personal piece that also introduced me to the terrible plight of racing greyhounds, of whom as many as 20,000 a year are killed by the dogtrack industry. I have since come to learn firsthand how exceptional these dogs are and how rewarding a relationship with them can be. After our most recent checkup, a vet tech remarked to me, "So many people come in with the most popular dogs -- retrievers, terriers, you know -- and they tell me the dog is so hyper, so demanding that it's driving them nuts, and I keep thinking they should have done more homework up front and gotten a greyhound instead."

The actual point of the post is to call attention to the need to help find homes for a huge number of dogs from a racetrack that's scheduled to close on May 15th-

This is an extraordinarily large number of greyhounds to be in need of placement all at once. There are multiple rescue organizations in the United States, but they are staffed by volunteers, and their websites typically feature about 20 to 30 dogs at a time who are immediately available for adoption. The dogs who cannot find homes are almost certain to be put down. That's why I'm asking every dog person who reads this to do three things.

1. Acquaint yourself with the ugly facts about the lives (and deaths) of racing greyhounds. There is abundant evidence here, very disturbing to look at, I grant, but a vital part of the situation.

2. Learn about greyhounds -- their special attributes and needs -- at this website and any others you can find on the Internet.

3. Read the rest of the email about the 1200 from Plainfield, reprinted below, and consider how you might lend a hand, either by adopting a dog or by helping out with the other resources being requested

I certainly wish I was in a situation where I could take a dog or two. I've never met a greyhound that didn't have the sweetest temperment imaginable. They need a little room to run, but they are terrific pets.

If you have the room and have been waiting for the right time to get that special friend, I think the right time has arrived.

A Not-So-Old-Fashioned Monkey Trial

An update of sorts on something I wrote about awhile back. From the AP via the Kansas City Star: No witnesses for evolution; legal challenge seen

TOPEKA, Kan. - Evolution supporters will present no witnesses and won't debate the theory's merits during hearings before a State Board of Education subcommittee, their attorney said Monday.

The attorney, Pedro Irigonegaray, also predicted that the board will face litigation if it revises the state's science testing standards to include elements of intelligent design, which he claims some members of the board are trying to do.

He is working with a coalition of science and education groups that have boycotted the hearings.

"We determined that it would be inappropriate to debate an issue such as evolution with individuals who are merely bringing to table a supernatural answer," Irigonegaray said during an interview.

But John Calvert, a retired Lake Quivira attorney organizing the case for intelligent design advocates and evolution critics, called Irigonegaray's tactics "silly" and "all bluff."

Calvert also said following intelligent design advocates' proposals is the only way to avoid a legal challenge.

"Pedro doesn't have a case. He knows he doesn't have a case, so he's not putting one on," said Calvert, who helped found the Intelligent Design Network. "His client is on trial and he's not going to have him testify because he can't afford to put his client in the dock."

Intelligent design said some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause. Evolution says species change over time, and that's how different species can emerge from common ancestors, including man and apes.

Though the state board has sought to avoid comparisons with the 1925 "Monkey Trial" of a Dayton, Tenn., teacher convicted of illegally teaching evolution, [ed. fat chance] the hearings will in some ways resemble a trial, with witnesses being questioned. A three-member board subcommittee will preside, and six days of hearings are set to begin Thursday in Topeka.

How cowardly (or petulant) does it make you look to not even bother to show up and answer questions? So what if the crowd is hostile to you? Furthermore, the impulse to simply boycott the meeting and have a judge impose your preference through the courts is nothing short of tyrannical.

People have the hardest time understanding my position on these types of things. Yes, I believe in evolution. Yes, I do think that Intelligent Design is worth discussing, although probably not in a high school classroom. No, I do not have a problem with school districts deciding not to teach evolution if it is simply too controversial in that locale. No, I do not think there is any room in public schools for creationism. Yes, I do think the desire to shove evolution down the throats of people who do not want it is elitest and tyrannical in its inspiration.

Somehow these set of opinions allowed someone in the Left2Right comment section to lable me as a creationist, a view at once ill informed and stupid, but sadly typical.

The present situation in Kansas is being botched terribly by the evolution supporters. They are not going to be able to settle this question by using the tactics they are opting for. All they can do is sow the ground for continuing battles in the future, which certainly won't help Kansas high schoolers. But I suppose the need to impose your will on all the dumb hill-billies is more important.

(I know, I know....Kansas doesn't have any hills.)

I See What He Means

One thing I have always liked about DougPetch.com is that Doug is an unabashed champion of the little guy, or the little blog. A constant theme over at DougPetch is how often ideas that get big play on the larger blogs already had a hearing on one or more of the small-fries. (For good examples see this and this.)

Well, this small-fry was interested to read today's opinion piece by Cathy Young in the Boston Globe: A left-wing witch-hunt on campus

THE NOTION of left-wing political bias in the universities is widely pooh-poohed on the left as so much right-wing propaganda -- a smokescreen for an attempt to push a conservative agenda on college campuses. Sure, conservative professors may be a rare breed; but that, we are told, is only because the academy is all about intellectual openness, tolerance of disagreement, robust and untrammeled debate, and all those other intrinsically liberal values that conservatives presumably just don't get.

For a rather dramatic test of this proposition, one need look no further than Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, which is currently in the grip of a witch-hunt that would do the late Joe McCarthy proud -- except that it's directed by a leftist mob.

A valid take on those whose idea of "due process" is a Stalinist show-trial. Then again, I would say that because I have said almost exactly the same before. (See last Wednesday's McCarthyism In Reverse) Now, I'm not saying that Ms. Young is ripping me off. I am saying that blogs like this one, or any of my favorites listed on the right, can give you top quality complaining right up there with any of the large urban dailies.

Isn't that what its all about?

I'm Not Normally The Marching Type...

...But if I was still living in DC (or if I wasn't going to be in London at the time) I would attend the following:

Join the March Against Terror

The Free Muslims Against Terrorism are proud to announce that on May 14th 2005, Muslims and Middle Easterners of all backgrounds will converge on our nation’s Capital for a rally against terrorism and to support freedom and democracy in the Middle East and the Muslim world. This will be the first rally of its kind in Washington DC that is led by Muslims and Middle Easterners.

Join us in sending a message to radical Muslims and supporters of terrorism that we reject them and that we will do all we can to defeat them.

We also want to send a message of hope to the people of the Muslim world and the Middle East who seek freedom, democracy and who reject radical Islam that we are with them and that we will do all we can to support them.

This rally is NOT limited to Muslims and Middle Easterners. We request anyone and everyone who supports our message to join us at the rally. We want to send a message to the extremists and terrorists that American Muslims, Christians, Jews and people of all faiths are united against terrorism and extremism.

We welcome all endorsers and we ask that you circulate and publish this message to as many groups and people as possible. Help us make history.

To sponsor this rally, please send the name of your group to the Free Muslims Against Terrorism. President@freemuslims.org

Location of the rally:


Freedom Plaza
Neighborhood: Downtown
Address: Pennsylvania Ave. between 13th & 14th Street, NW
Metro: Federal Triangle
Date & Time: Saturday, May 14th 2005 1-5 pm

Free Muslims Against Terrorism
www.freemuslims.org
202-776-7190

Here is hoping they get a large crowd.