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Thursday, March 03, 2005
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OK, since I've started brewing my own, I do have to confess that I've developed a minor case of beer snobbery. Still, as Modern Drunkard says, it's not as bad as wine snobbery, and they haven't made any movies about us yet. The article is a great and accurate guide to beer snobbery.
1:18:14 PM 
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Shermer on Consilience: "While you're over at the Scientific American site, have a look at Michael Shermer's latest column. It will probably be old hat to most readers of this blog, but it never hurts to be reminded of the basics:
Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: ‘Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.’ Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand ‘just one transitional fossil’ that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.
This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a ‘single fossil’--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
Shermer goes on to discuss some recent work on dog evolution. Go have a look!"
(Via Evolutionblog.)
1:02:48 PM
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I don't much agree with Antonin Scalia much, but yesterday he said something that contradicted a lot of what the Christians put out about the Ten Commandments:
You can't get the Declaration of Independence out of the Ten Commandments!
12:40:47 PM
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Looking the Other Way: "The Bush administration's annual report on human rights violations looks away from American involvement in the mistreatment it decries."
(Via The New York Times > Opinion.)
The Bush administration enthusiastically congratulated itself this week for including abuses by Iraqi authorities in its annual report on human rights violations. One State Department official called it proof that "we don't look the other way." But the report did look away - from American involvement in the mistreatment it decried. In the end it was another sad reminder of the heavy price the nation has paid for ignoring fundamental human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo; in the secret cells where the C.I.A. holds its unaccounted-for prisoners; and at home, where President Bush continues to claim the power to hold Americans in jail indefinitely without the right to trial.
The administration's refusal to remedy these abuses - or even acknowledge most of them - leaves the 2004 human rights report heavy with irony and saps its authority. Not only did the report fail to mention that the Iraqi government it criticized was appointed and controlled by the United States, but it also chastised the local security forces for the same kinds of arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment and torture that have been widespread in American military and intelligence prison camps. Indeed, some of the practices the report labeled as torture when employed by foreign governments were approved at one point for American detention centers by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
8:50:08 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 4/19/2005; 3:44:53 PM.
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