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Saturday, February 04, 2006
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Two nice posts on Goosing the Antithesis about the immorality of belief:
A virtue is a mental attitude that is conductive to moral behaviour. Rationality is a virtue because using rationality as a standard, and committing myself to seek reality, will not lead me astray. On the other hand, using faith as a standard will definitely lead me astray, even if it is correct in a specific instance. As the maxim goes, one lie upheld on reason is better than ten truths upheld on faith - even if I'm right, the fact that I reject reality means that I'll never have any way of understanding why I'm right or when I might be wrong in the future. Reason, on the other hand, is self-correcting.
7:32:42 PM 
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Matthews: Maybe liberals and gays burned down churches in the south  Friday Night with Chris: ''''''''''''''''''''' Video-WMP QT later Read what he said here
(Via Crooks and Liars.)
Matthews is starting to make O'Reilly look like a man of integrity.
5:56:16 PM
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It’s as if the President is working towards more Americans dying
Saying that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network “remains our top concern,” Negroponte testified that despite successes in targeting its leadership, “the organization’s core elements still plot and make preparations for terrorist strikes against the homeland and other targets from bases in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.” In addition, al Qaeda has “gained added reach” through its merger with the Iraq-based group of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, “which has broadened al Qaeda’s appeal within the jihadist community and potentially put new resources at its disposal,” he said.
More Americans have died as a result of terrorism under Bush than any president in U.S. history, but increasingly it seems by neglecting the fight he’s trying to break his own sorry record.
(Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.)
5:44:27 PM
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In an indication of the depth to which Republicans will stoop, Rep Bob Beauprez, running for governor in Colorado, is apparently making campaign appearances wearing a military jumpsuit. The only problem, according to the DailyKos, is that Beauprez was never in the military, and has the worst record in the...
(Via CoolAqua.)
5:31:47 PM
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"I cobble together a verse comedy about the customs of the harem, assuming that, as a Spanish writer, I can say what I like about Mohammed without drawing hostile fire. Next thing, some envoy from God knows where turns up and complains that in my play I have offended the Ottoman empire, Persia, a large slice of the Indian peninsula, the whole of Egypt, and the kingdoms of Barca, Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. And so my play sinks without trace, all to placate a bunch of Muslim princes, not one of whom, as far as I know, can read but who beat the living daylights out of us and say we are 'Christian dogs.' Since they can't stop a man thinking, they take it out on his hide instead," - a passage from Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, Act V, Scene 3.
(Via Daily Dish.)
3:01:55 PM
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"In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don't care about Egyptians," - John Derbyshire, National Review Online.
(Via Daily Dish.)
3:00:57 PM
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A reader writes: Here's my question:
President Bush worked in the oil industry for years. So did his father. So did many of his close friends. He obviously knows (I hope) that if new technologies were to reduce our total oil consumption by something like 5 million barrels a day by 2025 that no one can simply choose, on a country by country basis, where that savings is going to come from. Yet clearly this is what he implied; that the decrease would all come out of our Middle East imports. If anything, we're liable to get a greater proportion of our oil from the Middle East. Simple economics tells us that if we reduce our demand for oil imports the country that is likely to suffer most is Canada, as they have the highest costs of production. The cheapest oil comes from the Middle East.
So we're left with yet another 'lesser of two evils' conclusion here: either President Bush spent years in the oil industry (not to mention Harvard Business School) and yet failed to absorb even the most basic knowledge about that industry, or that he knows full well that what he's saying isn't true, but is willing to say it anyway if he believes it benefits him politically."
Bottom line on this question of telling the truth: "We do not torture."
(Via Daily Dish.)
10:42:08 AM
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A ban on human-animal hybrids announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address has many senior White House staffers panicked, and the NIH, which has been tasked with enforcing the ban, has already prepared subpoenas for DNA samples for most of the White House staff. Dick Cheney, who is thought to be a chickenhawk-man, told reporters today that the State of the Union was not intended to be taken literally by anyone.
(Via Opinions You Should Have.)
10:12:18 AM
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Ever since the Supreme Court kinda sorta said local governments can promote Ten Commandments displays on public property, religious right activists have made concerted efforts to get more "religion in the public square" with more religious monuments. But in one very interesting case in Utah, these same activists suddenly want less religion in public, not [...]
(Via The Carpetbagger Report.)
10:08:27 AM
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From the official SOTU transcript:
Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security --
(applause) -- yet the rising cost of entitlements is a problem that is not
going away. (Applause.)
Per Josh Marshall's request for video, it's at 35:07 in the C-SPAN footage (Real Player - if the link above doesn't work, click the link on the C-SPAN homepage).
(Via Brendan Nyhan.)
10:06:49 AM
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Every time Osama bin Laden sneaks another tape out of a remote location, he boosts George Bush's numbers. Richard Simon comments.
(Via KQED's Perspectives.)
10:01:04 AM
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The Wall Street Journal has published another fair and balanced critique of climate change science and negotiations, in a Business World commentary by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr, here. A summary of the arguments is as follows:
1. It will never be possible to prove that global warming is ...
(Via RealClimate.)
9:53:52 AM
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Top-25 movies of 2005 per critics' reviews (rTomatoes-list via MovBlog)
(Via robot wisdom weblog.)
In a year of a lot of movie-going, I only saw 8 of these. But on what planet does War of the Worlds belong on this list and and it omits, for example, Good Night, and Good Luck, and March of the Penguins. Feh.
9:41:57 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 3/2/2006; 9:09:17 AM.
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