Plead the First

In last night’s State of the Union Address, Bush laid out a specific goal relating to our dependence on oil:

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.

Of course, being the straight-shootin’, no-nonsense-talkin’ President that he is, by “Middle East” he meant “wherever“:

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

So he only meant the Middle East figuratively. Twice in two sentences.

Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.” The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

This makes no sense at all. It could have been “dramatized” just as easily – and apparently more accurately – by saying, “to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from areas such as the Middle East by 2025.”

It’s not like this was an impromptu speech. The administration presumably knew the State of the Union Address was coming up, and took some time to plan and write the speech. We shouldn’t need assorted administration officials to tell us “what the president meant” in such an address.

(Hat tip: DailyKos)

Poking around the Internet tonight, I came across this article by Red Phillips from Georgia. He’s thought about the conflict between Evolution and Intelligent Design, and in the wake of Judge Jones’ decision in Dover he’s come up with a novel solution to smooth over the differences:

Here is what I propose. States all across the God-fearing South as well as Christian and conservative States in that other country that lies to the north of Dixie should pass laws mandating the teaching of creation in public schools, in blatant defiance of the brain-dead court. But the laws should contain additional wording something like this:

“We, the legislature of Alabama/Georgia/South Carolina/Mississippi etc. have carefully considered the constitutionality of this proposal. The 1st Amendment which states ‘Congress shall make no law’ clearly applies only to Congress and laws passed by Congress. Therefore, it is not possible that this law is in violation of the 1st Amendment. Therefore we will consider any decision by a federal court that finds this law in violation of the 1st Amendment to be null and void. We authorize the use of State law enforcement to arrest and transport to the State border, any federal agent attempting to enforce such a decision. We also do not authorize any money be paid out of the State treasury for any fines or court fees incurred by a judicial challenge to this law. Any State official who attempts to take money from the State treasury for the purpose of paying any fines or court costs may be arrested for theft. The State National Guard may not be ‘federalized’ for the purpose of enforcing a court order.”

It’s so simple, I’m surprised no one has thought of it before now. Just ignore the First (and Fourteenth) Amendment, and arrest anyone who tries to enforce it!

The High Point ABC Board was having some trouble recently, between illegal sales of liquor, slush funds, and shady real estate deals. That board got the axe – hopefully the new board will turn things around like they say they’re going to.

As previously noted, computerized DREs are now the voting machines of choice for Guilford County, so keep a close eye on your vote!

Mitch Johnson, the Greensboro Police Officer’s Association, and other officials seem to have their side of the story, and Wray certainly has his side of it. And if the conversations in the local blogosphere and in the News and Record’s Letters to the Editor are any indication, everyone else is taking up sides too. Here’s hoping for some truth and some reconciliation in the not-too-distant future.

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a great idea on how to keep legislators from monkeying around with our school science standards:

We don’t allow people to practice in many fields without demonstrating that they have some expertise in it. We won’t even let someone cut hair without a cosmetology license in this country. And yet we allow ignorant legislators pass laws on those issues without demanding that they know anything about them. I propose a new rule – before a legislator is allowed to propose a change or vote on an issue involving high school science standards, he must first at least be able to pass the AP exams in the basic sciences with a good grade.

Backwards City links to an interview with Katee Sackhoff, the actress who plays Starbuck on SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica. At the end of the Backwards City post, there’s this quote from Gravity Lens:

I need someone to explain to me how a show about humanity, slaughtered and driven from the twelve worlds they occupy by technology that they created, now pursued and manipulated by these same enemies, having to determine on-the-fly what constitutes “human,” and preserve the remnants of the race doesn’t qualify as science fiction.

That’s an accurate assesment. In the show, the Cylons were created by humans as servants, but the Cylons turn against their creators. How tragic is that – driven from your home, pursued and slaughtered by technology that you created. The work of your own hands, carefully crafted, turned into a cunning killer. But then I realized something.

The humans totally had it coming to them. I mean really. You go and create something that looks like this:

and you don’t expect it to turn out evil? Of course it wants to kill you – just look at it! It has a glowing red eye for Kobol’s sake! You want to build a robot that will be nice to you and not commit genocide the first chance it gets, you build a robot that looks like this:

The county commissioners have voted 8-2 in favor of the Board of Elections’ recommendation to use computerized DRE voting machines in Guilford County. One strange statement during the discussion was made by Vice-chairman Steve Arnold, who said (paraphrasing), “All the great ballot stuffing throughout history has been done with paper ballots.” Might that have something to do with the fact that computerized voting is a recent development? I suppose mechanical lever machines didn’t use paper – I’m not sure how prevalent they’ve been through history, but maybe they were common enough to give Arnold’s statement some actual meaning.

Update: Roch has more details in the comments.

Last week, RhinoTimes writer Orson Scott Card gave his take on the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate. Though he sounds reasonable in a few places, he seems to have some misconceptions. In writing about the ID concept of Irreducible Complexity, Card says:

Basically, Behe’s approach was this: Complex systems in advanced organisms depend on many biochemical steps, all of which must be in place for the system to work at all.

So how, Behe asked, could such a complex system have evolved, if the only method available was random variation plus natural selection?

It would be impossible to believe that the entire series of steps in the complex system could randomly appear all at once. But any one step along the way, since it does nothing by itself, could not give the organism that had it any competitive advantage. So why would each of those traits persist and prevail long enough for the complex system to fall into place?

Behe’s conclusion is that since complex biochemical systems in advanced organisms could not have evolved through strict Darwinian evolution, the only possible explanation is that the system was designed and put into place deliberately.

In other words, though he shuns the word, complex systems had to have a creator – they have to be intelligently designed.

He goes on to sum up the “Darwinist response” with a strawman which I will ignore, as I’ve never seen an Evolutionist respond as he claims. There are in fact, perfectly valid responses to claims of irreducible complexity:

1. Some of the examples often given of irreducibly complex (IC) systems are demonstrably not irreducibly complex. For instance, whales are “missing” parts of their blood clotting system, yet their blood still clots with no problem. The eye has been cited as an IC system, however there are many sorts of eyes of varying complexity in the animal kingdom, from light-sensitive spots, to the human eye, and everywhere in between. Each one of them is functional in some way and conveys a competitive advantage.

2. There are several known ways in which IC systems may evolve:

How might an IC system evolve? One possibility is that in the past, the function may have been done with more parts than are strictly necessary. Then an ‘extra’ part may be lost, leaving an IC system. Or the parts may become co-adapted to perform even better, but become unable to perform the specified function at all without each other. This brings up another point: the parts themselves evolve. Behe’s parts are usually whole proteins or even larger. A protein is made up of hundreds of smaller parts called amino acids, of which twenty different kinds may be used. Evolution usually changes these one by one. Another important fact is that DNA evolves. What difference does this make, compared to saying that proteins evolve? If you think about it, each protein that your body makes is made at just the right time, in just the right place and in just the right amount. These details are also coded in your DNA (with timing and quantity susceptible to outside influences) and so are subject to mutation and evolution. For our purposes we can refer to this as deployment of parts. When a protein is deployed out of its usual context, it may be co-opted for a different function. A fourth noteworthy possibility is that brand new parts are created. This typically comes from gene duplication, which is well known in biology. At first the duplicate genes make the same protein, but these genes may evolve to make slightly different proteins that depend on each other.

3. Computer simulations have actually demonstrated IC systems evolving:

What gets IDCs edgy about the Lenski, et al., paper is that the assembly language programs – the genomes of the digital critters – that evolved to perform those complicated logic functions are “irreducibly complex�? in exactly the definition of Michael Behe …

Behe (and Dembski, following him) contends that “irreducibly complex” structures and processes are not accessible to evolutionary processes: they cannot have evolved by “Darwinian” mechanisms … But Lenski, et al., showed that the assembly language programs evolved in avida satisfy Behe’s operational (knockout) definition. If replacing an instruction with a null instruction (a knockout procedure) in a digital critter’s program results in the loss of a logic function, the program is “irreducibly complex” by Behe’s definition (or is part of the “irreducible core” of the critter’s program, to use Dembski’s term). So the Lenski, et al., analysis shows that “irreducibly complex” structures can evolve by plain old “Darwinian” mechanisms.

As you can see, there are arguments against irreducible complexity if one takes the time to look for them. I would have rather seen Card address these rather than the strawman he presented, but maybe he was just unaware of the rebuttals.

Another point to consider is that even though there are indeed gaps in our knowledge about evolution, this doesn’t warrant an attempt to replace the theory of evolution with something else. All scientific theories have gaps. That’s the point of research, to try to fill in those gaps. Claiming to know the answer – that a given system was designed – based on a lack of knowledge is not the way to go. The honest and logical course is to say “we don’t know that yet” and to keep looking for answers.

Further Reading:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html

In this past week’s Rhino Times, John Hammer writes an article in which he touches on the new senior drug program:

Some people make bad financial decisions throughout their lives and it appears that if people do that then the government is going to provide for their every need after they retire. Why should people who are working today pay for drugs for retired folks who can’t afford them because during their working years they bought a new car every year, had to have that motor home that they took on a trip once and then it rotted in their driveway, or put what should have been going into a retirement fund into a boat? Some seniors have really high drug bills because they spent money that should have been going into their retirement on cigarettes and now they have a whole host of health problems related to smoking.

I’m sure it’s true that some seniors have made bad financial decisions (maybe that prime real estate in Florida was just a little closer to the swamp than it looked to be on the map). However, is there any reason to think that this is the case the majority of the time? What about those seniors who are in financial trouble due to factors beyond their control – are we justified in ignoring them simply because there are some people who have mismanaged their money?

What’s interesting to me is the assumption that if a senior is having financial difficulty that it must be due to something that he did wrong. I’ve seen this assumption before in similar circumstances, such as in discussions about homelessness or welfare. Many people seem to take the position that if a person is having difficulties, it’s due to laziness, bad planning, or some sort of character flaw. It makes me wonder if there’s some version of the Fundamental Attribution Error at work here:

When something bad happens to me I attribute it to external causes. When something good happens to me, I attribute it to internal causes. The reverse is also true. When something bad happens to somebody else, it is because of internal causes. If something good happens to another person, it is attributed to external causes.