Chez Watt Ballot August 4, 2008

The Watts are on the campaign trail and hoping that you will vote for
them. Votes from Michigan and Florida will now be counted, but only
since they no longer change the outcome.

Jason

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In the "self-fulfillment of Godwin's Law" category:

Not at all. It's just such a common semantic argument ("Atheism is a
religion!" "Is not!" "Is too!" "Bald is not a hair color!" "Nude is a
color of pantyhose!" "Religion is irrational!" "Well, atheism is a
religion, so you're irrational!" "Yeah, well you're just like
Hitler!") that I figured it was worth it to say something (again)
about the slipperiness of semantics for the lurkers.

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In the "Oh baby that's a fine suggestion you've got" category:

In Maryland there is a law, that specifies a $5 fine. Some wag suggested
raising the fine to $500, as a revenue raising measure.

If you pay the fine in advance will they provide a woman?

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Creationist math department:

What is 97% of 2 billion if there are 2 billion bits of information in
a strand of DNA?
Thats 40 million bits of information.

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In the category: Disproving evolution by showing that something that
didn't happen and isn't predicted can't happen.

And I will suggest there is a need for a gland that secretes aspirin,
and it would be advantageous, to have that gland, as most people take
aspirin at some point.

But to create a gland that secretes aspirin, you would have to know
about dosages, and also about the side effects to the stomach, and so
then is it all trial and error, in developing that gland, where many
many people will die but some will survive, and then all will have
that gland? When the organism can survive without it, but it is
advantageous to have it.

Another example is the horn that appears on a person's head and it
becomes a dominant gene and the children have it and it looks nice and
become prestigious to have it, and so people want to mate with the
horned ones and so 2 million years from now people have this nice
attractive looking horn, and the first individual to have it is the
common ancestor.

So why don't we see this in progress anywhere in the world, where some
people have some unique trait, or some part of the population has some
unique gland, but instead what we see, is that all people have the
same parts?

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In the "after the revolution, foxes wind up against the wall"
category...

the ideal chicken can grasp a fox in its talons and throw it over the
chicken coup wall.

Perhaps he was thinking about the chicken soup moat?

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In the category, When H' = ln(x)

I don't even know Shannon, and if she is like Miller, I am not about
to say, she is saying what I am saying, and we are all saying that,
because Shannon knows everything and we don't know anything, and what
Shannon is saying makes more sense, because all we are saying is that
information does not spontaneously self organize into complex systems
rife with metaphor and instruction sets.

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In the category, My Sweet Lord:

Evil can be blamed upon something other than God, like Satan. But
given God's Goodness, Omniscience and Omnipotence, the existence of
Satan becomes a problem. Satan seems to have been one of the sons of
God, actually his prosecuting attorney or adversary, before he got a
little impatient and disrespectful and cast down from the heavens. Yet
this eventuality in the history of Satan points to a fundamental flaw
in creation or God's planning process. Someone in his own entourage
was flawed. Did God check Satan's credentials thoroughly before hiring
him?

That some lowly snake was able to tempt Eve so early in the history of
humankind and result in the original sin points to a design flaw too.
Creation becomes like a sea monkey colony that goes awry or a botched
junior high science fair project. At some point God gets really ticked
at how flawed his project has become and decides to trash it
altogether with a deluge only to start from scratch with Noah. Yet
this new start went awry with Ham and one can see through history that
God's programming skiils fall far short of Omnipotence, Omniscience
and/or Benevolence. The human lumbar region and appendix could have
benefitted from a more careful planning process.

Then he picks amongst the nations one group out of many in the Levant
and upon putting the Egyptians through hell in his rescue operation,
as these folks kinda got themselves into a predicament due to some
brothers selling one of their own only to meet up with him later in
Egypt, God gives these people a long list of rules that nobody could
ever abide by and tells them to go kill some heathen in Canaan. He
continues insisting on their faithfulness, like a paranoid jilted
lover and get pissed when they go a whorin after other gods. He picks
a bandit chieftan to carve a nation out of the mess and promises him
that his seed will reign eternal, yet reneges when it is obvious that
flawed humans cannot follow his obsessive-compulsive edicts, so he
employs Assyrians and evil Babylonians to do his dirty work. Later he
employs some Romans and allows them to get smitten by an odd variant
of the belief system he saddled the Jews with so they can go on and
spread the word of peace via the sword. He eventually does the same
with some Arab guy and sits back and enjoys the carnage that ensues as
followers of his divine guidance slaughter each other. He then
provides them with nuclear technology, since swords and catapults no
longer meet his needs for entertainment.

What exactly is the take home message in all this?

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Inter-plant-ary wars (who knew?):

From Eugenics to Nazism, from the "Holly Wars" to
Islamic terrorism, history provides us with several examples of how
dangerous can be pseudoscience and religious fundamentalism.

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I just have 42 questions.

I have a question. Do you plan on telling us that you have 42
questions while you keep those questions to yourself or do you have
any intention of asking those questions in public?

I have, one question for each protein.

Do you have answers for the 42 questions?

I dont even have questions, at this point.

My challenge to TO, is that I can ask 42 questions on this topic that
cannot be answered.-

In the "Yes I do/ No I don't" category

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In the "Lying Eyes" category:

If it can be observed as it happens, in real time, by the naked eye,
then it is not real

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Under "Sir I challenge you to a duel over my shrubbery"

Others are not. However, if I believe that bush in my back yard is the
One True Incarnation of Alexander Hamilton (my favorite founder) and
you want to disabuse me of that ridiculous notion by pouring herbicide
over my fence and braying, "See! Alexander Hamilton would not have
succumbed to a poison designed to kill PLANTS!", don't be surprised if
I just plug you.

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In the "Modern Parable" category:

I heard a story of three girls sharing a house. The washing
machine malfunctioned and continued to spin without end.

One girl had hysterics. One girl knelt down and gave the washing
machine
a hug (I'm not making this up). The third girl pulled the plug out.

Perhaps all of human nature is in this little parable.

It's the people who pull the plug out who keep the world running

Why don't scientists get the basic facts about the way things are?

because hugging the washing machine isn't going to make it stop

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In the pwned! category

You are a person who has basically admitted that you do not know
what Creationism claims.

I guess it has escaped your notice that I have written a whole book about
what creationism claims. Ask at your local bookstore.

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In the category 'If only they could talk:'

Decisions are also made in planets, which decide the
future trajectory, and decisions are made in the weather. That is
what science says.

Language isn't your first language, is it?

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In the category:"Clarifying what I don't know about science."

Her claim that you can *hear* light when it slows down enough is a classic
example of that.

You don't reflect that you ever understood that radio
waves are part of the EMR Spectrum, and that they
cannot be heard in space, but in our atmosphere, they
are able to be heard.

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They are. Jews, christians and muslims all worship the same gods.

They
show from their content that this is not the same
God. God in the Bible says that he has a *begotten*
Son,

No, that was JC - junior.

Muslims see him only as a profit.

Well, perhaps the tele-imams do. Puts them in fine company.

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To skirt the rules - the mystery of /human's/ intuition:

I don't know what existed before our universe. My intuition says some
kind of perfervid energy with a tendency to produce matter.

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Subject: Is everything inevitable?

In the category 'read the thread title':

You had to ask that, didn't you?

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Due to foreign language difficulty, we were discussing whether
flowering plants are descended from threes.

A three is BIGGER than a flower!

Your problem is that you can't see the threes for the fours!

You can't see the florist for the threes.

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File under "Check, please.":

Genes, for instance. Darwin knew nothing whatever about the genetic
processes later discovered by the Polish Catholic monk, Gregor
Mendel --

Polish? I guess all of those central Europeans are
indistinguishable.

Ignorant of biology? Check
Ignorant of history of science? Check
Ignorant of geography? Czech.

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