If you’re into tracking blog wars – like the one Little Green Lunatics has been so desperately trying to launch – this might interest you:

Is it just the lack of Insta-love that’s driven Excitable Chucky over the edge?  Maybe.  But the HotAir dismissal had to hurt.  Maybe he’ll have better luck romancing the Kossacks, though Markos “Screw them” Moulitsas isn’t exactly the blogger I’d want to cuddle up to.  Well, you never know… Andrew “RawMusGlutes” Sullivan might take a break from investigating Sarah Palin’s uterus and throw him some link love on a regular basis.  NTTAWWT!

Making the rounds of medical blogs:

I was a smoker for seventeen years until I quit in 2000. Kris smoked for even longer.  It was a lot more expensive than I thought, according to Dr. Happy.  In order to finally quit, I gradually reduced my smoking and put off, in five-minute increments, when I would smoke. After a meal I waited five minutes to light up. Then ten, and so on. [Read more...]

Cobb is serving up some meaty, satisfying food for thought on self-determination.  Just because the video is about eight minutes long doesn’t mean it’s fast food. [Read more...]

A twist on my usual “What I’m Reading Instead of Working” posts.  All I had time for was to run quickly through my RSS feeds and mark stuff that looked interesting.  I read one or two of these, but not many. (But what I did read this morning was three chapters of Hebrews. I read the entire book yesterday, and I’m going to continue reading it once a day for at least the next month.)

Amy Alkon, at Advice Goddess Blog, on the attacks from the left for her heresy against leftist doctrine and her doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime:

The worst thing about this for me is learning how naive I’ve been in pooh-poohing right-wingers when they tell me how the real fascists are on the left. Again, I take people as individuals, but I’ve learned that there are a whole lot of people who call themselves “progressives” and “liberals” who see speech they disagree with not as a reason to speak out themselves, but as a reason to work very hard to intimidate the person who’s spoken from speaking their mind again.

And this encouraging comment from Tom, emphasis added:

Amy,

What is happening to you has been happening on college campuses for years. Conservatives are generally not welcome on campus. The reason fo this is that the faculty and administrations of 99% of our institutions of higher learning are leftists. “Speech codes” are the norm on most campuses. Some going so far as to ban speech that makes an individual of a certain group uncomfortable. (unless that group is Christian and white)

Democrats are talking about reinstituting the “Fairness Doctrine” because they cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas. This is serious stuff. This is dangerous stuff.

I work with many far left people. I have found that I often find their political positions to be naive, uninformed or in direct contradiction to the facts. I just think they are misguided. They think I am evil. That’s a huge difference.

The biggest problem facing The West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is the stranglehold that the far left has on our media and academic institutions. There is a big difference between being educated and being indoctrinated.

I’m glad you are not some one who is easily intimidated, Amy. I really enjoy your column and I read it daily. You are way more socially liberal than I am, but I appreciate your intellectual honesty. Because I respect you as a person of reason you have made my re-evaluate some of my positions on various issues. You haven’t changed my mind, but you make me think. Isn’t that what the exchange of ideas should be all about?

Keep your head up.

Tom

Henry Neufeld has two good posts: Barack Obama’s Income Redistribution Plan. We don’t agree on everything with regard to energy technology, but it’s a good read and I wholeheartedly agree with this:

I am disappointed with congress and with both our presidential candidates, though I’m not surprised at their action. We, the voters, are demanding that they behave irresponsibly, and they’re just doing what we ask. No, not what we say we want. What our actions show we want.

In Redistribution: Wealth and Responsibility he considers the redistribution of both money and responsibility vis a vis health care:

But we need to look very carefully at what we’re giving away and what we’re getting. Count the cost. Despite political promises, none of this stuff comes without a cost.

I purposely stay out of the evolution/creation debate, because I’m not willing to put the time in to have a well-informed, defensible opinion and because many people involved seem to have their own facts, not just their own opinions. I don’t want to take the time to sort through not just asserted facts, but personalities history, and motives. Ben Stein, who I always had a good deal of respect for, seems to have used some Michael Moore-style film tricks in Expelled. While it doesn’t automatically disqualify everything he says, it’s disappointing and it makes me view him with a far more skeptical eye. Then there are the shenanigans at the Discovery Institute… rather than parse every phrase in arguments like this, I have stayed out.

I believe that science declares the glory of God. In this debate, there’s been plenty of dishonesty on both sides, from outright faked evidence to purposely dowdifying quotes to change their meaning. Frankly, I’m more distressed by the dishonesty on the creation side because I have higher standards for Christians than non-Christians. So I’m extremely happy to report that a friend of ours has started a new site to engage in the debate. Mark is someone I know personally and trust. He is humble, honorable, and above all loves the Lord. I know that the information I read on his new site, DetectingTruth.com will be honest and as accurate as humanly possible. He’s got an IT/engineering background and a talent for putting the cookies on the lower shelf so people like me, who really are new to the debate, can grasp it easily. This post on Evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a good example.

Last May, I wrote -

One thing I do believe – where there seems to be a conflict between God and science, it’s because we have a faulty understanding of one or the other.

So the next time I want to dip my toe into the creationism/evolution pool and try to gain some understanding of all this, I have a really trustworthy resource at my disposal.

Bookmark Detecting Truth or add it to your RSS reader.

Trackposted to [Read more...]

Cobb: Obama’s Fascist Temptation

In a world of broadcast media where Jim Cramer’s volume moves millions and where the likes of Chris Matthews are considered to have gravitas, this is a story from heaven. In the greatest nation on earth where serious intelligent people operate the heavy machinery of civilization, this story is a station wagon full of children with a drunk driver behind the wheel. I’m not sure which is worse, the drunk driver who crashes or the one who survives to abscond with more trust. Whichever the case may be, Obama’s shallow following allows him all the opportunities of a fascist. I don’t think he is any more or less corruptible than the average Senator, but the nature of this following provides the sort of power that personality alone cannot and will not check. For that, he needs a rationality and policy that will be consistent when a man cannot be. For his campaign to denounce that which defends him logically but offends his illogical supporters demonstrates that he will lie when the truth is sophisticated. It is the first mark of a man who doesn’t respect the capacities of the citizenry, the license of the free press and the world as it is.