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Politics : A Neutral Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (1612)	12/1/2005 5:28:15 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 2253

I can't remember my old posts about oatmeal either, but my Zojirushi rice cooker makes good Irish oatmeal on the porridge setting. Not that I eat it often. Rolled oats in the microwave. Natural rolled oats only take five minutes. I think Irish buttermilk and American buttermilk are different, though. Clearing out the closets is a daunting task. I assume it is because his wife died? Or is he moving? Every so often I go through a different room in the house, gathering things to give away or throw away, and have my mother doing the same thing at her place. We finally got most of the main floor "done" well enough for guests and so finally had non-family people over for the first time since we bought the house. I still need to take the bannister to be sand-blasted. Given up on stripping the metal, it's too frou-frou, even for stripper and wire brush and pressure washer. Agh. But also have the downstairs halfway done, well enough that she has been staying there since before Thanksgiving and seems comfortable, although it's just temporary, I think she's going back to her own place today. She really needs to move in here eventually. Last night she and Chris and I watched the Cream reunion show on PBS. I am the big Cream fan, ever since the beginning of Cream, but they like them well enough to watch with me and enjoy. She was a little old for Cream and I was a little young for Cream but the age difference was small enough (17 years) that we both liked a lot of the same music growing up. She was actually a Dylan fan but dated younger men who liked stuff like Cream and used to leave the albums lying around. Speaking of which I have tickets for the Donovan show this weekend in Annapolis. Chris will go with me, bless him. I think Donovan mystifies people who were not there at the time. Coincidentally ("I'm Just Mad About Saffron") my saffron crocuses bloomed and I was picking saffron with a pair of tweezers last night. Sad story, sort of, when the bulbs arrived in September I was too busy to plant, and opened the box in November, and they had sprouted, so put the box on the front stoop hoping to plant them. Now they are blooming in the box! I have no idea what to do. Probably plant them anyway. But decided to harvest the saffron rather than let it go to waste. I suppose for people who live full and complicated lives, there must be a lot of closets to clean out after they're gone. Cleaning them out as you go along is a nice thing to do, but you can't keep them totally cleaned out, that's giving up on life entirely. But you knew that of course. Here's to complicated closets. Edit: just remembered. One of my recurring dreams is cleaning out closets for grandmothers etc. who have passed on, and finding treasure.

To: Rambi who wrote (1612)	12/20/2005 12:55:03 PM
From: Constant Reader	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2253

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that "intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district. Just reported: The Dover Area School Board violated the Constitution when it ordered that its biology curriculum must include "intelligent design," the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled Tuesday. Predictable. Correct. UPDATE: Here's the opinion. It's lengthy. Basically, the judge, following precedent, asks whether a reasonable observer would perceive a government endorsement of religion. He also, more briefly, applies the Lemon test. Here are some key points: As a reasonable observer, whether adult or child, would be aware of this social context in which the ID Policy arose, and such context will help to reveal the meaning of Defendants’ actions, it is necessary to trace the history of the IDM. ... Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses.... Dramatic evidence of ID’s religious nature and aspirations is found in what is referred to as the “Wedge Document.” The Wedge Document, developed by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (hereinafter “CRSC”), represents from an institutional standpoint, the IDM’s goals and objectives... The Wedge Document states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that the IDM’s goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” As posited in the Wedge Document, the IDM’s “Governing Goals” are to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”... The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates... that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling evidence strongly supports Plaintiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled. ... [T]he disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.... ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.... [A]lthough Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony, such a strategy constitutes additional strong evidence of improper purpose under the first prong of the Lemon test. As exhaustively detailed herein, the thought leaders on the Board made it their considered purpose to inject some form of creationism into the science classrooms, and by the dint of their personalities and persistence they were able to pull the majority of the Board along in their collective wake. ... [T]he Court likewise concludes that the ID Policy is violative of Plaintiffs’ rights under the Pennsylvania Constitution.... The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. ... The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources. I love that last part about who's the real activist here. And note the passage I've highlighted in red. I think that translates into: You call yourself religious? You hypocrite! You lied and cheated your way through this case! ADDED: I'd like to retitle this post: School Board in the Hands of an Angry Judge. He is really angry, isn't he? althouse.blogspot.com I thought of you and Karen when I ran across this on Ann Althouse's wblog. (The story is best viewed at her website.)