Last little whimper of the Pivar story

It could have been a much bigger story. A reporter came out to talk to me about that lawsuit a while back, and he had talked with Pivar and many of those involved, and he said he was preparing a fairly substantial write-up … and then after he got back to the Twin Cities, he got a call from Pivar announcing that he had dropped the suit, and so the story got cut way back. Dang. If only Pivar had held off for one more day.

Anyway, you can now read the abbreviated story of the Pivar vs. Seed/Myers lawsuit right now. I guess I got a little snark in, anyway.

One thing that didn’t make it into the story is that Pivar accused me of being a big bully, picking on him like that. The irony is incredible. I’m the $45K/year associate professor at a small town university, he’s the multi-millionaire septic-tank magnate from New York City with buckets of cash to throw at expensive art, lawyers, and frivolous lawsuits. He was suing me for a sum that was more money than I’ll probably make in my entire lifetime, yet was maybe six months income for him. And I am the bully.

Man, I’m tougher and fiercer than I thought. I should have beat him up for his lunch money — I’d probably be able to pay off my mortgage with it.

Bush knew?

You’ve got to read this account of the intelligence that led to the Iraq war.

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was told that the source that claimed there were was not credible, and he was told that the information coming from a source close to Hussein had been validated.

Bush lied to drag us into a pointless, unjust war.

Bush must be impeached. It doesn’t matter how impractical the process seems to be, or how timid the Democrats are. This is an issue of the rule of law: are we to be governed by criminals? Is there to be no punishment for such hideous acts that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? These men are monsters.

All I’m asking is that Bush and Cheney be thrown out of office in disgrace. If justice were served, there’d also be a subsequent act of extraordinary rendition that delivered them into the hands of the government of Iraq.

Time for another blogger ethics review panel

This is appalling. How dare a mere blogger do the research, write up a detailed account, and break an important health story before the NY Times writes it up without recognition of the source? Some will demand that the NY Times retroactively acknowledge the work and expertise of the blogger, but nay — that is not the one true way. Bloggers should proactively acknowledge the possibility that the NY Times might someday use their research and rewrite their stories for them.

— grateful acknowledgment —
The NY Times hasn’t published anything about this article yet, but if they do, this post was the product of borrowing their future hard work and good name. With my magic time machine.

The Nyikos* Award for List Management goes to…

The managing editor of a small town newspaper in Wisconsin, Rose Eddy, is very upset with certain vicious hate groups, so she made up a list for her staff and announced that they will not be accepting ads or information from them, ever. And then she publicized it, declaring her unimpeachable moral probity in the pages of her newspaper. Here’s her list of awful, terrible people who must not appear in print:

  • The Nazi Party. Bad, very bad. I think this one has been condemned by history well enough.

  • Al Qaeda. A known terrorist organization that wants to destroy America — the very symbol of evil today.

  • The Ayn Rand Institute. Um, well. OK. They are kind of selfish libertarian creepazoids, who seem to be infamously pretentious … but they don’t seem to be quite in the same category as Nazis and fanatical terrorists.

  • People looking for Elvis. What! That’s half of small town America! These people may be mildly wacky, but they’re definitely harmless.

  • The Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Nazis, Al Qaeda, Ayn Rand, Elvis, and atheists. Ms Rose Eddy has a very peculiar pattern of discrimination, I think. How could she have left off mimes, Amway salesmen, and Paris Hilton?

*Obscure Talk.Origins reference. Old hands will remember the list lord.

(via Jeffrey Shallit)

Bill Nye doesn’t use the Bible as a science text? Heretic!

Reality is highly offensive to the godly. Bill Nye has alienated Texas by pointing out a simple fact:

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

Curse you, moon! Every night when you rise, you mock the gods with your false “light”!

D. James Kennedy: dead

I guess now he’ll be able to sit down and have a little chat with Hitler and find out if he really was a godless atheist who got all his ideas from Darwin. I doubt that he’ll be able to ask Darwin directly, though — I’m pretty sure they’re in very different places.

At least, that would be the case if his beliefs were anywhere near correct. Personally, I think he’s erased.

Battling giants

Want to see Freeman Dyson and Richard Dawkins butt heads? It begins with a talk Dyson gave to an Edge conference in which Dyson (watch the whole talk) made these comments:

“By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species.”

“With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.”

Dawkins rightly objects. Those are weird claims: the first is, I think, a misreading of Darwin. Darwin says something very different.

[Read more…]

Nice turn of phrase

Next time you hear the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument (almost as common as the why-are-there-still-monkeys argument!), remember this rebuttal:

Creationists seeking to argue against evolution often liken the evolution of complex organisms by natural selection to the building of a DC-10 by a hurricane blowing through a junkyard. Their conclusion? Since such an event is staggeringly unlikely, a special sentient hurricane must have built the plane deliberately.

That’s going to be handy!