Monthly Archives: October 2010

News

Man chases down kidnapper’s vehicle to rescue young girl

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Story from ultra-leftist MSNBC of all places. (H/T Mara)

Excerpt:

A man who rescued an 8-year-old girl who had been abducted by a stranger says he was “beyond scared” as he forced the alleged kidnapper to stop his truck and hand over the child.

At about 6:45 a.m. Tuesday, Victor Perez, 29, recognized the truck from media reports about the girl, who was taken while she played outside a home in Fresno, Calif., at 8:30 p.m. Monday.

He gave chase in his own vehicle and repeatedly tried to force the alleged kidnapper’s truck off the road. Eventually, Perez saw the girl’s head in the truck’s window.

“He kept getting away. He kept going round my truck. The last time I completely said, ‘Either he crashes into me or he stops.’ He stopped and pushed the little girl out,” he told NBC station KSEE 24 News.

After being forced out of the truck, the girl ran to safety.

“The first thing she told me, ‘I’m scared,'” Perez said. “She was shaking. I said, ‘You’re all right now.'”

[…]Perez told CNN that he saw a vehicle matching the description of the one used in the abduction — an older-model, reddish-brown Chevrolet with a white stripe on the side — as he stood outside his house talking with his cousin about the abduction early Tuesday.

“I thought, that could be the truck,” Perez told CNN Tuesday night.

“I had a split-second decision to decide to call 911 or go after it,” Perez told ABC News. “I decided to go after it while my cousin was dialing 911. I took a chance to go and ask a question to see if that was the man that we’re looking for.”

He got into his 1988 white Ford pickup, and began to follow. As he tried to cut off the truck, its driver reportedly told him, “I don’t have no time,” and claimed his battery was dying.”The second time I reached him, the way he acted — yes, I was, for a split second I was nervous until I saw the little girl and all fear was out the window after that,” Perez told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“I didn’t have no fear. I wasn’t thinking of me no more. I was just thinking we need to get that little girl to safety,” he added. “I wasn’t going to give up. … I couldn’t give up.”

“I kept telling him, ‘That’s not your little girl.’ We argued. We exchanged words,” Perez told CNN, admitting that he had wondered whether the motorist had a gun. “I was beyond scared.”

“He was hiding her — like pushing her down. I thank God he put me here to help out that little girl — that’s for sure,” he added.

On the fourth attempt, he forced the vehicle to stop.

This man is a hero! We need to make a big deal out of him in order to encourage more men to be heroes.

Commentary

How can you tell whether something is designed or not?

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In honor of William Dembski’s debate tonight at 8 PM Eastern time, I present this article from Access Research Network.

Excerpt:

Instead of looking for such vague properties as “purpose” or “perfection”—which may be construed in a subjective sense—[intelligent design] looks for the presence of what it calls specified complexity, an unambiguously objective standard.

That term sounds like a mouthful, but it’s something we can all recognize without effort. Let’s take an example.

Imagine that a friend hands you a sheet of paper with part of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address written on it:

FOURSCOREANDSEVENYEARSAGOOURFATHERSBROUGHTFORTHONTHISCONTINENTANEWNATIONCONCEIVEDINLIBERTY …

Your friend tells you that he wrote the sentence by pulling Scrabble pieces out of a bag at random.

Would you believe him? Probably not. But why?

One reason is that the odds against it are just too high. There are so many other ways the results could have turned out—so many possible sequences of letters—that the probability of getting that particular sentence is almost nil.

But there’s more to it than that. If our friend had shown us the letters below, we would probably believe his story.

ZOEFFNPBINNGQZAMZQPEGOXSYFMRTEXRNYGRRGNNFVGUMLMTYQXTXWORNBWIGBBCVHPUZMWLONHATQUGOTFJKZXFHP …

Why? Because of the kind of sequence we see. The first string fits a recognizable pattern: It’s a sentence written in English, minus spaces and punctuation. The second string fits no such pattern.

Now we can understand specified complexity. When a design theorist says that a string of letters is specified, he’s saying that it fits a recognizable pattern. And when he says it’s complex, he’s saying there are so many different ways the object could have turned out that the chance of getting any particular outcome by accident is hopelessly small.

Thus, we see design in our Gettysburg sentence because it is both specified and complex. We see no such design in the second string. Although it is complex, it fits no recognizable pattern. And if our friend had shown us a string of letters like “BLUE” we would have said that it was specified but not complex. It fits a pattern, but because the number of letter is so short, the likelihood of getting such a string is relatively high. Four slots don’t give you as many possible letter combinations as 143, which is the length of our Gettysburg sentence.

So that’s the basic notion of specified complexity.

This is something you really need to understand in order to understand the arguments from biological building blocks and biological information in DNA.

Videos

Democrat Congressman says that country’s debt is a “myth”

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Wow. Watch this video of Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL).

Transcript:

And we will see a terrible price that we will pay years down the road for letting our children down when they need us the absolute most.  I’m not going to be part of that, so every minute that I have here is going to be spent debunking the myth that this country’s in debt and we just can’t spend.

He says that we have to keep spending… for the children?

Um. The annual budget deficit under Obama is about 1.5 trillion. The national debt has increased 3 trillion so far under Obama to 13.3 trillion. Our total GDP as a nation is only 14.5 trillion. By next year, our national debt will be higher than our GDP. The children are inheriting a lower quality of life than we have today. They’ll have to pay for our spending today.

Oh, here is his previous video:

In which he says that he doesn’t care that whether health care mandates are unConstitutional.