All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

Michele Bachmann calls for Napolitano to resign

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Representative Michele Bachmann
Representative Michele Bachmann

This video is awesome. (H/T The Maritime Sentry)

But the leaked DHS report is not the only problem that conservatives are facing from the fascist left. The tolerant left, champions of diversity and tolerance, doesn’t like the idea of hearing things that might hurt their feelings. Every word you say has the potential to incite violence against them!

So, they’ve proposed this new Hate Crimes bill so that they don’t have to listen to people they disagree with anymore.

Excerpt from a post on Atheism Analyzed: (H/T Apologetics 315)

Committee members allowed that, yes, the law could result in the imprisonment of religious leaders. Conceivably then, a threat might be perceived in the preaching from a Bible (the weapon), perceived as inciting “radicals” to do bodily harm to non-believers or gays or whoever. Thus the perception allegedly received by the alleged victim holds total sway over the actual occurrence, which in actuality might have been completely benign.

If the validity of the actual occurrence is not the basis for justice, then there is no justice under this proposed law; it is an invitation for persecution by allegation of personal offendedness, a legalization of internal outrage as the definition of a crime regardless of whether the outrage is legitimate.

Protection from outrage is not possible; so persecution of the hated must substitute. Justice misapplied can become persecution, and it undoubtedly will if H.R. 1913 becomes law.

We elected Obama, and now the whole country will look like the university campuses, where leftist fascism is the rule, and conservatives need bodyguards and police escorts in order to be able to speak.

BONUS:

Michele Bachmann talks with Neil Cavuto about cap and trade, and the recession: (H/T The Maritime Sentry)

Sensible science, sensible energy policy and sensible pollution reduction. Why won’t the socialists just listen to her? Just do whatever she says to do and we’ll get out of this mess that the Democrats put us into.

Commentary

Why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

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That is the actual title of an article by Gerald Warner of the UK Telegraph. (H/T Stop the ACLU)

We are the laughingstock of the entire world now.

This entire passage from the Telegraph piece needs to be excerpted, so that people understand that the United States has elected a President who is far less competent than Jimmy Carter. The Worst President Ever.

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

That is why he opened Pandora’s Box by publishing the Justice Department’s legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda.

“Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened the last few weeks,” he told intelligence officers. Is he kidding? Thanks to him, al-Qaeda knows the private interrogation techniques available to the US intelligence agencies and can train its operatives to withstand them – or would do so, if they had not already been outlawed.

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers…

President Pantywaist’s recent world tour, cosying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America’s enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners. His only enemies are fellow Americans. Which prompts the question: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

Michelle Malkin has more on the Democrats national security and foreign policy blunders:

Data point – Hillary cackles at serious questions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation.

Data point – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ups pressure for ‘truth’ panel on torture

Data point – Soros acolyte Rosa Brooks, al Qaeda apologist and military-basher, now ensconced at the Pentagon.

Data point – Radical Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh’s Senate confirmation hearing for a key State Department legal adviser slot set for next Tuesday.

Data point – Department of Haplessness and Stupidity Secretary Janet Napolitano — fresh from pooh-poohing terrorism and illegal border-crossings, botching 9/11 history and issuing hit jobs on limited government conservatives and veterans — is now pushing for repeal of Real ID Act

And she ends with this:

We have lost our war footing. Welcome back to the Sesame Street school of national security. Feel safer? Me neither.

You Democrats who voted for Obama didn’t want to know anything about this man during the election campaign. You trust the left-wing media to tell you everything you needed to know. Well, now you know what we, the people who can read, were trying to tell you.

UPDATE: Stop the ACLU linked to another post by Gerald Warner entitled Barack Obama: President Pantywaist – new surrender monkey on the block. Why is it that the entire world can see this guy is an unqualified joke, except us?

Polemics

An experimental particle physicist answers speculations about creation and fine-tuning

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I was corresponding with Dr. Michael G. Strauss recently regarding some comments that my previous articles on the kalam, fine-tuning and habitability arguments had drawn. Dr. Strauss is a tenured professor but he also does research on particle physics.

I wanted to draw your attention to a lecture given by Dr. Strauss to the students at Stanford University. In the lecture, he gives 3 arguments from the progress of science that support the conclusion that the universe was created and designed by an intelligent agent of immense power.

I highly recommend this lecture, entitled “Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God”.

Dr. Strauss is not a Christian philosopher or debater – he is a practicing physicist with a stack of publications, who is excited by scientific discoveries that confirm the existence of God.

Here is an outline of the lecture:

What does science tell us about God?
– the discoveries of Copernicus made humans less significant in the universe
– the discoveries of Darwin should that humans are an accident
– but this all pre-modern science
– what do the latest findings of science say about God?

Evidence #1: the origin of the universe
– the steady state model supports atheism, but was disproved by the latest discoveries
– the oscillating model supports atheism, but was disproved by the latest discoveries
– the big bang model supports theism, and it is supported by multiple recent discoveries
– the quantum gravity model supports atheism, but it pure theory and has never been tested or confirmed by experiment and observation

Evidence #2: the fine-tuning of physical constants for life
– there are over 100 examples of constants that must be selected within a narrow range in order for the universe to support the minimal requirements for life
– example: mass density
– example: strong nuclear force (what he studies)
– example: carbon formation

Evidence #3: the fine-tuning of our planet for habitability
– the type of galaxy and our location in it
– our solar system and our star
– our planet
– our moon

What Dr. Strauss thinks about science

As you listen to the lecture, pay close attention to the fact that it is the progress of science that has disproved atheism and given support to theism. Atheism is based on old science. And people who continue to cling to atheism against the new evidence must resort to speculations that are either not testable at all, or not confirmed by experimental testing.

Let’s take a look at two of the speculations that sound scientific, but aren’t confirmed by any research. The first is quantum mechanics (i.e. – vacuum fluctuation model). It argues that the universe is an event without a cause, because there is an unobservable hyper-universe that spawned our universe. The second is a response to the fine-tuning. It argues that there are an infinite number of unobservable universes that are not fine-tuned, and we just happen to be in the fine-tuned one.

Notice that both responses are theoretical speculations that take refuge in unobservable entities in order to escape the good experimental science that proves that there is a Creator and Designer. It’s atheism-of-the-gaps!

Vacuum fluctuation:
– offered as a response to the big bang
– what can QM do: explain how particles appear in a vacuum when the vacuum is sparked
– speculation is that this same process may explain the origin of the universe
– in order to test it, our universe would have to be contained within a larger universe, with similar laws of physics
– but there is no evidence that this unobservable hyper-universe exists

Chaotic inflationary model:
– offered as a response to the fine-tuning
– speculates that inflation may cause other universes to come into being, with different constants
– no experimental verification has been offered
– no evidence of any of these other universes

So, what we have here is a clear cut case of logical arguments and evidence for theism, vs atheist faith and wish-fulfillment. All the data we have today is for theism, but all the untestable speculating is on the part of the atheists, who have faith and hope that the progress of science will overturn what we know and replace it with the what atheists hope for. (And I haven’t even talked about the origin of life and molecular machines, etc.!)

In fact I e-mailed Dr. Strauss about these two speculations, and this was his response:

Wintery Knight,

Quantum mechanics works within the laws of physics. So if you postulate that this universe was created from QM then you must also postulate that a previous universe with similar laws existed previously.

There are a number of theories that would allow multiple universes, though none have any experimental verification. Have you read Jeff’s “Who’s Afraid of a Multiverse?” It is very good.

-Mike

I think that we need to be careful when we explore these issues of faith and science. This is not a game. We need make decisions about what is true today, not hold out hope that some discovery will be made later that validates what we want to believe.

Further study

Dr. Strauss gave a similar lecture more recently at the University of California (Santa Cruz) and in the Q&A, he actually faced questions regarding quantum mechanics and the chaotic inflationary model. You can hear him express his mistrust of theories that haven’t been proven as he urges the audience to go with the evidence, not with the self-serving speculations. Dr. Strauss takes part in a panel discussion on science and religion here.

Also on this topic is the debate between William Lane Craig and atheist physicist Victor Stenger, (audio here). Also, a lecture titled “Beyond the Big Bang”, was delivered at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in front of Victor Stenger and other physicists (audio here). There is a period of Q&A in which Bill must face challengers. These are both available on DVD. More Bill Craig debates are here.

In this published research paper from the journal Astrophysics and Space Science, William Lane Craig responds to the several naturalistic attempts to evade the implications of the kalam argument. Vacuum fluctuation, chatoric inflationary, steady state and quantum gravity models are all addressed.