| This thread has been locked, it will not receive new replies. |
|
Locked on 07/28/2006 3:39:28 PM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
. |
Posted on 06/21/2006 9:17:55 AM PDT by RonDog
MARK STEYN MARK STEYN Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it's been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn't that great?" and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer. But nobody's talking too much about the finer points of Miss Coulter's argument. Instead, everyone -- from Hillary Rodham Clinton down -- is going bananas about a couple of paragraphs on page 103 and 112 in which the author savages the 9/11 widows. Not all of them. Just the quartet led by Kristen Breitweiser and known as "the Jersey Girls." These four widows have been regular fixtures in the New York TV studios since they first emerged to complain that the average $1.6 million-per-family compensation was insufficient. The 9/11 commission, in all its ghastly second-guessing showboating, was largely their project. As Miss Coulter writes: "These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." And at that point Senator Clinton jumped in to denounce the incendiary blond commentatrix as (dread word) "mean-spirited." Maybe so. But in 2004, the Jersey Girls publicly endorsed John Kerry's campaign for president: they inserted themselves into the political arena and chose sides. That being so, to demand that they be insulated from the normal rough 'n' tumble of partisan politics merely because of their biography seems absurd. There are any number of 9/11 widows. A few are big George W. Bush supporters, many are apolitical. I was honoured to receive an email the other day from Deena Gilbey, a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center and remained in the building to help evacuate his colleagues. A few days later, U.S. Immigration sent Mrs. Gilbey a letter informing her that, as she was now a widow, her residence status had changed and they were enclosing a deportation order. Having legally admitted to the country the men who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act after having enabled his murder is to further traumatize the bereaved. The heartless brain-dead bonehead penpusher who sent out that letter is far more "mean-spirited" than Miss Coulter at full throttle. Yet Mrs. Gilbey isn't courted by the TV bookers the way the Jersey Girls are. Hundreds of soldiers' moms believe their sons died in a noble and just cause in Iraq, but it's Cindy Sheehan, who calls Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world," who gets speaking engagements across America, Canada, Britain, Europe and Australia. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisy cutters, the media don't go to Paul Bigley, who rejoiced that the man who decapitated his brother would now "rot in hell," nor the splendid Aussie Douglas Wood, who called his kidnappers "arseholes," nor his fellow hostage Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who's invested 50,000 bucks or so in trying to track down the men who kidnapped him and visit a little reciprocal justice on them. No, instead, the media rush to get the reaction of Michael Berg, who thinks Bush is "the real terrorist" rather than the man who beheaded his son. But it wasn't until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry's pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush's Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he's still down there. It's gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can't attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you've got most of your arms and legs and he hasn't. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn't have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry's speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, "If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards." "What crackpot argument can't be immunized by the Left's invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?" wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. "If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we're allowed to respond to?" Now that's a point worth making. As it is, thanks to Coulter cracks like "Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy," even chaps on the right are doing the more-in-sorrow shtick and saying that they've been making the same basic argument as Ann and it's such a shame she had to go too far with her cheap shots because that's discredited the entire argument, etc. The trouble with this line is that hardly anyone was objecting to the professional widow routine pre-Coulter. Well, that's not strictly true. Yours truly objected. After the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, I wrote: "The first reaction of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the 9/11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result, as if the prosecution of the war on terror is some kind of national-security Megan's Law on which they have inviolable proprietorial rights. Sorry, but that's not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who died were not targeted as individuals: they were killed because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to murder Mrs. Smith. . . It's not about 'closure' for the victims; it's about victory for the nation." But nobody paid the slightest heed to this line. For all the impact my column had, I might as well have done house calls. Then Coulter comes in and yuks it up with the Playboy-spread gags, and suddenly the Jersey Girls only want to do the super-extra-fluffy puffball interviews. So two paragraphs in Ann Coulter's book have succeeded in repositioning these ladies: they may still be effective Democrat hackettes, but I think TV shows will have a harder time passing them off as non-partisan representatives of the 9/11 dead. So, on balance, hooray for Miss Coulter. If I were to go all sanctimonious and priggish, I might add that, in rendering their "human shield" strategy more problematic, she may be doing Democrats a favour. There's no evidence the American people fall for this shtick: in 2002, the party's star Senate candidates all ran on biography -- Max Cleland, Jean Carnahan (the widow of a deceased governor), and Walter Mondale (the old lion pressed into service after Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash). All lost. Using "messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to" doesn't solve the Democrats' biggest problem: their message. The Dems, says the author, have "become the 'Lifetime' TV network of political parties." But, except within the Democrat-media self-reinforcing cocoon, it's not that popular. A political party with a statistically improbable reliance on the bereaved shouldn't be surprised that it spends a lot of time in mourning -- especially on Wednesday mornings every other November. To comment, email letters@macleans.ca
Ann Coulter: America's fiery, blond commentatrix
June 21, 2006 One crack about 9/11 widows and the author of Godless loses her audience. Too bad.
Copyright by Rogers Media Inc.
May not be reprinted or republished without permission.
This story can be found at:
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060626_129699_129699
I want to make sure we flesh this out fully and I don't take you out of context... you think the plant itself is created by photosynthesis?
What would that have to do with either evolution or the 2nd law?
Just proving you aren't paying attention. Please engage, your negativity is hurting the discussion. Your abuse of the Theory of Relativity and these "clues" are just an annoyance.
If you had just kept reading: "It certainly violates the 2nd Law of Thermo that complex life could come from a system evolving toward inert uniformity." If you don't understand what's being said, just say so.
Here's a secret: There still is entropy. Open systems have it too.
Must be the best kept secret in science! By definition, entropy is measured in a closed system. Your deficiencies are showing...
Many physicists have an opinion on who is hotter, Alba or Jolie. That still doesn't make it part of any physics theory.
I'm just about done with your nonsense. You still have not engaged the conversation on anything but a "you're wrong" level. I like this topic but I'm not going to waste my time on an intellectual black hole.
Now I know why we aren't getting anywhere... you truly don't understand the conversation. Photosynthesis is the process by which carbon dioxide, water and sunlight are synthesized into sugar and oxygen. Sugar is food for the plant, not the plant itself anymore than a cheeseburger is part of you.
You do know that E=mc^2 means that matter and energy are interchangeable, right?
Silly me, I thought we were talking about living matter. Care to show how E=lmc^2. It doesn't and you are throwing nonsense.
Our conversation is over. I have wasted hours with nothing of value coming back from you.
ayyuh.
...or that there can be multiple independent open systems contained as subsets within an overall closed system, etc...
Hey, you guys actually studied science! That's no fair. /sarcasm mode
reality isn't "fair" - why should those who study reality be "fair" to those who do not? *grins*
1) Abiogenesis is not evolution. If you want to argue abiogenesis then do so but please be more precise. Evolution is based on mechanisms such as selection than at this point can only be confidently applied to living organisms. It may be that at some point we can apply those mechanisms to pre/proto life but that is not the case now.
2) There is at no time a necessity for non-life to jump to life in the current theory of abiogenesis. This division is an artificial one created to explain consciousness and ultimately the human soul. In real life there is no sharp dividing line but a gradual change from basic chemical reactions to self replicators we can define as pre-life to proto life to life, taking many steps in between. We do not just assume that a murky pond had some chemicals and clay in it one day and full fledged life the next.
3) The sun is a low entropy source of energy which was created through gravity (which has a tendency to 'organize' matter). That low entropy energy is supplied to Earth which through such processes as water evaporation and condensation increases the local energy entropy which is then radiated into space. In the meantime however, that energy is put to use in the form of work. In the case of evaporation and condensation, water is elevated where it acquires energy that is used in forming clouds and is dissipated when the drops of water fall to earth in the form of high entropy heat.
This same low entropy energy is used to form chemical bonds where some of the energy is stored just as it is stored in the raindrop. This is all according to the 2LoT.
Since the formation of the first replicators was due to chemical bonds produced through available energy, that formation does not break the 2LoT in any way.
I have to leave for the moment but I'll tackle this when I get back.
I will be glad to cite some chapter and verse, if you will be so kind as to do the following:
1. specify the number of errors you desire
2. specify the degree of refutation you believe will be required to cause you, if you find them compelling, to publicly admit that they are indeed errors
3. agree to specify in what way you find the refutations faulty if you read them and find them unconvincing.
Your engaging in game playing and you know it. If you have a list of glaring errors post them. You know very well what is being asked for.
Not game playing. He wants to be sure you don't move the goalpost after he has responded.
Just state what would be convincing to you, and see if he has it. Pretty easy, no?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.