A Freethinker's Paradise

White House vs. GOP

I find this interesting:

We are also told that Gonzales, his new deputy Paul McNulty, and FBI director Robert Mueller had sent word to Bush that if he decided to appease Denny Hastert and the House GOP caucus and return the documents to Jefferson, all three would resign or force Bush to fire them for refusing to do so. We are told that while Gonzales, McNulty, and Mueller took their stand, they were opposed by of all people Dick Cheney and his new chief of staff David Addington, who as former congressional types both thought Gonzales created a major constitutional problem for the White House with their own caucus by having the Justice Department execute a warrant on Capitol Hill. This would be the same Dick Cheney who believes in the imperial presidency, objecting to something an attorney general did who is closer to Bush than anyone else in the West Wing except Karl Rove.

Excuse me if I find all of this to be utter BS. I have no sympathy for Jefferson, a guy who apparently took a bribe, ignored a subpoena, stashed the cash in his freezer, and who voted for the estate tax repeal and the bankruptcy bill in one two-day period last year. The man is no friend of working Americans and is nothing more than a DLC guy on the make. Having said that, what really is at play here is that Hastert finally got a wake-up call after five years that the imperial, unitary executive reserved the right to turn its investigative energies not just at everyday Americans, but also towards Congress as well. And with that, the GOP suddenly cared about privacy and being free from what they deemed to be unreasonable searches and seizures, notwithstanding the fact that Hastert and Frist suddenly were petrified at what the FBI might find in their offices as the Abramoff and Cunningham investigations hit their stride. As the New York Times noted in their account of this dust-up, Gonzales felt that he had to defend his troops here and make the ultimate threat because he believed that Hastert staged this as a proxy fight to box in Justice over the upcoming investigations of the House GOP. Gonzales feels apparently (and correctly) that Hastert was trying to cut off DOJ’s legs in future searches and seizures of Republicans by raising a fuss here on a Democrat unconnected to the bigger GOP culture of corruption. If Hastert and Frist did nothing here in response to the raid on Jefferson’s office, they were worried that it would signal to Justice that open season on Republicans could begin.

Pass the popcorn, because it is gonna be crazy.

Reid Calls Language Amendment Racist

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called a proposal to make English the official language "racist" on the Senate floor yesterday.   "This amendment is racist. I think it's directed basically to people who speak Spanish," the Democrat said during the already tense debate over immigration reform.
    Moments later, the Senate approved the measure on a 63-34 vote. Virtually all Republicans were joined by 11 Democrats to approve the largely symbolic amendment. Immediately following that vote, the Senate approved a second amendment, declaring on a 58-39 vote that English is the "common and unifying language."

I have to agree with Reid on this.  The entire idea behind 'immigration reform' is to get the base (ie, stoke the racist feelings amongst those prone to it) to vote in November.  Why?  Because they've already gotten all the mileage they can out of gay/lesbian bashing.  Now I think the language of government operations should be in English, but I don't think people should be coerced into it.

Half the problem is that some Americans don't welcome Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal.  If they don't feel welcome, they're obviously not going to mix very well, are they?  It is a very complicated situation, but some white people are simply scared SHITLESS that 'brown people' may quite possibly one day be the majority in this country.  And some people simply cannot face that.

The Bush Regime Turns Up the Heat

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security.

The nation's top law enforcer also said the government will not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly.

"There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Gonzales said, referring to prosecutions. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."

Why don't you enforce the laws GWB doesn't like, Mr. Gonzales?

This seems a bit odd to me.  Kinda like its as if the Bush Regime doesn't want something getting out...

Karl Rove indicted?

Truthout reports that the indictment announcement will occur this week.  But will it really?  And what does it mean?

In Other News Today

The governor of Kentucky was indicted

More Tax Cuts for the Rich

We find out telcos have been helping the NSA gather info for years

FEMA says it's ready for hurricanes

All of these indicate that Republicans aren't capable of governing anything close to a country.

Tom DeLay resigns!

Woohoo!  I suppose he's tired of being the anchor of the Republican Party.

Free Will

This is a bit weird to me, as it seems a bit illogical:

If there is no God everything is purely material, including ourselves. Material things do not make decisions, but respond in determined ways to prior physical events. They do not act, but simply react to prior physical factors. For any particular event there exists a series of prior physical events that not only result in the event, but necessitate it.

If man is just physical stuff, then our "choices" and "knowledge" are like boiling water and falling dominos: they are necessary reactions to prior physical processes. There is no free will.

Where does the atheist's knowledge that God does not exist come from, then? Does it come from a free will evaluation of the evidence? No, his belief is the result of prior physical causes acting on his physical stuff. It is caused by the way prior physical events randomly played themselves out in his life. Ultimately the atheist's belief that there is no God is not based on good reasons, but good physics!

If materialism is true we cannot claim to know anything; we are simply led to believe them (whether they be true or false) by prior physical factors, and cannot believe anything else. If all that exists is the material world knowledge is determined by physics, not meaningful and objectively related to reality. For knowledge to be meaningfully related to reality requires the existence of some immaterial aspect to man (soul) that can transcend the determinism inherent to a purely physical word. Such an immaterial aspect to man begs for an immaterial source for its existence. That source must be God, because physical stuff cannot produce non-physical stuff, of which the soul is. Ultimately, then, God must exist for one to know He doesn't.

Wha??  The above is from a Christian apologist.

So let's go through this piece by piece:

If there is no God everything is purely material, including ourselves.

This seems reasonable.

Material things do not make decisions, but respond in determined ways to prior physical events.

Humans are material things, and I just made the decision to go through this apologist's logic and find things that dont make sense to me.  This is one of them.  This person seems to forget the importance of sentience (ie, knowledge that one exists.)  Baseballs are material things, and yet they cannot make decisions (that we know about anyhow.  Of course, the sentence above is quite complicated and has many implications, but for the purpose of this, I think a reasonable interpretation is that humankind is a mindless set of walking baseballs.

They do not act, but simply react to prior physical factors.  For any particular event there exists a series of prior physical events that not only result in the event, but necessitate it.

Ah, but this goes back to the First Cause (or non-moving mover) argument for which I have not found a completely satisfactory explanation for.  What I do know is that St. Thomas Aquinus explanation was intellectually lazy and/or misleading.

If man is just physical stuff, then our "choices" and "knowledge" are like boiling water and falling dominos: they are necessary reactions to prior physical processes. There is no free will.

In a sense this is true (ie, we are constrained by our needs: food, shelter, love, etc.) but humans have unprecedented leeway on how to proceed to find our needs and wants.

Where does the atheist's knowledge that God does not exist come from, then? Does it come from a free will evaluation of the evidence? No, his belief is the result of prior physical causes acting on his physical stuff. It is caused by the way prior physical events randomly played themselves out in his life. Ultimately the atheist's belief that there is no God is not based on good reasons, but good physics!

I also would like to know where an atheist's definitive knowledge that God(s) does(do) not exist comes from.  Although I don't think physics is the answer to that, as science isn't suited to deal with beliefs. 

If materialism is true we cannot claim to know anything; we are simply led to believe them (whether they be true or false) by prior physical factors, and cannot believe anything else. If all that exists is the material world knowledge is determined by physics, not meaningful and objectively related to reality. For knowledge to be meaningfully related to reality requires the existence of some immaterial aspect to man (soul) that can transcend the determinism inherent to a purely physical word. Such an immaterial aspect to man begs for an immaterial source for its existence. That source must be God, because physical stuff cannot produce non-physical stuff, of which the soul is. Ultimately, then, God must exist for one to know He doesn't.

This is a bunch of hand-waving intellectually lazy crap.  Why must the source by God?  Why can't it be Zeus? or Apollo? or the Flying Spaghetti Monster?  Why? Because those that believe in a deity FEEL the deity.  They interpret the flying of electrons across their neurons as proof that God exists.  Even Bertrand Russell admitted he was an agnostic.  As we all logically must be.

The war on contraception?

This is quite scary to me, as it seems like the Right is becoming more and more fanatical as their time runs out.  NYCEve at DKos has the scoop:

But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

The emphasis is Eve's, but the story is at the New York Times.  This is quite possibly the scariest thing I've read in awhile.  The real issue to me is that people cannot keep from having sex.  The world has too many humans already.  Population control is essential.  Why can't we have abortions, or at the very least, contraception?

Hookergate mushrooms

Now expanding to include Porter Goss and Dusty Foggo-- good administration lackeys that might end up being a bit too partial to hookers.

It seems like all the corrupt Republicans are connected somehow.