For those of you who think the suicide pilot is a hero…

more about "For those of you who think the suicid…", posted with vodpod

Source article:

When Ken Hunter first heard about a plane crashing into his father’s office building in Austin, he said he hoped his dad, Vernon Hunter, wasn’t there.

After several attempts to reach his father, a 67-year-old IRS worker, he discovered his dad was missing.

Pilot Joseph Stack crashed his Piper Cherokee PA28 single-engine plane into the Echelon Building 1 in northwest Austin. The building housed 200 employees of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and its criminal investigations division.

The pilot and Hunter’s father were killed in the crash. Thirteen others were injured.

“I saw the building and that was my dad’s office building. So I called maybe eight times or more,” Ken said.

But his dad never picked up the phone. A few hours later, he learned his dad was missing. [...]

In the hours that followed, Ken said he heard lots of talk about the pilot’s motivations and felt compelled to speak out on his father’s behalf.

“There was just too much going on about what the guy did and what he believed in, and enough’s enough,” he said. “They don’t need to talk about him. Talk about my dad. You know, some people are trying to make this guy out to be a hero, a patriot. My dad served two terms in Vietnam. This guy never served at all. My dad wasn’t responsible for his tax problems.”

Some commentary from here:

I have been in a rage since this happened!

I’ve seen so many people commenting on this scum pilot these last couple of days, Domestic Criminal Terrorist, on how he shouldn’t have done what he did But he had a righteous, populist rage against the Government for his tax troubles They were causing him!

This Terrorist flew a quarter million dollar plane, he owned, into a building intent of killing as many people as possible! It was a well planned attack, right down to a many page written suicide note of his rants against The Man!

It’s been reported he had his business license stripped in California twice for evading taxes, one of those times, I heard, had something to do with a partner and religious ideology as tax exempt. My guess is if he ever had any employee’s he was screwing them like he kept trying to screw the government, Us!!

He gets absolutely no sympathy from this Veteran and now we find out the one that died was a brother ‘Nam Vet who did not one but two tours In-Country!

There is NOTHING honorable or understandable about what this suicide pilot did. He killed an innocent man and anguished his family. He torched his own house and screwed over his own family. He endangered rescue crews and ordinary people who were driving on the highways that the emergency vehicles had to travel over.

He was a pathetic, self-pitying murderer, period.

From our Student Newspaper: Racist Kooks in Central Illinois

This is the link:

In late January, fliers calling for locals to speak out against a Peorian allegedly involved in the Illinois National Socialist Front, a neo-Nazi organization, were discovered on campus. About two weeks later, a flyer describing the goals of the Knights Party, also known as the Ku Klux Klan, was also found.

The first report of the fliers came about 1 p.m. Jan. 21 when Eugenia Kyle, an employee in the Multicultural Student Services Department, alerted police that two men were attempting to hand out fliers at the Garrett Center.

The leaflet, apparently distributed through South Side Chicago Anti-Racist Action, an organization seeking to fight racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and discrimination, called for locals to protest against purported NSF member Philip Anderson.

It listed Anderson’s last known home address in Peoria Heights, an e-mail address for the Illinois NSF as well as Anderson’s supposed personal e-mail address, his phone number and other information.

The flier urged Peorians to speak out against Anderson.

“Let’s make clear to Phil and his hate organization that they are not welcome,” it read.

Williams Hall Director Jeff De Chavez found one of the fliers at the back entrance of Williams that same day. De Chavez said he was shocked when he discovered the flier and he took it down immediately.

“It’s something to be kind of alarmed about because this is a campus … and we are getting these around a school that is so diverse,” he said.

Two weeks later, about 2 p.m. Feb. 6, a student found a flier on the windshield of a car parked in the 1400 block of St. James Avenue. The student turned the flier in to food service staff at the Student Center, who then called campus police.

This flier explained the Knights Party, claiming that “the position of whites are vilified” and that other races and cultures have “a hatred of white culture, a jealousy for all that [whites] have accomplished.”

So KKK fliers and anti-racist fliers on campus. There were Neo-Nazi fliers distributed in the general area some time ago, but that isn’t discussed in this article. I have to admit that this article was the first thing that made me aware of these goings on.

OMG, A President that Understands Elementary Science!

Of course, current weather neither disproves nor proves climate change. The current crazy weather is consistent with but not diagnostic of climate change; climate change is proved via long term and widespread measurements.

If Paul Krugman is feeling optimistic…

that is a very good sign.

20 February 2010: What Evolutionists Argue About

Scientists who are experts on evolution often disagree on key issues. One of the key issues is “what are the predominant forces/principles that drive evolution? ” In particular, “what role does natural selection” play and to what degree?

No serious scientist doubts that natural selection is a major force. But does it dominate the other forces (e. g., genetic drift)?

Here is one opinion (taken on an article discussing a book review) from Jerry Coyne:

True, there are processes besides selection that can cause genetic change—meiotic drive and genetic drift are two of them—but no process other than natural selection can yield those remarkable features of organisms—the apparent “design” of plants and animals—that used to be explained by God.

I’ll start paying attention to these radical revisions of Darwinism, including attacks on natural selection, when they tell me how non-Darwinian processes can yield the appearance of design. I’ll exit the flock of “hidebound Darwinists” (a term Steve Gould once applied to me) when I hear how modularity, epigenesis, self-organization, or evo-devo constitute self-contained explanations for the elephant’s trunk.

Note: Coyne liked the review in question; the book review that attacked the book.

Of course, I lack the credentials to have an opinion worth listening to. But here is what I see:

Example one: check out the animal camouflage series at the Conservation Report:

Now how do you explain such natural camouflage other than by natural selection?

Example Two: Niche filling:

Here is a photo of a marsupial carnivore which evolved to fill a predator niche.

Of course, other excellent scientists know this but still disagree. Here is Larry Moran:

But the fundamental point about constraints is interesting and it’s true that adaptationists have been forced to recognize it every since Gould and Lewontin published the Spandrels paper back in 1977. Most adaptationist still don’t get it and Ruse is no exception, although in this case he probably gets it better than Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini. Ruse admits that there are certain physical constraints on the way plant leaves evolve, for example, but he then goes on to say that everything else is an adaptation. How does he know this? How does he know for sure that the differences in the leaves of red maples, silver maples, and sugar maples are all due to natural selection? [...]

Hundreds of evolutionary biologists have written about random genetic drift and other possible mechanisms of evolution (e.g., molecular drive, species sorting). They do not claim, as Ruse implies, that non-adaptive traits become fixed because they are “linked” to adaptive ones. Is this how Ruse dismisses random genetic drift—by treating it as a by-product of natural selection?

In fairness, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini do go on about linkage in their published articles so Ruse is right to mock those silly claims. However, I wish he didn’t make things worse by implying that hitchhiking is the explanation for drift.

The existence of random genetic drift does not mean that natural selection “fails. ” It just means that natural selection by itself is not a sufficient explanation for evolutionary change. Perhaps Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are confused about this—other reviews suggest that this is the case—but Michael Ruse seems to be trashing the very idea that something other than natural selection could be at play. [...]

Ruse and his fellow adaptationists treat the world as if it were an object of design because they are psychologically committed to the idea that natural selection is responsible for almost everything. They cannot adjust to the fact that much of what we see in living things could be due to accident, or even the fixation of deleterious mutations. That’s one of the reasons they have so much trouble with junk DNA and it’s why they can’t account for so much diversity in populations.

Here’s a clue. Life doesn’t actually look terribly designed. Get over it. Abandon the metaphor—it just feeds into a false notion of evolution and, incidentally, lends support to the IDiots.

Note: Larry Moran does not like the review that Jerry Coyne liked.

And speaking of the appearance of design: I find it interesting that I learned from Coyne’s book (Why Evolution is True) how our own bodies blatantly point out the lack of design; for example consider the weird path taken by the Vagus nerve which runs from our brains to our voice box but winds through our chests!

Of course this oddity isn’t about natural selection or drift but rather the remnants of what we evolved from.

And yes, I am aware that much really doesn’t look THAT designed:

20 February 2010: link dump edition

Ok, I’ve been wanting to talk about many of these topics but haven’t gotten to yet:

As far as my opinion of this president: this blog author is on my wavelength. I like the conclusion:

We now have a bona fide intellectual in the Oval Office – such things are rare. This is a man of understanding and insight, but his power to achieve change for good is not greater than the dedication of his supporters. Obama has to rally his supporters through a visible commitment to action, and his supporters must be willing to stand tall beside him.

I still wish that he was more partisan but he has more political skill in his pinkie finger than I have in my body. Sure he is human and will screw up from time to time. Also, I don’t agree with him on everything; for example I tend to side a bit more with Paul Krugman and Robert Reich on economic issues. But I have little doubt that he examines the issues completely prior to making a decision, and that is NOT the type of confidence that I had in our previous president (though I did have it with the first President Bush).

How does the 2010 mid-term elections look? Nate Silver argues that while the situations might be vastly different, the results (in terms of Democrats losing seats) might look more or less the same. In all honestly, things have gotten done, but there is a lot of attention on the big-ticket items. I honestly think that passing health care reform can only help the Democrats; remember that much of the opposition to the Senate Bill comes from the left (e. g., it doesn’t go far enough).

Also, there have been successes in Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two senior Taliban leaders have been arrested in recent days inside Pakistan, officials said Thursday, as American and Pakistani intelligence agents continued to press their offensive against the group’s leadership after the capture of the insurgency’s military commander last month.
[...]

The arrests come on the heels of the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s military commander and the deputy to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the movement’s founder. Mullah Baradar was arrested in a joint operation by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency.

Together, the arrests represent a significant blow to the Taliban’s leadership in the American-backed war that began in 2001. They also demonstrate the extent to which the Taliban’s senior leaders have been able to use Pakistan as a sanctuary to plan and mount attacks in Afghanistan

Yes, that is one of the things that the voters will look at. Of course, the success is due to the military and to the long term strategy, some of which began under the previous administration. This is an American success, not a political party one. But this is the type of news that can help an incumbent.

Political and Social Issues: Facebook as been an interesting experience. I have friends from many different walks of life; I have wealthy ones, MD’s, Ph. D’s, lawyers, truck drivers, the chronically homeless (who check in from public libraries), engineers and former (and current) military types.

Some live in rural areas; others live in big cities. Some are African American, others have my skin tone and many (most?) are white.

What I’ve come away with is that my day to day life is very different from the day to day life of others. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this. I had someone say this:

Statement from the guy who flew the plane into the Austin TX IRS building today. I think this is more central to American concerns, rather than race

To this individual, “race” isn’t a central American concern. Well, what do you mean by “American concerns“?

“Do you think blacks have achieved racial equality, will soon achieve racial equality, will not achieve racial equality in your lifetime, or will never achieve racial equality?”

Some numbers from this question:
Answering “have achieved”: 11 percent of Blacks, 40 percent of Whites. Answering “will soon”: 38 percent Blacks, 31 percent Whites. Answering “not in this lifetime” or “never”: 49 percent Blacks, 26 percent Whites.

How can race not be central to American concerns?

Science Snark fail: I like making fun of southern states as much as anyone. But be sure that your snarky cartoon doesn’t have elementary errors in it, ok?

Now remind me: why does being religious make one a better parent?:

It’s another case of religious parents killing their kids, but this time, it’s not because they denied them medical care.

No, in this case, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz just whipped their 7-year-old child Lydia to death.

Police found a 15″ length of rubber tubing in the Schatz’s home which the children say was used to discipline them; sometimes for “hours” at a time. According to the district attorney, Lydia and Zariah sustained deep bruising and multiple “whip-like” marks on their back, buttocks and legs. This, Ramsey said, is believed to have resulted in significant muscle tissue breakdown that impaired their kidneys and possibly other vital organs.

What horrible thing did Lydia do that invoked this tragedy?

[County District Attorney Mike] Ramsey said the evidence suggests the girl who died was being disciplined “for hours” last Friday in the parent’s bedroom for mispronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson.

20 February 2010 (pm): Personal Issues

Saturday night. I am not at the Bradley basketball game as my cough is still a bit too unpredictable though I am well past the “most contagious” period.

Workout notes I lifted weights; barbell benchpresses, military presses, curls, pull ups, pull-downs, yoga leg lifts, then one round of my dumbbell routine.

I was weak; I made my dumbbell weights (at lower reps) and made 185 in the bench but missed at 195 (barely).

We had lunch with Barbara’s son and his wife; and then I slept the afternoon away as the “nighttime” medicine put me out and made me feel drugged.

I hope to swim tomorrow morning (gentle, relatively short)