… and gettin’ his story straight.
The New York Times published an incisive editorial on Monday about the lame habit Treasury and the Fed (including Geithner) have of throwing up their hands and saying they had no legal authority to act otherwise when faced with challenging questions about their failed handling of bailouts and assorted crises.
I remain cautiously optimistic that Geithner can successfully represent and implement Obama’s platform, but I have absolutely no problem with bringing out the hot coals during his confirmation hearing.
Luckily you are spared further pontification on this matter as I am on a plane today, flying across country with a toddler. (And we thought managing the financial markets was tough.) I’ll be “reporting” from my old Los Angeles stomping ground over the holidays. Cheers!
By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be taking a final exam, and my heroic co-author will be experiencing the American holiday air travel system, in all its overpriced, infuriatingly slow, soul-crushing grandeur. We who are about to die, salute you.
And yet, just because we’re occupied elsewhere does not mean that idiocy will content itself with slumber. Far from it. The day before yesterday, Uncommon Descent published its most recent breathtaking work of staggering genius in defense of intelligent design. The operative parts follow – staggering admissions in bold:
Laying aside any real or imagined conspiracies on the part of “creationists”, I want to focus on the contrast Branch and [my hero Eugenie] Scott make between a “scientific explanation” and a “supernatural account” of the history of life. There are so many assumptions built into this particular contrast its hard to know where to begin. First the clear implication is that a scientific explanation represents fact whereas the supernatural account represents some fuzzy religious idea. In other words, its an epistomological assumption about what represents true knowledge (science) and what does not (religion).
Secondly is the assumption that the naturalistic worldview of science takes precedent over the theistic worldview of anyone who purports that a supernatural creator had something to do with bringing about the existence of life on earth. So much for methodological naturalism. Clearly full blown philosophical naturalism is equated to science here, since the contrast is between science and the supernatural.
In case we’ve forgotten, science excludes supernatural causes because it’s the only way to create objective, testable, applicable hypotheses. But that’s neither here nor there. The real story behind “DonaldM’s” open flaunting of ID’s supernatural core is this.
See, intelligent design used to be dangerous. It has always been – and will remain – a misguided attempt to understand the world built on uninformed, dogmatic, simple-minded misunderstandings of basic fact. But it used to be something to be feared, a creationist’s cloak-and-dagger way of appearing to play within the scientific framework by obscuring the “theory’s” reliance on supernaturalism, in an attempt to bypass Supreme Court precedent barring the teaching of creation science in public schools because of its reliance on the supernatural. ((See Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) (spurning as non-scientific, and therefore religious, any theory of human origins that relies upon supernaturalism.)) ID creationists played along – until it was exposed on the stand for all to see. ((See Kitzmiller v. Dover Area Sch. Dist., 400 F.2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005), available here.)) Now it seems that (ID)eologues, from Ben Stein to the Discovery Institute to (now) Uncommon Descent, have openly given up the ghost and conceded their reliance on supernaturalism, essentially terminating any hope ID ever had for legal incorporation into the public sphere.
It’s like Uncommon Descent never got the (wedge) memo, and somehow forgot to fasten the hatch on ID’s little Trojan Horse. It’s a beautiful thing, watching all their little soldiers tumble helplessly and harmlessly out. Way to go, “DonaldM.”
