Judge Condemns Intelligent Design as "Breathtaking Inanity"

Dear Diary,

Judge Says 'Intelligent Design' Is Not Science

He calls a school board's effort to teach it as an alternative to evolution unconstitutional.

A federal judge, saying "intelligent design" is "an interesting theological argument, but … not science," ruled Tuesday that a school board violated the Constitution by compelling biology teachers to present the concept as an alternative to evolution.

The ruling came after U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III heard 21 days of testimony in a closely watched trial that pitted a group of parents against the school board in the town of Dover, Pa. In October 2004, the board had required school officials to read a statement to ninth-graders declaring that Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution were "a theory … not a fact," and that "gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence."

"Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view," the statement said.

Jones, a church-going conservative who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bush in 2002, said the statement was clearly designed to insert religious teachings into the classroom. He used much of his 139-page ruling to dissect arguments made for intelligent design.

Legal experts described the ruling as a sharp defeat for the intelligent design movement — one likely to have considerable influence with other judges, although it is only legally binding in one area of Pennsylvania.

The "overwhelming evidence" has established that intelligent design "is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," Jones wrote. Public remarks by school board members, he said, made clear that they adopted the statement to advance specific religious views. Testimony at the trial included remarks from a board meeting, where one of the backers of the intelligent design statement "said words to the effect of '2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?' " the judge noted.

Supporters of intelligent design argue that biological systems are so complex that they could not have arisen by a series of random changes. The complexity of life implies an intelligent designer, they say. Most of the movement's spokesmen take care not to publicly say whether the designer they have in mind is equivalent to the God in the Bible. On that basis, they argue that their concept is scientific, not religious.

But Jones said the concept was inescapably religious."Although proponents of the [intelligent design movement] occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members" of the movement, including expert witnesses who testified, Jones wrote.

Remarks by board members that they had secular purposes in mind — to improve science teaching and to foster an open debate — were a "sham" and a "pretext for the board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote.

Anticipating attacks, Jones said his ruling was not the "product of an activist judge."He said school board officials had lied in their testimony and excoriated them for not bothering to understand what intelligent design was about before making their decision.

He rebuked what he called the "breathtaking inanity of the board's decision."

"This case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case" on intelligent design, he wrote.

The school district will not appeal the ruling, said Patricia Dapp, who was elected to the Dover board this year. The supporters of intelligent design have been voted out of office, and eight members of the board now oppose the concept, she said. The Dover trial, in which Jones heard testimony from leading advocates of intelligent design as well as experts on evolutionary theory, was one of several battlegrounds for intelligent design in the last year.

In January, a U.S. district judge in Georgia ruled that the school system in Cobb County, near Atlanta, had violated the Constitution by requiring stickers to be placed on biology textbooks casting doubt on the theory of evolution.This month, a federal appeals court in Atlanta considered arguments in the case, with at least one judge expressing doubts about the lower court ruling.

In Kansas, the state Board of Education has changed the definition of science to permit supernatural explanations.That reliance on the supernatural was key to Jones' rejection of the Dover school board's position.Intelligent design arguments "may be true, a proposition on which this court takes no position," he wrote, but it "is not science." "The centuries-old ground rules of science" make clear that a scientific theory must rely solely on natural explanations that can be tested, he wrote. That portion of the decision won praise from Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I. He was the lead expert witness for the parents in the case and is the author of biology textbooks used in college and high school classrooms. Miller testified that it was crucial that scientific propositions be able to be tested. To illustrate his point, Miller, an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox, testified that when his team beat the New York Yankees in the 2004 baseball playoffs, a fan might have believed "God was tired of [Yankee owner] George Steinbrenner and wanted to see the Red Sox win." "In my part of the country, you'd be surprised how many people think that's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened last year. And you know what? It might be true. But it certainly is not science … and it's certainly not something we can test," Miller said.

Supporters of intelligent design denounced Jones' ruling along the lines the judge had predicted."The Dover decision is an attempt by an activist federal judge to stop the spread of a scientific idea … and it won't work," said John West, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. The institute, based in Seattle, is a major backer of the intelligent design movement."Anyone who thinks a court ruling is going to kill off interest in intelligent design is living in another world," West said.Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center, the lead lawyer for the school board members, called the ruling an "ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God.""The founders of this country would be astonished at the thought that this simple curriculum change [was] in violation of the Constitution that they drafted," he said.

But Lee Strang, a constitutional law professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., which advocates a greater role for religion in public life, said that given Supreme Court precedents and the evidence that Dover school board members had religious goals in mind, Jones' ruling was inevitable.The Supreme Court in 1987 barred the teaching in public schools of what backers called creation science. The concept of intelligent design emerged after that ruling, Jones noted in his ruling.

Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas School of Law said the ruling would probably have considerable influence because it came after a trial in which "both sides brought in their top guns" to testify. The judge's detailed ruling "will be quite persuasive to other judges and lawyers thinking about provoking a similar case elsewhere," he said.

Marci Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York, who is an expert on religious freedom issues, agreed that the ruling could have broad ramifications."These are tough times to rule against a religious group," Hamilton said. "This decision sends a message to judges that it is not anti-religious to find things like intelligent design unconstitutional."

Eric Rothschild, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, called the ruling "a real vindication of the courage [the parents] showed and the position they took."The testimony, he said, had demonstrated that "the emperor had no clothes. The judge concluded that intelligent design had no scientific merit" and could not "uncouple itself from religion."

Dear Diary,

Who knew?

There is a Santa Claus, Indiana!

Santa Claus is located just 7 miles south of Interstate 64 in Southern Indiana.

According to legend, this small community, originally founded by German immigrants in the late 1840s, got its name on Christmas Eve in 1852. The local residents and leaders had been struggling quite some time to come up with an acceptable name for their town. Most of the community was present for the last town meeting of the year, held right after Christmas Eve services in the local church. They were hoping to finally determine a name for their town, when suddenly the wind blew the church doors open and mysterious sleigh bells were heard outside. The children yelled excitedly, “It’s Santa Claus!” At last! They finally had the perfect name for the town.

In the 1940's, Industrialist Louis J. Koch, built the World’s first theme park in the town of Santa Claus. Koch loved holidays and wanted children who visited the town to be able to see that this was truly Santa's home. The theme park, originally named Santa Claus Land, has experienced tremendous growth over the years and is well-known today as Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari.
Santa Claus is the only town in the world with the Santa Claus name that has a post office. You will find quite a few other Christmas-themed business and street names throughout the town - everything from Christmas Lake Village and Kringle Place to Santa’s Lodge, Holiday Foods and Ho Ho Ho Video. Each year, this small town hosts an old-fashioned Christmas in Santa Claus celebration and a 14-mile Festival of Lights.
http://www.traveleze.com/travel_planning/santaclaus.html

Torture is Morally Necessary?

Dear Diary,
according to some IT is.

"The Truth about Torture It's time to be honest about doing terrible things. "
by Charles Krauthammer 12/05/2005

DURING THE LAST FEW WEEKS in Washington the pieties about torture have lain so thick in the air that it has been impossible to have a reasoned discussion. The McCain amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the United States sailed through the Senate by a vote of 90-9. The Washington establishment remains stunned that nine such retrograde, morally inert persons--let alone senators--could be found in this noble capital.

Now, John McCain has great moral authority on this issue, having heroically borne torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese. McCain has made fine arguments in defense of his position. And McCain is acting out of the deep and honorable conviction that what he is proposing is not only right but is in the best interest of the United States. His position deserves respect. But that does not mean, as seems to be the assumption in Washington today, that a critical analysis of his "no torture, ever" policy is beyond the pale.

Let's begin with a few analytic distinctions. For the purpose of torture and prisoner maltreatment, there are three kinds of war prisoners:

First, there is the ordinary soldier caught on the field of battle. There is no question that he is entitled to humane treatment. Indeed, we have no right to disturb a hair on his head. His detention has but a single purpose: to keep him hors de combat. The proof of that proposition is that if there were a better way to keep him off the battlefield that did not require his detention, we would let him go. Indeed, during one year of the Civil War, the two sides did try an alternative. They mutually "paroled" captured enemy soldiers, i.e., released them to return home on the pledge that they would not take up arms again. (The experiment failed for a foreseeable reason: cheating. Grant found that some paroled Confederates had reenlisted.)

Because the only purpose of detention in these circumstances is to prevent the prisoner from becoming a combatant again, he is entitled to all the protections and dignity of an ordinary domestic prisoner--indeed, more privileges, because, unlike the domestic prisoner, he has committed no crime. He merely had the misfortune to enlist on the other side of a legitimate war. He is therefore entitled to many of the privileges enjoyed by an ordinary citizen--the right to send correspondence, to engage in athletic activity and intellectual pursuits, to receive allowances from relatives--except, of course, for the freedom to leave the prison.

Second, there is the captured terrorist. A terrorist is by profession, indeed by definition, an unlawful combatant: He lives outside the laws of war because he does not wear a uniform, he hides among civilians, and he deliberately targets innocents. He is entitled to no protections whatsoever. People seem to think that the postwar Geneva Conventions were written only to protect detainees. In fact, their deeper purpose was to provide a deterrent to the kind of barbaric treatment of civilians that had become so horribly apparent during the first half of the 20th century, and in particular, during the Second World War. The idea was to deter the abuse of civilians by promising combatants who treated noncombatants well that they themselves would be treated according to a code of dignity if captured--and, crucially, that they would be denied the protections of that code if they broke the laws of war and abused civilians themselves.

Breaking the laws of war and abusing civilians are what, to understate the matter vastly, terrorists do for a living. They are entitled, therefore, to nothing. Anyone who blows up a car bomb in a market deserves to spend the rest of his life roasting on a spit over an open fire. But we don't do that because we do not descend to the level of our enemy. We don't do that because, unlike him, we are civilized. Even though terrorists are entitled to no humane treatment, we give it to them because it is in our nature as a moral and humane people. And when on rare occasions we fail to do that, as has occurred in several of the fronts of the war on terror, we are duly disgraced.

The norm, however, is how the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo have been treated. We give them three meals a day, superior medical care, and provision to pray five times a day. Our scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Korans, which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo ever became an issue. That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.

Third, there is the terrorist with information. Here the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply. Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.
Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?
Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

Yes, you say, but that's an extreme and very hypothetical case. Well, not as hypothetical as you think. Sure, the (nuclear) scale is hypothetical, but in the age of the car-and suicide-bomber, terrorists are often captured who have just set a car bomb to go off or sent a suicide bomber out to a coffee shop, and you only have minutes to find out where the attack is to take place. This "hypothetical" is common enough that the Israelis have a term for precisely that situation: the ticking time bomb problem.

And even if the example I gave were entirely hypothetical, the conclusion--yes, in this case even torture is permissible--is telling because it establishes the principle: Torture is not always impermissible. However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb.

That is why the McCain amendment, which by mandating "torture never" refuses even to recognize the legitimacy of any moral calculus, cannot be right. There must be exceptions. The real argument should be over what constitutes a legitimate exception. Click here for the remainder of this article http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/400rhqav.asp
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Amnesty seeks UK probe into CIA flights
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F70C4486-A501-4F69-9695-59F92AEB8226.htm
Amnesty International says Britain allowed the CIA to operate flights on its territory to transport terrorism detainees illegally and demanded that the government launch an investigation.

"The UK has allowed these aircraft to land, re-fuel and take off from their territory," the human rights group's regional director Claudio Cordone said in a statement on Thursday.

"The UK government must launch an immediate, thorough and independent investigation into mounting evidence that its territory has been used to assist in unlawfully transporting detainees to countries where they may face "disappearance", torture or other ill-treatment," he added.
The British government said on Monday it had no evidence that the current US administration had been transporting terrorism suspects through British airports.

Cordone said: "Whether the US is sending people to other countries to be tortured, or snatching them in other countries to be abused in Guantanamo, international law prohibits the UK, or any other state, from aiding or abetting them."

CIA prisons
Human rights groups accuse the CIA of running secret prisons in eastern Europe and covertly transporting detainees -a practice known as "extraordinary rendition". They say incommunicado detention often leads to torture.

"The UK government must launch an immediate investigation into mounting evidence that its territory has been used to assist in unlawfully transporting detainees"Amnesty International statementThe Amnesty statement named several men it said had been abducted by the CIA and flown to Jordan and Egypt as part of the US campaign of "extraordinary rendition".

In each case a Gulfstream V, registration N379P, had stopped to refuel at Prestwick airport in Scotland on its way back to the United States after dropping off its passengers, it said. It cited the case of Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed who it said was seen being bundled aboard the CIA plane by masked men in Karachi on 23 October, 2001. The plane then flew to Jordan and the following day, now without its passenger, it flew to Prestwick and then on to Dulles International airport near Washington.

Amnesty demanded that the United States reveal Mohammed's whereabouts. UK stop-overAmnesty said that on 12 January, 2002, Indonesian security officials saw Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni being put on the plane in Jakarta and flown to Cairo. Once again the plane stopped in Prestwick to refuel after depositing its passenger.

It said Iqbal Madni had since been returned to US jurisdiction and was now a detainee in Guantanamo Bay where fellow detainees had said he was on the verge of a breakdown.
Amnesty cited a third case where a Swedish investigation has already revealed that US security officials took Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari from Sweden to Cairo for torture.
In total, Gulfstream N379P had been logged between 2001 and 2005 making at least 78 stopovers at British airports while en route to or from destinations such as Baku, Dubai, Cyprus, Karachi, Qatar, Riyadh, Tashkent, and Warsaw, Amnesty said.

Institutional Repository (IR) / Open Access Archives

Dear Diary,

I met with a few library faculty and other department faculty to give them a courtesy overview of our project.

The head of the IR committee and I met with the law school professor who specializes in Copyright. We learned a lot about exclusive rights to copy and distribute, difference in pre & post-1922 materials, and a few exceptions, such as photographs of pre-1922 works which would ordinarily be in the public domain.

We realized the amount of work involved in tracking down individual Copyright Agreements for contributing individuals. We understand better the focused, yet extensive audience that already exists for law faculty. Law faculty can be pre-published and track how many times their pre-prints have been viewed with SSRN. The law faculty specifically already has many of the conveniences we would offer with our IR. So at first glance it would appear that the benefits to contribute to our IR would be neglible. So we need to work to find a way to make it more appealing. I loved the explanation given: "Lawyers are cautious and risk adverse." Aren't we all?

So the next portion is to create a website for our IR project. I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel so these are some of the sample sites I plan to suggest we model our page after and/or link directly to:

FAQs:
https://drum.umd.edu/dspace/help/FAQs.jsp
http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/idea/faq.html
http://libweb.uoregon.edu/catdept/irg/SB_FAQ.html

Glossary:
http://library.osu.edu/events/cs/techseminar04/glossary/repos.html

Webliography & Sample Repositories:
http://www.bc.edu/libraries/about/scholcomm/s-repositories/#examples

RoMEO:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html