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Thanks to Baron Scarpia for alerting us to this website, which outlines the rigorous academic standards [Quote-miners, please note: this is sarcasm] which William Dembski’s students have to achieve in his courses on Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary:

http://www.designinference.com/teaching/teaching.htm

If you follow the links, you will see that it is full of gems: we won’t spoil them for you by flagging them all up, but – just to whet your appetite – you will notice that, at both undergrad and masters level, there are courses for which 20% of the final marks come from having made 10 posts defending ID on ‘hostile’ websites! This could explain a lot.

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Along with selling unknowing consumers $80 HDMI cables that they could buy online for a few bucks, HDTV retailers other longtime scam is to boost the brightness in their stores (including on the sets themselves) to entice buyers. Why? In part because bright screens can mask poor black-level performance on cheaper sets. But then some buyers are then surprised when sets that “pop” in a store appear far more muted when they are hooked up in the living room.

Adding a little bit of empirical evidence to back up this claim, HDGuru recently visited major retailers with an illuminance meter in hand to see just how much brighter their showrooms are compared to the average living room. While he measured 10 homes with light levels that ranged from 1.2 to 110.1 lux, the stores he visited measured: Best Buy, 180.3; Sears, 236.58; Target, 371.38; Walmart, 411.66; BJs, 412.13, and Costco, 742.77. You’ll notice that the stores that have sales people who specialize in home theater equipment (Best Buy and Sears) register far lower readings than the big-box and warehouse stores that don’t offer dedicated TV help. HDGuru theorizes that the amped-up levels at Target and Costco help the cheaper sets they sell look a lot better than their performance will be once you bring them home.

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On August 7, 2009, on her Facebook page, Palin wrote,

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

But as the Anchorage Daily News reported this last July, the situation in the state’s Medicare- and Medicaid-funded in-home elder care program became so bad that the federal government had to step in and force Alaska to make necessary improvements.

In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.

The feds had been tipped off to the systemic problems by doctors and other health care providers, who found the state unresponsive when confronted with their incompetence.  No other state faced comparable problems.

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….”never once did I have a Medicare bureaucrat tell me what I couldn’t do for a patient, but all the time we have bureaucrats from the insurance companies calling up and saying we’re not going to cover this, we’re not going to pay for that, we’re denying coverage for that. The system we have now is broken. We need to fix it.”
Dr. Howard Dean, former Democratic Presidential Candidate and former DNC Chairman
Source: Raw Story

The most intrusive system to life-saving medical care is already occurring. Doctors daily have to contend with the regulation on their medical practice by the Health Insurance Industry that decides what treatment is acceptable for payment.

So while former Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin has called President Obama’s health plan “evil” because it may lead to “death panels” that decide who gets to live and die. Unfortunately, we already have these death panels and they are insurance company executives that decide who will get to live and die based upon what they will pay for.

The absurdity of the rationale in which it is all right for a person to live or die based upon whether they have good health insurance, but it isn’t all right for all people to have access to health care because the government might be involved is a type of American madness.

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South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford used state aircraft for personal and political trips, often bringing along his wife and children – contrary to state law regarding official use, an Associated Press investigation has found.

According to state budget law, “Any and all aircraft owned or operated by agencies of the State Government shall be used only for official business.”

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The governor has made a political career out of being outwardly thrifty – known to demand that state employees use both sides of Post-It notes. He has frequently railed against government spending, and attempted for months to block federal stimulus money for South Carolina schools.

While you were all looking at a broken web site, I was on a boat trip to Klein Curacao, and all your email about the site did not get seen by me, as internet hasn’t really reached small uninhabited islands yet… (and thanks to Jan-Mark for fixing it!)

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To understand the impotent fury that provokes in impoverished farmers, consider the reaction if something similar happened in Britain. The international development policy consultant Mark Weston has a vivid image to help: “Imagine if China, following a brief negotiation with a British government desperate for foreign cash after the collapse of the economy, bought up the whole of Wales, replaced most of its inhabitants with Chinese workers, turned the entire country into an enormous rice field, and sent all the rice produced there for the next 99 years back to China,” he suggests.

“Imagine that neither the evicted Welsh nor the rest of the British public knew what they were getting in return for this, having to content themselves with vague promises that the new landlords would upgrade a few ports and roads and create jobs for local people.

“Then, imagine that, after a few years – and bearing in mind that recession and the plummeting pound have already made it difficult for Britain to buy food from abroad – an oil-price spike or an environmental disaster in one of the world’s big grain-producing nations drives global food prices sharply upwards, and beyond the reach of many Britons. While the Chinese next door in Wales continue sending rice back to China, the starving British look helplessly on, ruing the day their government sold off half their arable land. Some of them plot the violent recapture of the Welsh valleys.”

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Deep in the outer realms of our solar system, well over a billion kilometers away, something bizarre happened at Saturn’s F ring.

I mean, seriously: what the hell happened here?

This is one of the latest pictures returned from the remarkable human achievement that is the Cassini spacecraft, a probe the size of a school bus that has been orbiting the ringed planet since 2004. It’s returned one incredible picture after another, and lately — as Saturn’s orbit has brought it to a point where the rings are nearly edge-on to the Sun — things have gotten not only spectacular but also really weird.

The rings are incredibly thin, only a few meters in thickness despite being hundreds of thousands of kilometers across. Over the past few months, as the Sun shines almost straight into the rings (instead of down on them), every bump and irregularity sticks out like, well, like a tree in the desert. Weird gravitational effects from Saturn’s fleet of moons tune and resonate the countless particles making up the rings, creating beautiful waves and ripples.

But this, this is something new.

It’s not exactly clear what’s going on here, even in this slightly zoomed shot. But it looks for all the world – or worlds — like some small object on an inclined orbit has punched through Saturn’s narrow F ring, bursting out from underneath, and dragging behind it a wake of particles from the rings. The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it’s casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what’s with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed in the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.

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For two-and-a-half days, about 800 doctors, nurses, dentists and optometrists treated 2,700 uninsured and underinsured people, most from Appalachia. No one was asked for an insurance card. There were no co-pays. And there were no bills.

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ad news for VAIO owners out there hoping to use Windows 7′s XP mode or run any other hardcore virtual machine applications — Sony disables the required hardware virtualization features of its laptops for “security reasons.” That means XP Mode won’t work on any VAIOs, but there’s hope yet: Sony’s Xavier Lauwaert says that the company will re-enable VT on “select models.”

Sony is probably worried that you’d infect your computer by putting a Sony audio CD in them – the one with the rootkit..

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Every so often there’s a story on the global health circuit that is so absurd, it causes our proverbial record to scratch. Like the time that South Africa’s former Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, said that ingesting lemon juice and potatoes could help treat HIV.  Or when evangelical groups like Word Relief, who received millions of U.S. federal dollars in PEPFAR funding under President George W. Bush, told people in countries like Mozambique, Kenya and Haiti that condoms don’t work to prevent STDs.

Well, now it’s time to count Malaysia’s government-run news service as part of the global health lie factory.  Today they’re out with an article from a physician that says homosexuality and masturbation make the body an easy target for Swine Flu (otherwise known as H1N1).  The scary part is that the news service in question, Bernama, runs their stories in nearly every part of the country.  Lies and misinformation, get ready to spread.