Dennis Miller, on the left-wing bias of the New York Times: “They’re so anti Bush now, they won’t even use words in the crossword puzzle that have a “w” in them.”

You’ll have to excuse me now — my sides are still aching from the uncontrollable spasms of laughter that one induced.

Jury Duty

Originally uploaded by gocarrt.

Guess what? I got called for jury duty. Most people try to get out of jury duty, but I must admit, I’m pretty psyched.

Jury duty means $40 a day from Uncle Sam (aka Gov. Spitzer). That’s right, forty bucks a day just for sitting, listening, and giving one up-or-down vote at the end. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

No hustling for this gig, they send me a legally binding summons.
Usually, I don’t get paid unless I write about stuff. With jury duty, I’m mercifully forbidden to write anything about what I see or hear. Just sitting, listening, and meting out a legally binding opinion on the facts.

Maybe they’ll even make me the foreman.

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Biblical evidence suggests that people and dinosaurs coexisted.

The word dinosaur was coined in 1841 by creationist Richard Owen[1], from the Latin for “terrible lizard”. Dinosaurs were a group of large lizards that previously lived in abundance on Earth.

Darwinists believe that dinosaurs lived from 230 million until 65 million years ago and that they are all currently extinct (except for birds, which they consider to be descended from dinosaurs). They claim the fossil evidence supports their beliefs.

Creationists believe, based primarily on Biblical evidences, but also drawing on archeological and fossil evidence, that dinosaurs were created on the 6th day of the Creation Week[2], between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago; that they lived in the Garden of Eden in harmony with other animals, eating only plants[3]; that pairs of various dinosaur baramins were taken onto Noah’s Ark during the Great Flood and were preserved from drowning[4]; that fossilized dinosaur bones originated during the mass killing of the Flood[5]; and that some descendants of those dinosaurs taken aboard the Ark still roam the earth today[6].

Because the term only game into use in the 19th century, the Bible obviously does not use the word “dinosaur.” However, they are mentioned in numerous places throughout the Good Book. For example, the behemoth in Job[7] and the leviathan in Isaiah are almost certainly references to dinosaurs.

h/t reader JX.

… adding, here’s some of their source material:

How did those huge dinosaurs fit on the Ark?

Although there are about 668 names of dinosaurs, there are perhaps only 55 different “kinds” of dinosaurs. Furthermore, not all dinosaurs were huge like the Brachiosaurus, and even those dinosaurs on the Ark were probably “teenagers” or young adults.

Creationist researcher John Woodmorappe has calculated that Noah had on board with him representatives from about 8,000 animal genera (including some now-extinct animals), or around 16,000 individual animals. When you realize that horses, zebras, and donkeys are probably descended from the horse-like “kind”, Noah did not have to carry two sets of each such animal. Also, dogs, wolves, and coyotes are probably from a single canine “kind”, so hundreds of different dogs were not needed.

According to Genesis 6:15, the Ark measured 300 x 50 x 30 cubits, which is about 460 x 75 x 44 feet, with a volume of about 1.52 million cubic feet. Researchers have shown that this is the equivalent volume of 522 standard railroad stock cars (US), each of which can hold 240 sheep. By the way, only 11% of all land animals are larger than a sheep.

Without getting into all the math, the 16,000-plus animals would have occupied much less than half the space in the Ark (even allowing them some moving-around space).
Conclusion

The Bible is reliable in all areas, including its account of the Ark (and the worldwide catastrophic Flood). A Christian doesn’t have to have a blind faith to believe that there really was an Ark. What the Bible says about the Ark can even be measured and tested today.

The human mind is a wondrous and terrifying thing.

I missed this one a couple weeks ago, just caught it on a Daily Show rerun:

“Could you picture Davy Crockett at the Alamo looking at his Blackberry getting a message from Congress? ‘Davy Crockett, we support you. The only thing is we are not going to send any troops.’ I’m sure that would really be impressive to Davy Crockett.”

–Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo), 2/13/2007, during the debate on a resolution opposing the troop escalation in Iraq.

It’s link-to-Salon day here at TMW.

Joe Lieberman, today: “previously there weren’t enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias.”

Joe Lieberman, 2005: “The administration’s recent use of the banner ‘clear, hold, and build’ accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.”

How can Joe Lieberman claim today that we previously lacked sufficient troop strength to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared, when he insisted a year ago that we were holding neighborhoods — he saw it himself — and that we were therefore on the verge of success?

On what conceivable basis is Joe Lieberman accorded even the most minimal respect or credibility?

I recently invited Lindsay Beyerstein to join the TMW blogging collective because every time I looked at her site, she’d have something on a news story I’d either meant to blog but didn’t get around to or had missed entirely. Rather than vowing to do a better job myself, it seemed easier just to co-opt her. And reading this piece of hers in Salon confirmed to me that she’ll fit in at TMW, because I would have had exactly the same response, in the astonishingly unlikely event I were invited to blog for a campaign:

I was dazzled by Edwards’ speech, Bob’s vision and the sense that I might be on the verge of the big time. I wanted to jump on the bus, but I knew I couldn’t.

“I’m probably not … the person you want,” I said, finally. “I mean, I’m on the record saying that abortion is good and that all drugs should be legalized, including heroin. Don’t you think that might be a little embarrassing for the campaign?”

Bob assured me that my controversial posts weren’t a problem as far as the campaign was concerned. They were familiar with my work. And Bob did seem to know my writing. I didn’t get the impression he was a daily reader, but it was obvious he had been reading the blog for a while.

“That’s you, that’s not John Edwards,” he said.

Bob was confident that people would understand the difference. I wasn’t so sure.

“So, it’s not a problem that I’m an outspoken atheist?” I asked.

Every blogger says controversial things from time to time, Bob assured me. He admitted that he’d drawn some fire for a tasteless joke on his own site a while back. It hadn’t been a big deal.

I asked if I would have to quit blogging at Majikthise in order to take the job with Edwards. My blog means more to me than any job I’ve ever had. After three years of hard work, I finally have a platform from which to express ideas that won’t get a hearing in the established media, let alone in mainstream Democratic politics. So the prospect of giving up my untrammeled freedom to blog press releases for John Edwards gave me pause. Still, I assumed Bob would say it was a necessity.

I was wrong. Bob promised that I wouldn’t have to give up my personal blog. He added that I probably wouldn’t have much time left for personal blogging, since everyone was working 18-hour days on the campaign. But, he noted, he hadn’t given up his own blog, and neither had another member of the Edwards Internet team.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A bunch of Internet staffers with private blogs sounded like a disaster waiting to happen.

What happened to the Edwards bloggers was infuriating. But knowing that these issues were raised in advance … suffice it to say, some day we’re going to look back on this point in the history of the internet and be astonished at how naive and careless we were.

The war on rationality proceeds apace.

On a related note, you’ve certainly heard about the Conservapedia by now. (If not, don’t say I never gave you a present.) I agree with the kids at Sadly No that it will probably soon become a wholly-infiltrated parody site — but in the meantime, there are delights like this actual entry to savor:

The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times,[1] which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.

In the original texts, unicorns go by the Hebrew name Re-em whereas the Greek Septuagint used the name Monokeros.[2] Unicorn itself is Latin. All three names mean “one horn”.

Also: the seed of the idea for this week’s cartoon, the “flat earth” riff, came from a reader who either wishes to remain anonymous or doesn’t check his email very often. You know who you are — if you’d like a signed print of the cartoon, shoot me an email.

I gotta say, I like this Al Gore a lot better than the guy who thought Joe Lieberman was a good choice for a running mate.

Even when he confines his column to what one imagines would be his own comfort zone — grandiose yet unsupported sociological generalizations — Brooks manages to screw it up, conflating Neal Pollack-style Williamsburg hipster parents with their upscale Urban-Baby-Dot-Com/Maclaren-stroller-buying Park Slope counterparts.* There’s certainly some overlap, but these are actually two very distinct types. I don’t expect most people reading this post to have given the matter much thought, but if you’re somebody who prides himself on being able to spot a societal trend at thirty paces, trust me, it’s a distinction you should really be aware of.

And there’s this:

There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture. For 30 years, the music, the fashions, the poses and the urban weeklies have all been the same. Everything in this society changes except nonconformity.

I can’t speak to the poses, having never been particularly cool myself, but if you believe that music, fashions, and most importantly (to me) altweeklies are exactly the same today as they were in 1977 — well, your name must be David Brooks, and you get paid a great deal of money to opine on topics about which you are aparently unencumbered by personal experience or knowledge.

*Adding the obvious: the majority of people Brooks is trying to summarize fit into neither easy category … I use the Brooklyn neighborhoods here as handy shorthand, nothing more — I lived in the Slope for more than five years myself, some of them as a parent …

1. Arthur Silber, “Dispatch from Germany, Summer of 1939,” Part I and Part II

2. Michael Klare at Tomdispatch, “Bush’s Future Iran War Speech”

3. And of course Seymour Hersh, “Our Government’s Gone Completely Insane and I’m Writing About It in the New Yorker for the 30th Time Even Though None of You Seem to Listen”

Richard Wolffe of Newsweek:

I think the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards in covering politics in general.

Fantastic!

Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed…

Among those polled for the AP survey…the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890.

Fantastic!

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

(Title borrowed from Saheli.)