Designs Of The Times

Well, this is unusual. The New York Times has actually given Intelligent Design theorist Michael Behe space to say in his own words what the Intelligent Design movement is all about, without burying it in the middle of some kind of "Creationist Idiots Are Out To Destroy Science" story. I've been following the Intelligent Design (ID) debate since 1996, and have read all of the key books published on the topic (including those by uber-Darwinist and staunch atheist Richard Dawkins). Before reading up on ID, I'd always been content to believe in the whole "random mutation, natural selection", "molecules to man", "goo-to-zoo-to-you", "we're just a random accident" creation story of Enlightened Science. I thought it was pretty cool, and it really didn't represent any kind of stumbling block to my new Catholic belief. However, upon reading Behe's Darwin's Black Box, and the writings of the other ID folks, I just couldn't buy Darwinism any more. It's hard to see how I ever could have believed in it, what with being a systems engineer and all. Exquisitely intricate and robust nanotechnology doesn't just happen by accident. I reject Darwinism on scientific, not religious grounds.

This is not to say that I believe in "the Earth is 4,000 years old and all the fossils were created during The Flood" nonsense. No doubt that the earth is billions of years old and life has unfolded over vast time in ever increasing complexity. It just wasn't an unplanned accident, or a blind material process with no intelligent input.

I've yet to see any answers from the Darwinists which address what the ID folks are actually arguing. Just a lot of anti-religious slurs, bitter, ad-hominem invective, and argumentative red herrings. And for advocates of an "it all happened by chance" process, they are vociferous in shouting down anyone who would dare actually attempt to calculate the odds. Curiously, despite the fact that it is supposed to be a scientific question, they tend to employ theological arguments ("What kind of a God would...", or "Who designed the designer?"), which betray an ignorance of theology on their part that is far, far deeper than my ignorance of science! It is quite rare that an ID'ist is allowed to even state his case in the press. Perhaps this is starting to change?

Books written by intelligent design proponents (Behe, Denton, Johnson, Dembski, Wells, Hunter, et al) get into much greater technical, historical, and philosophical detail than Behe can in a quick editorial, but here is what Behe had to say in the NYT piece:

Bethlehem, Pa. — IN the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design. As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not.

First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.

Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")

The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.

In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.

The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.

Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.

The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.

Out Of The Loop And On To The Slopes

It's time at long last to go skiing. I'll be posting again on Monday or Tuesday. See you then!

Excellent Essay

By Brian Tiemann. Won't excerpt, go read!

I Don't Need A Protocol Droid

Ace thinks this is pretty cool. Ace is also ticked off at these guys.

Hang Up And Drive

Looks like some scientific evidence is coming in for the obvious.

excerpt:

A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they're as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.

"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone," said University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer. "It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."

The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the quarterly journal Human Factors.

Traffic jams and death

Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States every year, according to the journal's publisher, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

The reason is now obvious:

Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.

"Once drivers on cell phones hit the brakes, it takes them longer to get back into the normal flow of traffic," Strayer said. "The net result is they are impeding the overall flow of traffic."

Strayer and his colleagues have been down this road before. In 2001, they found that even hands-free cell phone use distracted drivers. In 2003 they revealed a reason: Drivers look but don't see, because they're distracted by the conversation. The scientists also found previously that chatty motorists are less adept than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.

...

The impaired reactions involved seconds, not just fractions of a second, so stopping distances increased by car-lengths.

I've almost been run down in crosswalks by SUV drivers yakking on their freakin' phones several times. And countless times stuck behind some dufus doing 45 on the freeway as he chats away. And tailgated by folks steering with their knees so they can use one hand to hold the phone and the other to make conversational gestures. And so on. And so forth.

What Price Freedom?

This is good.

Basra, Iraq - In another blow to a nation already reeling from months of U.S. occupation, a new World Heath Organization report suggested that Iraqis may face another humanitarian disaster caused by exposure to potentially harmful finger ink during Sunday's nationwide elections.

According to the report, the ink used to mark fingers of as many as 8 million Iraqis contained traces of a chemical, Dimoxycyclene K-phosphate 3, which has been associated with elevated lesions in laboratory animals. Sold under the trade name of Dyphex, the chemical is used as an additive in various inks and dyes as a fixative and preservative.

Critics noted that the not-yet banned chemical is produced by a RayTel, a Georgia-based firm whose executives contributed over $1800 to the 2004 Bush campaign. Records also show that over 20 gallons of the finger ink was transported to Iraq via Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the controversial firm once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"In order to avoid risk, it is critical that Iraqis keep internal consumption of finger ink to less than 100 millileters per day," said WHO spokesperson Francois Garres. "We are desperately trying to get the word out, but we have not gotten the good cooperation with US military officials."

Garres said efforts to educate Iraqis on the dangers of Dyphex were also hampered by widespread street celebrations.

Another piece of inspired satire is here.

The Armor Begins To Crack

This is a compelling read. A vehemently anti-Bush blogger goes to watch Iraqis in America vote, takes some pictures, listens to some life stories.

excerpt:

I’ve had a guilty taste in my mouth since the inaugural protest’s cocktail of adrenaline and pepper gas wore off. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that while the right is wrong, the left might not be right either. I looked around those protests and saw legitimately angry people who were well-fed and intentionally scruffy. Not to be presumptuous, but I didn't detect sadness and suffering ringing the eyes of most protestors. People were angry, loudly vocal, and legitimate in the depth of their feeling...but I didn't see anyone from the middle East. While I would guess that many people there had travelled, I doubt any of them had an Iraqi stamp in their passports.

This is not to discount the suffering felt by thousand of families and friends connected to those lost in the war.

Ever since I got ready to leave America, I've felt the country wobbling out of balance, like world events have been spinning out of control and America is right there at the center pulling the levers. I’ve needed the comfort that comes from answers and been really jealous of the righteous sense of stability that the religious right and Bush supporters and other stupid white people seemed to have. I took refuge in a knee-jerk liberal identity for a long time, but now it's threadbare and not as comfortable as it once was.

Tash and I are both terrifically loudmouthed critics of the Bush administration, she from an Australian perspective and me from a disgruntled American's p.o.v. We are also both white, young, healthy, and from lands that enjoy a vast degree of privilege, thousands of miles away from true suffering. We knew we didn’t have the full story so we went out to the Iraqi Out-Of Country Voting poll on Sunday to get another truth and see ground-level democracy for ourselves.

...

You may think that you have felt dumb before, but let me tell you something: until you have stood in front of a man who knows real pain and told him that you are against your country's alleviation of his country's state-sponsored murderous suffering, you have not felt truly, deeply, like a total f------ moron.

I still am no Bush fan, and I know that America got lied to. I know we shouldn't have gone, and I think Rove is as evil as they come. But through all this deception and lying, through all this dismemberment and pain, America has wrought a beautiful, fantastic side effect: joy, freedom and a hope for peace. Does it take lies and misdirection to do this?? Is this what the other side of justice is? I feel like such a whiner and I don't know what to think anymore. Ultimately, in total defiance of my mother and grandmother’s teachings, two wrongs have made a right and my moral compass is tired and busted.

I can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and I want a clear cut mandate, some lines to believe along. But there aren't any. There's just right and wrong and following your heart of hearts. And for the first time in my life, I can say that I was wrong to be compulsively critical of the current administration without seeking my own truth.

Read the whole thing. Also, look at the rest of his site. This guy is the genuine leftist article.

Will Wonders Never Cease

The letters to the editor in the SF Chronicle today are overwhelmingly up on the Iraqi election and Bush, and down on the leftists who did everything in their power to prevent this outcome. I understand Hell has placed a large order for Zambonis.

Thinking The Unthinkable

An antiwar columnist wonders: "What if I was wrong?"

excerpts:

[A]fter watching Sunday's election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?

...


I won't say that it had never occurred to me previously, but it's never gone through my mind as strongly as when I watched the television coverage from Iraq that showed long lines of people risking their lives by turning out to vote, honest looks of joy on so many of their faces.

Some CNN guest expert was opining Monday that the Iraqi people crossed a psychological barrier by voting and getting a taste of free choice (setting aside the argument that they only did so under orders from their religious leaders).

I think it's possible that some of the American people will have crossed a psychological barrier as well.

...

On the other side of that barrier is a concept some of us have had a hard time swallowing:

Maybe the United States really can establish a peaceable democratic government in Iraq, and if so, that would be worth something.

Would it be worth all the money we've spent? Certainly.

Would it be worth all the lives that have been lost? That's the more difficult question, and while I reserve judgment on that score until such a day arrives, it seems probable that history would answer yes to that as well.

...

[O]n Sunday, we caught a glimpse of the flip side. We could finally see signs that a majority of the Iraqi people perceive something to be gained from this brave new world we are forcing on them.

Instead of making the elections a further expression of "Yankee Go Home," their participation gave us hope that all those soldiers haven't died in vain.

Obviously, I'm still curious to see if Bush is willing to allow the Iraqis to install a government that is free to kick us out or to oppose our other foreign policy efforts in the region.

So is the rest of the world.

For now, though, I think we have to cut the president some slack about a timetable for his exit strategy.

If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance.

Maybe I'd have to vote Republican in 2008.

The horror. The horror.

Well. There It Is, Then.

The de-Christianization of Europe continues apace.

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

Miss Garweg said that women who had worked in call centres had been offered jobs on telephone sex lines. At one job centre in the city of Gotha, a 23-year-old woman was told that she had to attend an interview as a "nude model", and should report back on the meeting. Employers in the sex industry can also advertise in job centres, a move that came into force this month. A job centre that refuses to accept the advertisement can be sued.

Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits.

"Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" said Miss Ulyanova.

Ulrich Kueperkoch wanted to open a brothel in Goerlitz, in former East Germany, but his local job centre withdrew his advertisement for 12 prostitutes, saying it would be impossible to find them.

Mr Kueperkoch said that he was confident of demand for a brothel in the area and planned to take a claim for compensation to the highest court. Prostitution was legalised in Germany in 2002 because the government believed that this would help to combat trafficking in women and cut links to organised crime.

Miss Garweg believes that pressure on job centres to meet employment targets will soon result in them using their powers to cut the benefits of women who refuse jobs providing sexual services.

"They are already prepared to push women into jobs related to sexual services, but which don't count as prostitution,'' she said.

"Now that prostitution is no longer considered by the law to be immoral, there is really nothing but the goodwill of the job centres to stop them from pushing women into jobs they don't want to do."

We don't need religion or the Ten Commandments to tell us right from wrong. That's only for the superstitious, fearful, and gullible! We believe in freedom, baby, yeah!

Shut Your Pie Hole, Commie

Not everyone is happy about the Iraqi election. A poster at DU proves that psychotic dissatisfaction with the world is the engine, leftist politics is the caboose (via The Corner).

Here's the post:

The Iraq vote is making me sick this morning

All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how "freedom" has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the so-called "voters" and barely mentioned the resistance movements at all. Where are the freedom fighters today? Are their voices silenced because some American puppets cast a few ballots?

I can't believe the Iraqis are buying into this "democracy" bulls---. They have to know that the Americans don't want them to have power, because they know that Bush is in this for the oil, and now that he finally has it he's not going to let it go. This election is a charade. The fact is that the Iraqis have suffered during the past two years more than any people on earth at the hands of the American gestapo. Maybe they're afraid and felt they had to vote. That's the only way I can explain it to myself.

OR--I just thought of this--maybe they're smiling because they're using the Americans own game to defeat them. They're voting in candidates who they know will widen the resistance, take the fight to the streets, and finally drive the occupying forces out of their country. Perhaps they're smiling because--right under the American's noses--they're planting the seeds of a bigger and more effective resistance movement. Wouldn't that be fitting? Use *'s own tools against them?

We can only pray that this is the case. Becuase if it's not--and if the Iraq vote is seen as a success that spread "freedom"--the world is screwed. Bush's inaugural speech left little doubt that he has other countries on his list to spread "freedom" to. They will be his next targets, and the world will burn because of it.

Let's hope the resistance got voted in, or if not, they only increase the fight and take down those who betrayed their country today by voting in this fraud election.

Of course I'm assuming this isn't a hoax post to make the DU look bad. This one could be...

A blogger has highlighted some rebuttal posts from the same DU thread. At least one has been deleted. Too much danger of sense being spoken, I guess.

In another Corner post, Michael Novak says:

These are the days that try men's souls, if they are men and women of the left. When their own sense of what has been going on is shattered. When the vision of the hated conservatives comes to life in reality, and its birth seems to send joy through conservative ranks. At such times, the hive of the left often falls silent. Everyone seems to wait for a big bee to teach them the new buzz. Listen in the silence! The queen bee will stir. The buzz will grow soon.

The secret compass of the left used to give off a clear signal, even when puzzling events suddenly clouded the sky. One had only to discern whether new events empowered a new and larger collective (the state, the UN), in which case that was the side to cheer. If the individual was weakened, if the United States was weakened, and if the collective powers were strenghthened, that was guidance enough.

The fall of socialism has destroyed that guidance system. What to do? Whom to cheer? What to reject?...It takes longer these days for the hive to regain its voice and sense of direction...these days, the identity of the big bee is no longer so certain.

There are many lost souls on the left.

Jim Geraghty has also taken note.

Hearing comments like that, how can one not feel pity? You see happy faces of Iraqis taking place in the first election of their lifetimes, braving threats to life and limb... and your only reaction is more bitterness? What a dark little world of their own making they live in.

John Kerry has also been raining on this parade, and Geraghty has something to say about that, too.

Cool Site!

Via RealClearPolitics, I've stumbled across a very cool site, which contains scans of each day's front page from newspapers around the world. Neat!

Here's an example (click to zoom):

This Is A Great Day

If you want to know more about the Iraqi election, Instapundit is a good place to start...

Oh, yeah, leftists, NOT IN YOUR NAME.

This post highlights the bellyaching at Democratic Underground. This post pokes a little fun at the MSM.

Instapundit quotes an e-mailer:

I'm remembering the coy saying about the French resistance. "If everyone who claimed to be in the resistance really had been, there would have been nobody left to collaborate."

I make the following prediction: In 20 or 25 years (it might not even take that long) all the people who where saying that the war was wrong and Iraq was wrong will talk about how America brought democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan and how they were a part of it due to their protests and desire for democracy and the end of tyranny. (of course they will not mention that the tyranny that they meant was us.) If the same people who write the current history books write them again be sure that this will happen.

To which Glenn replies: "Heh. Yeah, just like everybody pulled together during the Cold War."

Update: The NYT has a nice election slide show here.

Update: Excellent animated slide show in the form of a .WMV file is here. Set to music ("Fanfare For The Common Man").

<sarcasm>
Update: I want to be the first to say: Kudos, Democratic Party for all you did to make this day possible. America couldn't have done it without you!
</sarcasm>

Update: A nice short-and-sweet tribute here, with photos and historical references.

You're Soaking In It

I liked this Opinion Journal article about the global oil situation. Having grown up in the 70's, I've heard my fair share of the "sky is falling" energy crisis hype, and the last year or so there've been similar rumblings. Funny, three years ago when oil was down around $10 a barrel nobody was saying we are about to run out. Now at $50, it seems we are. The stuff costs less than $5 to get out of the ground in the Mideast. The rest is politics and games.

Traitor

I heard Ted Kennedy's treason speech yesterday on Limbaugh.

This is a good fisking of it (via Instapundit). If you don't know what Kennedy said, you need to. Here is the Democratic Party, in all its pathological glory.

For some reason, the MSNBC transcript excerpts pass over Kennedy's call to immediately withdraw at least 12,000 troops. Also check out the transcript of what Rush had to say about all of this.

Excellent Photos

A series of remarkable photos taken during last Saturday's Walk For Life is here.

You Gotta Like Evan Coyne Maloney

Evan has been making his own mini-documentaries the last couple of years. Generally he goes to left-wing protest rallies and lets the folks speak for themselves. Maloney is such a nice guy, with such a gentle, amiable persona, that the folks he interviews are able to state their lefty views without getting all riled up. I was actually reflecting on this a bit after the march last Saturday. I walked to a nearby restaurant district with some friends, and thought, "You know, I'll probably end up holding the door for people who were yelling at us in the counter protest. They won't recognize that I was in the march, and I won't recognize them. We'll smile and nod." But still. I ain't going to vote their way!

Anyway, Evan's latest documentary was done amongst the inauguration protestors in DC. They seem like nice people. Quite an amusing video.

Thomas Sowell On 'Protest'

A good dose of Sowell lucidity here.

excerpts:

The enraged speeches and street disorders across the country that accompanied the inauguration of President Bush may tell us more than we want to know about what is happening to this country.

The media dignify these outbursts by calling them "protests" but what are they protesting?

That they lost the election? Doesn't somebody always lose an election? Did the Republicans take to the streets when Bill Clinton was elected?

Are the shouters and the rioters protesting that they disagree with President Bush's policies? Isn't that why we hold elections in the first place -- because people disagree?

Elections are supposed to be an alternative to other ways of settling political differences, including riots, military coups and dictatorships. But riots have been re-christened "demonstrations" by the mealy-mouth media.

What are these "demonstrations" demonstrating -- other than adolescent self-indulgence and contempt for the rights of other people to go about their lives without finding their streets clogged with hooligans and the air filled with obscenities?

The irony is that many of those who are indulging themselves in these strident orgies are the same people who were telling us to "get over it" and "move on" during President Clinton's scandals. Today the liberal MoveOn.org is the last place where people are willing to move on.

...

[T]he left does not accept the proposition that other people have just as many rights as they do. This is obvious not only in the disorder and vandalism they inflict in the streets but also their intolerance on academic campuses across the country, where students who question the party line are hemmed in by speech codes and ridiculed and intimidated by professors who do not hesitate to punish them with low grades.

Ask any environmental extremist if people who don't care about preserving swamps ("wetlands") have the same rights under the Constitution that the people in the green movement have. Gay activists who demand tolerance and sensitivity from others do not hesitate to include in their parades insulting skits mocking nuns and others in the Catholic Church.

When pro-life demonstrators tried to hold a peaceful march in San Francisco on January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a pro-abortion crowd not only followed them, shouting to drown them out and hurling insults at them, some sat down in their path to block the march and force them to detour.

We are seeing the ugly face of intolerance under the idealistic pretense of protest. We need to recognize it for what it is, even if the media refuse to do so. Above all, we need to see it as a warning of where our society is headed. Whether at home or abroad, if political conflicts are reduced to contests between the wimps and the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Update: There's another interesting treatment on the topic of "Protest as Religion" here.

What Planet Are They Smoking?

Boy, the Golden Gate chapter of Planned Parenthood is engaging in bold faced lying about the San Francisco Walk For Life.

More than 6,000 Pro-Choice Bay Area Residents Stand Up for Women's Health and Rights

1/22/2005

Pro-choice crowd outnumbers anti-choice marchers by more than 3 to 1 in peaceful demonstration

SAN FRANCISCO – Outnumbering anti-choice demonstrators by more than three to one, an estimated 6,000 took to the streets of San Francisco to stand up for women's health and rights on Saturday, January 22, 2005. The rally and march sent the loud and clear message that the San Francisco Bay Area is overwhelmingly pro-choice and will continue to defend women's rights against attack.

Following a rally at Powell and Market Streets in San Francisco, over 6,000 pro-choice Bay Area residents marched to the Embarcadero where an anti-choice demonstration was taking place. Pro-choice marchers peacefully lined the route of the anti-choice march chanting slogans such as "Get up, get down! San Francisco is a pro-choice town!"

The numbers they are quoting are completely backwards, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the crowd estimates by the SF police, the pictures that have been widely published, and what I saw with my own freakin' eyes! They don't even provide a citation of where they got this preposterous number and ratio. Desperation...

An earlier post of mine has links to photos taken by both sides as well as video taken by the opposition so you can see for yourself. There is also a link to the Chronicle article.

First they complain about all of the people bused in from outside (because, you know, it is not possible that anyone in San Francisco could possibly be pro-life), then they exult that there actually weren't any people to begin with! What a bunch of dorks.

Reinstitute Institutionalization

Peeve Farm has an excellent round-up of some recent blogosphere thinking about the homeless problem. Be sure to check out the links. Tiemann is right. Manhattan is beautiful. Downtown San Francsico is something right out of the depths of hell.