Odds & ends

The purpose of this blog is to provide "Pebbles for David's Slingshot", those odds bits of information which will help control the Goliaths of this world.

In today's NYObserver, there is a review by Daniel Mendelsohn of E.O. Wilson's latest contribution to the cacophony. He (rightly) dismisses Wilson as "a Mr. Magoo genially oblivious of everything he can't or won't see".

I use your position as an excellent example of the truism that a Liberal is but a Puritan without the secular power to enforce his opinion. Once the Liberal gets the power, the Puritan shows up immediately. The passion for order (power) trumps the sense of justice. And the fiddling with the facts begins. [To Fr. McBrien]

"I only had a roll in the sack; she got pregnant"

LONDON, May 7, 2008 - MPs of the Commons Home Select Committee were said to be shocked last week to learn that poor women and girls in the UK are being lured into the sex trade by job advertisements at job centres run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Denise Marshall, director of a government funded anti-trafficking organization, the Poppy Project, told the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that the government was acting as a "pimp" for the sex trade.
The jobs listed include stripper, webcam stripper, adult show hostess, lap dancing and work with an escort agency. Some vacancies listed the ability to "discuss sexual fantasies" as a useful skill. One ad, called "admin work" by the Jobcentre Plus website, said successful applicants would earn £10 an hour to "talk dirty" and perform sex acts live in front of a webcam.
The Department for Work and Pensions, however, said it is obliged to carry the ads because of a High Court decision in 2003. A spokesman for the department said, "Jobcentre Plus has a duty to advertise any legal job. Legal vacancies within the adult industry come within this." The spokesman said Jobcentres Plus was required to carry such ads after the High Court overturned their previous policy "which did not accept certain types of adverts connected with the sex and personal services industries".

Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking.

“There are philosophical or methodological objections to evolutionary theory. They have been very well voiced by Professor Karl Popper that the current neo-Darwinian Theory has the methodological defect of explaining too much. It is too difficult to imagine or envisage an evolutionary episode which could not be explained by the formulae of neo-Darwinism”. Sir Peter Medawar (p.xi)
“All I want to say is that most of this research dealt only with two factors, mutation and selection, in other words, the original Darwinian model. Popper is right; this model is so good that it can explain everything, as Popper has rightly complained.” Ernst Mayr (p.47)

Adult stem cells are programmed to make repairs, and so have resulted in numerous potential and real therapies. Embryonic stem cells are programmed to make babies, and have been impossible to control.

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."
"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: "ye must have faith." It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with." [Max Planck]

In these three books, Wills simply did not know enough to do the job. [Luke T. Johnson on Gary Wills’ three Jesus books]

‘Like the university, which she still resembles in several ways, the Church must shut her mind firmly against the needs of society. This is not only her age-long duty, it is also her only chance of turning out in the end to have served the needs of society. If she is to survive, the one thing she must not do is move with the times. She must pursue or regain her role as a force for order and continuity, stay as she is or was until the times move back to her, still or once more preach, not indeed torments or sectarian hatred, but an all-powerful, all-loving God and his divine Son. Whether she likes it or not, she has her obligations to my sort of person as well as to her communicants.’ [Kingsley Amis]