Hopefully a quickie post today–on the subject of your spicy brains!
Two really interesting podcasts this week (I understand some people still need reminding you don’t need an MP3 player, certainly not an iPod to listen to podcasts. They’re just MP3 files you can download and listen on your computer.)

The first is The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe:
♦ SGU’s Latest Episode
In addition to other cool topics like their experience at a psychic fair ($20 for a 15 minute reading, and dozens of readings through the day–even just working the fair for 4 hours that’s over $300. For four hours of conning people through play-acting and lying. Amazing. But I digress….) they did some news on some updated research regarding how photographs (and manipulated photographs in particular) influence the way we remember something, which influences what we think about a particular topic.
(Something politicians, spin doctors, and marketers already know all too well.)

They also discuss some research that shows that when we recall a memory, we’re changing the neural paths and proteins that “store” the memory–we change the memory when we remember it! Every time we remember an event, we’re editing it with current sensory stimuli and emotion and thoughts. Keep that in mind next time you think you’re absolutely certain about how something happened, or are dealing with purely anecdotal “evidence.”

And, the latest episode of Point of Inquiry:
♦ Richard Wiseman - Quirkology
Wiseman is a magician, psychologist, and professor of Public Understanding of Psychology. He’s written a new book, they discuss. But talks about his work dealing with perception, how our senses fool us, how others fool us, and the psychology of how we perceive what we do. His experience in magic helps him bring an interesting and entertaining perspective on the topic.

There’s a link on the site to a YouTube video he made that really might blow your mind, regarding our senses and false perception. Cwazy!

The government has a social contract with the people. The government, in a secular society, is there protect liberty and provide the means for people to have a quality of life, liberty and pursue happiness. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican and a progressivist, stated: “Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people.” He established the concept of the “living wage.” He laid the foundation for what F.D. Roosevelt would later accomplish with the New Deal.

Thanks to the social programs FDR set in place, (and the economic push of WWII production), the majority of the U.S. citizens were able to work one job, not worry about retirement, own, OWN a car and a house, and have ample leisure time. The opportunity to have a college education was open to nearly anyone thanks to various government social programs, and the sick, disabled, elderly, were taken care of. How things have changed since Reagan started to dismantle those programs, defund the social contract, privatize social programs.

Here’s some recent issues. There was a time in which a Pell Grant would actually pay for all of college tuition. Now, it barely pays for the books. The G.I. Bill allowed tens of thousands of returning WWII veterans to get college educations (and strangely, during the 50’s-70’s our country led the world in engineers, scientists, researchers. Now, we’re about equal with many 3rd-world countries–but we do have a LOT of retail clerks and food service employees.) The Bush administration, in its desire to de-educate the masses and keep quality education for the wealthy, have nearly gutted the G.I. Bill. It’s taking people like billionaire philanthropist Jerome Kohlberg, who went to an Ivy league school thanks to the post-WWII G.I. Bill, to try to get Iraqi/Afghanistan veterans the money to be able to go to college, and be able to do something other than work at McDonalds or be homeless.

Here we have an administration whose mantra is “Support the Troops!” Every bill they pass to keep the war going, every bill they defeat that would limit our involvement in the war, they bring out “Support the Troops!” But how does the administration do that? But continuing to defund the G.I. Bill. The Veteran’s Affairs medical system used to be a model to the world for quality health care. Other countries used to model their social health care system on our V.A. system. What has the Bush administration done to support the troops? Privatize it, with the call “V.A. system is socialized health care!” and put it in the hands of for-profit private companies. The quality of care in the last few years has plummeted, the hospital conditions have deteriorated, thousands of servicemen aren’t able to get care at all. Some who have received monetary compensation for their disabilities are being asked for the money back. It’s become so bad, lawyers are being mobilized to provide free assistance to veterans to get their benefits! The last time lawyers had to be called en mass to help veterans get benefits from the government they served–the Civil War!

It seems this administration, the neo-cons, has the same idea of supporting the troops as they have in reproductive rights: the fetus is a person deserving of the utmost in fanatical protection while in the womb, but once they’re out–they’re on their own. Support the soldier only so long as he’s in combat fighting for your oil, he or she’s on their own when they come back.

The libertarian might look at this, and point up the fact that Yea! Individuals like the rich guy are helping out, private lawyers are doing a social service–that’s the way it should be! Well, sure, those are great things, people helping out each other. That IS the way it should be, we have a social contract with our fellow citizens and humans. But when it’s left up to individuals to take care of a society, well, I’m sorry but for-profit companies can’t be trusted to have anyone’s interests but the stockholders’ in mind, and individual people just don’t have the ability to do anything more than fill in gaps. Katrina is a good example. The best in humanity came out during Katrina with people, and yes, even companies to some degree, to help each other. But the best efforts of all could not fill in the gaps where the government–which has the money, manpower, infrastructure, logistics, and ideally lack of interest in profit of PR–should have been. Governments should protect the society, not just the individual, certainly not corporations.

In the interest of benefiting society, some “socialism” is necessary: healthcare, food aid, public safety, education–the “commons.” The institutions in which ALL citizens benefit and take part in. The downside to having a government which actually strives to help its citizens is that there is a risk of the government taking too much power and limiting liberty, freedom, and privacy. But a government by and for the people, and not corporate interests and those of the wealthy elite, have less risk. That’s what we (mainly) had from 1940 through 1980.

It’s what we need again, before the entire government is nothing more than a Board of Directors.

The normally very calm and reasonable John W. Loftus has a post today that got him as upset as I’ve been known to be here on my blog, discussing religious issues:

♦ Girl from Qatif Rape Victim

In brief, a newly married young woman was gang-raped. The Saudi Arabian courts, in accord with their extreme Islamic tradition, found her at fault. But, due to relations with the West, instead of killing her like they usually do, they’re just going to have her brutally flogged.

John does a good, brief job pointing out the Judeo-Christian connections in this story, so I’ll leave it at that. What I want to point out is the political issues at hand. Saudi Arabia is the U.S.’s primary “friend” in the Middle East…well, aside from Israel. And why is this? The uber-rich oil families that the Bush family is very cozy with. Yet, Saudi Arabia is one of the most extremely fundamentalist Islam nations. Not only that, but the majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from there, as are the majority of the non-Iraqi insurgents within Iraq! More than 60%! (Iran, by the way, accounts for less than 5% of the Iraqi insurgents.)

Meanwhile, there was Iraq 8 years ago. One of the few secular nations in the Middle East (maybe only). Iraq had a strong Middle Class, a strong economic base, pretty decent social health care, a well educated populace, and good social services.
OK, obviously it must be said, Hussein was a brutal dictator, and his sons were psychopaths. The world’s better off without them, no question. But in the Bush Crime Family’s obsessive desire to control the oil interests in Iraq, instead of just putting down a dictator, he’s brought a formerly modern, progressive society back into a dark ages, to match Saudi Arabia. Millions of people have left Iraq, leaving mostly the poor and super wealthy. The schools and universities have a fraction of their former students. Places still don’t have working water and electricity. And worst yet, religious fundamentalism is rushing in to fill the social gap.

Let’s look at something here: Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, between 1940 and 1980, this country’s middle class was soaring. Strong and powerful. The U.S. middle class had economic power and political power. Since Reagan and his Milton Friedman economic policies which called for the increased power of the corporations, the removal of Unions, civil services, and privatizing of The Commons, equating social progressivism as “evil empire red Communism,” and funneling the wealth toward the top in order for it to “trickle down,” and removing the borders on production and distribution, the middle class has become weaker and weaker. Since 1980, the middle class has been having to work harder and harder to barely get what the previous generation had. We have very little say in politics, as the government has become the tool of the corporations and the wealthy elite. The middle class is becoming the working poor and our nation is heading back into a new Gilded Age of pre-Depression era economics–except with HDTV’s and XBox’s. And most American families in many times more debt than the average family 90 years ago.

The government likes a weak middle class, because it allows them (them being those who control the government–and take a look at who that is, Republican AND Democrat. Elite, wealthy corporatists), to consolidate power and arrange things to continue to funnel wealth to the top 5%. They don’t like having the majority of the country mucking things up with demands for social institutions, social programs, quality education, the means to be able to do something other than work two jobs to barely make ends meet, making more money for the CEO’s and more debt for the worker, who won’t have time and energy and resources and ability to demand change.

So the U.S. government likes the way counties like Saudi Arabia runs things–massively rich oil families at the top, crushed populace at the bottom, the tool of religion controlling the hearts and minds of the masses, keeping them in line. (Karl Rove’s expressed opinion to insiders, that religion component. He’s not been secret about his desire to use the Religious Right as a tool to foster unquestioned allegiance and submission to the President and the administration).

Story on BoingBoing today about a rather scary issue as reported by FOX News:

♦ DHS to firefighters: snoop on emergency victims for evidence of terrorism

The imperial government under King George wants firefighters, who don’t need a warrant to enter your house when they’re responding to an emergency, as a means of circumventing that annoying, silly little 4th Amendment thing. King George wants them (as well as meter readers, by the way, who can look into windows) to not just report on the obvious dangers such as finding bomb making equipment (duh,) but also, get this: items and behavior that appear un-American and un-patriotic!

Welcome to the Eastern Bloc, comrade!

But a volunteer firefighter commenting on BoingBoing made this additional, thoughtful observation:

If criminals have to worry that by calling the fire department they are also calling the DHS, they may be less likely to call in the first place, putting lives and property at further risk. If they do call, they may treat firefighters as hostile parties, placing firefighters’ lives at risk beyond the normal hazards of the job.

We’re already well into the world of 1984, this takes us a step closer to Fahrenheit 451. Sweet. Always thought it’d be nice if the world were more like the books I read….

UPDATE: Some of the comments on BoingBoing are good:

I have to agree with Andrew. I’m an EMT in Washington St. We are taught that we are advocates of the patient, so even when I roll up on-scene of a car accident and smell alcohol on the breath of a driver, I’m not allowed to tell the police; only the hospital staff see my report. I know I look around the apartments and houses, but it’s certainly not for DHS or the police.
-tfuller

Time magazine has an interesting story this weekend:

♦ Sunday School for Atheists.

It’s a very brief look at the rise of Freethinking Sunday Schools (as well as sleep-away camps like Camp Quest) to fill a particular need of the young adults in America who claim no religious belief, trying to raise moral, thinking kids in this society.

Down the hall in the kitchen, older kids engaged in a Socratic conversation with class leader Bishop about the role persuasion plays in decision-making. He tried to get them to see that people who are coerced into renouncing their beliefs might not actually change their minds but could be acting out of self-preservation–an important lesson for young atheists who may feel pressure to say they believe in God.

Oohh, poli-sci sucks! Or rather, not being an ideologue sucks. If only there were an -ism I could latch onto and sink my beliefs into and not question and just be that, life would be simpler. But when you’re a Marxist-libertarian-anarcho-socialist, things get messy.
No organization should have control over the people, period. But, objectavism and libertarian laissez-faire economics is the playground for criminals and power-mad corporatists, but government serves only its own power and draws corruption like honey and ants, but “the commons” can’t be privatized and expect to be working for the social good….

OK, angst aside for a moment, the point of this post: two instances of government f—ups.
The first comes from the U.K. where two government (”password protected,” but you know how pointless that is) disks turned up missing–along with personal and vital data on every U.K. family with a child under six!
♦ UK’s families put on fraud alert

Look, let’s say you think it’s all OK for the government to collect data on its citizens. In fact, in this case, the data wasn’t from covert surveillance but from a social assistance program. Let’s say you trust the government with the data it collects–you can’t trust that human intent by all within the government and who have access to government, and that accidents never happen. You can’t and they do. Data gets compromised, lost, stolen, and misused. It’s the point of this informative video on the subject. Even if you trust the government as good and valiant and truthful and honest, the data is there and collected and always available to those who misuse or be careless or malicious.
(Add to that the concern of having a criminal, power-mad, imperialistic, fascist-loving government which has no scruples or sense morality, and is collecting data we never gave permission to have collected.)

Then we have FEMA, (you know, the formally social service which helped people in crisis, which was handed over to friends of Bush who then privatized it and gutted it and made it a tool for handing out government contracts to their own companies and the companies of their friends. The organization that held a fake, propaganda-laden “news conference” during the California wildfires….) which has stated that the trailers Katrina victims are staying in, may be hazardous. But who do they inform? The people living in them? Nope. They tell FEMA employees who are advised not to enter them:
♦ Don’t go in! Oh, you here? Fine.

Oh what more can I possibly say.
Workers of the world, unite!, I guess.

Hmm, I may be playing with fire here….my own. I’ve stopped posting on religious issues, mainly because it makes me a complete raving meanie. (Huh, kinda like some people and drinking….) But this is an informative and thought-provoking post, not a hateful insulting one.
OK, so, the development of the Jesus myth is very heavily and clearly seen as having arisen from other regional myths. Dionysus and Horus two major examples, Mithras being the uber-ur-proto-Jesus, however.

But what’s possibly more interesting, is how the Christian religion was nearly entirely co-opted by Greek myth/philosophy!
Check out this post by Harry McCall:

♦ The Pagan Development of Christianity

None of this information is new or secret–I’d just not seen it synthesized in such a well-formed way. We already know that early Christianity was a collection of many different sects and cults. Most of which were excluded by the Councils that codified Christianity as a religion, and some overtly sought to be destroyed by the ensuing “orthodox” religion that developed (like the Gnostics).

If it weren’t for the emotional issues religion brings up in me, due to the current use of religion as a means of brainwashing, behavior control and privacy violation, human rights violation, political and secular theocratic control, method of abolishing reason and logic and rationality, I would so absolutely love religious studies! The way cultures create gods and myths, and the way morph and change and evolve, and influence the cultures/religions around them, just really absolutely fascinate me! If only it weren’t for the intolerance, hatred, discrimination, genocide, bigotry the Abrahamic religions encourage, practice and endorse….

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments in the post above, especially this one:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2007/11/pagan-development-of-christianity-by.html#c666720749933774439

Here is the world we live in now:

♦ Terror police ’shot’ man in coma

Cops in Leeds, England, decided it was better to Taser a man, twice, and hold a pistol on him, because he was found on a bus unresponsive due to a diabetic coma. Better safe than sorry, right?! He could have been one of the floods, deluge, of terrorist bombers that have carpeted our Western Lands. Not one of the one or two people who are citizens in medical distress, or confused, or in need of help.

A commenter, I think on BoingBoing, in a thread discussing how police in Vancouver killed an innocent although distraught man in an airport (either from the Tasering or the putting all of one officer’s weight on his knee on top of the guy’s neck…the medical examiner’s report isn’t out yet), has remarked that Tasers have made cops lazy. Instead of actually doing their job, using their brain, intuition, experience, training to figure out what a situation is and then deal with it in the most appropriate manner, they just shoot a “non-lethal” Taser at the problem until it’s jerking around helpless on the ground soiling himself, then they’ll bother to figure out what’s going on.

Just this last year, off the top of my head, we’ve had the cop brutally and sadistically Tasering the drunk woman on the side of the road and she’s screaming in pain and fear and terror, the guy at the airport killed by Tasering cops, the politically questioning college kid Taser’ed needlessly outside the John Kerry appearance, the diabetic coma guy Tasered for being unresponsive–all in this last year.
Then there’s the several incidents of “War on Drugs” cops decked out in military body armor and carrying CAW shotguns and MP5 submachine guns and M15 assault rifles breaking into houses of the occasional innocent person or family, either because of their own mistake, an informant’s mistake, or an informant’s lie, and at worst killing innocent people and planting evidence or at best terrorizing and threatening peaceful and innocent families. (See: The war on drugs, liberty, reason.)
There’s peaceful protesters in Burma, Georgia, and Los Angeles set upon by brutal and violent military (or militarized police).
London has CCTV cameras on nearly every city block.
The NSA is tracking the phone calls, phone records, email, even buying habits of American citizens….

I have to ask, seriously, am I just blowing things out of proportion? Am I succumbing to the common cognitive bias that all times in the past were better than they are now? Has society always been this f–ed-up, or are things getting worse? Have police always been thugish brutes in general, willing to shoot up houses and people with military issue weapons without asking questions? Have always been spied on with such wanton disregard to privacy and personal liberty, and I’m just being a crotchety curmudgeon Chicken Little?

Or are we in the middle of some terrible, horrific, slide into a coming socio-political nightmare? I truly want to know.

Former seminarian, preacher, apologist, John W. Loftus’s latest post:
♦ Liberal Christianity: A Dangerous Pretend Game.
No commentary; just posting the link and a quote from it here.

This discussion has made me think about playing pretend. I liked the movie “Toy Story,” produced by Disney. The character Buzz Lightyear actually thought he had supernatural powers and could fly. When he learned the truth he was depressed to the point where he didn’t try to help others out for a while. As the movie progresses he learned to do what he could without any of his special powers. I was going through my period of doubt when I first took my kids to that movie, and I asked myself, is Buzz Lightyear better off knowing the truth? I think so, and the reason is clear. Buzz Lightyear could’ve gotten himself killed by bouncing around on spoons and acting like he could fly through the air when he really couldn’t fly. He could’ve hurt himself…badly. The truth is always better, come what may.

I would add, all that bouncing based solely on belief, could seriously hurt innocent others as well.

This is an issue that somewhat recently gotten me emotionally involved. Well, ever since I opened my eyes and started realizing there’s more going on in this world than the Good and Holy Capitalist Democracy bringing peace and love all over the world. Up until a year I thought of social protest as something riotous mobs did as an excuse to act criminal. In the U.S., we don’t see protest too often. We see either workers on strike, walking around in small circles, or we see actually criminal riots breaking out because of a bad jury decision or the result of some sports game. If you watch the news carefully, you might see something about protest in another country, especially if they get large enough to warrant international attention–such as Tiananmen Square in ‘89.

Not to say there aren’t protests in the U.S.! Viet Nam resulted in protests, nuclear power mismanagement, nuclear arms proliferation, lately Iraq War has been a cause for more protests. But the odd thing is, there’s a lot more protest by we the people in the U.S. than we generally let on to. The media–which is a tool (intentionally and unwittingly) in maintaining status quo, generally keeping the citizenry uninformed about true social issues and our power to criticize socio-political issues, and promoting the corporate-benefiting capitalist ideology which demands that the people be passive and complacent sheeple–tries to avoid letting people know that everything’s not happy and helpful in society at large. Oh, they’ll report news now and then, sure, if it involves some health harm (real or exaggerated), because it both keeps people watching TV and keeps us a little bit afraid and willing to hand over our control to either government or corporations to keep us safe and protected.

“Yes, poor citizen, there is danger out there! Boogeymen and bad guys and tainted toys and increased heart disease. Keep your eyes on our news, following these commercials, and we’ll tell you how you can focus all yours worries on these problems and keep you oblivious to the greater issues undermining your entire identity, being, society and politics at large.” Capitalism demands complacent and fearful workers, dutifully doing their jobs and going to work, and coming home and buying things that they think will keep them happy, healthy, and safe. Good workers may worry about home security and fatty diet, but they don’t worry about the existing corruption and exploitation and eventually Gilded Age of the working poor that commodity fetishism creates. Well, makes you oblivious to, at any rate.

And so my point is, the media likes to avoid pointing up major social ills and the fact that people individually and in groups are unhappy about it and want change. Through Air America, Move On, and other activist sources, I find out about protests against the administration, the war, corporatism, all the time–and I almost never see these things mentioned on the corporate media. There was a nation-wide organized anti-war protest a couple of weeks ago that was held simultaneously in several cities and involved tens of thousands of people. But I saw nothing about it on CNN, MSN, ABC-News neither before nor after. Except FOX news did a little something on it that weekend, but in an attempt to make it look pitiful and silly.

Why am I discussing this now? I read a post today on Wired’s “Danger Room”:

♦ Acoustic Weapon Hits Georgian Protesters
(That’s Georgia as in the former Soviet country, of course.)

It’s a posting about how the Georgian military is using high-tech devices such as noise generators in addition to the classic tear gas and water hoses to disperse protesters. On that post are links to video of the dispersal, like this one. You see dozens, possibly hundreds of soldiers mercilessly and forcefully disperse protesters calling for the President’s resignation. The Wired blog not too long ago had a post about other “non-lethal” crowd dispersement devices such as one which will microwave (”without lasting damage”) the skin of large groups of people forcing them to painfully flee the area, and light generators that induce dizziness and vomiting.

I’m still so indoctrinated to be a passive adjudicator of my will and power to the government that my immediate thoughts about all this has been, “Well, it’s non-lethal, so good for the government finding humane ways to get rid of pesky protesters.” But then it hit me WHY there’s protest. These aren’t people who are wanting to get away from work and loot and burn stuff down. They’ve caused no property damage, no harm, just making themselves be heard (and at worst, blocking traffic–which was the reason the government gave for using force to get rid of the protesters). What about the students and Buddhist monks in Burma recently, who have been viciously and violently attacked by the state military, including an attempt by the government to force an all-media and Internet blackout to prevent the world from seeing them put down the protest. France has criminalized any attempt of a “non-official” journalist from reporting on violence in the country (of which there has been massive increases the last few years) and are trying to regulate and control bloggers and other citizen reporters. Then, closer to home, was the peaceful immigration march in L.A. that was put down by extremely over-zealous and violent police, where they even attacked and battered members of the press–with microphones, cameras, and press badges, simply for getting in the way. There are countless instances of the police using strong-arm tactics to prevent attempts to keep them honest, such as people being arrested for photographing arrests on public property. Fortunately, some of the most egregious (and public) examples end up resolved, sort of. (The case against the man in that last link had his charges dropped and his suit settled.) An “investigation” into the L.A. march fiasco has been opened…whatever that means and whatever inconsequential result it produces.

The problem is, the damage is done. People are beat, arrested, terrorized into not questioning authority, regardless of investigations or lawsuits happen after the fact. After another year, maybe it will all change for the better. Hopefully. But, maybe not. Power loves more power, and power corrupts and draws the corruptible. The massive, insane power grabs the Bush administration has made, the culture of fear, the wresting of social and civil control away from the people and into the hands of the NSA, CIA, Homeland Security, TSA, are not going to be easily given back by the next administration. The foundation has already been well established thanks to the long-running War on Drugs, which has helped to militarize the police and allowed them to break and enter, search and seize, terrorize and shoot innocents and even plant evidence whenever mistakes are made–and barely nods of apology are heard, if anything at all, over the draconian and fascist tactics of the zealous and militarized police. (See: The war on drugs, liberty, reason.)

And so the issue gets worse: The government grabs power and destroys civil liberties, the police embrace greater jackbooted stormtrooper behavior, the general media ignores educating people on real social issues and provides distracting fear, and corporations purchase all of the above agents. And the people continue to accept their place as drones, slaves to consumerism, without liberty, unable to pursue happiness or live a free life–but that’s OK so long as they’re able to buy eke a sustenance where they’re just able to buy food and shelter and mind-numbing entertainment and not be victims of the either crime or the iron fist of the police.

So, today, when I watch video of protesters in Georgia get swarmed by armed soldiers, hit with water cannon, have their ears blasted by “non-lethal” noise, and smoked with tear gas–because they demand social and political change as is their right and responsibility, I get really disturbed. Because it can happen here. Heck, it already has, in small scale. It’s just a matter of time before enough of us in the U.S. have had it with the war, the corrupt politics, the lack of real healthcare, the purchase of the government by corporations, the descending wages and increasing corporate profits and increasing poverty, the fall of the dollar, the brutal treatment of the police and legal system, the violations and misuse of privacy and personal data, the American use or torture and wanton use of arrests without cause or representation, the fear-mongering, the closing of the boarder and growing inability for Americans to travel in and out of their own country, that the protests and marches start to get large enough that they can’t be ignored and put down with just some police in riot gear. How long before the Authority begins to use pain-rays, nausea-inducers, sonic disruptors, on its own people?

I don’t know which thought is worse–that violent fascism beats down protest here at home, or not enough people willing to protest for their own life and liberty to make it an issue.

Just wanting to share this article from Classically Liberal:

♦ Pious politician prays after prognosis predicts precipitation.

Skeptico just posted a reminder for a potentially fascinating program on PBS tonight:
♦ Judgment Day – Tonight on PBS TV

Tonight, 8.00pm on PBS (US TV) is Nova’s Judgment Day - a two hour montage of interviews and reconstructions of the Kitzmiller vs Dover case from 2005. (Wow – was that really two years ago? Time flies.) The documentary apparently features all the main players except (inexplicably) Michael Behe. Or perhaps not so inexplicably. Remember, the Dover case was where Behe got to admit that Intelligent Design was a science just like astrology. I would want to forget that too if I were Behe.
Looks like an interesting program, anyway.

Remember, this is the watershed case in which Creationists Intelligent Design advocates wanted to inject ID into the Dover, PA school system through the back door, without any scientific foundation. The judge, who was a Bush appointed conservative, famously stated in his ruling:

Jones decried the “breathtaking inanity” of the Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote religion.

A six-week trial over the issue yielded “overwhelming evidence” establishing that intelligent design “is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” said Jones, a Republican and a churchgoer appointed to the federal bench three years ago.

(Judge rules against ‘intelligent design’)