Michael Schermer has re-posted an editorial he wrote a couple years back. It’s brief and gives six reasons why Christians and/or conservatives should embrace the theory of evolution.

1. Evolution fits well with good theology
2. Creationism is bad theology
3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature
4. Evolution explains family values
5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts
6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics

Reasons 3, 4, and 5 boil down to “behavioral evolution confirms many of your religion’s moral beliefs.” Reasons 1, 2, and 3 are interesting. For the first reason, he writes:

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Awhile back, I posted about a Foreign Policy Magazine poll were you can vote for your favorite intellectuals. Well, the results are in (and have been in for over a month, actually).

Here are the top five vote-receivers:

1. Fethullah Gülen – Moderate Islamic philosopher
2. Muhammad Yunus – Economist and Nobel Laureate (Peace Price) for microcredit program
3. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi – Muslim scholar and Founder of al Jazeera
4. Orhan Pamuk – Novelist and Nobel Laureate (Literature)
5. Aitzaz Ahsan – Lawyer and Human Rights activists who worked to restore Pakistani’s Supreme Court

It’s disappointing, but not surprising that two of the top intellectuals are religious thinkers. Spots 6, 7, and 8 also fit this mold. Sure, they contribute to humanity by making some religions a little less horrible, but that alone shouldn’t be enough to be considered the world’s top intellectuals. Reducing the negative consequences of believing impossible things is good but still believing in those impossible things is not. In fact it’s downright anti-intellectual. At least one person critical of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, made the list at number fifteen.

More disappointing is the utter lack of scientists. The first scientist, Richard Dawkins, appears on the list at number nineteen. The list is definitely dominated by religionists, writers, and other humanities experts. Despite the supremacy of science’s ability to explain the world, the first culture (the humanities) still reigns supreme in the minds of far too many people.

Here’s how the intellectuals I voted for wound up:

• 29. Peter Singer
• 57. Steven Pinker
• 19. Richard Dawkins
• 71. J. Craig Venter
• 46. Steven Levitt

As has been written about before on this blog, biofuels are a bad idea. They make no sense economically and environmentally. The ethanol mandate (currently 9 billion gallons required a year) amounts to unwise government interference in the market. Finally, some politicians are starting to take notice.

The New York Times has an article about Rick Perry‘s opposition to the ethanol mandate. Why? He’s the Governor of Texas (Republican). As such, he responds to the needs of his constituency. In this case, Texas ranchers, who have been hurt by high feed costs resulting from competition from ethanol. So Perry has requested that the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) reduce the current mandate by 50% instead of increasing it by 17% in 2009 as planned. The deadline for a decision from the E.P.A. is today though they’ll likely take more time.

Perry is not alone in his concern. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) has introduced legislation that would freeze the mandate at its current level. John McCain (R-AZ) and ten other Republican Senators have cosponsored the bill. While I prefer Perry’s plan to cut the mandate, it’s still nice to see some Republicans taking steps in the right direction.

Add to this pressure the fact that Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Ben Bernanke suggested removing the tariff on Brazilian ethanol (made with sugarcane, which is over seven times more efficient than corn-based ethanol). A pattern seems to be emerging. American Ethanol is no longer the darling of Washington politics. I suspect the main reason they were ever overly pandered to is because the ethanol capital, Iowa, is the first primary state.

The above image was created and is licensed by Todd Ehlers.

Less than one day after dismissing the idea that the media has a liberal bias, it looks as though I may have to eat some of my words. That evening, NPR ran this story about how network news coverage is heavily bias in favor of Barack Obama.

The Tyndall Report has monitored news coverage of presidential candidates since 1988. This election cycle, they claim that there is an unprecedented bias in favor of one candidate. As evidence, they point out that there has been “41 stories by the three network newscasts on Obama between May 2 and July 2; in comparison, there are 17 stories about Republican Sen. John McCain.”

That is certainly unbalanced. But is it really unfair? The first thing I thought as I read the article was that the dates Tyndall chose seem arbitrary. Why a two month period? Why start on the 2nd? I suspect those dates were chosen to “pad” the stats. I bet they looked for the time period in which the coverage was most unbalanced. Furthermore, I noticed that the time period overlaps with the last weeks of the hotly contested Democratic primary. Of course Obama (and Clinton) would be mentioned more than McCain for much of that time period. I also wondered why Tyndall limits his data to just the three major television news networks.

In their own defense, the networks pointed out that not only was coverage of Obama due to the primary, but also that they don’t set the number of interviews, the candidates do. Obama has made himself more available. Furthermore, the public knows less about Obama than they do about McCain so they have an obligation to inform them. Lastly, the networks claim that future coverage will balance out as we approach the election.

One last note, even Tyndall points out that even though Obama has received more coverage, it has not all been positive coverage. “Obama is the center of attention in this election, and we can just predict that will happen all the way through to November. This is a test for Obama to see if he has the chops to become president.”

As the media keeps on telling us, the media has a liberal bias. The media giant Clear Channel, owner and operator of numerous radio and television stations and owner of countless billboards is no exception. In fact, their bias is so pinko-leftist that they censored advertisements critical of the Bush administration… again.

The first was an ad featuring Cindy Sheehan in which she accurately describes Bush administration as lying about its justification for going to war. Remember all those WMDs we were supposed to find and the claims that the war would be short, on the order of months and that Iraqi oil would cover the costs? Lies, all them.

Now comedian/actor/writer/etc. Harry Shearer has had an ad censored by Clear Channel. The ad is a promotion of his new CD, Songs of the Bushman, which is critical of the Bush administration. Initially, they eagerly agreeing to take Shearer’s marketing money – a good thing in a capitalist society. But once they saw the cover art (upper-left), Clear Channel ended the sale via a curt email that described the art as “not acceptable” – a bad thing in a free society. So of course I have to include this unacceptable image in this post.

Of course Clear Channel has every right to not run the advertisements. That’s part of freedom too. But in light of such censorship, it’s absurd to continue to believe that the media has a liberal bias.

This is the hardest time for me in the presidential election cycle. One of the democratic candidates wins the primary and then waits a few weeks for party unity to start to take shape. Then he/she rushes to the political center. The week of the 4th of July was when Barack Obama decided to start that process. Last week, he indicated that he would expand Bush’s faith-based initiatives, gave his support to a FISA capitulation compromise that grants retro-active immunity of civil rights violations, and stated his opposition to late-term abortion.

The first move to the center, his desired expansion of federal grants to religious charities isn’t all that bad, if looked at a little more closely. The government has always given money to religious organizations, as long as they meet two criteria: they don’t use the money for programs that proselytize and they don’t discriminate on the bases of religion for receipt of aid and for hiring. The Salvation Army was one such organization. What Bush’s faith-based initiative did was to turn a blind eye to discrimination in hiring by charities and aid groups.

Obama wants a restoration of the anti-discriminatory policy. He said, “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion” (emphasis mine). Thus Obama simultaneously appears to support faith-based initiatives while actually returning to pre-Bush policies. Furthermore, federal law is actually ambiguous about funding organizations that hire based on religion so Obama’s position is actually a liberal one.

The above image is created and licensed by dbking.

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I ran across this story today via the Huffington Post. Documents released yesterday by the Senate Armed Services Committee confirm that terrorist suspects who received harsh treatment at the hands of the U.S. military where hidden from Red Cross inspectors.

Here are a couple of quotes from the documents that demonstrate that the cover-up was planned: “We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” – Lt. Col. Diane Beaver. “In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Department of Defense) has ‘moved’ them away from the attention of the ICRC.” – Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Time has released additional key findings of the Armed Services Committee investigation that led to the release of the documents. The first was that the Pentagon learned their “harsh interrogation” techniques by reviewing a U.S. military program, SERE, designed to train U.S. troops to resist torture. We were expecting our enemies of the time, countries like Soviet Russia, Vietnam (during the War) and North Korea to torture captured troops. Where we used to just prepare troops to handle that threat we now borrow those ‘techniques’. We have become our enemies.

The committee also found that Rumsfeld approved the use of torture (though I don’t think they used that word) over the objections of top U.S. military lawyers from all four major branches of the military.

Of course, we already knew this to some degree. What the documents indicate is that the leaders knew it was wrong, else they wouldn’t have sought to keep it secret. Our country has been misled from the top down.

It’s about time that congress has started to take action. I sincerely hope it leads to more. I want hearings, I want Rumsfeld in prison, I want the President and Vice President impeached and removed from office for crimes against humanity. But most of all, I want it to stop and want America to return to the principles of basic human rights and basic human dignity.

The actions of America in the last six years has robbed me of some of my pride in being an American. They have undermined my faith that the U.S. military will act with honor and my faith in our democracy’s ability to elect capable, just leaders. I now fear for our troops who may face “harsh interrogation techniques” at the hands of our enemies follower our lead. I am disgusted by the Bush administration. These are dark times in our history for sure, but there is hope.

Politics and the economy are intertwined. We all know this. That is why in recent political polls, the most common response to “Thinking ahead to the November presidential election, what is the single most important issue in your choice for president?” is “Economy/Jobs”. We wouldn’t name that as an election issue if we believed politicians could affect the economy.

Markets influence politics and politics influence markets. The actual stings on influence are many and diverse. Add to this tangle, a new thread, from Intrade.com. The site sets up a futures market for all sorts of events. Everything from the name of the last named storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season (‘Omar’ is the current favorite) to the most used internet search engine. The most interesting futures, though, are about politics.

These are real markets. Real money is spent to buy shares of an Obama presidential victory and the like. The value of those shares fluctuate according to how the market views how his chances of winning change. As of the time when this sentence was written, an Obama victory is trading at 61.3 and McCain is trading at 34.4. They are followed by Clinton at 5.1 and, amazingly, Al Gore, who isn’t even running, at 0.6. I think I’d sell that one short, if I could find a buyer.

The numbers represent the percentage chance of the event occurring. Thus if you think Clinton’s odds of winning the 2008 Presidential election is greater than 5.1%, then you should buy shares. If not, you should sell them. The monetary value is one-tenth the percentage. Thus, in this example, a share of a Clinton victory is $0.51.

Anyway, they do a state-by-state victory as well. For instance, you can buy shares in a Republican Presidential victory in Ohio for $3.90 apiece (representing a 39% chance that the republican candidate will take OH’s electoral votes). Because of this, they always have a current Presidential electoral map based current prices. Check it out now and then and let’s see how self-correcting this market is.

Note: This was an article I originally wrote for ReligiousFreaks.com back in October of ’06. Unfortunately, the site has fallen into disrepair and risks disappearing altogether. As such, and with inspiration from a recent Spitball Politics post, I wanted a permanent home for the article, so I am copying an edited version of it here. Note that some of the links are no longer valid due to the age of the article.

The Christian States of America?

There has been much debate across the web over whether the United States is a Christian nation or a secular nation. The debates can be categorized into three distinct questions: Is America currently a Christian nation? Was America founded as a Christian nation? And finally, should America be(come) a Christian nation? On the extreme sides of this debate are fundamentalists and atheists. Fundamentalists who desire a ‘Christian America’ often are of the opinion that the nation was founded as a Christian nation but an encroaching anti-Christian sentiment has made it a secular nation in need of reformation. On the other hand, atheists who believe America should be secular are of the opinion that America was founded as secular and has been growing increasingly Christian in recent times. Both sides feel they need to save the country from the other group. Which group is right about which questions and to what extent? This article attempts to detangle the noise surrounding this debate and argues that the nation was founded as, is still, and should remain secular.

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The other day I received my monthly email from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) full of recent articles that they have published and one article caught my eye. The article discusses the most recent business cycle from 2001 to 2007 and compares the data to other business cycles post WWII.

I was astonished to see the authors findings. The paper gives a great breakdown, so I will quote that below and you won’t have to work through a summary provided by myself, lucky you!

* Of the 10 expansions since 1949, as measured from the end of the recession (trough) to the end of the expansion (peak), the expansion from 2001 through last year ranks last in average growth of GDP, investment, employment growth, and employee compensation.

* GDP growth in the latest expansion was a full 40% slower than the post-World War II average (2.8% versus 4.8% in previous expansions).

* Despite tax changes that were promoted as incentives to increase investment, average growth in total investment over the latest expansion was less than half of the post-WWII average, and ranked last in this group. For the full cycle, investment growth was also less than half the average and worse than all cycles in the last 50 years.

* Compared to the start of the last recession (the peak that occurred in the first quarter of 2001), the percent of the population employed declined by 1.5 percentage points by the end of 2007. The only previous drop in this measure relative to a previous business cycle peak came during the mini-expansion of the early 1980s, and the drop in the latest expansion was five times as large.

As a matter of fact, the paper points out that of the 9 major indicators for economic growth the 2001-07 business cycle ranked 8th or worse (out of 10) in 7 of them when compared to all full cycles since 1949! The only two areas where this most recent cycle was above 8th were Unemployment (5th) and…drum roll please…Corporate Profits which was 2nd best! It is sad that during an entire administration’s 8 year reign, their policies were only able to help boost corporate profits.

The records are going to show that the administrations policy of tax cuts and economic policies did not produce strong economic fundamentals, instead they help create the worst economic recovery. The worst part about the tax cut policies, as the paper points out, is that it makes it harder for future administrations to create the liquidity they need to fund much needed programs.