I am so glad I'm not a science teacher right now. English can have its own censorship pitfalls, but at least I don't have to worry about someone telling me I have to teach the Bible alongside all that heathen literature.

(Though it may be worth noting that I have, in fact, been accused of teaching evil pagan propoganda. Bless Me, Ultima caused quite an uproar one year. But witches they were persecuted love the earth and wicca good and I'll be over here.)

Hardly anyone has been taught how to think anymore, that was one of the classes deemed extraneous to a curriculum designed to train people to make money.

So, you're saying, now is the time to investigate my opportunities in the growing field of confidence swindling??

Actually, it's not that people can't think any more, it's that, it didn't used to matter as much. When the big swindle is a guy with a cart full of patent medicines, who shows up yearly, you're in a lot less danger of being swindled than if you short stock options in the 21st century.

These aren't web popups. They're a random window extolling virtues of some sort. It's not like I'm going to read the whole thing.

Oh, annoying.

OMG, speaking of evil pagan propoganda, I was at this party over the weekend, and this woman was saying she works for Liz Claiborne (the company), and this other girl was like, "Doesn't she give part of the company's profits to devil worship? That's what I heard." Um.

::throws out all Liz Claiborne stuff::

::has exactly the same amount of stuff she had ten minutes ago::

1. Is Liz Claiborne actually a person? For that matter, Yves Saint Laurent? (I know about Coco Chanel.)

2. People who believe that major corporations would actually put "devil worship" in a line-item budget need to be beaten with an old-time mechanical calculator. You put that expense under "Travel and Entertainment."

I don't know about Liz Claiborn, but FYI, Estee Lauder was an actual person, now deceased.

Yes, Liz Claiborne is a real person, but she is no longer associated with the company. Here's the Snopes thing about the similar P&G story with a mention of LC: [link]

So, you're saying, now is the time to investigate my opportunities in the growing field of confidence swindling??

Come to Utah for your training, we lead the country in personal fraud. We've made great strides, though, mortgage fraud, going from first in the rankings to sixth.

It's easy to convince people there are no biological precursors to eyes (even though there ARE)-- they seem to be willing to believe that if they don't know about it it must not exist.

Yes, in recent years there have been elegant studies in developmental genetics showing how simple mechanisms can assemble into something like an eye, or how a slight change in the protein produced by a gene can change scales into feathers. The core of "Intelligent Design" is the idea of irreducible complexity, but no such thing has been found in biology. Proponents of the ID are either ignorant or they are liars or they are both.

Made my chiro appointment for today, and cancelled the ortho. I need my spine cracked something awful. I don't know what's happening to my skeleton, but my joints are very cranky recently.

ita illustrates the other big problem with Intelligent Design: all known species are filled with unintelligent design that betrays their inefficient evolutionary history. It is obvious that humans, for instance, were not designed to walk upright, although some last-minute biological jury-rigging allows us to do so. If species were created by an intelligent designer, it must have been an intelligent designer on crack.

Also, why would an Intelligent Design just muck around with single cell organisms for billions of years?