Via Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, we get a link to this lovely little piece from the South Bend Tribune.

The gist of the article is that a number of television stations in South Bend have received letters from the Republican National Committee regarding the stations’ plans to air an ad from MoveOn.org. The ad claims that the administration’s plans for privatizing Social Security would result in benefits cuts of up to 46%. The RNC calls these claims false and malicious, but the 46% figure is based on data supplied by the Social Security Administration itself.

What I find most troubling here is the threatening nature of the letters. For the “threatening” part, take a look at this excerpt from one of the letters:

As an FCC licensee, you have a responsibility to exercise independent editorial judgment to oversee and protect the integrity of the American marketplace of ideas, and to avoid broadcasting deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. Such obligations must be taken seriously and I urge you to decline to broadcast this advertisement.

This letter places you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading. Your station should act responsibly and refrain from airing this advertisement

So here we have the party of the President and the majorities in both houses of Congress attempting to keep the media from airing criticism of the President. Further, at the mention of the stations’ broadcast licenses, one can’t help but be reminded of the fact that the Federal Communications Commission is also controlled by the Republicans.

I was at PS1 in Queens this past weekend. If you’re not familiar, it’s a former public school that has been turned into exhibition space by the Museum of Modern Art.

Anyway, among the works currently on exhibit, there is a photographic series by a German artist named Hans-Peter Feldmann that consists of 100 pictures. Each one is of a different person—the first is of a baby that is a few months old, the next is a 1-year old child, then a 2-year old, a 3-year old, and so on, all the way up to a 100-year old woman.

As I read the explanatory blurb on the wall at the front of the exhibit, it struck me as being fairly contrived. However, by the third or fourth photograph I had gotten entirely sucked in, and we ended up spending close to an hour looking at all of them. While the choice of subjects was not entirely random (Feldmann used mostly friends, family, and acquaintances), there did not seem to be a deliberate attempt to create any sort of pattern or narrative flow from one portrait to the next. Nonetheless, all sorts of patterns and comparisons presented themselves, and overall, there was definite feeling of watching a progression that went beyond the simple incrementing of the subjects’ ages.

Fascinating stuff.

Let me just say, for the record, that this is super-cool.

The ever-vigilant Craig just forwarded me a link to this op-ed piece in the New York Times by Intelligent Design apologist and psuedo-scientific crank Michael Behe. I assume Craig will have plenty to say about it on his site, so I won’t steal his thunder.

However, the exasperated disgust the article stirred up in me brought to mind something I heard on NPR on the way home from work today. During a promo spot for a story about the continuing argument over the teaching of evolution (as though there were such an argument outside of the massive PR/disinformation campaign being waged by Christian Conservatives), they played a clip of a statement by an unnamed supporter of Intelligent Design theory. I don’t have the exact quote handy, but it went something like this…

You can keep searching for a natural explanation, but at some point you have to admit that the only source of information is a mind.

Aside from belying a fundamental (no pun intended) lack of understanding of the scientific process, or a willing misinterpretation thereof, this statement is an example of a problem common to most pseudoscience, namely, a lack of imagination. The notion of “I can’t imagine how this state of affairs could have come about naturally” becomes confused with the idea that there actually is no way such a state of affairs could have come about naturally. At the point, we are free to jump to the conclusion that ghosts are causing the cold spots in the house, or that God created the universe as described in the Bible, or that the Earth is actually flat.

What’s wrong with such thinking, you ask? What’s wrong is that no matter how outlandish, outrageous, or unlikely it might seem, any natural explanation for a particular phenomenon (be it the origin of life, or the creation of Stonehenge, or the fact that sometimes one’s dreams seem to predict the future) is inherently more reasonable than the claim that supernatural forces are at work. Once you introduce the supernatural (a force that is outside of the realm of observation or verification) into the argument, you can make any sort of claim you want, and there’s nothing anyone can say to dispute it. While this tactic might be rhetorically handy, it is not and has never been of any use for producing useful results in our interactions the world.

My Metallica-listening of last week has turned into a full-blown metal phase, which is odd—I almost never listen to metal during the winter. I’m not sure what is up with this change of habits, winter generally being the time for industrial.

It started out with Metalllica (mostly …And Justice for All, and a bit of Ride the Lightning), and then I started listening to Carcass and At the Gates in the car. They stayed in the CD player for several days. Then I found myself listening to Reign in Blood in my cubicle on Friday…

Alright, I’ll admit it. I didn’t even watch the State of the Union address the other night. It’s the first one I’ve missed in at least eight or nine years. Usually, this sort of thing is like the Superbowl for me—I get some beer, a bunch of snacks, and settle in the couch, yelling at the TV the whole time. Not this year, though.

My official excuse is that I was on my way home from a work trip to Boston, and didn’t get back in time to watch the speech. In reality, I was home at 9:15 and probably could have caught most of it, but just couldn’t bring myself to watch.

From what I have seen, heard, and read about the speech, I am satisfied with my decision to skip it. It’s not as though Bush is going to say anything new, and watching him stand up there and blatantly lie would just make me even more pissed off and depressed than I already am.