Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

Another scientific body, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, has spoken out against the idiotic Creation Museum in Kentucky.

From the article:

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a world-wide scientific and educational organization concerned with vertebrate paleontology, contends that the museum presents visitors with a view of earth history that has been scientifically disproven for over a century.

The Creation Museum’s fossil exhibitions, though artistically impressive, include a vast number of scientific errors, large and small. These errors range from implying that the Earth’s sedimentary rocks were deposited by a single biblical Flood, to claiming that humans and dinosaurs lived alongside one another, to denouncing the reality of transitional fossils.

“Ken Ham is not recognized as a scientist or educator among experts in the fields of geology and paleontology, and his views on the interpretation of Biblical texts are extremist. Visitors to his ‘museum’ may arrive knowing little about these sciences, but they will leave misled and intellectually deceived,” said Dr. Kevin Padian, professor and curator, University of California, Berkeley and president of the National Center for Science Education.

“That’s the real danger of such a place – undermining the basic principles of science, eroding the public’s confidence in science, and causing a general weakening of science education in the country,” commented Dr. Glenn Storrs of the Cincinnati Museum Center.

I don’t have much to add to this, other than to echo the sentiments of this song.

It looks like Asshat Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is finally going to be held accountable for his lies:

The head of the FBI contradicted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ sworn testimony and Senate Democrats requested a perjury investigation Thursday in a fresh barrage against President Bush’s embattled longtime friend and aide.

In a third blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas to compel the testimony of Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, in connection with its investigation.

“It has become apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements,” four Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to Solicitor General Paul Clement calling for a special counsel to investigate.

“I’m convinced that he’s not telling the truth,” added Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

I thought that the Republicans were supposed to be good, upstanding, God-fearing people who were going to “restore integrity” to the White House. Isn’t “bearing false witness” one of the ten things that you’re Really Not Supposed To Do ™, according to a certain set of religious laws that Republicans keep trying to cram into our courthouses?

Princess Märtha Louise of Norway (fourth in the line of succession to the Norwegian throne) has made some interesting claims:

Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise, daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja, has emerged as a clairvoyant, and is launching an alternative school aimed at training students to contact angels.

The princess’ business partner has publicly confirmed the training program, which is billed as a means of “getting in touch with your own truths” through “readings, healing, crystals and hands-on treatment.”

The 35-year-old princess was educated as a physiotherapist, trained as a Rosen therapist and also has studied at an academy for holistic medicine “where I learned to systematize sensual impressions to read others, and through horses I learned to communicate with animals on a deeper level.”

Märtha Louise, who competed in equestrian events for several years, said that she started “taking contact with angels” when she worked with horses. “I have later learned the value of this enormous gift, and want to share it with others,” she said.

The princess has launched Astarte Education with a friend, Elisabeth Samnøy, who describes herself on the website as a former ship mechanic who also attended a holistic academy.

“After that I have been in a process where angels and their frequency opened contact with the divine in my heart,” Samnøy wrote.

Clairvoyance? Healing crystals? Talking to horses? Any rational person can see right through these claims. They contradict the known, observable nature of reality and there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that any of this has any merit.

So we’re all in agreement, right? This princess is just nutty? Not quite. According to that poll, some 81% of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Why don’t the same rules of evidence that we use to judge “healing crystals” apply to angels and alleged human-angel communication as well?

Courses will be offered twice a week over three years, at a cost of NOK 12,000 per half-year. Students are obligated to sign up for at least one year at a time.

Does she actually believe her own bullshit, or is she just a manipulative charlatan?  Either way, at approximately $4,200 per sucker student per year, voodoo certainly can be lucrative.

One of the few respectable members of the U.S. Senate, Russ Feingold, is making another attempt at censuring President Bush and others in his administration over the deceitful invasion and occupation of Iraq and the illegal warrantless wiretapping scandal.

From the article:

Feingold spoke eloquently of the need to set the historical record straight. What message does it send, he asked, if elected representatives do not hold accountable a President and Vice President who have used mistruths, spin, manipulated intelligence reports and fear to drag this country into a war that is the most colossal foreign policy mistake in our history? What message does it send if we do not hold them accountable for weakening our security through relentless assaults on the rule of law on which our country was founded?

History must therefore record, Feingold argued, that when faced with an administration which doesn’t recognize or respect the separation of powers, which perpetually acts as if the executive branch is above the laws of our nation, the people and their elected officials stood up and demanded accountability.

Let’s hope that Harry Reid and other spineless Democrats grow some balls and get behind these resolutions. Impeaching and removing Bush and Cheney is far too much to hope for, but censure is within the realm of possibility and would be an important symbolic milestone.

For what it’s worth, you could express your opinion to your Representative and Senators.

I’d like to take a moment to plug our Web hosting service: KJChost. If you’re looking for a small, friendly, Linux-based Web host, drop us a line.

In 2003, a bunch of filthy stinking douchebags conspired to expose the identity of an undercover CIA operative. This is a big no-no, for reasons that should be obvious.

Why would they do such a thing? Payback. Specifically, these Republican criminals blew the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to get back at her husband, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly criticized the Bush administration’s lies about the “threat” posed by Iraq.

Valerie Plame filed a lawsuit against Cheney, Rove, Libby and Armitage seeking damages for this illegal retribution. As of today, the lawsuit has been dismissed. Between this and Bush’s commutation of Libby’s prison sentence, Republican-style justice (letting your cronies off the hook) has definitely been served.

I’ve been a computer enthusiast since 1991 and a systems administrator since 2001. In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work/play with a wide variety of hardware and software, which has inevitably led to the formation of opinions about various vendors. There are the good (e.g. Seagate, Crucial/Micron, 3ware, Asus, Texas Instruments, Cisco), the bad (e.g. Dell, D-Link, IBM, Gateway), and the downright ugly (e.g. Microsoft, Real, SCO).

Recently, I’ve discovered a vendor of servers and server-class components that definitely belongs in the first list: SuperMicro. The name is a little dorky, but I’ve been impressed with the quality of their stuff.

At work, we have four servers using SuperMicro parts:

I personally plan on buying an SC733T chassis and a PDSLA motherboard in the near future. I’ve been meaning to build a RAID-5 media & backup server for a while now…

If you can’t or don’t want to home-build, check out Silicon Mechanics, a Seattle-based integrator of SuperMicro products. They built-and-burned the first two machines in that table. We’ve been quite pleased with them as well.

I have no stake in, nor affiliation with, either company. I’m just a satisfied customer, and since the computer industry is teeming with crappy products from crappy vendors, I wanted to take a second to recognize some exceptions.

The op-ed page of today’s Detroit News contains a slew of letters (see this, this, and this) in response to the remarks made last week by Pope Benedict XVI in which he re-declared the (alleged) veracity of Roman Catholicism, to the exclusion of other Christian groups.

The writers of these letters expressed relatively predictable views. There were Catholics supporting the Pope’s remarks, Protestants complaining about them, and a number of people on both sides advocating tolerance and ecumenical fellowship.

I propose that all Christians, regardless of their denominational affiliation or attitude toward the Vatican, should spend some time considering the implications of the fact that there are:

• Multiple religions on the planet (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.)
• Multiple branches of Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, etc.)
• Multiple denominations within Protestant Christianity (Reformed/Calvinistic, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopalian, etc.)

Most, if not all, of these groups and sub-groups put forth some sort of claim of exclusive knowledge of the true nature of the (alleged) spiritual realm. Depending on the magnitude of the difference between a particular group’s teachings and your own beliefs, they might declare that you are damned and will burn in “Hell”, or they might just say that you’re wrong about the finer points of theology and while you will still be admitted into “Heaven”, you’ll realize the error of your beliefs and be embarrassed once everyone arrives there. Or something like that…

Contrast this situation with what you’d expect from a deity who exists and wants worship in this life and companionship in the (alleged) next. Shouldn’t we expect such a God to communicate with humans in an clear, consistent, undeniable manner? Wouldn’t it be trivially easy for an omnipotent deity to prevent thousands of years’ worth of human bickering, brawling and bloodshed by demonstrating his/her/its power and authority in a verifiable, unambiguous manner, thereby establishing a truly unified Church?

Before anyone objects that “God needs to stay hidden” or “God wants us to have free will” or “God wants us to take everything on faith”, consider that, according to the Bible, obvious miracles happened all the time: parted seas, frogs falling from the sky, pillars of fire, burning bushes, people turning into salt, talking donkeys, expansion of bread and fish, dead people coming back to life, etc. If ancient people received verifiable proof of the existence of a God, there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect the same.

The existence of such a diverse range of religious beliefs, to an unbiased observer, is evidence against all of them.

Major road construction + T1 line + Internet-addicted sysadmin == bad.

After lunch today, I returned to the office and was greeted by a storm of “host unreachable” whinings from Nagios and a blinking “WAN” LED on the T1 router. A few phone calls later, it was confirmed that our local loop circuit had been physically cut. Wonderful.

How am I supposed to survive without Google, to say nothing of IM and email? I actually had to dig out a physical, dead-tree book to look up the answer to an (unrelated) technical issue today. Argh!

I haven’t abandoned the blog — I’m just on vacation.

We’re having a great time doing “up north” stuff - boating, fishing, fireworks, road trips, etc. We’ll post a few pictures when we have a chance.