December 2005 – Richard Bennett

Housing bubble bursting

New home sales declined 11.3% last month, the biggest drop in more than a decade: WASHINGTON — New-home sales posted the biggest fall in nearly 12 years last month, while a strong surge in the volatile aircraft sector boosted demand for expensive manufactured goods. Amid mounting interest rates, sales of single-family homes decreased 11.3% to … Continue reading “Housing bubble bursting”

New home sales declined 11.3% last month, the biggest drop in more than a decade:

WASHINGTON — New-home sales posted the biggest fall in nearly 12 years last month, while a strong surge in the volatile aircraft sector boosted demand for expensive manufactured goods.

Amid mounting interest rates, sales of single-family homes decreased 11.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.245 million, the Commerce Department said Friday. The plunge was the deepest since sales fell 23.8% in January 1994. Wall Street expected an 8.7% slide.

“The sharp drop in new home sales may be the first sign that the housing market is finally hitting a wall even if the level is still decent,” said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc. in Holland, Pa…

The Commerce report on new home sales showed inventories climbed to a record last month, while prices tumbled. The average price of a home decreased to $283,300, down from a revised $290,600 in October. There were an estimated 503,000 homes for sale at the end of November, a record high. That represented a 4.9 months’ supply at the current sales rate — the highest since 5.0 in December 1996.

There have been other signs the housing market is cooling after years of climbing prices and brisk construction activity. For instance, U.S. existing-home sales in October fell 2.7%. Financing costs have been creeping upward. Freddie Mac data show the average 30-year mortgage rate was 6.33% in November, the highest monthly level since 6.49% in July 2002.

Excellent.

Justice in Dover

The court’s ruling that Intelligent Design is nothing more than a sham was better than I’d expected: A “hypothetical reasonable observer,” adult or child, who is “aware of the history and context of the community and forum” is also presumed to know that ID is a form of creationism. Child Evangelism, 386 F.3d at 531 … Continue reading “Justice in Dover”

The court’s ruling that Intelligent Design is nothing more than a sham was better than I’d expected:

A “hypothetical reasonable observer,” adult or child, who is “aware of the history and context of the community and forum” is also presumed to know that ID is a form of creationism. Child Evangelism, 386 F.3d at 531 (citations omitted); Allegheny, 492 U.S. at 624-25. The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism. What is likely the strongest evidence supporting the finding of ID’s creationist nature is the history and historical pedigree of the book to which students in Dover’s ninth grade biology class are referred, Pandas. Pandas is published by an organization called FTE, as noted, whose articles of incorporation and filings with the Internal Revenue Service describe it as a religious, Christian organization. (P-461; P-28; P-566; P-633;Buell Dep. 1:13, July 8, 2005). Pandas was written by Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis, both acknowledged creationists, and Nancy Pearcey, a Young Earth Creationist, contributed to the work. (10:102-08 (Forrest)).

As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge: (1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content, which directly refutes FTE’s argument that by merely disregarding the words “creation” and “creationism,” FTE expressly rejected creationism in Pandas. In early pre-Edwards drafts of Pandas, the term “creation” was defined as “various forms of life that began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc,” the very same way in which ID is defined in the subsequent published versions. (P-560 at 210; P-1 at 2-13; P-562 at 2-14, P-652 at 2-15; P-6 at 99-100; P-11 at 99-100; P-856.2.). This definition was described by many witnesses for both parties, notably including defense experts Minnich and Fuller, as “special creation” of kinds of animals, an inherently religious and creationist concept. (28:85-86 (Fuller); Minnich Dep. at 34, May 26, 2005; Trial Tr. vol. 1, Miller Test., 141-42, Sept. 26, 2005; 9:10 (Haught); Trial Tr. vol. 33, Bonsell Test., 54-56, Oct. 31, 2005). Professor Behe’s assertion that this passage was merely a description of appearances in the fossil record is illogical and defies the weight of the evidence that the passage is a conclusion about how life began based upon an interpretation of the fossil record, which is reinforced by the content of drafts of Pandas.

The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted, that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling evidence strongly supports Plaintiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled. Importantly, the objective observer, whether adult or child, would conclude from the fact that Pandas posits a master intellect that the intelligent designer is God.

The polite thing to do before now has been to play along with the idea that Intelligent Design had some scientific basis and to refute it on scientific grounds. But now that even a federal district judge has been able to see through the charade and get to the substance of the matter, we don’t need to do that anymore. ID is an attempt to sneak supernaturalism into science classes, and it’s illegal.

That it’s also bad theology is almost beside the point, except for religious people who stand by the commandment about bearing false witness.

This is a great day for American science education. Now if we can get the feminist/liberal crap out of the social sciences the victory of science over propaganda will be complete.

ID prophet Bill Dembski is strangely cryptic about Dover, which he wrongly predicted, and the rest of the Discovery Institute frauds are completely silent. UPDATE: DI’er Paul Nelson says it’s no big deal:

There’s not a lot to say about yesterday’s opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover. The oucome was as predictable as the sun rising, with the only question of interest being the possible breadth of the ruling. On that score, Judge John Jones III went for the Full Overton (see below), with an added half-rotation before entry.

Panda’s Thumb has interesting commentary, as does Steve Verdon at Outside the Beltway.

Via Mumon, here’s the closing para from The Skeptic’s review of the case:

Kitzmiller provides an excellent case study of evolution in action; ironically, in this case how the language of creationists has adapted to changing cultural environments. The defense argued that Intelligent Design is an entirely new species unrelated to creation science, and the plaintiffs expertly demonstrated both the clear ancestral relationship between creationism and ID and the selective pressure of higher court decisions that caused the speciation. With that phylogenetic relationship clearly established in the trial, the judge evidently decided that creationism had not mutated enough to survive as the new species of Intelligent Design.

Heh, indeed, RTWT.

Supporting the Death Penalty

I’m opposed to the death penalty and have been for quite some time. While there are several good reasons to oppose the death penalty, the one that I find most compelling is the sloppiness of the criminal justice system. Eye-witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, and it’s the gold standard of evidence, and physical evidence is too frequently inconclusive with respect to the link between the crime and the accused. We may know that a certain gun fired the bullet that killed someone, but we rarely have certainty that person X fired that gun, let alone what his motivation may have been. So a small element of doubt remains in most death penalty convictions, and that’s enough for me to oppose a punishment that forecloses the discovery and the correction of errors that may have been made in the trial. This is a slim reed in an era in which every death penalty conviction is appealed and appealed for one or two decades, of course, and a non-existent objection in cases in which the evidence is clear and overwhelming.

But my experience is that I become more and more willing to accept the death penalty every time the celebrities leave their gated mansions to lecture the rest of us on morality. Bianca Jagger, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson have nothing to teach us about morality.

Jagger’s only achievement in this life was to marry Mick Jagger for a brief time, and Hayden has a similar resume as the most expensive ex-husband of Jane Fonda and former occupant of the most expensive seat in the California Assembly. Sarandon named a child after Jack Henry Abbott, the brutal killer who murdered a waiter just six weeks after Norman Mailer and a host of other celebrities secured his release from prison on a prior murder. And Jesse Jackson is simply a shake-down artist, a philanderer, and an opportunist.

Hayden argued that Tookie Williams should have been pardoned because he was part of a revolutionary vanguard that threatened to bring down capitalism presumably because it was an impediment to dealing drugs, and the Religious Left made all sorts of incoherent and self-righteous arguments about God’s mercy, redemption, and social science. This tradition goes back to Gandhi’s notoriously false assertion that “an eye for an eye makes us all blind.” I’m not blind and neither are you.

The death penalty does exactly nothing to prevent redemption, salvation, or conversion. We all die, and the only difference between death row inmates and the rest of us is that they know when, where, and how it’s going to happen. If redemption is in the cards, they know the schedule and have a leg up on the rest of us. And if religious conversion is driven strictly by God, the timetable is absolutely unimportant.

We have the death penalty because most of us believe that some crimes are so horrible that it’s inconceivable that their perpetrators should be allowed to live and breath the same air as the rest of us. We can all conceive of some crime so horrible that it should qualify: Hitler’s gassing of millions, the rape and torture of a bus load of school children, the negligent drowning of sex worker, or the execution of a twelve-year-old child by a shotgun blast to the face after she’s been made to watch the killing of her mother and father, Tookie’s crime. So the death penalty is here to stay.

If Hollywood’s activists have so much time on their hands that they have no choice but to lecture us on the death penalty (between their divorces and trips to rehab), it would certainly be a lot more palatable if they could find a more suitable poster child than Tookie Williams. Their support of such a monster makes them look downright dim.