has funded and directed three expeditions to the Sinai desert where he was the first person since Baruch (Jeremiah’s grandson) to discover the real Mount Sinai. He discovered all the altars that Moses describes in the Torah. In addition he was the first person since Moses to see the real Abraham’s altar also located at Mount Sinai and not in Jerusalem. He has discovered the code systems used by Moses when writing the surface story of the Torah, which enabled him to decode the Torah and other earlier books of the Hebrew Scriptures.His book features:
The first information theory of existence. explains many of the hardest phenomena in the Universe such as: the causes of the ice ages, polar reversals, mass extinctions, gravity, light, pyramid energy, kirlian photography, psychic phenomena, and more!So in addition to a self-proclaimed expert on typography, conspiracy theorist, and "birther," Vogt is apparently a creationist, pseudo-archaeologist, Bible code advocate, and promoter of a wide variety of pseudoscience claims.
This mailer came from an organization called Mesa Deserves Better, chaired by Republican fundraiser and dirty tricks operator Nathan Sproul, who is former head of the Arizona Republican Party and former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition. Sproul was previously mentioned on this blog during his support of the failed gubernatorial campaign of Len Munsil, when he was complaining about a campaign by a deceptively-named group called the "Arizona Conservative Trust" that criticized Munsil.The race for a state Senate seat in west Mesa broke out into a wide-open brawl Wednesday, with allegations that Rep. Russell Pearce attacked his wife nearly three decades ago and Pearce's campaign firing back that the charge is false and the height of sleazy campaigning.
A mailer sent to voters in west Mesa cited a divorce petition that LuAnne Pearce filed in 1980. In it, she charges that her husband had a violent temper, hit her and shoved her. The petition also says that two days before the filing, Pearce "grabbed the wife by the throat and threw her down."
The petition was later withdrawn, and the Pearces remain married.
At least she doesn't call for new laws. I'd endorse consumer civil complaints, if not fraud charges, against sellers of bogus products, which would include the so-called "therapeutic" binaural beats just as much as the allegedly "sinister" ones.But websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.
All your child needs is a music player and headphones.
Digital drugs supposedly synchronize your brain waves with the sound. Hence, they allegedly alter your mental state.
Binaural beats create a beating sound. Other noises may be included with binaural beats. This is intended to mask their unpleasant sound.
Some sites provide binaural beats that have innocuous effects. For example, some claim to help you develop extrasensory powers like telepathy and psychokinesis.
Other sites offer therapeutic binaural beats. They help you relax or meditate. Some allegedly help you overcome addiction or anxiety. Others purport to help you lose weight or eliminate gray hair.
However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files ("doses") that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.
But it doesn't end there. You'll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.
Many are skeptical about the effects of digital drugs. Few scientific studies have been conducted on binaural beats. However, a Duke University study suggests that they can affect mood and motor performance.
Dr. Nicholas Theodore, a brain surgeon at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, said there is no real evidence that idosers work. [emphasis added] But he noted that musical preference is indicative of emotional vulnerability. Trying idosers could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs and other dangerous behavior.
Theodore added that idosers are another reason to monitor kids' Internet usage. And, he said, kids need frank talks with their parents about correct choices.
...
Let's think about this for a moment. The sites claim binaural beats cause the same effects as illegal drugs. These drugs impair coordination and can cause hallucinations. They've caused countless fatal accidents, like traffic collisions.
If binaural beats work as promised, they are not safe. They could also create a placebo effect. The expectation elicits the response. Again, this is unsafe.
At the very least, digital drugs promote drug use. Some sites say binaural beats can be used with illegal drugs.
The CPI report is titled "The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War."President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.
Why were they so dishonest about it? If Mathis had said outright that he wants to interview an atheist and outspoken critic of Intelligent Design for a film he was making about how ID is unfairly excluded from academe, I would have said, "bring it on!" We would have had a good, pugnacious argument on tape that directly addresses the claims of his movie, and it would have been a better (at least, more honest and more relevant) sequence. He would have also been more likely to get that good ol' wild-haired, bulgy-eyed furious John Brown of the Godless vision than the usual mild-mannered professor that he did tape. And I probably would have been more aggressive with a plainly stated disagreement between us.Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education reports a similar experience--she also was interviewed for "Crossroads."
I mean, seriously, not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest.
He [Morey] even quotes from a famous atheist debating guide, in which every trick in the book is offered to fellow atheists as they attack theists. Published by Prometheus Books, the main atheist publisher, The Art of Deception by Nicholas Capaldi teaches atheists how to deliberately use deception to refute theists. After reading Moray’s [sic] description of, and quotations from, the book, it occurred to me that all the atheists I have been debating must have well-worn copies of the book. It certainly explains why actually having a rational debate with an atheist is so difficult. All the dirty tricks, ruses, ploys and deception makes any debate with them a one-way affair.Muehlenberg has been deceived by Morey, and is deceiving others with this description. First, Nicholas Capaldi is not an atheist, he is a Catholic who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and has written a number of religious publications from a Catholic perspective (though his central focus is on business ethics). Some of his publications include "From the Profane to the Sacred: Why We Need to Retrieve Christian Bioethics" and "A Catholic Perspective on Organ Sales" (both in Christian Bioethics).
... I have written this book from the point of view of one who wishes to deceive or mislead others. On the assumption that "it takes one to know one," I have found that people are able to detect the misuse or abuse of logic if they are themselves the masters of the art of deception. I ask the reader to contemplate the prospect of a world in which everyone knew, really knew, how to use and thereby detect the misuse of logic.I draw the conclusion from the facts of the matter that either Morey did not carefully read Capaldi's book, or he is himself being intentionally deceptive. I hope that Muehlenberg will allow the comment I've posted at his blog through moderation and refrain from further misrepresentation of Capaldi's book.To exemplify this perspective, I wish to use an analogy with writings on politics. There are at least three great books which seek to describe political reality: Aristotle's Politics, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Machiavelli's The Prince. Aristotle fails because he is so dull that he is often not read, while Hobbes's perceptiveness is lost in the controversy over the theoretical context in which he embeds his insights. Machiavelli's vivid account is the most popular and the most effective. I believe that more readers have learned about politics from reading Machiavelli than anyone else precisely because Machiavelli's Prince is presented in a format of active manipulation rather than passive recognition. I hope that my presentation of informal logic will have the same kind of impact as Machiavelli.
It’s hardly surprising that antitheistic authors like Nicholas Capaldi published by antitheistic publishers like Prometheus Books should advocate deception. Under an atheistic world view, where we are just rearranged pond scum, there is nothing wrong with deception. It’s about time that Christians realized the implications of an atheistic evolutionary worldview and stopped being so trusting of evolutionary “science” that can provide no objective basis for the rightness of truthtelling.Sarfati has also been deceived about Capaldi and his book, but goes on to engage in outrageous falsehood himself by claiming that it is an implication of "an atheistic worldview" that "there is nothing wrong with deception." This is a lie that Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis is also quite fond of repeating. Even most atheists who reject objective morality (which is not a logical consequence of atheism alone) would not agree that there is "nothing wrong" with deception, but I have never seen a young earth creationist actually engage with any writings or arguments defending nontheistic metaethics (which arguments may in many cases be authored by theistic philosophers). They write things like the above as propaganda against atheism, not as an expression of interest in truth.
After complaining that "some atheists deliberately use deception to refute theism" (pg. 87), Morey cites Nicholas Capaldi's book The Art of Deception as "proof" of atheistic deception. Morey quotes page 117 of Capaldi's book thusly: "Never admit defeat... ". The only problem is that Capaldi never says this (or anything like it) on this or on any other page. Morey has numerous other false quotes attributed to Capaldi, such as: "Refuse to be convinced. Even if you feel that he has a good argument and that your case is weaker, refuse to be convinced of your opponent's case". Nowhere does Capaldi advocate, as Morey accuses him of doing, that atheists should "use any invalid or deceptive argument as long as it helps him (to) win his case". Morey concludes this amazing series of lies and defamation of character by noting that his examples provide "a small sampling of the 'dirty tricks' methodology that seems to pervade modern atheism", and that, as a consequence, "my personal experience has proven this makes rational debate with an atheist very difficult".I also note that the Wikipedia entry on Robert Morey states that Morey has claimed to be a reliable information source to the FBI and Naval Intelligence about Islamic terrorist activity inside the United States, that he gave a speech to a San Diego church stating that he had "advised the State Department to blow up the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina if they wanted to win the war on terror quickly," and that he's written an anti-Islam book published by Jack Chick. If these claims are correct, then I'd class Morey with Chuck Missler--a complete huckster who has no qualms about relying on bogus claims or fabricating them himself to promote his "ministry." My bullshit detector goes off when somebody claims to be an important intelligence source and have access to secret inside information--not to mention when they're published by Chick, who has repeatedly published fabricated works by frauds.
UPDATE (December 29, 2009): Looks like Morey's church shut down earlier this year amidst scandal.I’ve now been informed (by a fair-minded atheist who has taken fellow atheists to task for unfair attacks), then investigated further, that Morey doesn’t seem to have read Capaldi’s book or know much about his background. Checking on Amazon, its full title is The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking : How to : Win an Argument, Defend a Case, Recognize a Fallacy, See Through a Deception, Persuade a Skeptic, Turn Defeat into Victory. It appears to cover introductory logic, critical thinking, seeing through fallacies and contructing powerful arguments. The contents pages on the site and the reviews show that it’s not a how-to-defeat-Christians guide.
Also, Capaldi is Distinguished Scholar Chair in Business Ethics at Loyola University of New Orleans. So there is a good chance that he is a Catholic, rather than an antitheist. Publishing in an antitheistic press which has a virtual monopoly on the “Jesus never existed” nonsense is hardly encouraging, and this should send up red flags just as “Chick Publications” does for atheists (and informed Christians too). Nor is the fact that many Catholic universities are really CINO (Catholic In Name Only), e.g. teaching higher criticism and inviting pro-abortionist commencement speakers, and Loyola seems to fit the description. But it’s hardly plausible that they would appoint a high-profile atheist to be a chair, if that’s what Morey claims Capaldi is.
The ad is online, though it doesn't seem to be one of the ones the ONDCP put on YouTube, with subsequent ridicule.February 22, 2004, 05:24 PMI keep seeing this TV commercial from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The commercial shows a girl standing on a dock on a lake, with a life preserver sitting on it, and another drowning in the water as she looks on. The voiceover says something like "If you had a friend who was drowning, you'd help, wouldn't you?"
Every time I see it I think it's going to be an argument for the nonexistence of God.
The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist.He goes on to note that
Today’s Christmas Pentagon is the Fox News Channel, which during a recent five-day period carried no fewer than fifty-eight different segments about the ongoing struggle, some of them labelled “Christmas under attack.”and discusses John Gibson's book and Bill O'Reilly's role as "Patton." Near the end, he notes:
In this war, no weapons of Christmas destruction have been found—just a few caches of linguistic oversensitivity and commercial caution. Christmas remains robust: even Gibson says in his book that in America Christmas celebrators (ninety-six per cent) outnumber Christians (eighty-four per cent). But the “Happy Holidays” contagion has probably spread too far to be wiped out.O'Reilly's response on December 20:
O'REILLY: Time now for "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." New Yorker magazine joins our hall of shame. We are recommending readers and sponsors avoid the publication. The reason: that magazine allows writer Hendrik Hertzberg to print dishonest propaganda fed to him by left-wing smear sites. As I previously stated, any publication or news operation that does that will be listed on BillOReilly.com asAnd Fox's John Gibson, author of The War on Christmas, got into a shouting match with Rob Boston of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, with Gibson threatening to sue Boston for pointing out O'Reilly's falsehood about green and red clothing being prohibited by Plano, Texas schools. As it turns out, there were some prohibitions about party items and gifts in Plano schools which included such things as paper plate color, which led to a lawsuit; that ban was revoked and the guidelines made more sensible--e.g., students could give each other religious-themed gifts, but teachers (who are acting in an official capacity and represent the state) cannot give religious-themed gifts to students.
not worthy of your attention or advertising dollars. The spin and the propaganda stop here. The New Yorker magazine should be ashamed and is absolutely ridiculous. And one note to Mr. Hertzberg: You might want to rethink your practice of character assassination, sir. Just looking out for you.
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