Karl Rove's adoptive father and genital piercing

Apparently Karl Rove's adoptive father, Louis Rove, an oil geologist, was a gay man who was an avid fan of genital piercing, whose piercings were frequently pictured in Piercing Fans International Quarterly.

(Via Stan Schwarz on the SKEPTIC list, who also reports that he personally met Louie Rove.)

Bush says FISA law change is just advisory

The Bush administration, commenting on Congress' expansion of the Executive branch's warrantless wiretapping powers without needing approval of the FISA Court, says that the legislation is "just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do."

Constitution? What Constitution?

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

The consensus for anthropogenic global warming

This is from back in February of 2006, but A Few Things Ill Considered has a nice list of statements from scientific organizations endorsing anthropogenic global warming that includes NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and, perhaps most interestingly, British Petroleum, the Shell Group, and, in the comments, ExxonMobil. A number of the links are broken at this point, but I was able to find numerous statements about the reality of anthropogenic global warming on the Shell web pages with a Google search for "global warming site:shell.com".

Science isn't a matter of popular vote, but when a scientific consensus is established it certainly puts the burden of proof on the challenger.

Melanie Morgan vs. Naomi Wolf

Crooks and Liars has a video clip of Melanie Morgan and Naomi Wolf appearing on Chris Matthews' Hardball to discuss Cheney's position of 1994 about why invading and occupying Iraq was a bad idea. Morgan immediately descends into dissembling, claiming that 9/11 changed everything, when in fact it changed nothing about Iraq. Naomi Wolf calls her on it, and correctly describes how the Bush administration has engaged in deception and lies to get us into the war and to seize unconstitutional powers for the Executive branch. Morgan's response to Wolf: "You're going to look super in a burqa."

Morgan seems to think that radical Islamic fundamentalists are about to take control of the United States, and that invading Iraq (one of the few countries in the Middle East which actually had a secular government) and turning it into a breeding ground for radical Islamic insurgents is an essential step to prevent it from happening. That's wildly insane.

The Cheney of 1994 was exactly right in his predictions of what would happen if we invaded Iraq, and no one has yet explained what changed his mind. September 11 is not an answer to that question. I think part of the answer can be found in James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans--groupthink from the Project for a New American Century crowd infected him, and he thought he could be at the center of power of a new American empire controlling the Middle East. But they were completely wrong about what would happen.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Lying at the Weekly Standard

Julian Sanchez points out the staggering misrepresentation by those arguing that the recent increase in wiretapping power amounts to nothing more than an update of FISA procedures to reflect current technology.

(Hat tip to Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front.)

The top six lies of Alberto Gonzales

At Talking Points Memo.

Answers in Genesis Wikipedia edits

Thanks to Wikiscanner, here are a few of the anonymous Wikipedia edits made by people at Answers in Genesis:

November 18, 2005: Changed a sentence in the entry on "Answers in Genesis" from "...according to Biblical myth, there was no death in the Garden of Eden" to "...according to the Biblical record, there was no death in the Garden of Eden."

December 5, 2006: Vandalized the entry on "Football" to add the words "Football sucks".

December 28, 2006: Added an entry for www.articledirect.com to the entry on "Free content." Does an AiG employee have another business on the side?

May 24, 2007: Modifies a sentence in the entry on "Creation Museum" from "This museum portrays the Earth's history interpreting the genesis literally" (ick!) to "The museum presents the account of man's origins and early history according to the Book of Genesis."

There are several other edits of "Creation Museum" and I didn't review them all, but most were reasonable improvements to the article, with the occasional biased statement that propounded creationism as true.

Jeffrey Dahmer and Answers in Genesis

(I've had this in draft since June 21, but forgot about it--I was making an effort to verify that Dahmer was actually raised as a creationist or Christian, but didn't find anything to indicate when Lionel Dahmer became either one. I raised the question in comments at Ed Brayton's blog, and one commenter, Kristine, replied that Lionel Dahmer says he only became a creationist after his son was arrested. That undermines the specifics of the case below. There have certainly been serial killers raised as Christians (such as Ted Bundy), but I've not heard of any that have been specifically raised as creationists. I don't think police departments look at Christianity or creationism as a relevant factor in a serial killer profile, the way they look at, say, possession of a copy of the Satanic Bible, except in extreme cases, which is probably as it should be.)

Ken Ham likes to argue that evolution is the cause of a variety of social ills--teen pregnancy, pornography, drugs, abortion, racism, the Holocaust, etc. His book The Lie: Evolution argues that evolution is responsible for all of these things.

I just learned (thanks to Ed Brayton's blog) that Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer, was raised as a creationist, and his father, Dr. Lionel Dahmer, is listed on the Answers in Genesis website as an analytical chemist who accepts the biblical account of creation.

If evolutionists used Ken Ham's technique, they would argue that being raised as a creationist causes cannibalism. Answers in Genesis specifically suggests that it was belief in evolution, rather than issues from his upbringing, that caused Jeffrey Dahmer to kill, quoting a 1994 statement from him that "If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…"

The Wikipedia entry on Dahmer observes that he "dissected already dead animals as a child" (he collected and sexually interacted with roadkill), began abusing alcohol at 14, had extremely low self-esteem, and his parents divorced after "constant fighting" when he was 18. His father "forced him to enlist" in the Army for six years, but he was discharged after two due to excessive drinking. He built an altar of candles and human skulls in the closet of his apartment that was found when he was arrested. In prison, he declared himself a born-again Christian (which he was when he made the above statement), and was beaten to death in prison in 1994.

Psychiatrist George Palermo testified at Dahmer's trial that he killed his victims because he hated his own homosexuality.

UPDATE (September 6, 2013): It has been pointed out to me that if Lionel Dahmer claimed to have become a creationist after his son's arrest, this is false--Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, but Lionel Dahmer co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, a conference which was held in 1990.

UPDATE (December 15, 2023): Glenn Branch brought to my attention that Lionel Dahmer died on December 5, 2023, and received an obituary in the New York Times (December 12th) that is as much about his son as him, but makes no mention of the creationism. He also noted that Lionel Dahmer's memoir says that he was inspired to return to Christianity in 1989 via the influence of young-earth creationist Bert Thompson of Apologetics Press.  Bert Thompson was subsequently fired from Apologetics Press after allegations of grooming and sexual abuse of teen boys.

UPDATE (December 27, 2023): Glenn Branch has published an article: "Like father, like son: Jeffrey Dahmer's claims about evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer's creationism"

God Hates Roman Catholics?

...Or is it Peruvians? Or perhaps Peruvian Roman Catholics?

From Yahoo News:

Hundreds had gathered in the pews of the San Clemente church on Wednesday — the day Roman Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary's rise into heaven — for a special Mass marking one month since the death of a Pisco man.

With minutes left in the Mass, the church's ceiling began to break apart. The shaking lasted for an agonizing two minutes, burying 200 people, according to the town's mayor. On Thursday, only two stone columns and the church's dome rose from a giant pile of stone, bricks, wood and dust.

Mr. Conservative

Tonight I attended the Goldwater Institute's screening of the HBO documentary "Mr. Conservative," a biography of Barry Goldwater produced by his granddaughter, CC Goldwater, who was in attendance along with Barry Goldwater Jr. The audience was a mix of people who still call themselves conservative, libertarians, and even a few liberals. (Gary Peter Klahr sat directly behind me, and his question in the Q&A session was what Goldwater would have thought of the Bush administration's power grab and war in Iraq. Barry Goldwater Jr.'s answer was that his father disliked foreign entanglements and supported the Constitution.)

The film features footage and photographs taken by Barry Goldwater himself--the film notes that he always had a camera in his hand, and at least three books of his photographs have been published. He was born in Arizona prior to its statehood, to a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother--which led to one quip from Goldwater reported by Robert MacNeil in the movie: "He would say things like, 'I went to a golf club where they wouldn't let Jews play, and I said, "I'm only half Jewish. Can I play nine holes?'"

The movie features interviews with people ranging from George Will, Barry Goldwater, Jr., and Sandra Day O'Connor to Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Al Franken, Julian Bond, and Hillary Clinton. Also featured is the exceedingly evil Jack Valenti.

The film covers Goldwater's life in Arizona, including his mother teaching him to shoot guns, his coming home from the University of Arizona to run the family store in Phoenix so his smarter older brother could stay at Stanford, his love of ham radio and flying airplanes (he would hear on the radio of medical emergencies among the Hopi Indians and personally deliver medicine from Phoenix--and this during his political career). He was a very early runner of the Colorado River (in 1940 using wooden dories--when fewer than 100 people had run the river; Goldwater was #73). He ran the river with camera equipment, making a film which he traveled about Arizona to show, which made him well-known before running for office. He won his first election to the Phoenix City Council, and went straight from the City Council to the U.S. Senate.

In his later life, he was outspoken in his support for a woman's right to abortion, for gays to serve in the military, and for the religious right to stop pushing their religious views into politics. The film reveals that he supported his daughter obtaining an abortion before Roe v. Wade, and that he has a gay grandson. Several of the more liberal interviewees say that they thought Goldwater became liberal later in life (and some in the audience seemed to have a similar view), but Goldwater himself is shown making a statement that preempts this claim, back in 1963--that he is a conservative, but that at some time in the future people will call his views liberal.

He was a supporter of individual liberty who wanted the government's role in private life minimized across the board, on both economic and social issues--it wasn't he who changed, but the political environment that changed.

I recommend the movie--it is well done, it fairly points out his foibles and flaws as well as his strengths. It is sad that there are virtually no politicians today who are as forthright, honest, and outspoken about their views--who are as genuine as he was. We need more people in the public sphere who speak out with integrity and honesty, rather than with dissembling and spin.

UPDATE (August 17, 2007): I glossed over Goldwater's negatives in my last paragraph, but the film doesn't. It reports on how he lost the 1964 election in the biggest landslide in history, and why--including his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (though he supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, supported the Arizona NAACP, and helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard), his remarks about the use of atomic weapons for defoliation in Vietnam, and his remark about sawing off the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and letting it float away. LBJ's political ad graphically depicting the latter remark and his famous "Daisy" mushroom cloud ad are shown in the film. Goldwater's reaction to the latter is reported as saying that if he thought that accurately depicted what he would do, "I wouldn't vote for me either."

A few other points of interest in the film: Goldwater was a friend of John F. Kennedy, and they were looking forward to running against each other in the 1964 election, flying from city to city on the same plane together to campaign against each other face to face. That would have been an interesting match up. (I should note that my opinion of JFK is not as positive as the general public's view, after having read how he made use of the CIA. He was one of the worst abusers of the CIA for interventions in attempt to overthrow the governments of other countries who ever sat in the White House.)

Barry Goldwater Jr. was a long-time friend of Nixon White House counsel John Dean, and Dean consulted with Goldwater Sr. before testifying in front of the Senate about Watergate. Goldwater told him to go ahead and nail Nixon, because Nixon was a liar.

During Watergate, Goldwater, whose wife had decided to remain in Arizona, spent much of his time in D.C. at the home of Lt. Gen. William W. Quinn and his wife Bette. The Quinn's daughter Sally was a journalist engaged to Ben Bradlee, publisher of the Washington Post. Bradlee reports that Goldwater told him that he thought Nixon was going to resign, but not to publish a story about it because if he did, Nixon was so stubborn that he'd then refuse to do it.

The Wikipedia page on Goldwater is quite comprehensive.

UPDATE (August 18, 2007): Apparently the golf story is apocryphal. The discussion page on Goldwater's Wikipedia entry says "In his autobiography, 'Goldwater,' BG attributes this joke to his brother Bob, speaking about HIS brother Barry at 'a golf pro tournament near Los Angeles.' B. Goldwater adds, 'The story got a big laugh, but the incident never occurred.'"