“Power, without control, appertains to God alone; and no man ought to be trusted with what no man is equal to.”—Cato’s letter

“The more time goes by, the more I think that our moral lives depend, to an enormous degree, on our ability to stop and think before crossing certain lines; to recognize that it is time to stop acting in whatever ways come naturally to us”—Hilary Bok

“Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole truth can be won.”—Col. Clayton Wheat

“(The Greeks) take us back to what we know is true: how immensely hard it is to make a great civilization out of the raw material we humans are.”—Charles Mee

“Despite the valor and skills of our fighting forces, some objectives are not obtainable at a human, diplomatic, and financial cost that is acceptable.—Bill Moyers

Quote from a comment on the slacktivist blog: “As best I can figure out, when men say “women are complicated” what they mean is ‘certain women dress/act/move/talk/breathe/exist in a way that turns me on, but then when I call them on it, I find out that they don’t want to have sex with me after all.’”

In a letter to the Daily News Saturday, one Jules Dubuisson asserts that “no one has ever witnessed an event of evolution, nor has a credible transitional form ever been discovered.”
Wrong on both counts. There have been cases of “speciation” in the present (one generation produces offspring different enough to count as a viable separate species) and there have been many transitional forms found in the fossil record (between mammal and reptile, between land and sea dwellers, etc.).
Possibly the poor man has been fooled by the creationists who’s response to finding any transitional form is “Well, what about the transitional form between that and the next step! Until you find every single transitional form, I’m not convinced!”
Given their motivation is religion, not science, I’m quite sure that if fossils of every living thing ever to walk the earth turned up, they’d still find the record inadequate.
I do agree with Dubuisson that children should look at creationism and intelligent design along with evolution, so that they can be taught how totally unscientific, false and inaccurate they are. Oh, wait, he thought we should teach them as if they had some grounding in science, didn’t he?
So I guess he’s wrong about everything.

“There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’

In a Jan. 8 letter to the Daily News Niceville’s Chip Dearing rants that allowing gays to marry is “pushing for more government intervention in the bedroom” because someone will have to decide whether “those two women or men are married for love or for the benefits … How are you going to prove it one way or another?” He concludes that gays can already marry in Florida “but they want the benefits, they want the money” and will leech off taxpayers to get them.

It’s true, one of the issues in gay marriage is about benefits: The right to be with your partner and get information about him/her when they’re in the hospital, the right of inheritance, adoption and so on and so forth. But how exactly do these generate the huge pile of government welfare that Dearing seems to think is out there? I know a lot of married couples, and I don’t recall them getting huge pots of money from the state just for tying the knot.

In the second place, it’s true that gay couples could be married in a church or religious ceremony in this state. But I would bet money that any straight couple (including Mr. Dearing, should he be married) that made a church wedding and was told “I’m sorry, as far as the law is concerned, you’re just two single people living together.” would think this a significant infringement on their rights.

In the third place, if gay couples were together for benefits, how would this be different from countless straight couples? I had a friend who was married in name only to an Air Force officer because it gave her a financial benefit (I think it was housing allowance, but it’s been too many years to be sure) and he received a kickback. And we all know that some marriages happen purely because one partner has a big bank balance, which is another form of marriage-for-benefits. Cases like these haven’t led to “government intervention int he bedroom,” so why should gay marriage be any different?

An earlier post referring to Pointe One Marina has been deleted. When the council started discussing a controversial marina last night, I made an assumption that was what they were talking about. I was wrong (it was actually HarborWalk’s proposed marina).

A useful lesson in the drawbacks of liveblogging, I guess.

From Spout Off in the Daily News: “I am sure I am just an idiot who doesn’t understand evolution, but if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?”
Setting aside the writer’s self-assessment of his intelligence, there are two reasons:
A)We didn’t evolve from any of the apes now existing, but from some common ancestor.
B)Because evolution isn’t a magic wand that transformed apes into people. Evolution by natural selection means that in any generation there will be a certain variation between offspring—some are taller, some are heavier, some run faster, etc.
In the case of our ancestors, that variation meant some offspring were very good at living the way their parents did (foraging in forests, hanging from trees, whatever). Others found it easier to find food by doing things a little differently. Their offspring were more different still. And so over time, they diverged completely from the ancestral stock. But that doesn’t mean the ancestral stock goes away.
And that’s why there are still apes.

An article this week in Southwest Florida’s News Press reveals that the money gathered from the state selling Choose Life specialty license plates is piling up in several counties because while they can use it to help out single mothers, they can only do it if the mothers plan to give up their babies for adoption, not if they choose to keep and raise them.

The logic of this completely eludes me.

Emily Yoffe, a writer on the Slate Web site, discussed Islamic honor killings in a recent post–including a case that happened in Canada–and grumbled that feminists don’t seem to care: She’s been to the Web site for the National Organization of Women and can’t find any opposition to such murders.

Amazingly, I found a page condemning honor killing after oh, 15 seconds searching.

A letter from the American Christian Heritage Center in Sunday’s Daily News argues, as conservative Christians are prone to do, that the purpose of the First Amendment is to ensure “no denomination would be established as a national church,” not to separate the church from the state. On the Center’s Web site, the author of the letter, one Calvin Longton, points out that “separation of church and state” isn’t actually in the Constitution.

Perfectly true. But neither is one single word about Christianity or God, other than the fact there shall be no religious tests required for federal office. So if Jefferson’s reference to the “separation of church and state” is irrelevant to understanding the First Amendment—since it isn’t in the Constitution—presumably the Founders’ Christian beliefs aren’t relevant either, since they aren’t included.

After all, it’s not as if they couldn’t have said “Congress shall make no law representing the establishment of a federal church” if they’d wanted to. Or “prohibiting the free exercise of any Christian sect.” Or said their shall be no religious test applied to any professing Christian.

Instead the First Amendment speaks about the free exercise of “religion”, as if they (unlike so many people) conceived of a nation where nonChristian believers might be free to worship as they chose.

Go figure.