The Maudlin Press

Well, interesting series of events today. On my post about the upcoming Ben stein movie, I got a comment from someone over at TheScroogeReport. It is basically nothing more than a link to their post about the movie taking a pro-Ben pro-ID stance.

Now, as I am all about free speech, I approved the comment. I also posted a comment linking back to this site. Lets see if they return the favor. From their post:

The opposition to the Intelligent Design school of thought is so strong that not only have jobs been placed in jeapordy, but censorship reigns free.

The movie’s exposition of censorship in the educational system should no longer be a stretch in anyone’s mind. Those of you that peruse the internet, blogging and chatting, should already know about the ID hate that is out there.

Fair enough. Everyone can have their opinion. Calling the pursuit of legitimate science over mythology “censorship” may be stretching the facts a bit.

I believe the word “Censorship” generates an immediate visceral reaction from most people. We have been trained to perceive it as an especially evil activity, and to fight tooth and nail against it. The use of “Censorship” in regards to ID therefore is purely inflammatory, and not a proper use of the term.

Creationism and intelligent design are not legitimate, provable scientific theories. They have no factual basis beyond the unshakable belief of their proponents. There are no supporting facts and no provable experiments or mathematical formula to support the idea. All evidence provided up to now has proven to be overly broad, vague or highly discredited.

For this reason, its not science. It does not belong in a science class. I support the teaching of ID in mythology, philosophy or any of the other format where the story is not perceived to be delivered as fact.

Not teaching ID in science class isn’t censorship anymore than not teaching it during drivers ed would be. its placing the relevant information into proper context. You can believe what you want, but do not present your unsupported beliefs as science. The fight is not against the idea of ID, its against presenting that idea as something its not.

In a study published recently in the Journal of Affective Disorders, examined the habits of 20 people who had spent more than 30 nonworking hours a week online for the past three years. The participants described skipping sleep, ignoring family responsibilities, and showing up late for work to fulfill their desire to visit chat rooms and surf the Web. The consequences were severe: Many suffered from marital problems, failed in school or lost a job, and accumulated debt. Link

First, if you don’t use Firefox for browsing, you really should. IE sucks. Now, once you have Firefox, you can start to throw some add-ins (plugins) on there. These are additional little programs that integrate with Firefox to extend your capabilities. Every time I rebuild a computer, or setup a new Firefox install, theres always a few plug ins that I wind up loading.

FoxMarks - The Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. Basically, it means that you will never loose your bookmarks again. Once the plug in is loaded, it pulls the most recent copy of you bookmarks from the internet. If you change your bookmarks locally, it saves the changes automatically. You can also acces your bookmarks on their site after you log in.

DownloadHelper - DownloadHelper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites. The practical use is that you can save Pandora music and Youtube videos easily.

DownThemAll- DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager: it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400% and it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time! This is really handy when you want to download a bunch of links or files at once.