but let's not get swept away, Glenn Beck style. Sure, there are some weasels hiding in our house but let's not blow up the house just to get them. It's still where we live.

I think there is a criminal case in the offing here, but white-collar cases take a lot of time to build solidly, and let's not make so much noise that a good defense lawyer can argue that a fair trial is impossible because of all the prejudicial publicity.

In the meantime, here is a suggestion: One of the main reasons to give AIG all that money (if not the main reason) is to pay off the creditors who are the counter-parties to the CDS's that are causing such grief. That's why the payments to Goldman and various other companies, including (horrors!) some foreign ones. The idea is that if AIG defaults, then these other entities may have to default and so like a row of dominoes the whole interlocked world banking system would go down. So the suggestion is this: why not pay off AIG's creditors directly? They are made more secure (probably not whole, but certainly in better shape), AIG and its amoral sociopathic weasels get bypassed and can no longer steal a cut, and the FP division can be shut down.

AS for those ghastly bonuses, I suppose we can sue, and I would like to see it. But that will take years to resolve, and we have much more important fish to fry. Maybe Obama and Co. bungled this one, but considering all that they have to do and how much they have done already, it's not surprising. Yes, I still believe that they can recover and forge ahead. He has already shown that he learns fast.

Now go ahead and call me a socialist, naive, or whatever floats your sorry boat. I'm too old to care or scare. Except for Cheney, he still scares me.

Meanwhile, Rush continues to pile up flammable material under himself. He really is unhinged.

Great. But who will write it?

there was a news story about a 14-year-old in Northern NJ who posted "racy" photos of herself on MySpace. No description of what was "racy". She has been charged with child pornography and could be branded a sex offender. Another stupid prosecutor trying to score cheap points with the "values" crowd.

The girl of course was irresponsible but probably watched "Sex and the City" or "Desperate Housewives" a little too much. But the prosecutor is disgusting. No matter how it turns out, the family will be out some big bucks for attorneys and the girl will be branded for life; doesn't every dog get one bite any more?

"The idea that mutation can produce novel forms is wishful thinking at best and objectively blind faith."

This is as wrong as it gets. Three examples:

(1) There was a species of butterfly in Britain that was light-colored and so blended with the trees (birches I believe) in which they lived. This natural camouflage tended to make their chances of avoiding predators increase. Then during the latter half of the 19th century, industrial air pollution stained the tree-trunks to a darker color and the camouflage became a deadly disadvantage. Over several generations of butterfly reproduction, lighter colored individuals tended over time to get eaten before they could reproduce and those somewhat darker (by mutation and/or genetic recombination) survived longer. Eventually the predominant color was dark.

Then as pollution began to be controlled, the trees gradually regained their former color, and so did the butterflies. In about 100 years, two evolutionary changes were brought about by natural selection responding to an altered environment.

(To avoid the 1000 word limit, I'll put the rest in the next post,)

Well, you can say that a color change is not a species change. Bot 100 years is less than an eye-blink on the time scale of evolutionary change. And the definition of a species is a human construct, a convenience, not a fact of nature. (Two species are distinct, by definition, if they cannot cross-breed to yield fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys are distinct species because even though they can mate to produce mules, the mules are sterile.)

(2)Ring species. There is a gull which lives in the far north which shows small variations as you trace it around the latitude of its habitat. Those birds which are neighbors are not distinct species by this definition, but when you go all the way around, the small variations add up and when the circle closes, the species are distinct. What this shows (in space rather than time) is that the small changes that we can observe do lead to speciation. Consider this over thousands of generations or more and it becomes obvious.

(3) Superbugs. This is one that affects us directly and not in a good way. The heavy use of antibiotics, not just for bacterial infection but in livestock raised for meat kills most of the bugs. This is a major environmental change for the bugs. But not all of them die, and since bacteria reproduce (by fission) very quickly, any mutation which confers immunity to a specific drug will spread just as quickly...after all, we have killed off the competition. What kills one bug may not kill another so new antibiotics are developed. But at present, there are some strains that respond to no known drug. These are the superbugs. A mutation has enabled them to survive and thrive a radical environmental change --- analogous in the bug world to the volcanic eruptions, climatic changes, or the asteroid impact that did in the dinosaurs and made ecological space for mammals (and thus us) in the larger world.

If you can't see evolution by natural selection at work here, then there is no point in further discussion.

But I knew that anyway.