Dover Case
stcynic | April 8, 2006Larry Fafarman has posted a long comment on a thread below and I'm moving it up here to answer it because it raises a really important point on this trumped up controversy over why the Dover school board didn't rescind the ID policy on Dec. 5, 2005 at the first meeting they were sworn in at. He begins by conflating two very different things:
WHY MOOTNESS WAS A REAL POSSIBILITY
It has been argued that because of the "voluntary cessation" doctrine ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness ), the judge could not have declared the Dover case moot even if the new anti-ID school board members had…
stcynic | April 7, 2006Jon Buell, the head of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and publisher of the book Of Pandas and People (Pandas), has written a long essay criticizing Judge Jones' ruling in the Dover case. That's hardly a surprise, of course. The judge ruled against his position, how could he do anything but criticize it? Unfortunately for him, his criticisms don't hold up under scrutiny because they are based on false claims, legal ignorance and, in at least one case, an outright lie. This may be a long one, so let's get started. He begins by complaining that the judge refused their request to intervene…
stcynic | April 6, 2006There is an update at the bottom
Another commenter at UD made the following argument:
Under open meetings laws in most states, school boards can only consider items placed on the agenda IN ADVANCE. The old board decided not to put the ID policy on the December agenda. Yes, the new board was sworn in during the December meeting but could only consider items already on the agenda. They voted to put the ID policy on the agenda for the January meeting. THIS IS ALL THEY COULD DO LEGALLY.
And DaveScot responded:
Well, at least this is an attempt at an answer. I can't find any prohibition in the…
stcynic | April 6, 2006The ever intrepid DaveScot has responded yet again on this question of why the Dover school board didn't rescind the ID policy on Dec. 5th, 2005. And while his prior messages were just based on ignorance, he's now added lying to his bag of tricks. He writes:
Ed responded again this time his lame excuse is the board didn't have time to discuss rescinding the ID policy at the first meeting.
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing, Dave, but this is either A) a lie or B) you're just too stupid to understand your native language. Nowhere in my response did I say anything about the board not having time to…
stcynic | April 5, 2006Everyone's favorite ignorant blowhard, DaveScot, has aimed a question at me over at Dembski's home for wayward sycophants. I'll quote the whole question and then give the whole answer:
Ed Brayton in characteristic fashion dodges the real question. The new Dover school board was elected partly on a campaign promise to repeal the ID policy. Why didn't they? Over to you, Ed.
They did. At the very first meeting at which the new board was all present. Back to you, oh clueless one.
P.S. Anyone wanna start a pool on how long it'll take that post to be edited or removed?
Update: And sure enough, the…
stcynic | April 5, 2006Over at the Panda's Thumb, there's a troll by the name of Larry Fafarman who has been posting under about 50 different names, using proxies to evade a ban. He's apparently posting under the name J Simes now and he's trying, both valiantly and absurdly, to defend the Manzari and Cooper article and make the case for collusion. (I notice now that the comment was deleted, since he's already banned, but it should be debunked anyway). Since he actually lists his arguments in order, it's nice and easy to take apart.
(1) At the Dec. 5 meeting, the new board members should have kept their campaign…
stcynic | April 5, 2006I have a feeling that Michael Francisco got a warning from someone who knows what they're talking about, who told him that he was coming dangerously close to defamation with his post at the DI blog, because last night he suddenly edited his post to make it a whole lot less actionable. That was quite predictable, of course, and I archived the original post. The first big lie is still in there, but changed to express a whole lot less certainty. Here's the original passage:
Manzari & Cooper explain in detail how the newly elected Dover Area School Board, which campaigned on removing the ID…
stcynic | April 4, 2006This is hands down the winner of April's Robert O'Brien Award. Nothing I read over the next 4 weeks could possibly match the stupidity of this.The DI's newest blogboy, Michael Francisco, has posted one of the dumbest arguments ever uttered in a new post about the Cooper and Manzari article that Wes Elsberry blasted earlier. You have to see this. He actually wrote this as a serious argument:
Manzari & Cooper explain in detail how the newly elected Dover Area School Board, which campaigned on removing the ID policy actually voted to keep the policy during their first meeting. Why? Because…
stcynic | April 4, 2006Wes Elsberry has caught a major falsehood in an article published by the American Enterprise Institute, written by one of their research analysts (who either failed to do his research or chose to lie about it) and Seth Cooper, formerly of the DI and the attorney who worked with the Dover board on their ID policy in 2004. They accuse Bryan Rehm, one of the plaintiffs in the Dover case who was later elected to the Dover school board just after the trial wrapped up (but before the ruling came out), of having a conflict of interest and of helping to defeat a school board motion that would have…
stcynic | March 25, 2006Via Red State Rabble, the York Daily Record reports that Judge Jones received enough threatening emails after his ruling in the Dover trial that the US Marshall Service took copies of them all and guarded the Judge and his family:
In the days after U.S. Judge John E. Jones III issued his decision in Dover's intelligent design case, outraged people sent threatening e-mails to his office.
Jones won't discuss details of the e-mails, or where they might have come from, but he said they concerned the U.S. Marshals Service.
So, in the week before Christmas, marshals kept watch over Jones and his…
stcynic | March 16, 2006It looks as though Paramount is indeed going to make a movie out of the Dover trial. They had someone there taking notes the whole time and now they've hired Ronald Harwood to write the script. Harwood is one of the more prominent screenplay writers in the world, having written such movies as The Pianist, Cry the Beloved Country and Being Julia. One commenter at PT is suggesting that Denzel Washington play the role of Nick Matzke. He's obviously never met Nick, who, despite being a Californian, makes Nicole Kidman look like George Hamilton (and I can say that because I share the same shade of…
stcynic | March 10, 2006Science and Theology News has a series of invited commentaries on the Dover trial and Judge Jones' ruling that are worth reading. Among others are commentaries by Steve Fuller, witness for the defense in the trial; Alvin Plantinga, prominent Christian philosopher; Paul Gross, fellow Panda's Thumb contributor; and Robert Pennock, my MCFS co-founder and witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial.
Pennock, by the way, has just become a father for the second time (at least I assume the baby has been born by now, since she went into labor on Wednesday) and I'm impatiently waiting to hear the…
stcynic | March 5, 2006In the aftermath of the ruling in Kitzmiller, Pat Robertson famously proclaimed that the people of Dover would be in for some natural disasters and that they had no right to complain about it because they had "thrown God out of their community." Alas, it turns out that Robertson was right. In the wake of God's departure, in walks Kent Hovind - a disaster if ever there was one.
The evangelical group Repent America is bringing about a dozen people to the Dover area next week to spread information before hosting a Creation vs. Darwin debate.
Michael Marcavage, president of the Philadelphia-…
stcynic | February 22, 2006The Dover school board voted last night to accept a settlement over legal fees stemming from the Kitzmiller case for $1 million. The total cost was over $2 million, which is much higher than I had heard previously:
The Dover Area school board voted Tuesday night to pay $1 million in legal fees to the attorneys that successfully sued the district over its intelligent-design policy.
In addition, each of the 11 plaintiffs will also receive $1 in nominal damages.
Eight of the nine board members voted in favor while Bryan Rehm, who is also a plaintiff, abstained...
The $1 million figure was the…
stcynic | January 30, 2006Larry Farma has left a long comment in response to my post about the DI's claim that Judge Jones should not have ruled on the scientific status of ID in the Dover case. Because that post is getting old and the comment is so long, I figured it should be moved up top and responded to in its own post. I'll go argument by argument, as usual.
Rule 702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., discussed in preceding comments, concern only the rules for making a judgment of expert scientific testimony, and have nothing to do with determining when such a judgment should be made.
This is true…
stcynic | January 29, 2006John Pieret has also done an excellent job of fisking Michael Francisco's claim that Judge Jones should not have ruled on the question of whether ID is science. He makes many of the same points I make, but in more detail. He included one argument that I intended to include but forgot as well. Francisco makes a big deal out of the fact that in the section of the ruling about "Whether ID is Science", Judge Jones only cites precedent three times, which he says is "strikingly sparse." I noticed this when initially reading his post but forgot to respond to it. Pieret nails it:
Considering that…
stcynic | January 27, 2006The Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, also known as their blog, has a new writer. His name is Michael Francisco and he's a second year law student at Cornell. His first contribution to the ongoing diatribe against Judge Jones' ruling in the Dover case is the subject of this post. In his essay, Francisco beats much the same dead horse that the DI was beating even before the ruling came out, the entirely false notion that Judge Jones had no justification for ruling on the scientific status of ID. I will show that not only was he justifed in doing so, he had no choice but to do so…
stcynic | January 21, 2006This is funny. Repent America - the same organization whose leaders were arrested in Philadelphia for protesting a gay pride event (the charges were eventually dropped, and I believe rightly so) - has rented out the Dover High School auditorium to hold a creationism seminar and "teach the truth about God's creation." But remember, this has nothing to do with religion, all evidence to the contrary. They do, of course, have a legal right to rent the facilities for this purpose.
But here's the funny part - apparently they asked the Dover school board - the new board, the ones who rescinded the…