Barry Arrington

Anthony Fauci is a liar. No reasonable person doubts that. Yet he remains an icon of progressives, who continue to hang on his every utterance. This is mystifying. Or it would be if we did not know that for progressives the “narrative” is for more important than the truth. Here is a convenient summary of some of his most egregious whoppers. A trove of thousands of emails released as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request show that, since the beginning of COVID-19, Anthony Fauci has been just as mendacious as some of his worst critics have alleged. On Jan. 1, 2020, Fauci received a credible warning from a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, Kristian Anderson, that Read More ›

ID science is being applied at a practical level to determine if COVID-19 is a natural or artificial organism. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, we get everything short of an explicit reference to Dembski’s explanatory filter: Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made? Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural Read More ›

See story here. A government probe last year into the origins of the coronavirus found practically no evidence COVID-19 originated from nature, former State Department official David Asher told Fox News on Thursday. “We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19,” he told “America Reports.” . . . Asher, the lead contractor on the subject, said the team investigated the two chief hypotheses for the virus’ origins, the other being the lab-leak theory that has gained credence after widespread media dismissal over the past year. . . . “The data disproportionately stacked up Read More ›

There is a famous passage in Molière’s play The Imaginary Invalid in which he satirizes the tactic of tautology given as explanation.  A group of medieval doctors are giving an oral exam to a doctoral candidate, and they ask him why opium causes people to get sleepy.  The candidate responds: Mihi à docto DoctoreDomandatur causam & rationem, quareOpium facit dormire ?A quoy respondeo,Quia est in eoVirtus dormitiua,Cuius est naturaSensus assoupire. Which is translated: I am asked by the learned doctor the cause and reason why opium causes sleep.  To which I reply, because it has a dormitive property, whose nature is to lull the senses to sleep. Of course, “dormitive” is derived from the Latin “dormire,” which means to sleep.  Thus, Read More ›

Hint:  Don’t think very hard about the conclusions that are logically compelled by your metaphysical premises. Today, frequent commenter Seversky gave us an example of a materialist employing this stratagem.  UD News posted about Professor Granville Sewell’s observation that the materialist account of the origin of life is a provably unprovable proposition.  In advancing this proposition, Dr. Sewell states: All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, that a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, computers connected to monitors, keyboards, laser printers and the Internet, cars, trucks, airplanes, nuclear Read More ›

As our News Desk has noted, over at Mind Matters Michael Egnor engages with Jerry Coyne on whether, as a matter of logic, the cosmos can be self-existent. Egnor says no, and one reason he gives is the logical principle that any causal chain points to a first cause. He writes: Imagine a chain hanging from the sky supporting a weight suspended in the air. Each link in the chain is a cause for the continued suspension of the links and the weight they hold up. However, the chain could not hold itself up alone. It can’t be “links all the way up.” Something at the beginning must be holding the chain up. And whatever holds the whole causal series Read More ›

In the wake of another senseless shooting yesterday we can expect progressive attacks on our Second Amendment freedom to become even more shrill and frenetic.  That is why now is a good time to go back to basics.  In this essay I will explain the history and theoretical underpinnings of the Second Amendment and discuss why it continues to be vitally important in both of its functions – ensuring the right of law abiding citizens to defend against both private violence and public violence.  The Theoretical Underpinnings of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms The United States Supreme Court has held the right to keep and bear arms [“RKBA”] is “among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of Read More ›

Yes, yes, I grant that he was brilliant in his field of expertise, theoretical physics.  But as was recently noted in these pages, when he ventured outside of his bailiwick, he said some really boned-headed things.  Consider just one example from his book The Grand Design:  “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” In one sentence Hawking committed two egregious logical blunders.  First, he committed the error of reification (ascribing concrete properties to abstract concepts).  The law of gravity does not do anything.  Like all laws of science, it is a mathematical model of observed regularities.  Why the regularities scientists observe should be such as they are and how those Read More ›

Vasily Grossman was a war correspondent in the Soviet Union during World War II.  After the war he became a novelist, and Life and Fate, about life in the Soviet Union during the Battle of Stalingrad, is considered his masterpiece.  Written in 1960, the novel was suppressed by the KBG and not published until after a manuscript was smuggled to the West in the 70’s.  Last night I finished watching the 12-part TV series adopted from Life and Fate (Amazon Prime; Russian with English subtitles).  As you might expect, life in Soviet Union under Stalin was a dystopian nightmare where political persecution was so commonplace that various slang terms developed around it.  For example, one character warns another “Don’t you Read More ›

Explaining how as science has advanced, the existence of God has become more probable, not less.

Thank you to the UD News desk for putting up From Closer To Truth: Is Mathematics Invented Or Discovered?  In this video public intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews mathematicians and philosophers regarding the titular question. The most profound statement in the video does not address the question.  It addresses the current cultural constraints on the approach to answering this — indeed all – questions.  Kuhn is interviewing mathematician Gregory Chaitin.  At  about 13:25 Chaitin tentatively expresses that he would like to believe that mathematics expresses a fundamental reality that is independent of the physical world.  The following exchange ensues: Chaitin:  It’s a separate reality, and I don’t know where it is.  Don’t ask me where the positive integers live, but Read More ›

Here’s a scenario for your consideration: Suppose there were a group of people who insisted there is absolutely no objective standard for morality and that all moral norms are based on subjective preferences that are foisted on us by material evolutionary forces. And suppose there were a group of people who are so serenely confident of their own moral rectitude and the indisputable goodness of their policy prescriptions (which policy prescriptions are driven by their moral viewpoint) that they are determined to force the entire nation to conform to those prescriptions. Now suppose that these groups are one and the same.  It would be mind blowing if such a group actually existed would it not? Here’s another scenario to consider: Read More ›

If only Captain Picard had frequented this site, he would have known that he has nothing to worry about because the probability of a random toss of letters spelling out “disaster” is practically nil. We wish all of our readers a joyful and merry Christmas. And so that we can keep this site up to, among other things, stave off the misguided fears of such as Capt. Picard, we hope you will consider a yearend donation to UD. As I have told you before, we aspire to have a shoestring budget. Our budget is more comparable to an aglet (the small sheath at the end of a shoestring). Our operation is very lean, and we could really use your support. Read More ›

To all of the materialist OOL researchers who continue to blither about how we are tantalizingly close to discovering how blind unguided natural forces produced the staggeringly complex nano-technology in even the simplest cell, we challenge you to a 100 yard dash. And there is good news.  We will spot you 99 yards and 35 inches.  Here’s how.  Take the simplest living cell you can find.  Put it in purified water free from any contaminants.  At this point you will have every chemical you need for the existence of simple life.  You will have all of those chemicals already arranged so that life can exist.  You need absolutely nothing else.  It is an absolutely perfect chemical cocktail for the existence Read More ›

“There is no such thing as truth. Science is a social phenomenon and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit or injury it confers on the community” Adolph Hitler* (or your average woke postmodern academic) When you hear a progressive talk about “white science” or “patriarchal science” or “Western science” you should hear an echo of the “Jewish science” so hated by the Nazis. The impetus behind cordoning science (or any other universal enterprise) along tribalist lines is indentical. _________ *quoted in Daniel, G. (1962) The Idea of Pre-History, London: C.A. Walts and Co, p. 147,