Florida Believers are Not Stupid, But the State Issuing the Liscence Plates Is

April 14, 2008

When it comes to defending science and rebutting creationist claptrap, biologist blogger PZ Myers is second to none. He’s rude, crude, and controversial, but by and large when it comes to debates over things like framing (i.e. “shut up, atheists, selling science would be easier without you”), I’m on his side. But not always. In his recent post on a proposal to offer cross-bearing “I believe” license plates in Florida, he steps over the line:

Look at it this way: the stupid people in Florida are going to be conveniently self-labeling themselves with the Mark of the Buffoon.

It almost makes me feel worse to know that if someone called him on it, he’d probably actually defend this language. I almost don’t want face how disappointing that would be.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a believer, and I spend a lot of time arguing against religious claims that I think are anything from pernicious to pathetic. But I don’t think believers are stupid: not even stupid to believe. As I argued, I’m in the skepticism game against bad ideas, bad arguments, even bad people. But belief isn’t itself an argument: it doesn’t even always claim to be supported by arguments, good or bad. So I just can’t justify the attitude of someone who runs around calling believers qua believers stupid, or saying that by wearing their belief on their sleeves that they are marking themselves as buffoons.

This isn’t about Myers inconveniently “mis-framing” some issue. He’s just wrong.

And it muddles the issue. The problem with these plates is not at all what they say, but where they say it. It’s simply yet another example of the government trying to get into the message business (and the especially dicey religious message business) when there’s simply no need or justification for it.

Citizens are perfectly capable of decorating their cars with messages about their religious convictions, political party, opinions on world peace, and attitudes towards fat chicks. They simply do not require, in any way shape or form, the aid of the government in expressing their views. Government issued materials should be strictly functional: serving some legitimate regulatory purpose and then getting out of the way. They have no business being promotional, and certainly not promotional for just one religion.

In the case of Florida, this has gotten particularly pernicious, because while there are many different plate designs to choose from, the range of messages allowed by no means open forum. Each design must be approved by the state legislature: i.e. politicians rule on what messages they like or don’t like. And the process for citizens to even nominate a design is both arduous and expensive, with a $60,000 application fee on top of market research costs and so on.

And while most of the selections are relatively banal, there’s an unavoidably political and sectarian slant to the selections. There’s the notorious “Choose Life” plate (I don’t see any corresponding pro-choice plate), and if the current lawmakers have their way, things like “In God We Trust” and the Christianity-themed “I Believe” will soon follow. The closest comeback to any of these I can see the is ambiguous John Lennon “Imagine” plate.

But even that’s sort of beside the point. If the range of plates really was wide and free enough to encompass all sorts of different messages, I’d still oppose this sort of thing. There’s just no reason for the government to play this game. Space on cars for promotional messages is hardly at a premium. Dull license plates are hardly a high price to pay for a government that knows its place, and leaves expression wholly up to the people, rather than trying to get in on the game.

Expelled! Forgets to Mention: Holocaust Was Intelligently Designed & Anti-Semitic Creationists

April 13, 2008

Two things worth covering regarding the imminent Expelled!. First off, John Pieret over at Thoughts in a Haystack notes yet another reason why the film’s driveby smear of evolution as an ideology that bears genocidal fruit doesn’t add up. As Pieret points out, one of the primary complaints from creationists, especially in the film, is that evolution explains nature without reference to any teleology or external purposing or direction. This oft cited lack of purpose supposedly leads people to moral depravity (though, in reality, this critique merely confuses scientific description with moral proscription).

But this complaint is flatly incompatible with the insistence that evolution Holocaust, eugenics, and so on are all the logical end of accepting the evolutionary description of the natural world. For eugenics and Aryan racism alike are nothing if not deeply teleological. Hitler was not interested in human fitness as determined by the natural course of human technology and culture: he sought to impose his own very specific will on it. Eugenics, the same. The Holocaust was, in fact, the directed design of an “intelligent” agent: a depraved and malicious one.

And over at Stranger Fruit, John Lynch finds something even stranger: while over in Europe bemoaning the Darwin’s “necessary but not sufficient” contribution to the Holocaust, Ben Stein hobnobs with a certain Maciej Giertych, who Lynch notes is a “professor of dendrology, right-wing member of the (Catholic) League of Polish Families, member of the European Parliament, candidate for the presidency of Poland, signatory of the DI’s “Dissent from Darwinism” statement…” You might remember him from the clip in which he sagely declares that evolutionary processes are incapable of generating “new information.” But as it turns out, Giertych is also something of an old-fashioned anti-semite:

Jews are not pioneers. They do not go conquering the wild world or overpowering the hazards of nature. They settle among other civilizations, preferably among the rich. They tend to migrate from poorer to richer lands.They do so always as a group, immediately forming their own separate community.

In other words, here’s Stein, all choked up about the extermination of Jews, nodding along with a guy celebrating the same stereotypes, rhetoric, and hatreds that spiraled out of control in post WWI Germany. Here’s more about Giertych and the philosophies he champions in Poland: including the idea that Jews and Catholics cannot live together in the same civilization.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

Ben Stein Contradicts “Crossroads” Explaination for Anti-Evolutionary Film Expelled!

April 12, 2008

The producers of Expelled! have long claimed that the premise for their film, the very “Expelled” theme and concept evolved organically: their horror at academic science and their crusade against it was something they discovered in the course of making the film. This story is critical to defending themselves against accusations that they deliberately mislead nearly all of their pro-evolution interviewees: remember, they came to these scientists under a completely different production company name that had no links back to the real production company or the evangelical main producers, were calling the film Crossroads, and described it as an even-handed exploration of the “intersection between science and faith.”

Well Wes Elsberry has come across some interesting interviews with Ben Stein that stand in rather stark contrast to the “Expelled evolved out of the interviews” account of things.

Here’s the key quote:

WORLD: How did you get involved with Expelled?



Compare this to the sneering excuses the producers were publishing back in September:

The release references “Crossroads,” as a “tentative” title, if that’s OK? So just to set the record straight, the film was titled EXPELLED only after we began to see the disturbing pattern and shocking information that the footage reveals! So, thanks for the title guys, we couldn’t have done it without you! And we’re still considering using “Crossroads” for something else! Watch out.

And remember: here’s the blurb that was shown to the scientists about what Crossroads was:

Crossroads – The Intersection of Science and Religion

It’s been the central question of humanity throughout the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859, Charles Darwin provided the answer in his landmark book, “The Origin of Species.” In the century and a half since, biologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers, and philosophers have contributed a vast amount of research and data in support of Darwin’s idea. And yet, millions of Christians, Muslims, Jews and other people of faith believe in a literal interpretation that humans were crafted by the hand of God. This conflict between science and religion has unleashed passions in school board meetings, courtrooms and town halls across America and beyond.

Nothing in there about claims of persecution or lack of academic freedom. No references to Hitler or fascism. No accusation of huge holes in evolution. No mention of Intelligent Design. In fact, the wording of the blurb seems to imply (somewhat incorrectly) that Darwin provided the answer to our origins, and that there are vast amounts of research and data that support evolutionary theory.

Now imagine yourself as an employee for Premise/Rampart: say, associate producer Mark Mathis. Take as a given what Ben Stein says he was told the film was all about even years prior to existence of Rampart, the public face you will be using to line up interviews, instead of the real production company, Premise.

How on earth could you possibly innocently sit down and write out that Crossroads blurb given the pretty darn uncompromising and specific description of the movie that Stein describes, which happens to pretty much match Expelled! exactly and Crossroads, almost not at all?


April 11, 2008

One of the glaring omissions from Expelled! is the existence of countless religious scientists who happen to support evolution and agree that Intelligent Design is not good science. Since a major thrust of the film is that evolution is not just science, but rather a particular (and distinctively atheistic) “worldview,” the fact that so many people all with very different metaphysical/theological worldviews can all accept evolution as sound science is a huge, huge problem.

How do the producers justify this omission? The implication seems to be that for the mostly evangelical crew that makes up expelled, these scientists, theologians, and everyday believers are all phonies. Producer Ruloff, for instance, claims that geneticist and evangelical Francis Collins is merely “toeing the party line” on evolution. The idea that he could be both a sincere believer and a scientist. What does Collins’ say?


It’s worth fleshing that out a bit more: Dr. Collins certainly has seen his pro-faith arguments criticized by atheist scientists and scholars, which is a bit more than people being puzzled or even respectful. He, for his part, has responses to those criticism. But the point is that you can agree or disagree with either side of that debate without it having any real impact on the debate over evolutionary science. And even if you think that Collins arguments for faith are wrong, or his arguments for evolution are wrong, he’s still very relevant as an example of someone who endorses both.

Over at Higgaion, Christopher Heard transcribes a sit-down discussion between Mark Mathis and the editors of Scientific American. Scientific American editors point out that there are countless scientists who are also Christians who have no problem with evolution and oppose the motives and methods of the Intelligent Design movement. Then they ask why, for instance, one prominent biologist, Ken Miller, (who is also a believing Catholic) wasn’t featured or even mentioned in the film. Mathis replies:

Mathis: But I would tell you from a, my personal standpoint as somebody who’s worked on this project, that Ken Miller would have confused the film unnecessarily. I don’t agree with Ken Miller. I think that you, I think that when you look at this issue and this debate, that really there’s, there’s one side of the line or the other, and you, it’s, it’s hard to stay, I don’t think you can intellectually, honestly, honestly intellectually stand on a line that I don’t think exists—

Doesn’t agree with Ken Miller? On what? Believing in God in the way he does? And why does it matter that Mathis disagrees, whatever that means? Religious opponents of Intelligent Design, religious evolutionary scientists, right or “wrong” these people are all stark counter-factuals to the central dichotomy of the film: that evolution is purely an atheistic worldview, rather than a scientific explanation based on evidence which people of any worldview can appreciate. Mathis doesn’t want them recognized because “they would have confused the film unnecessarily.” On the contrary, these people are a simply reality. It’s thus a very necessary “confusion” (i.e. complication) for anyone trying to understand the debate.

It gets even more ridiculous from there: Mathis apparently isn’t a “theological expert” and thus has no idea until some Catholics inform him that most Catholics are not biblical literalists (Is Mathis? Why do the producers of the film so often seem to just assume that most Christians are?). This is kind of big deal, folks, because it just so happens that Catholics represent the bulk of the world’s Christians. And what’s the official position of Catholicism on evolution? That it’s a reasonable explanation for the diversity of life on earth and is based on the evidence. The Church, of course, requires a list of other additional beliefs (like God ensouling humans at some point, and so on) that all run outside the scope of science, but there is no hard and fast theological impossibility to be seen here.

For Mathis, though, there is this line: “when you look at this issue and this debate, that really there’s, there’s one side of the line or the other.” What Mathis seems unwilling to concede is that there is more than one line. There is certainly a line between accepting evolution as good science or not. But then there is also a line between whether one believes in a god or not. Indeed, that latter line isn’t even a single line either: people can believe or not believe in all sorts of different religious ideas about gods.

The fact is: no position on any these lines directly determines you position on any other, and we have examples with nearly every combination. Logically, they are all distinct and cross-compatible (though, of course, any one specific religious belief may assert something that’s incompatible with evolutionary science… but then it could just as easily be incompatible with another religious belief as well).

Given all this, you can finally see how grossly misleading the core contentions of Expelled! are. It tries to make the case that evolutionary theory implies an ideology they call “Darwinism,” which turns both descriptive science into crude normative assertions as well as making atheism all but inevitable. But if this is the case, how can some of evolutionary theory’s best defenders, and some of Intelligent Design’s harshest critics, hold worldviews and values so radically different from “Darwinism?”

The filmmakers don’t seem interested in even bringing up the subject, and when pressed on it, their escape seems to be implying that these people are basically crazy, or not real Christians, or not really understanding what they, the producers, know evolutionary science is, at heart.

There’s no doubt that Expelled! is grossly insulting to non-believers: trying to imply that we must logically hold or lack all sorts of values. But by neglect and deliberate omission, it’s not much kinder to Christian scientists either.

Why “Where is the ACLU??” Often Ends in Intellectual Tragedy (Islamic School Edition)

April 10, 2008

The ACLU is not a perfect organization (though given that they are not monolithic, it’s hard to generalize). But by and large, they have the right idea about religious liberty, especially when it comes to preventing governments from superseding the rights of citizens to observe or not observe whatever religion they see fit and protecting private religious expression from government interference.

Unfortunately, there are a whole host of (mostly) conservative bloggers out there who seem incapable of distinguishing government action from private freedoms, and who rather ridiculously assert that the ACLU is out to destroy religious practice, rather than protect it from the government. Of course, the big problem for such people is simply all the rather awkward evidence to the contrary. What’s a crank conspiracy-theorist to do?

Well, luckily, they’ve hit upon a stopgap defense mechanism: anytime they come across a potential infringement of free speech or religious expression, an regardless of how much time has elapsed, whether anyone has even notified the ACLU, what the actual facts of the case are, or even if some other organization is already providing counsel, they cry “Where is the ACLU?!!” The implication is, of course, that the ACLU is deeply hypocritical: that their conspiracy isn’t savvy enough to at least pretend to care about this or that free speech/religious expression issue.

The problem is that this rallying cry so often ends in embarrassing tragedy. The latest case in point involves an Islamic school, sponsored by the government, which has apparently been caught coercing its students to pray, amongst other things. Part-time culture-warrior William Wallace raised the predictable cry: Where is the ACLU Now?

Where is the ACLU? The ACLU was all over the Dover PA school district for merely suggesting that life might have been designed by some unidentified creator as a violation of the so-called separation of of church and state. But here in Minnesota, it is “halal” (kosher) to fund Islamic schools.

This righteous outrage lasted for precisely one day, until a commenter happened to stop by and link to a letter from the ACLU to the school, asking them to stop exactly the practices that Mr. Wallace was complaining about. Oops.

And if that weren’t ridiculous enough, the letter is nearly a month old. So it’s Mr. Wallace that’s late to game in condemning the school: the ACLU might well have run their own blog entry entitled “Where is William Wallace on this issue, hunh?!?”

Mr. Wallace’s response?

The letter you cite is very interesting, in that is very friendly. It is as though the ACLU wants to teach the school how to continue to be a public Islamic school.

I’ll analyze the letter in more detail later; might make for an interesting blog.

This is what’s known as “changing the goalposts.” First the ACLU was evil because it was supposedly ignoring the controversy as part of some crafty plot to promote Islam and destroy Christianity. But when that implication became both ridiculous and even anachronistic, suddenly the ACLU is instead bad because their letter warning the school to stop its unconstitutional religious endorsement doesn’t call Muslims enough racial slurs in the process, or something.

I almost can’t wait for Mr. Wallace’s ‘analysis,’ but I suspect it may be delayed until he finds some means to remove the egg from his face.

More: If you’re interested in a vastly more sane analysis of the Islamic Charter School issue, Hemant over at Friendly Atheist has the goods.

Intelligent Design Film Expelled! to Face Legal Action for Copying Cell CGI Video?

April 9, 2008

I’m still not clear on the details: we’ve long known that the producers of Expelled! show some version of a video called “The Inner Life of a Cell” in their movie. You can view the version apparently used in the film at the end of this short clip (and I discuss some of the ways in which their usage of it is misleading here, regardless of the copyright issues). This video is no stranger to controversy or creationists: no less than ID’s crown prince, William Dembski, was accused of stealing it and stripping it of its narration and credits without permission for one of his lectures.

Whether the producers of Expelled! once used the original version or not and now have replaced it with a near copy, and whether that near copy is a truly new production or just a cheap reprocessing of the images, we still don’t really know (though we suspect…). But as a copyrighted production (making such videos, let alone doing the research to make them useful, ain’t cheap), the owners of the original video (Harvard and XVIVO) have always had some grounds to at least complain either way. There’s so far no evidence that the producers ever asked for permission, let alone paid to use the clip in their for-profit film.

And now it seems that Peter Irons, an attorney who has been a longtime foe of Intelligent Design efforts, has been busy drafting a complaint which seeks to excise the material from the film (which might prove to be a substantial burden for the producers at this point) based on these copyright claims.

This could get quite interesting. If this does turn into a legal battle, it would be another perfect excuse for the producers to lamely claim that “Darwinists” just don’t want people to see their “dangerous” film, or that they want the video itself hushed up (on the contrary: it’s a great vid… as long as it has its original narration and credits intact, as well as people understanding what it does and does not show). Regardless, it’s something to keep an eye on.

And in any case, messageboard-star Quidam, who had such a great single image review of Expelled! way back when, has the perfect photoshop response to this controversy too:

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. As I noted, Ben Stein has lept from one wacky conspiracy theory to another in his career as a right-wing ideologue, and conspiracy theorists seem to abound
amongst his fans as well. Here’s William Wallace, claiming, as I suggested the film’s fans might, that the legal injunction is some sort of attempt to silence the “truth.” And if that weren’t nutty enough, Mr. Wallace also suspects that the Harvard/XVIVO video was actually produced by “closest creationists,” who are only suing to protect their copyright claims because they’ve been cowed into submission by a tiny think tank on the West Coast with threats of a “Sternberging.” Which itself is bizarre. Exactly what does it mean to “Sternberg” someone? To criticize them for misconduct and unethical behavior… but not do anything to them at all?

Update Twain: I’ve altered the post title to “copying” since stealing is too definitive: as perhaps wasn’t clear in my discussion, the version in the film is almost certainly a reproduction of the original film: the question is whether they really did one from scratch, with original research (as Jonathan Wells seems to imply), or basically had a CGI studio simply whip up a near copy of it. One of the video’s original creators, David Blonsky, makes the case that only the latter makes sense: the Expelled! version isn’t just showing the same structure, but the very same shots and proteins out of thousands and thousands of possible ones to choose from, and hundreds of different ways to represent them. He also notes, yet again, that these videos are very misleading guides to “cells as artfully engineered factories” if you forget that they are leaving out what is a rather key element: the chaotic Brownian churnings that actually take place in a cell, rather than the depicted smooth mechanical that make it far easier for viewers to understand the overall progression.

Ben Stein’s Expelled! Can’t Face Critical Reviews from Scientific American And Michael Shermer

April 9, 2008

Let me just state at the outset that I’m really quite surprised at this point: as all these negative reviews roll in, defenders and promoters of this film seem amazingly scarce outside of their own protected websites and conclaves. They celebrate, instead, the few positive reviews, almost all coming from devoted creationists, and almost all simply parroting and celebrating the claims made in the film rather than analyzing them, as the critics do.

They talk a big game. Their rallying cry is supposedly for more debate and free speech (even if they badly misunderstand those principles). But I’ve seen next to nothing from either the producers nor their fans making any substantive response to these criticisms. Bragging about the existence of harsh criticism just isn’t the same thing as having a good response to it: it’s a means of quickly changing the subject. According to them, however, defenders of science are “scattering” in fear of their assault. And yet, here we are, front and center, taking all comers, with no sign that they have any serious responses to our arguments in turn.

That out of the way… Michael Shermer, one of the many hoodwinked interviewees from the film, has now written up his review of the picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

FoxNews Pans Intelligent Design Film Expelled!

April 9, 2008

Wesley R. Elsberry of the Austringer sends word that Fox News has reviewed Expelled!… and they were not impressed.

Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, “Expelled” is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) “expose” of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.

The reviewer even gets the basic larger strategy of the film of trying to troll up a national controversy:

What the producers of this film would love, love, love is a controversy. That’s because it’s being marketed by the same people who brought us “The Passion of the Christ.” They’re hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here, since there’s a visit to a concentration camp and the raised idea — apparently typical of the intelligent design community — that somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the Holocaust. Alas, this is such a warped premise that no one’s biting.

Let’s be fair here though, and dispense with the apparent idea that there’s something politically special about FoxNews giving a poor review to a conservative movie. Fox’s entertainment reporters, and especially Roger Friedman, are generally all over the map when it comes to liking or hating political event movies. Friedman even gave a decently positive review to Fahrenheit 9/11 and panned The Passion of the Christ.

If that didn’t hurt Friedman’s credibility enough though, it gets worse: he hates Rush, Poison, and Journey.

All this is not to say that Expelled! has never gotten rave reviews: WorldNetDaily loves the thing. But the trend, of course, is that these reviews simply parrot the claims made in the film and celebrate its conclusions: the negative reviews, in contrast, tend to be from people who are in on the scam and point out specific misrepresentations and problems with the films’ claims.

Richard Carrier on Atheist Morality & Theist Fears of Depravity

April 7, 2008





Ben Stein Continues to Face the Hard Questions on Expelled!… from Calvinist Minister

April 6, 2008

I had meant to watch and comment on this Stein interview with Calvinist minister RC Sproul at some point, but never got around to it. Ed Darrell over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub has now beaten me to it.

As Ed points out, it is simply astonishing that Sproul can sit there demanding that universities pay for and the support of Intelligent Design utterly regardless of whether it has merit or not (which is what universities normally use to judge what to fund, and a subject Stein and Sproul do not even bother to address). Does Sproul or any of his Bible colleges do the same for mainstream biology? How many evolutionary biologists have been invited to teach Sproul’s parishioners?

The video is also a pretty good example of the shallowness of Stein’s understanding of the subjects he’s purporting to know are all flawed and implausible. He simply repeats the standard canards and questions that Intelligent Design proponents told him, oblivious to the fact that they often make no sense (i.e. “where did the information come from?“).  There doesn’t seem to be any evidence, in all his many interviews, that his is capable of expanding on these talking points, let alone really grappling with critics who are actually experts in the fields being attacked.

Sproul’s discussion of “chance” is a case in point of just how shallow and confused the discussion is here. Pretty much everything he says initially he phrases as if it were a rebuttal to evolutionary theory. And yet his discussion of how “chance” per se is basically a linguistic illusion is something I’ve heard countless biologists try to explain to unwilling creationists. When scientists talk about “chance” or “randomness,” they do so in a very strictly delineated sense: most often meaning that the occurrence of two variables or occurrences things are not discernibly correlated (i.e for coin flips, the outcome of the flips is averages 50/50 over more and more trials, and these outcomes are not correlated with relevant variables like who is calling heads and who is calling tails).

No scientist is claiming that “chance” is some sort of magical power as the two seem to imply. It is simply a notable feature of various processes we look at. For instance, scientists do not claim that mutations happen by “chance” in the sense that they have no ultimate deterministic cause or explanation. What they mean is that mutations happen without any observed correlation to what they might do or cause, and whether or not this would be helpful to the survival of the creature they occur within.

Ignorant of any of this, Stein and Sproul sagely agree that scientists are arrogant and appealing to “magic.” This coming from folks whose alternative IS, literally an openly, magic (performed by an inexplicable all-powerful magician).  And bizarrely, for all this pretension at having a superior scientific position, they seem to feel no obligation to explain the specific mechanism or functioning of their alternative.

Mike Huckabee Endorses Stein’s Anti-Evolutionary Film Expelled!

April 5, 2008

Mike Huckabee (R-Of Nothing) may have given up his quixotic quest to beat mathematically impossible odds against John McCain, but darn it: the man still has something to say. So take it from a guy that thinks bees fly via magic: this Expelled! film is boss!

He’s a heck of a lot more candid about his opinions on evolutionary science than he was in his famous debate answer, making it even more clear that even the Republican party dodged a bullet on this one.

Question for economists: If hot air like this is in such high demand, how come it’s still free? Infinite supply, right?

The 4th Wave of Creationism: Guerrillas for God

April 5, 2008

As Ed Brayton at Dispatches notes, we now have at least six US state legislatures that are either considering or have already passed so called “academic freedom” bills: Louisiana, Missouri, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama. In various forms, they all claim to protect teachers from any repercussions for teaching what they term “scientific weaknesses with evolution.” The insincerity of this sudden concern for “academic freedom” is obvious, given that the bills do not protect teachers from teaching children about, say, birth control or 9/11 conspiracy theories. Only the usual stalking horse of conservative creationists is fair game for fifth-grade science teachers.

With so many similar bills appearing in such a short time, all with such similar language and intent, it’s pretty clear that we’re seeing a new phase of in creationist efforts to attack evolution in public school science class. For those unfamiliar, the first three main phases have been Creationism proper, Scientific Creationism, and Intelligent Design, all as outlined in this Dispatches post. The phases have all overlapped to some extent (most obviously in the recycling of many of the same arguments), and advocates of prior phases all remain, though often strategically friendly to the newest effort. But this 4th phase doesn’t go under any sort of banner or title: and that, in fact, is the whole point.

Read the rest of this entry »