The CLUES:

The Brit lives in the Red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane Drinks tea.
The Green House is on the left of the White House.
The Green House’s owner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the Blue House.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
The QUESTION:

Who owns the fish?

Your account of Calvert’s Wichita event and your persistent questioning to uncover his lying (or is it self-delusion?) was great!

Calvert has targeted me and KCFS as the primary sources of all the criticism, fun-making, bad press, etc., that has been directed at ID in general and him in particular. In doing so, Calvert has attributed to me/KCFS far greater influence than we actually have. And, of course, lied shamefully.

As for the IDers’ problem with the media, the reporters have learned since 1999 that ID is not science. Where before they were maddeningly sticking to the “equal treatment” policy — five column inches for a scientist, five column inches for Calvert — now they realize ID deserves little or no coverage because it contains little or no science. I didn’t make them change their policy, nor did KCFS. Having normal intelligence, the reporters figured out ID is hogwash all by themselves, helped by the nonsensical blattings of Calvert, Harris et al.

Hence the necessity to put out news releases to their e-mail lists (since the papers wouldn’t print them) and print up 100,000 color printed “FAQ” sheets to be inserted in preimary election BOE district newspapers (since the papers didn’t care to print what they had to say, but were happy to take their money for doing the inserts).

As for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, neither KCFS nor I had anything to do with it, although we enjoyed the joke, as did many other people all over the U.S. Whoever created it made a clever comment on what IDers always say (in secular settings, but not in churches) when asked who the Designer is: “Gee, we don’t know. So we don’t go there. It could be aliens, or, or, anything!” So why not the FSM?

I wrote an e-mail to Calvert asking why he was lying about me and KCFS. I corrected some of his misapprehensions (or rather, conscious falsehoods, since he’s been told about them repeatedly) and asked if he thought the Commandment forbidding bearing false witness against one’s neighbor didn’t apply to him. As you might guess, he didn’t respond.

His platform partner, William Harris, in at least one presentation, indicated that Keith Miller, a member of the KCFS Board since the beginning, was lying when he defended the position that one could accept the evidence for evolution *and* also be a person of faith. Keith is an evangelical Christian and K-State geologist, and anyone who knows him knows his integrity is impeccable. Harris’ comment reflects badly, not on Keith Miller, but on Harris and his willingness to lie for his “cause.”

During their tour of Kansas, Calvert and Harris slung mud at me and KCFS, only to have it fly back in their faces. Whatever credibility they had before their tour has been obliterated by their own actions. Harris has now moved to South Dakokta, so Calvert is a solo act. One wonders what he will do next.

You can judge for yourself. There is audio of all of Calvert’s talks, as well as Jack Krebs’ talks correcting his errors, on the KCFS website: http://www.kcfs.org.

“1. What you post must concern something in my blog or what it is about.
2. That you respect religion and religious people.
3. If you are presenting an argument, I ask that it be a scientific argument, that scientific terms be used, and textbook science not be misrepresented.”

I would suggest that the comment in question has violated at least two of these requests.

From the RSR archives:
“I’m sure others can identify other salient characteristics, but I have found that it takes no more than three posts for enough of the above to identify any of its new incarnations. Following is a list of posters to various groups which have shown enough of these common characteristics to attract my attention (not all at RSR):

Anonymous (6/20, 22), Anti-Atheist, Atheist Fighter, Basement Activist, Blair, Blim, Charley, Christensen, Commentator, Emanuel Goldstein, Greg,
Heine, IANAL, Jacob, Letstalk, Lionel Mandrake, M, Nietzchean Superman, Patton, Stauffenberg, ubhawkingchawley, Wayne, Wilson, Winston, Wyatt, Yeah

Moderators have caught and banned most of its incarnations, although one seems able to survive with heavy surveillance. However, simple banning is never quite enougrse of action here.

This troll deserves no less than full (and ongoing) excision from the record. It deliberately acts as offensively as it possibly can, actually inviting censorship, so it can then turn that into an issue afterwards.”

Good Luck.

Your statement, “Do you perhaps recognize that mindless processes do not explain our existence?” I’m not sure specifically what you mean. Mindless means that you can’t choose the variation of your offspring, how they will mutate, or the direction your population will evolve. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t controlled by physical forces and natural selection. Calvert was trying to use unguided, etc. to say it’s merely by chance and justify Dembski’s factorless math based on poor assumptions. Evolution is mindless, and is responsible for the diversification of life on this planet. Whether or not it explains our “existence” depends on how you mean “existence”.