Notes from Evil Bender

she manages to outdue herself. In her latest bit of drivel at Uncommon Descent (I’m still not linking to the Blog O Disappearing Posts):

Barry Arrington notes that FAQ2 addresses the claim that No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously

Well, there is a big scandal going on right now in my home province of Ontario, involving accusations of cheating in lotteries. As explained by the inimitable Toronto Star,

Previous estimates suggested that lottery vendors and their employees and families have taken home $106 million in prizes over the past 13 years. The new audit says the actual figure is $198 million, a figure that Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin characterized yesterday as “astronomical.” In fact, it is almost certainly an underestimate of what insiders have been pocketing.

Winners’ names are only recorded for larger prizes – about one-third of the $14 billion in total winnings distributed since 1995. The rest of Ontario’s lottery jackpot is distributed directly by stores in the form of small cash prizes.

It is very likely, then, that these prizes are even more vulnerable to cheating.

“Astronomical is news speak for “These numbers are way too high to be the result of chance (as in “game of chance, or lots = lottery”) and therefore must be due to design.”

That’s right, folks, O’Leary’s decided a dreadful argument by analogy is proof of the validity of the argument from design. Among the legions of problems with this, probably the biggest is that discovering fraud from human agents with discernable methods and aims is not the same as looking at every unanswered question in science and shouting “A Magic Man supernatural agent JESSSUS unidentified designer did it.” If the investigators had decided that events unexplainable by chance were the result not of fraud but of God’s mysterious handiwork, they would rightly lose their jobs, as their conclusion offers absolutely nothing of merit.

O’Leary doesn’t stop there, though:

A class action lawsuit has been launched, and there is also a proposal to forbid ticket vendors, their employees, and families to participate in the lottery.

Of course that proposal won’t work. These days it would produce nothing but a huge raft of lawsuits and human rights commission hearings over what constitutes “family.”

Nice to know her political thought is as sophisticated as her faux-scientific analysis.

There is good news, though: it looks like the new management at UD has apparently shut down O’Leary’s linkfarm for the time being.