Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precise.

— Leo Rosten

We do have some LGF readers who are creationists, so we would be remiss if we didn’t bring to your attention a chance to win a prize of 100,000 new Turkish lira (about $63,191.14 US at current exchange rates), in a scientific essay contest being held by Turkish creationist Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar): WHY IS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION INVALID?

The competitors of the competition “Why Is the Theory of Evolution Invalid?” held by Science Research Foundation had some righteous demands, stating that given the too many dilemmas of Darwinism, 15 pages is too short for their essays and that the time is inadequate.

Upon these requests, some changes have been made on the rules of the competition and the GREAT PRIZE IS INCREASED. Entries which will be hand-written on A4 paper will NOT EXCEED 60 PAGES IN LENGTH AND NOT BE LESS THAN 30 PAGES.

The competition will include two stages. In this first stage of the competition, the prize of the winning contestant is increased to 25,000 YTL. Therunner-up will receive 15,000 YTL and the third prize-winning contestant will receive 10,000 YTL.

In the second stage of the competition, the winning contestant will receive a prize of 100,000 YTL, the runner-up 50,000 YTL and the third prize-winning contestant 25,000 YTL.

In the first stage of the competition, contestants will send to our foundation their essays containing comprehensive and convincing information on the subject of all the Darwinist dilemmas that prove the invalidity of evolution, of the kind summarized below. The first 1000 entries received will be considered.

The contestants will send their theses to the following address of the foundation by mail: Çakırağa mah. Katip Müslihittin sok. Sağlam İşhanı No.3 D.12-13 Aksaray/İstanbul. The last day to receive the essays is extended until 18 October 2009.

In the second stage of the contest, the scientific essays reaching our foundation will be evaluated by academicians who are experts on the subject and 100 contestants will be entitled to take part in the final.

The final competition will be held on 6 December 2009, Sunday at a location which will be announced later with the participation of the 100 contestants that are selected by the jury.

The contestants will be asked to answer a test consisting of 80 questions.

The winners will receive their checks at an award ceremony on 28 December 2009.

The purpose of this competition is to raise young people’s awareness of Darwinism, which has inflicted immense damage on mankind and to put them on their guard against this terrible fraud in science.

Old-time creationist huckstering at its best, with a Turkish flair.

Oktar proceeds to offer a long laundry list of anti-evolution talking points, helpful suggestions to the contestants about areas on which they should focus their research; a little intelligent design here, some young earth creationism there, irreducible complexity and the second law of thermodynamics, etc., ad nauseam. Ending with point #17, with which I dare you to argue:

(17) The fact that we only have experience of an image of matter totally demolishes Darwinist philosophy…

One reality scientifically proven in our century is that we never have direct experience of the external original of matter. Electric signals reach us by way of our senses, and the image that forms for us in our brains consists solely of these signals. But we see highly colored, vivid, active, three-dimensional and perfectly sharp images, hear perfectly clear sounds and perceive a flawless outside world. But all these are merely perceptions. It is the soul bestowed on human beings by Allah (God) that perceives, sees and hears them, that understands, thinks, rejoices and yearns. This great reality has totally discredited the materialist and Darwinist mindset, which claims that everything consists of matter.

(Hat tip: Killgore.)

The return of the son of the open thread…

After the first disaster of a trial, this news comes as a pleasant surprise: Holy Land Foundation defendants guilty on all counts.

A jury on Monday sided with the prosecution in the Holy Land Foundation trial, determining unanimously on more than two dozen counts that the defendants were guilty of charges related to the financing of the terrorist group Hamas.

The verdicts were read Monday afternoon.

Members of the formerly Richardson-based Holy Land are accused of funneling $12 million to Hamas after the Palestinian group had been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1995.

It took the jury eight days of deliberations to reach its decisions – less than half the time it took jurors to deadlock end up with an almost complete mistrial last year on the first go-around.

Opening statements at the Earle Cabell Federal Courthouse in downtown Dallas began Sept. 22. Over the past two months, prosecutors attempted to prove that five former charity organizers used Holy Land, once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., to funnel an estimated $60 million to the militant group – most of it before 1995.

His work there is done: Alan Colmes To Leave FNC’s Hannity & Colmes Show.

Allahpundit is crushing heavy on Kirsten Powers (yes, again) for Colmes’ replacement. My preference would be a left field oddball like Kinky Friedman. But it looks like Fox is leaning toward a stultifying five-day dose of “Hannity’s America.”

Here’s a scary little story about the increasing sophistication of online criminals: Hands-off hackers: Crooks opt for surgical strikes.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Internet criminals have been getting more “professional” for years, trying to run their businesses like Big Business to get better and more profitable at selling stolen data online. Now the bad guys of the cyber-underworld are exhibiting other unexpected traits: remarkable patience and restraint in stalking their victims.

A new report by antivirus software vendor Symantec Corp. details a startling trend that highlights the inventive ways criminals are figuring out ways [sic] to make money online.

Hackers are sometimes breaking into online businesses and not stealing anything. Gone are the bull-in-the-China-shop days of plundering everything in sight once they’ve found a sliver of a security hole.

Instead of swiping all the customer data they can get their hands on, a small subset of hackers have concerned themselves with stealing only a very specific thing from the vendors they breach — they want access to the compromised companies’ payment-processing systems, and nothing else, according to the “Symantec Report on the Underground Economy,” slated for release Monday.

They use their illicit access to online payment gateways for only one purpose: to validate stolen credit card numbers. They sell this validation service to the criminals who actually buy lists of card numbers, so they can be sure the numbers they’re buying will work. It’s a kind of underground service industry.

Barack Obama’s economic advisers: Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers.

CHICAGO — President Elect Barack Obama selected a Mr. Defense and a Mr. Offense for his economic team Monday,  picking Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council. …

The dual selection set up a formidable tag team to take on the global financial crisis. Geithner at Treasury will likely take a defensive role, spearheading the remainder of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program and decisions to bail out individual financial institutions.

Inside the White House, Summers will be the architect of the administration’s economic stimulus proposals, including what is shaping up to be a multi-hundred billion dollar jobs and infrastructure spending plan.

Barack Obama has promised the world to every special interest group in the US, and now they’re going to want to collect. One area where the promises have been especially extravagant: Experts Say Obama Must Build a Bipartisan Machine to Move Education Law.

President-elect Barack Obama has made big promises to educators, parents and the nation’s nearly 50 million public school students. He vowed to recruit an “army of new teachers,” create better tests and give public schools more funding. He also said he would make college more affordable.

As the new administration prepares to take over the Education Department, school experts say one of Obama’s first — and toughest — jobs must be restoring the broad bipartisan support it took to pass the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which aims to boost the achievement of poor children. That consensus has splintered, with people on both sides of the aisle souring on the law as it is overdue for reauthorization in Congress.