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March 25, 2009

Does He Think We’re That Stupid?

I caught part of Barack Obama's press conference last night--the part about how it's only fair to reduce the charitable gift tax deduction for well-heeled Americans. The reporter, bless his heart, followed up by asking if all those charities that are going ballistic over this proposal are wrong in thinking they'll be badly damaged by Obama's plans. Not at all, the messiah responded.

Maybe the people who run America's homeless shelters and AIDS clinics read a report by the Tax Policy Center, which found that Obama's proposal would reduce charitable giving by nine billion dollars a year.

Obama later told a reporter from Ebony magazine that his heart "breaks" over the thought of any American child being homeless. Well, if you feel that badly about it, Mr. President, it might be a good idea to listen to the people who RUN America's homeless shelters--shelters that survive only because "the rich" support them. Nine billion dollars will provide food and shelter for a lot of homeless kids.  But no--the government knows best how to spend that money....

What frustrates me most about listening to Obama speak is his assumption that we are too stupid to realize he's conning us (see above)--or flat out lying to us. Embryonic stem cell research will lead to cures for diabetes and Parkinsons? Please. This research has yet to yield a single cure, or even hope, for any disease. Obama knows this, of course. Anybody who pays attention to the debate knows this. But Obama lies about it anyway.

March 24, 2009

Daily roundup

Hooked

Hooked In the past few weeks, both Chuck and Wendy Shalit have reviewed Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children, by Dr. Joe McIlhaney and Dr. Freda McKissic Bush. I have an interview with Dr. Bush in the works, but in the meantime, both of these reviews are well worth a read. 

(Image © Northfield Publishing)

As a man sows

Garden With the economy forcing people to, well, economize, Americans are rolling up their sleeves and rediscovering vegetable gardens. According to the AP, we're supposed to call them "recession gardens," although the 1940s name of "victory gardens" sounds a whole lot cheerier. 

Those gardens, modeled after a White House patch planted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943, were intended to inspire self-sufficiency, and at their peak supplied 40 percent of the nation's fresh produce, said Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International.

Wow--can you imagine if 40 percent of our fresh produce came from our backyards? What would that look like? Maybe we could stop popping so many vitamin pills and get the healthy glow that comes from fresh vegetables and sunshine. Maybe the Global Food Crisis would disappear as American farmers were able to meet international need. Maybe people in our own communities wouldn't go hungry if we were each able to plant one extra row for a local food bank. Maybe we would one day hear Jesus say, "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat." Sounds like victory to me.

(Image © AP)

March 23, 2009

Eve of Destruction: Terminator Time

Sarah-connor "In the early 21st century, all of mankind united and marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to AI [artificial intelligence], a singular construction that spawned an entire race of machines."

What Morpheus was describing to Neo sounds like what Ray Kurzweil calls The Singularity: "an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today — the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity."

At the heart of this "new civilization" will be just machines that make big decisions, programmed of course by fellows with compassion and vision. Only by leveraging their abilities, embracing both the biological and the synthetic, can we become eternally free and eternally young.

As you might expect, "The Singularity" has more than a few detractors.The most obvious concern is that machines that are "smart" enough and powerful enough to usher in Kurzweil's utopia might one day decide that they will no longer take directions from their flesh-and-blood creators, or that humans are superfluous consumers of resources.

This Matrix scenario concerned Kurzweil enough that he took the time to comment on the movies. Aside from stating the obvious -- the second and third movies weren't nearly as good as the first -- he was mostly content to offer a technological critique of the movie ("There are problems and inconsistencies with the conception of virtual reality in the Matrix") and throw around adjectives like "dystopian," "Luddite" and "totalitarian." 

Adjectives aren't assurances: Kurzweil never does tell us why we shouldn't fear our prospective machine overlords. Mind you, I don't. Not because I am put at ease by things like the Three Laws of Robotics (the kinds of machines Kurzweil envisions are probably smart enough to circumvent these kinds of limitations) but because I'm willing to bet that no machine will pass the Turing test in the foreseeable future.

Continue reading "Eve of Destruction: Terminator Time" »

They were expendable

Knowing The following contains extensive spoilers about the recent films Watchmen and Knowing, so I'm going to put almost the entire post under the jump. Proceed at your own risk!

Continue reading "They were expendable" »

March 20, 2009

Daily roundup

Eve of Destruction: Plagues, or ’Pardon Me, but Your Buboes Are Showing’

Black_deathbrueghel In June of 1347, Joan, the favorite daughter of King Edward III of England, was arguably the happiest 15-year-old in Europe. Her father had arranged her marriage to Pedro of Castile. Her betrothed had sent her a troubadour to serenade her, and she was setting off for her wedding with a huge retinue of soldiers and ladies-in-waiting that included her own armada, one of whose ships carried nothing but her dresses.

Fifteen months later, Joan was dead. Like an estimated one-third of her fellow Europeans she was struck down by what John Kelly called, after the convention of the time, The Great Mortality.  

We know it as The Black Death. Whatever you call it, it was, in all likelihood, "the most devastating plague of all time," as the cover of Kelly's book puts it. The numbers, as best as can be reconstructed, are mind-boggling: between one-third and (in some parts) one-half of Europe dead. As many, if not more, dead from Northern China through the Middle East (the plague followed the Silk Road and the routes of Mongol conquest) and North Africa.

As devastating as its demographic impact was, the cultural impact of the Black Death, as chronicled by Kelly, Norman Cantor, and William H. MacNeill was almost as great. Among the victims of Yersinia pestis were political, social and religious verities, which isn't surprising. Once a society evolves much beyond a "big man" level, a kind of unspoken (sometimes spoken) covenant comes into play: in exchange for formal authority and the perks that go with it, the elites will protect hoi polloi from the Big Bads out there. Maybe not every time, but often enough to make life tolerable.

Catastrophes call the whole arrangement into question. People who have put up with a lot of . . . well, a lot are no longer as inclined to submit to authority -- any authority. 

As you probably know, that wasn't the last that mankind saw of bubonic plague: there were more localized European outbreaks for the next three centuries, most famously in seventeenth-century Britain. And the "Third Pandemic" in the latter half of the nineteenth century killed an estimated 12 million people in China and India alone.

Continue reading "Eve of Destruction: Plagues, or ’Pardon Me, but Your Buboes Are Showing’ " »

Global Warming, a New Kind of Morality

Earth3 Thanks to Pointificator Michael Snow for alerting us to an important video hosted by scientists refuting the global warming myth.  

The Discovery Channel (among others) is making a bunch of money running global warming stories, so I suggest that it is important for all of us to become educated on this worldview issue (Humans vs. Earth). Michael Snow is correct about who will suffer the most from bad policy decisions based on error-ridden science: the poor. 

Myths are hard to break. For instance, malaria was well on its way to being wiped out before Greeners decided that DDT was bad for the environment. (See Dr. Robert Cihak's article DDT vs. Death by Malaria.)

It always amazes me that we throw out perfectly good ethical and moral priniciples and replace them with nonsense. I guess St. Augustine was right: "our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee." If we don't find rest in God, we'll try to find rest in something else--like Earth worship and bad science.

(Image © The Discovery Channel)

March 19, 2009

Daily roundup

Not in my womb

Eggs This is where the Brave New World has brought us: You can abort a child who's not even your own.

(Image courtesy of Slate)

Eve of Destruction: Supervolcanoes, or ’Run, Yogi and Boo Boo, Run!’

Yogi Sometimes various scientific disciplines come together in an almost musical way to produce new knowledge that gives us yet another thing to be terrified of.

That's what happened when volcanologists and geneticists looking at very different sets of data both inferred that something really big happened approximately 75,000 years ago. 

For Dr. Michael Rampino and other earth scientists, it was ocean cores that pointed to a sudden 10-degree drop in ocean temperatures 75,000 years ago. As he told PBS' NOVA, "At the time I thought, 'There's something wrong here, this isn't normal. This isn't the way climate usually works.' It usually works on a much slower, more steady basis."

For population geneticists, it was DNA evidence of a population bottleneck about the same time. The evidence seemed to be pointing towards a catastrophic event that greatly reduced human population around the world: perhaps as much as 97-99 percent.

Put the two disciplines together and you get the Toba Catastrophe Theory.  

What is a "Toba"? Toba is (not was, is) a supervolcano on the island of Sumatra. All volcanoes are rated on something called the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI. For our purposes, all you need to know is that the index runs from 0 to 8; Mt. St. Helens, which ejected approximately one cubic kilometer of material, rates a five; and the index is logarithmic, i.e., each whole number represents a 10-fold increase in material ejected. Thus, Mt. Pinatubo, a VEI 6, ejected 10 times more material than Mt. St. Helens. A VEI 7 would eject 100 times more and a VEI 8, a.k.a. a supervolcano, 1000 times more.

Continue reading "Eve of Destruction: Supervolcanoes, or ’Run, Yogi and Boo Boo, Run!’" »

March 18, 2009

Daily roundup

We’re Hardwired for Religion, Scientists Say

Brain In an article titled, "Born believers: How your brain creates God," writer Michael Brooks says that while there is scientific evidence that humans are "hard-wired" for religion, many scientists say it's just a by-product of child development. A belief in God, we're told, is merely the brain's security blanket. 

One creepy aside: In trying to make his point that contrary to the evidence, God is not really there, Brooks writes, "adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives..." In a 2005 Harris Poll, 21 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation. 

Reincarnation isn't new, and Westerners certainly don't have a corner on the market. What's interesting is that Westerners have made it a positive event: Instead of going from higher to lower life forms to pay for sins until one reaches Nirvana, the formula is reversed--lower to higher.  

Thankfully, in orthodox Christianity, time is linear and our sins are paid for through the atoning blood of Christ, the second person in the Trinity. 

(Image © Morphonix)

Eve of Destruction: Asteroids, Meteors and Comets, Oh My!

Jupiter_showing_SL9_impact_sites I've previously told our gentle readers about the threat posed by Apophis, an asteroid scheduled to get uncomfortably close to Earth on Friday, April the Thirteenth, 2029. There's a one in 45,000 chance that Apophis will pass through a gravitational keyhole that will alter its orbit in such a way that exactly seven years later it will return and this time strike the Earth, thus putting into motion the long-frustrated subjugation of the Tauri by the System Lords. (Yes, I am a nerd: I own all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 and "Ark of Truth" on DVD plus "Continuum" and the original film on Blu-Ray.)

Apophis isn't a potential planet-killer, merely a severe planet messer-upper that, as far as we know, poses the most immediate threat to Earth.The best-known planet-killer is the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous, which is thought to have caused the mass extinction known as the K-T Event. (I say "thought" because, contrary to what you may have been led to believe, there are plenty of dissenters from the "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs" theory. Bob Bakker, among others, has raised some substantial objections to the theory, citing, among other things, the lack of actual dinosaur fossils in the K-T boundary. In his opinion, the asteroid didn't commit mass murder, more like desecrated a graveyard.)

I probably don't need to describe the consequences of, say, a 10-kilometer asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. You've seen Armageddon and/or Deep Impact. Let's just say it would be bad. Not quite as bad on the "Eve of Destruction" scale as wandering black holes or gamma ray bursts, but really bad nonetheless. (My favorite is the Discovery Network's Supercomet: After the Impact, a "docudrama" that features a panel of talking heads, one of whom, described as an expert on psychological responses to disasters, tells us that in the wake of a comet striking the Earth, people would feel "disoriented." Wow.)

Instead, let me take this opportunity to sing the praises of an unsung hero without whom life as we know it would be impossible. Since time immemorial, this hero has protected everyone and everything on this planet, often absorbing horrific damage that otherwise might be inflected on us. And we've never said so much as "thank you."

Gentle readers, give it up for Jupiter.

Continue reading "Eve of Destruction: Asteroids, Meteors and Comets, Oh My!" »

March 17, 2009

Daily roundup

’Unwind’ and the imagination

Unwind As I was looking at one of my favorite book blogs recently, my eye was caught by this review of Unwind by Neal Shusterman.

Generations from now, after the Heartland War, life is protected from the moment of conception until age thirteen.  Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, the parents or guardians of the now-teenaged child have the option to "unwind" -- to retroactively abort -- him or her.  If the parents choose to do so, the teen is sent to a harvesting facility where their body is taken apart and reused. . . .

Unwind was outstanding.  Really freaking outstanding.

I was impressed by, well, everything.  It deals with abortion without ever ever ever feeling preachy -- I didn't once feel that Neal Shusterman revealed his opinion on the issue.  It was action-packed and exciting (I read the last few chapters with my heart in my throat) yet that there was so much to think about -- the characters have conversations about the soul, whether it exists and where it is, and about when life begins.  There are things that can be interpreted in different ways -- some people will attribute those events to science whereas some may attribute the same events to something less tangible. 

The three major characters have distinct personalities, and the character development (especially of the two boys) is very well done and the secondary characters never blend together or into the background.  The unwinding scene is as stomach-turning as anything I've ever read by Stephen King, but without being graphic or gory.  While exploring different visions of our future world, I look for a couple of things beyond the future-stuff:  to see enough of the familiar to make it still seem like our world and to see how our language and stories have evolved.  In Unwind, I found both.

Continue reading "’Unwind’ and the imagination" »

Eve of Destruction: Gamma Ray Bursts

SN2006X-060214_small On February 18, 2006, Swift, a NASA telescope, detected what was later designated as Supernova 2006X. I'll let Gregg Easterbrook continue with the story:

Coded GRB 060218, this star detonation began as a gamma-ray burst that lasted 33 minutes -- absolutely stunning because previous gamma-ray bursts from space have lasted a few seconds at the most. The gamma rays came from 470 million light-years away. That was discomfiting because strong gamma-ray bursts usually emanate from what astronomers call the "deep field," billions of light-years distant and thus billions of years back in the past. A distance of 470 million light-years means the GRB 060218 supernova happened 470 million years ago. That is ancient by human reckoning, but many cosmologists had been assuming the kind of extremely massive detonations thought to cause strong gamma-ray busts occurred only in the misty eons immediately after the Big Bang. The working assumption was that since life appeared on Earth, there had been no stellar mega-explosion. Now we know there has.

For several days as the giant dying star GRB 060218 collapsed, this single supernova shined brighter than all 100 billion other suns in its galaxy combined. The detonation was so inexpressibly luminous that, though 470 million light-years distant, it could be seen by telescopes on Earth. And not just fancy telescopes at the tops of mountains: A few days after the Swift satellite detected the gamma-ray surge, an amateur astronomer in the Netherlands sighted the forming supernova through a backyard telescope. The stellar coordinates hit the Web -- it was at RA: 03:21:39.71 Dec: +16:52:02.6 -- and soon amateur astronomers the world over were marveling at the glistening beacon from the cosmic past. This explosion released so much energy that it happened 470 million years ago yet the light could travel for that protracted period, plus pass through the gas and dust of roughly a hundred galaxies along the way, and still illuminate mirrors of backyard telescopes on Earth.

If you're thinking "so what?" then here's the bottom line: "had GRB 060218 happened in our galaxy, life on Earth would have ended Feb. 18 [2006]." 

To understand why, check out the gamma ray burst entry at Wikipedia and the NASA Swift link above. Go ahead. I'll wait . . . .

Continue reading "Eve of Destruction: Gamma Ray Bursts" »

March 16, 2009

Daily roundup

Distraction Games with Human Life

(Ed. note: Please join us in welcoming Billy to The Point! His bio will be up on the Contributors page shortly. --GRD)

A few more thoughts on President Obama's Executive Order lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research:

Beyond the fact that this is morally wrong, it is a strange time to bring about such a bill. Congress is supposedly hard at work saving the economy from ruin. Then why is it also pushing to create controversial legislation opening up research opportunities that will take years to produce any sort of advancement? Obama himself claims that the promised cures will come about from “painstaking and costly research.” This is nothing more than a political ploy by liberal leaders to push their ideology on our country while we are all clinging to hope that the economy will turn around. 

President Obama also said, “Some of our best scientists leave for other countries that will sponsor their work. And those countries may surge ahead of ours in the advances that transform our lives." He seems to be placing ethics and morality aside so we can claim scientific advances that trump human rights. 

Continue reading "Distraction Games with Human Life" »

Eve of Destruction: Wandering Black Holes

STDoomsDay Having expressed my disregard for the apocalyptic fear-mongering many Christians seem to enjoy, I feel that I would be remiss if I didn't share with you, my gentle readers, things that really would bring the party to an end.

Using ABC/History Channel's Last Days on Earth as a guide, I'd like to introduce you to Eve of Destruction, or "How we're all gonna die!" 

Number one is Wandering Black Holes. It's bad enough that there really are regions of space with gravitational fields so powerful that not even light can escape -- it's obscene that some of these regions are on the move like the Doomsday Machine in Star Trek.

Obscene or not, that seems to be the case: according to Michio Kaku, since 2000 we've had "conclusive evidence that there are wandering black holes -- nomads, renegades -- right next to us in our own backyard of a galaxy."

And while the "probability of a black hole heading straight toward Earth and swallowing us whole is highly unlikely," those kinds of odds haven't stopped other people, including previous administrations, from treating them as virtual certainties, so you should know what's at stake.

Continue reading "Eve of Destruction: Wandering Black Holes " »

March 13, 2009

The Terri Schiavo Story

Terri Has anyone heard any buzz yet about this documentary from Joni and Friends?

(Image © Joni and Friends)

March 12, 2009

Climate Change: Is a CO2 Prohibition Law Right around the Corner?

Physicist William Happer has warned Senate members about jumping onto the Global Warming Crusade against CO2. He compares the current movement to the temperance movement of the early 1900s.    

Movements like these are not victimless. The temperance movement spawned organized crime, and Happer says that this current movement to reduce CO2 will most likely cause some other great injury. 

Happer also hits upon one of my main concerns about this movement: misusing words and ideas to gain power. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) report is, at times, downright dishonest. 

Happer writes of the report,

I could hardly believe my eyes. Both the little ice age and the Medieval Warm Period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick. This was far from an obscure detail, and the hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. We now know that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis. There really was a little ice age and there really was a medieval warm period that was as warm or warmer than today. I bring up the hockey stick as a particularly clear example that the IPCC summaries for policy makers are not dispassionate statements of the facts of climate change. . . . The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell's Ministry of Information in the novel 1984: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." The IPCC has made no serious attempt to model the natural variations of the earth's temperature in the past. Whatever caused these large past variations, it was not due to people burning coal and oil. If you can't model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?

Due to bad science and a quest for power, I can pretty much say that our energy crisis and dependence upon enemies of our great nation will only get worse. 

Words, Words, Words, Nothing but Words

This is a follow-up on a discussion we started about the deleterious idea that one evolutionary biologist (EB) proposed to his fellow EBs. Because of unpleasant associations with the Intelligent Design group, this fellow wanted to eliminate the use of the word “design” to ensure that ideas about ID that don’t fit within the framework of his worldview would not be heard.

The "word" problem is much larger than the issue of biology and design. As Pointificator David says, "The...'abuse of language' is a problem that shows up everywhere. Whether done by ideological opponents, the government or 'Madison Avenue,' calculated manipulation via words is as reprehensible as it is common." David has a further point to make: "The careless use of language may actually cause more damage."

Words give meaning and purpose to our lives, but sadly, the words and their meanings that make a difference in the very way we live, like "freedom" and "dignity," have been slowly eroding as cultural sophists have been busy at work changing meanings of words. For instance, the word "truth" has been neutered to mean whatever you think it means. Christianity, from which we get our rights, has been vilified. The virtues (temperance, prudence, fortitude, justice, faith, hope, and love) have been eerily transposed into bad words. Other concepts like first principles and natural law are ideas that people simply don’t understand. 

I thought it might be prudent for all of us to start illustrating abuses of language abuses as we see them here at The Point.

In the meantime, here's an article about words that some say transcend the test of time. One of the most interesting parts of this article to me is that words about personhood have been around at least 30,000 years. 

March 11, 2009

Daily roundup

March 10, 2009

Daily roundup

Dogma must direct science

Stem-cell-9 As we discussed yesterday, in the name of removing ideological pressure from science and technology policy decisions, the President has lifted the ban on federal funding of research on stem cells derived from human embryos. But Obama's ambitions are futile. By ignoring the concerns of those who oppose this line of research, Obama is just showing he abides by a different set of moral principles -- pragmatism and progress -- not that he has freed science from all principles. 

The goals of science and the methods used to achieve those goals will always be driven and directed by values. A utilitarian view of human life will naturally lead to one set of practices while belief in the sanctity of life will result in another. And, if we claim to despise such atrocities as the Nazis' scientific experimentation on people they considered sub-human, we had best pay careful attention to which dogma we cherish.

(Image © University of Wisconsin)

March 09, 2009

Why do you open the other door, then?

StemCell-030909-2 Obama today:

"We will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society."

Agreed.

But when the only difference (see page 4 here) between cloning human embryos for research and cloning human embryos for reproduction is that the living embryo in the latter scenario actually gets to stay alive--well, any comfort Obama's promise gives me is utterly reversed.

(Image © RTTNews)

The Swedes Are Happier because They Have a Market-Based Healthcare System

Mystery solved. All that hoohah last month guessing why the Swedes are *allegedly* so happy, and all involved missed the apparent reason. It's the market-based, non-governmental health care system! Dr. Herzlinger, of Harvard Business School (it's no William & Mary, but it ain't bad either) explains:

There is only one viable Republican solution: A consumer-driven system that passes the employer tax exemption and funding onto consumers, so they, and not the government, control all health-care costs. Switzerland, which enables universal coverage without any governmental insurance through this system, benefits from costs 40 percent lower than the U.S. and, unlike the single-payer systems in the U.K. or Canada, excellent results for the sick. 

Oh. Wait. Sorry. It's the Swiss, not the Swedes. My bad.

Well, imagine how much happier the Swedes would be if they DID have a market-based healthcare system!

More on embryonic stem cells

Yesterday, Dr. Charmaine Yoest, president and CEO of Americans United for Life, debated Dr. Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, over what Charmaine calls "the research of the past." Take a look.

March 06, 2009

Daily roundup

Pray for ’the least of these’

"Obama to Lift Ban on Funding for Embryonic Stem Cell Research"

March 05, 2009

Daily roundup

March 04, 2009

Daily roundup

Surely left and right can agree on THIS item....

Baby_girls_face-spl-1 I can't help but hope that this BBC news item will make both left and right readers of The Point recoil in horror. Let's hope so. Of course, we could hear the old strains of logic from freedom lovers on the right who say the law should leave people alone, or an extension of the lefty reasoning that what a woman does with her own body is entirely her own business.

I'm still banking that all but the tattered fringe on either side will go for recoiling. After all, this is technology that Hitler and Himmler might have found appealing. What do you think?

(WORLD has more here.)

(Image courtesy of the BBC)

March 03, 2009

Daily roundup

February 27, 2009

Daily roundup

Of chimps and men

Chimp Even though a certain segment of the population happily spent eight years comparing President Bush to a chimp, making such human/monkey comparisons suddenly has become a very naughty thing to do. As you may have heard, the New York Post recently published a cartoon that drew parallels between the economic stimulus plan and the chimp who went on a rampage and mauled a woman. Although the cartoon chimp showed no signs of being a direct representation of President Obama, this cartoon was taken by many as a racial insult. (There's an interesting conversation about this going on at Ed Gilbreath's Reconciliation Blog.) The scandal prompted a breathtaking display of obtuseness on the part of cartoonist Ted Rall -- who blogs at the Smirking Chimp blog (named "in dishonor of [Bush]") and who perpetrated this little gem of racism -- who declared himself a moral authority in these matters.

Of course the comparing of racial minorities to animals has a long and shameful history. (Thanks, Mr. Darwin!) That's why many made the leap that they made in viewing the cartoon, even though I sincerely doubt that any such meaning was intended.

But I think this controversy should get us thinking in broader terms about the way we talk about our fellow human beings, black or white. And along those lines, here’s a question to ponder: In recent years, as we're often reminded, we’ve found out that we and chimps have 99 percent of our DNA "identical in regions that we both share," as Regis wrote. So why are we still propagating negative stereotypes about our simian cousins? (The Washington Post has now apologized for running a chimp cartoon that had no racial implications at all!) Why aren’t we embracing them instead? Are we going to get all high and mighty over 1 measly percent?

Or is it possible that it really does make a difference after all?

February 26, 2009

It’s 1984 All Over Again

1984 My ninth-grade English teacher assigned George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984. Call me lily-livered, but the book scared me stiff.

Shenanigans like the one that Paul Nelson is exposing bring back the same horror I felt while reading that book. The big difference is that this time it isn't a novel.

(Image © Penguin)

February 24, 2009

Daily roundup

The Dangers of Fetal Stem Cells

In desperation, the parents of a very sick child sought treatment from physicians in Moscow. Unfortunately, the physicians used fetal stem cells--with terrible results. You might want to check out Chuck Colson's recent commentary about this very issue. 

This explains a lot

Dilbert.com

(Image © Scott Adams, Inc.)

February 20, 2009

Thanks to good ole Facebook . . .

Online networking

  • Your immune system could deteriorate
  • Your hormone levels could get screwed up
  • Bad things could happen to your arteries
  • You could get cancer, have a stroke, or develop heart disease or dementia 
  • Your brain could turn into mush

Well, maybe all of this is a tad fatalistic, but there might be something to it.

(Image © SPL)

Shoddy Science Used to Convict

Crimelab A report published by the National Academy of Sciences this week is devastating to the current practices of forensic science that are routinely used to convict across the United States.

It turns out that these methods, including fingerprinting, bite mark identification, and ballistics, are not reliable; practitioners testifying in court have little scientific basis for claiming they are accurate. These "experts" have essentially bootstrapped their hunches into accepted testimony by mutually agreeing that their methods work. And on the basis of their testimony, thousands of people have been convicted and some executed.

In addition, some police labs have had to be closed because they were not even running the tests but merely reporting the results that would help convict the person the police had chosen as the perpetrator. These scandals in crime labs involve hundreds of tainted cases handled by police agencies in Michigan, Texas, and West Virginia, and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At least 10 wrongly convicted men have been exonerated as a result of those laboratory investigations, and the cases of hundreds of other people convicted with the help of those facilities are under review.

For more on wrongful convictions, see Justice Fellowship’s Protecting the Innocent Resource Page.

(Image © Gothamist)

February 19, 2009

Daily roundup

February 18, 2009

Daily roundup

February 17, 2009

Daily roundup

Glimpsing Real Health Care

Wise-waiting It felt like the Third World in Wise County, Va., where thousands descended upon the state fair grounds last July, not for Ferris wheels or snow cones, but for free eye and breast exams.

Every year 800 volunteer medical professionals provide basic health care—including more complicated procedures like tooth extractions and benign tumor removals—to more than 2,500 rural Virginians, many of whom make no more than $14,000 per capita. Most of whom—like 47 million other Americans—don't have health insurance.

Some drive hours for a chance to wait in a long line outside of the campgrounds. There are no guarantees that they will receive treatment. For some, a diagnosis of diabetes or cancer is all they will walk away with.

But to finally meet someone who cares … it’s enough to hang a little hope on.

“I thank God. I pray for them people up there. It’s great what these guys are doing,” said 44-year-old David Briggs, fighting off tears. He has had most of his teeth extracted and is looking forward to a new set of dentures.

After reading this piece, I wanted to know more about the doctors, dentists, and nurses who would donate their time to do what our broken health care system does not do: care.

I wanted to know if some beautiful faith in the great Healer compelled them to reach the least of these in the richest county on earth. I have no way of knowing. But I have a sneaking suspicion He has something to do with it.

(Image © Remote Area Medical)

February 16, 2009

Ben Stein’s Taking a Hit

Stein1 Ben Stein is causing an uproar at the University of Vermont. They're hissing because of his audacity at making Expelled. Find out why.

Bad Medicine

Pills We ignore national security at our peril. According to a New York Times/International Herald Tribune article, we have "outsourced"--to the nth degree--manufacturing of crucial drugs to other nations, especially China and India. 

Part of the reason the manufacturing has been sent to other nations is because of all the taxes and unnecessary environmental regulations we've placed upon producers here.  

Seems to me that we'd go a long way toward securing our nation and generating jobs in America if we jettisoned some of the punishing taxes our big government places on manufacturer and eliminate all the nonsensical and costly reregulations. (Heck, getting rid of bad law will generate a few extra jobs too.)