Cal Thomas’ Article in the Spokesman-Review

Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist, had an opinion piece in the Spokesman-Review today concerning the current health-care fracas. I’ve only posted a few paragraphs from the article, head over to the Spokesman to read the whole thing. The article definitely has a “the sky is falling” ring to it. Here’s what he had to say:

“But this is about none of that. This is about liberal Democrats realizing their decades-old dream of complete control of our lives. Every move you make, every breath you take, they’ll be watching you. Except, of course, when it comes to terrorists who want to destroy America faster than the liberals do. A different standard is applied to them.”

Now, if you substituted “government” with “liberal Democrats” I’d be right with him. But Republicans have done their fair share of trying to control people’s lives. Regan’s ratcheting up of the war on drugs, Dubya’s Patriot Act and Republicans seem forever concerned with what’s happening in people’s bedrooms.

“This is how I see health care reform working: If you are a doctor who has spent a lot of money and time becoming a responsible and caring physician, the government will tell you how much to charge your patients and, in fact, whether you will be allowed to treat them at all. Bureaucrats, having given themselves the power of God, will decide whether a patient is worth the cost of treatment, thereby deciding who lives and who dies.”

Don’t insurance companies already tell doctors how to treat patients? I’ve heard a lot of how we’ll be in trouble if bureaucrats run health care, but they already do, they just happen to work for insurance companies and hospitals and not for the government.

“Despite the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, somewhere down the line taxpayers will be forced to underwrite abortions in violation of the consciences and faith of the majority.”

Two problems with this. Firstly, plenty of Americans are forced to pay for government projects they are morally opposed to. There are a lot of liberals who are morally opposed to the Iraq War, should they not have to pay taxes for it? Secondly, the country is evenly split over abortion, I’m not sure you could say a majority oppose it. A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll asked “On the issue of abortion, would you say you are more pro-life or more pro-choice?”. Forty-seven percent said pro-life, forty-four percent said pro-choice and six percent said both. When you factor in the margin of error, almost all of these polls come out statistically even.

“This is the triumph of the humanistic, atheistic worldview. We are all to be regarded as products of evolution in which the fit and the powerful will decide our survival and worth.”

Yeah and I heard atheists eat babies, torture kittens and pee in the water supply too, ridiculous. As you can imagine this was the paragraph that really caught my attention. I don’t know what type of humanists or atheists he has been talking to but he should really find some new friends. Richard Dawkins, who, if the atheists had or wanted one, could be considered the atheist pope had this to say on the subject:

“I hear the bleak sermon of the Devil's Chaplain as a call to arms. As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs. My previous books, such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, extol the inescapable factual correctness of the Devil's Chaplain (had Darwin decided to extend the list of melancholy adjectives in the Chaplain's indictment, he would very probably have chosen both 'selfish' and 'blind'). At the same time I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.'”

This is from the beginning of the Humanist Manifesto III:

“Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.”

If Cal Thomas took a second to actually read some atheist and humanist literature he would think twice before writing such close-minded, dim statements.

I completely agree with the following statement. There is a lot of hypocrisy going on in the Democrat party over the deficit. When Bush was in they couldn't stop talking about it and how great Clinton was for keeping it under control and now that they're back in office they can't seem to put the credit card away.

"When Republicans were in the majority, deficits mattered to Democrats. Now we see that expressed concern was a sham, because if deficits meant something when they were relatively small, they ought to mean something more when we are in hock up to the necks of our Chinese-made clothes."

Mobius Science Center in Trouble

It looks like Mobius Spokane went back to the Park Board with a revised contract and this has caused a bit of a problem.  Hopefully all parties will come to an agreement.  It sounds like it would be a great addition to Spokane.  Here’s the full story at the Spokesman.

Darwin’s New Finch

A very interesting research paper has been published.  No reason for me to rewrite it when other people have already done a much better job than I could hope to.  Here’s the short version on Wired, I went to the PNAS website, but you can’t review the article for free, so I’m unable to post it.

Ben is sick again….

Anybody who gets the title is already in good company.  I just want to take a moment to promote two of the best podcasts around.  Hardcore History and Common Sense, both produced by Dan Carlin.

In Hardcore History Dan takes an in-depth look into past world-making/shaking events.  The great part about HH is that it’s not a gloss job, he generally spends a good one to two hours covering each event and sometimes devotes multiple shows to a single topic (for example three shows on the Punic Wars and four shows on the Eastern Front during WWII).

In Common Sense Dan looks at current events.  Carlin is not the normal tv talking head you’re used to (i.e. Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, etc.).  He actually studies the subject and forms his opinions on the facts, not whether or not it’s liberal or conservative approved.  Chances are you’ll disagree with him on half of what he says, but it’s a good type of disagree, not an angry throw a beer bottle at Bill O’Reilly on the tv type of disagree.

Please check out both shows, I’m not sure there are any better.

Christian Nation

I try to keep up with as many of the local blogs as possible. One I check out pretty regularly is called Mark In Spokane. Mark and I are politically very much at opposite ends. I do have to admit though that I really like the fact that he’s a history buff. I love everything history, I can never get enough books or documentaries. He seems to stick to right-wing topics and religion. pretty much can boil it down to “Obama sucks, GO GOD!” (IN FAIRNESS TO MARK, THIS WAS MY ATTEMPT AT A BAD JOKE, CHECK OUT HIS SITE), really there's more than that, but it seemed funny to write. Here’s a topic in particular that I have a problem with:

“An interesting observation, built upon the expression of the idea that while America is a secular polity, that polity is built upon the bedrock of an essentially Christian culture:

America is a Christian nation; this is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Whether America will remain a Christian nation is matter for argument, perhaps: the creation of special rights for pathics, for instance, indicates that Christian morals are going by the board; and the prevalence of abortion, the deliberate destruction of one's offspring, is another suggestion that both Christian belief and Christian morals have begun to succumb to total religious indifference, if not yet to atheism. But if Christian faith and morals will be generally rejected by the coming of the twenty-first century, then probably the whole culture will disintegrate, the material culture as well as the intellectual and moral culture; and human existence here will become poor, nasty, brutish, and short: unless some quite new culture, which as yet nobody can imagine, should rise up. Any such unnameable innovative culture, to endure, would require some transcendent sanction, perhaps some theophanic event -- something more enduring than mere Marxist ideology, which was a violent attempt at a new faith and a new culture.

- Russell Kirk, Renewing a Shaken Culture (1992).”

Let’s go down this piece by piece. I have to admit that I had to look up what a pathic is, it’s basically a guy who takes it up the butt from another guy. I’d like to know what special rights homosexual men have received. The only thing I can figure is that by special rights he meant we no longer beat them to death in abandoned fields late at night. Of course if he wants a return to Christian morals, he may want a return to executing gays, along with atheists, adulterers, and people who don’t observe the Sabbath. Jesus did have a couple of good (but not original) moral ideas, love they neighbor, do unto others…, etc. But do we really need a 2,000 year old glorified book of Aesop's Fables to tell us how to live our lives?

He then suggests that everything will probably go downhill without a Christian or some other type of theist culture. He (Russell Kirk) thinks multiculturalism (the fraud as he says), the endeavor of militant secular humanists and the (again as Kirk says) heresy of democracy, or assuming that one man is equal to another will lead to this great calamity. I don’t understand his problem with multiculturalism, being as we were formed by different races in a country stolen from another people. I think people tend to forget that black people have been here almost as long as we have and that American Indians were originally here. So if we really want to be faithful to the American culture we should revert to the Indians culture. His problem with those dangerous, militant secular humanists comes back to atheism which I’ll get to. Then he has a problem with democracy and everyone being considered equal. I’ll give it to him that not everyone is equal. But who would decide everyone’s worth? There would be no practical way because everyone will have a different idea of how to decide someone’s worth. So it’s an impractical idea and therefore not worth bitching about.

I’m not sure why atheism is such a horrible thing. Mr. Kirk prattles on about how we need God (he seems to favor the Christian God, Zeus apparently won’t cut it) to be good and secularism leads to all types of naughty activities. Mark may know his history, but Mr. Kirk obviously skipped that class as a kid. He must have at least missed the part about witch burnings, crusades, executing homosexuals, imprisoning Galileo and other thinkers and all the other fun stuff that went along with Christianity. Of course, after only having read a little about Russell Kirk, I think he might have favored torture and killing, as long as the Bible says it’s okay. Mr. Kirk never really seems to get around to giving specific reasons or data that proves atheism leads to depravity. He alludes to Stanlinist Russia. The thing I’d point out here is that the Russian commies believed in complete, unquestioning faith in communism and their leader and basically turned it into a religion or personality cult. One thing most atheists will agree on (there’s not much) is that we all dislike unquestioning faith, regardless of where the faith is being placed.

I had to show you this brilliant line in crazy Kirk’s lecture.

“Religion restrains the passions and the appetites: and sensate natures flout restraints.”

I think it’s possible that Mr. Kirk occasionally got doped out of his mind before writing. In what ways does religion restrain the passions. If fondling little boys, blowing up oneself in large crowds and murdering doctors is them showing restraint I think we might need to buy an island for atheists where we can escape when they really lose it. Now I’m no Christopher Hitchens to say that religion has never done any good, which it has and does, but come on, the list of religions misdeeds would fill up a library.

To sum it up, Russell Kirk seems to have been a teensie bit racist, Bible thumper. Of course that’s not a good reason to dismiss his ideas, but I think his lack of evidence gives us the reason we need. I haven’t read a lot of Kirk, so if anyone does know of any evidence he gives for his atheism=bad equation please email me. Unlike theists, I place importance in data and evidence.

Laura Carder Loses Election

More than enough votes are in now to see that Laura Carder has lost the election for Spokane School District board, position 4. According to the Spokane County elections website there are only 250 uncounted ballots. The final totals for school board position 4 are Rocky Treppiedi 51.88% and Laura Carder 48.12%.

Before anyone goes out drinking though, we need to realize that this is a fairly hollow victory. We may have kept somebody off the board who wanted to brainwash kids with Genesis, but we end up with Treppiedi, who shouldn’t be anyone’s first choice. Our only hope is that he gets impeached and they appoint someone else.

I will admit though, I’m going to miss Carder a little bit. Her crazy rants on her website provided hours of entertainment.

New Dinosaur Discovered

Down in South Africa they’ve discovered a new dinosaur that they think is a transitional species from two legged to four legged dinosaurs.  Here’s the article from the Boston Globe (they have a cool graphic of the dinosaur).

“JOHANNESBURG—A newly discovered dinosaur species that roamed the Earth about 200 million years ago may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land, scientists in South Africa said Wednesday.

The Aardonyx celestae was a 23-foot- (7-meter-) long small-headed herbivore with a huge barrel of a chest. It walked on its hind legs but also could drop to all fours, and scientists told reporters that could prove to be a missing evolutionary link.

This is a species "that no one has seen before and one that has a very significant position in the family tree of dinosaurs," said Australian paleontologist Adam Yates.

Yates, who is based at the University of the Witwatersrand's Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research, led the research with a number of other local and international scientists.

Their findings were published Wednesday in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B, a London-based peer-reviewed journal.

The Aardonyx celestae species dates back to the early Jurassic period. Yates said the creature found in South Africa stood nearly 6 feet (about 1.7 meters) high at the hip and weighed about 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms). It was about 10 years old when it died, and its death may have been caused by drought.

The newly discovered species shares many characteristics with the plant-eating herbivores that walked on two legs, Yates said. But the new species also has similar attributes to dinosaurs known as sauropods, or brontosaurs, that grew to massive sizes and went about on all fours with long necks and whip-like tails.

"The discovery of Aardonyx helps to fill a marked gap in our knowledge of sauropod evolution, showing how a primarily two-legged animal could start to acquire the specific features necessary for a life spent on all-fours," said Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum who assisted on the dig that led to the finding but was not directly involved in the research.

Why and how dinosaurs grew into such massive creatures is a question that scientists have been trying to answer for a long time.

Walking on all fours allowed animals to carry more weight, and size was often their only defense against sharp-toothed carnivores, said one of the report's co-authors, Matthew Bonnan of Western Illinois University, by video conference from the United States.

The discovery of the new species was made by postgraduate student Marc Blackbeard, who was excavating two sites in central South Africa about five years ago.

It was a site that had been largely ignored by scientists who felt the bone fragments found there would prove to be a common dinosaur species found across the country. On the first day of excavation, a bone too large to belong to this ordinary species was found.

"We knew we had something new, something very, very exciting," Yates said.

The scattered bones were collected and cleaned of the heavy cement-like rock that clung to them. Scientists then began the slow process of studying the bones and trying to order them.

They were pleased with how much of the skeleton they could reconstruct and especially that a large part of the skull was found.

Bonnan said he also was thrilled to be part of this discovery: "It has been a childhood dream to discover a new dinosaur," he said.”