Stories below the fold

Do we remember the 100 million killed by communism?

Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism. Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.

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SenseOfEvents comments on the problem of that recent discovery that seems to show evidence of life much earlier than the theories state possible. 

But here is the problem: Pushing the date of earliest life back compounds the "origin of life" problem, it does not simplify it. If this find is of actual life, that puts the appearance of life on earth less than a billion years after the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. And the earlier the time life appeared, the much less likely that it appeared by chance. There just was not enough time.
It's not I who says so. It is a team of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, hardly a wing of the creationist institute (link).

David Warren's essay on the discovery HERE.

and he adds this factoid:

We are often told that we share 98 percent of our genes with monkeys; but did gentle reader know that we also share around 60 percent with their bananas?

which brings us to the next item on my list:

Book Review:Tom Wolfe takes on evolution and it's prophets. Ed Driscoll writes:

Science is all about the continual testing of theories to ensure they are still valid, which is why the global warming cult’s tut-tutting reply “The science is settled” is a non-sequitur. Similarly, those wedded to unquestioning obedience to the cult of Darwin will gnash their teeth at the mere thought of a household name like Wolfe tackling this topic. (See also: the art world’s response to The Painted Word and the architectural clerisy hissing at From Bauhaus to Our House.) But for everyone else, this is a thought-provoking look at how speech made man the superior creature he is, and how its creation remains a mystery after a century and a half of study. Why, it’s almost as if…

I believe the problem is that moderns don't know there is a difference between Science and Scientism, nor do they recognize the difference between Darwin's scientific theory of evolution, which describes evolution but doesn't discuss causality, and the Philosophy of evolution, which denies causality because there was a need by modern philosophers to get rid of God.

When I was in college, we were forced to read Lucretius, who like the moderns wanted to eliminate the supernatural in nature for philosophical reason. So he insisted there was no need for God, because after all tadpoles and frogs spontaneously arose in mud, so hey who needed a Creator?

Spontaneous creation theory was pretty well put to bed by Pasteur's experiments with yeast, (and he was a believer). And evolution has been allowed as the mechanism that God used to create life since the time of Augustine.

But never mind.
Any straw man will do.

Make "creationists" look like dodos, and you can pretend your "animals have rights" agenda is about protecting animals, not a way to mask your agenda to make it acceptable to kill infants who don't meet your criteria for personhood. (saying that hey, we kill animals so why not kill humans who are no more intelligent than animals).

One of their arguments is about humans sharing 98 percent of chromosomes with apes (without noting the banana part in David Warren's quip I cited)

and yes, that sounds extreme and paranoid, but these theories have been hiding in plain sight in the bioethics literature using fancy words for 30 plus years, and few people know about it....

And now the bioethics experts in Europe insist you don't have a right as a doc not to kill grandmom.

Hippocratic oath? What Hippocratic Oath?

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