Nachman’s Paradox Defeats Darwinism and Dawkins’ Weasel
scordova, Uncommon Descent:
The following is a crude 1-minute silent animation that I and members of the IDCS Network put together. God willing, there will be major improvements to the animation (including audio), but this is a start. Be sure to watch it in full screen mode to see the details.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrIDjvpx7w4
The animation asserts that if harmful mutation rates are high enough, then there exists no form or mechanism of selection which can arrest genetic deterioration. Even if the harmful mutations do not reach population fixation, they can still damage the collective genome.
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Great summary – says it all
American Presidents do not bow to royalty. In fact, heads of state do not bow or genuflect to each other in the normal course of diplomacy. At least, they didn’t until this amateur came into office and failed to learn from the first time he did it. What will the White House say this time? He got stomach cramps?
Jihad sparked accused Fort Hood killer
By SALIM MANSUR, SUN MEDIA:
The massacre in Fort Hood, Texas, was an act in the war the Islamists declared some three decades ago against America, the great Satan in particular, and the west in general.
At what point in his life Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — 39 years of age, Muslim by birth to a Palestinian-American immigrant family and a psychiatrist serving in the U.S. military — became in his own mind a loyal soldier of the global Islamist jihad (war) is highly relevant as are other details of his private life in piecing together the psychological profile of this accused mass murderer.
It seems there can be no mistaking that Nidal Hasan went out as an Islamist warrior to kill as many infidels before he found his martyrdom.
A majority of Americans and most people in the west for any number of reasons, including multiculturalism and political correctness, are dismissive of the view that a war is being waged against them by a segment of the global Muslim population that seemingly has no political standing anywhere in the world.
This would not be the first time the liberal fallacy — the idea that since war is irrational, no rational people will deliberately ignite war — endangers a country against those dedicated to the politics of violence, as are the Islamists in our time.
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Have we gone mad?!
By William R. Mann, CFP
I cannot describe the anger when I saw this. Americans bow to no one except Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Our a**-kissing, Muslim, Marxist “great leader of the NWO,“a legend in his own mind, bowing to Emperor Akihito [son of Hirohito] of Japan, a nation that caused our entry into WWII.
For what purpose? First the Saudi King, now this? What’s next? Praying at the tombs of Stalin and Mao?
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And to think that the US. was respected and feared just one year ago this month…
‘Islamism or Islam? Islamist or Islamic?’
By Andrew G. Bostom, AT:
During the autumn of 1843, in the heart of Istanbul, Turkey, Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat, witnessed the punishment mandated by Sharia (i.e., Islamic) Law for apostasy from Islam. He described this abhorrent spectacle as follows:
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Obama’s botched bow
Thomas Lifson, AT:
Bad enough that Obama bowed down to another head of state yesterday. Even worse that he did not bother to learn how one bows in Japan, and just winged it.
I agree with Scott Johnson, Steve Gilbert, Andrew Malcom, and many others that the President of the United States should not be bowing before any head of state. But unlike these astute observers, I actually know a little something about the art of the bow in Japan, having lived in Japan four different times on a resident visa, taught East Asian Studies at Harvard, and counseled many hundreds of American, European, Middle Eastern, and Australasian executives on how to work negotiate and with the Japanese — including teaching them the right way to bow.
Obama’s bow (below) violates a fundamental precept: NO TOUCHING while bowing.
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“A cult of misery and death”
Robert Fulford, NP:
Violence between Arabs and non-Arabs fills the news from the Middle East. But a larger, longer story comes into focus whenever you try to grasp the history of the region. Arabs killing Arabs: That’s the undeniable theme running through the record. It confronts us at every turn in The Arabs: A History, a newly published 553-page chronicle by Eugene Rogan, the director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford.
So far as he can, Rogan sees the world the way Arabs see it (he’s fiercely anti-Israel) and does his best to sympathize with them as an oppressed race. But his book demonstrates that, while Arabs have surely been exploited, they routinely destroy their own chances of emerging from the coma of stunted development.
Consider political freedom. On Wednesday, Rami Khouri of Beirut’s Daily Star noted that the Berlin Wall anniversary passed mostly unnoticed among Arabs. They don’t understand the meaning of the wall’s destruction because they don’t understand the freedom that 1989 brought to eastern Europe. Khouri speculated that freedom might come to the Arabs as a spark ignited in one country that then spreads to others — like Solidarity in Poland, he suggested.
That’s a spectacular case of wishful thinking. The parallel doesn’t exist.
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United Nations Green Religion squeezing Jesus out of the House of God
By Judi McLeod, CFP:
If the United Nations has its way, Jesus won’t be found in church anymore. With the approval of pious priests and ministers, Jesus is being squeezed out of the House of God to make way for global warming/climate change proselytizing.
Church bells around the world, which call Christians worldwide into church on Sundays, will join the din of drums and gongs to sound a UN ordered message 350 times on December 13 during the Copenhagen climate change summit. The church bells are a call to action on global warming.
“The leading council of Christian and Orthodox churches also invited places of worship for other faiths to join a symbolic “chain of chimes and prayers” stretching around the world from the international date line in the South Pacific.” (Breitbart, Nov. 12, 2009).
“By sounding their bells or other instruments 350 times, participating churches will symbolise the 350 parts per million that mark the safe upper limit for C02 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere according to many scientists.”
The bell-ringing at worldwide churches makes about as much sense as Hanne Strong, who used constant drumbeats to hold the “energy pattern” when her aging UN Poster Boy husband Maurice Strong led the 1992 Rio de Janeiro United Nations Earth Conference.
Not one media jumped in to ask: “Constant drumbeats to hold the energy pattern?”
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Christian Defense Coalition Concerned about the Role of the FBI Under the Obama Administration
Christian Newswire:
Group wonders why their Director, Rev. Patrick Mahoney, was visited and questioned by FBI agents for leading a peaceful prayer vigil in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Yet Major Hasan, who contacted Islamic terrorists multiple times, made threatening comments to the American military and considered himself a “Soldier of Allah” was never visited or questioned by the FBI.
Is it possible that Rev. Mahoney was targeted because he has been an outspoken critic of President Obama’s record on human rights and social justice?
[...]
Bombshell: Obama bringing KSM to NYC for trial; former Bush AG Mukasey to respond at Federalist Society this afternoon
By Michelle Malkin:
It’s Friday. The president is flying off to Asia. Congress is not in session. Perfect time to drop a bombshell on the American people:
The Obama administration is bringing 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York City for a civilian trial.
No, it’s not a joke. Via the NYT:
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Here be Hicks and Hillbillies
Lorne Gunter, NP:
Apparently, if my fellow commentators at other outlets are any gauge, this country’s urban elites believe that beyond the boundaries of their megalopolises there reside only people too stupid to move into more sophisticated boroughs. People who live outside Canada’s three biggest cities have been routinely portrayed in the past week as unthinking, knuckle-dragging, cousin-marrying rubes whose voices should not be heard in national debates, whose opinions should not be counted — unless, of course, they agree with their enlightened urban superiors.
In a column dripping with contempt for rural Canadians, John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail insisted the only reason the registry might be ended on so-called “long guns” is because representation in the House of Commons is skewed in favour of rural voters.
This will come as a great surprise to many Canadians, since, for instance, the Greater Toronto Area by itself has more seats than all but two provinces, Ontario and Quebec. But conceding Mr. Ibbitson’s main point for a moment — that rural votes have a slightly greater statistical weight than urban ones — how does he explain the existence of the registry in the first place? The same imbalance existed in 1995 when the Liberals passed their Firearms Act.
Given that the Liberals imposed rigid party discipline to pass the bill — and imposed it again several times in the decade that followed in order to preserve the registry from opposition challenges; and given that the registry failed the first time the Grits allowed their members a free vote, isn’t it just as true to say that the registry existed at all only because autocratic control by urban-dominated Liberal caucuses foisted it on the country?
[...]
The Liberals ruined Canada, beginning with Pearson.
Chairman Mo’s little red website
By Peter Foster, FP:
Why are people not more aware of the greatest threat to human freedom and prosperity since the collapse of Communism?
I refer not to the 2008 financial crisis, or man-made climate change, but to that eminent Canadian Maurice Strong. He is, after all, more than any other person responsible for sending the nations of the world down the path to Copenhagen.
It seems that Mr. Strong too may be fed up with his lack of profile. He has set up a website, www.mauricestrong.net, where you will find the bald — but accurate — statement that “Maurice Strong is the world’s leading environmentalist.” From heading the first UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1972 to masterminding the 1992 Rio summit, “Maurice Strong,” says Maurice Strong’s website, “has played a unique and critical role in globalizing the environmental movement.”
Mr. Strong is now 80 years old and thus out of the running for the title of CEO of “Earth Inc.,” but it is his environmental nightmares and dreams of global governance that will dominate Copenhagen. This is a man, we might remember, who welcomes the collapse of industrial civilization, and has described the prospect of billions of environmental deaths as a “glimmer of hope.”
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Obama’s failure, Netanyahu’s opportunity
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST:
Once again, US President Barack Obama has demonstrated his intention of “putting light” between America and Israel. His hostility toward Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during the latter’s visit to Washington this week was breathtaking.
It isn’t every day that you can see an American president leaving the prime minister of an allied government twisting in the wind for weeks before deciding to grant him an audience at the White House.
It isn’t every day that a visiting leader from a strategically vital US ally is brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door; is forbidden to have his picture taken with the president; is forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit; and is ordered to keep the contents of his meeting with the president secret.
Ahead of Obama’s meeting with Netanyahu, The Wall Street Journal reported that Obama was effectively attempting to blackmail the Israeli premier by conditioning the meeting on Netanyahu’s willingness to make tangible concessions to the Palestinians during his speech before the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America.
Although the report was denied by the Obama administration, if it was true, such a move by the White House would be without precedent in the history of US relations with Israel. And if untrue, the very fact that the story rings true is indicative of the wretched state of US relations with Israel since Obama entered office.
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Obama EPA silences employees
By: David Freddoso, Washington Examiner:
Remember James Hansen? As director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he grabbed headlines by claiming the Bush Administration was silencing him on global warming. In fact, Hansen was so ruthlessly hushed that he gave about 1,500 media interviews on taxpayers’ time while he was supposedly being silenced.
This year, two veteran EPA employees made a YouTube video expressing doubts about whether a cap-and-trade scheme will work to reduce carbon emissions. And the Obama administration is actually silencing them. The EPA forced two of its career attorneys to remove the video, which they made on their own time in order to explain to the public the issues involved.
One of the two federal workers, Allan Zabel, has overseen California’s successful acid rain cap-and-trade program for 20 years. He wanted to use his experiences to show the public to why a carbon cap-and-trade scheme would not function the same way.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has sent this letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, demanding a legal justification for why the two are being silenced and treated so shabbily. Issa writes:
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Muslim Extremists Attack Worship Service in Uganda
CDN:
About 40 Muslim extremists with machetes and clubs tried to break into a Sunday worship service outside Uganda’s capital city of Kampala on Nov. 1, leaving a member of the congregation with several injuries and damaging the church building.
Eyewitnesses said the extremist mob tried to storm into World Possessor’s Church International in Namasuba at 11 a.m. as the church worshipped.
“The church members were taken by a big surprise, as this happened during worship time,” said Pastor Henry Zaake. “It began with an unusual noise coming from outside, and soon I saw the bricks falling away one by one. Immediately I knew that it was an attack from the Muslims who had earlier sent signals of an imminent attack.”
[...]
They ’snapped’ apparently…
Another Bogus ACORN Lawsuit
by Michelle Malkin, FrontPage:
ACORN is doing what it does best: playing the victim, blaming everyone else for its self-inflicted wounds, perpetuating false narratives and defending the entitlement industry to the death.
On Thursday, the disgraced welfare rights organization filed suit over a congressional funding ban passed in September after nationwide undercover sting videos exposed ACORN’s criminal element.
The group and its web of nonprofit, tax-exempt affiliates have collected an estimated $53 million in government funds since 1994. This pipeline is apparently a constitutionally protected right. According to ACORN’s lawyers at the far-left Center for Constitutional Rights, the congressional funding ban constitutes a “bill of attainder” — an act of the legislature declaring a person(s) guilty of a crime without trial.
Now cue the world’s smallest violin and pass the Kleenex: ACORN’s lawyers say the group has suffered cutbacks and layoffs as a result of the punitive funding ban. The congressional persecution means ACORN can no longer teach first-time-homebuyer indoctrination classes and — gasp — the loss of an $800,000 contract to conduct “outreach” on “asthma.”
Message: The demons in the House who defunded ACORN (345 of them, including 172 Democrats) are cutting off oxygen to poor people!
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CNN’s War on Lou Dobbs
By Allie Winegar Duzett, AIM:
Accuracy in Media’s blogs have already acknowledged Lou Dobbs’ resignation from CNN, but the story here requires a little more delving. Reading about the situation, I cannot help but remember someone else’s recent resignation-which turned out to have a lot more behind it.
As it turns out, leftist organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Media Matters have been working hard to get Dobbs off the air for months. On July 24, 2009, SPLC President Richard Cohen wrote to CNN President Jonathan Klein to complain that Dobbs was “questioning” the verity of President Obama’s birth certificate and “push[ing] racist conspiracy theories [and] defamatory falsehoods about immigrants.” On the other hand, Media Matters’ George Soros funded the Drop Dobbs website, which since September 2009 has been featuring charming pages on Dobb’s “History of Hate.” This Drop Dobbs campaign has been taken up by a number of radical organizations, including the National Council of La Raza, and the Center for New Community.
For those who don’t know, La Raza is a far left, racist radical group. As AIM’s Cliff Kincaid pointed out:
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God, Design, and Contingency in Nature
Posted by Michael Behe, ENV:
I recently received an email asking if the correspondent correctly understood my views about intelligent design and God. Since I sometimes get similar questions, I’m posting this correspondence for anyone who is interested.
Q: I understand your current position to be that design is detectable in nature, and that design detection is not merely a theological gloss upon the scientific facts, but is actually an activity appropriate for science. I further understand you to be saying that design detection in itself is neutral regarding the way that the design found its way into nature. Thus, if the bacterial flagellum is designed, it *could* be that God took a regular bacterium and miraculously “tweaked” it, or it *could* be that God “front-loaded” the evolutionary development of the bacterial flagellum, in a manner similar to that suggested by, say, Michael Denton. Design detection as a science cannot rule on these things; all that it can show is that Darwinian mechanisms, all by themselves, could not have produced integrated structures such as the flagellum. If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today. Have I got your current position correct?
Me: Yes, that’s exactly right.
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The real flu story
By TOM BRODBECK, SUN MEDIA:
Isn’t the real story about H1N1 — despite all the fears and panic over it — is it’s far less deadly than the normal seasonal flu?
I had that discussion with Manitoba’s chief public health officer Dr. Joel Kettner and some of his first-year medical students who were observing his work yesterday.
Kettner has always said Manitoba has about 100 confirmed deaths from seasonal flu every year. This year, the only strain of influenza public health officials are seeing in Manitoba is H1N1. And so far, we’ve only had eight deaths from this supposedly very deadly disease.
Shouldn’t the real story be, “flu deaths way down this year?”
Spared elderly people
The truth is, H1N1 has spared a whole generation of elderly people from serious illness and death, folks who are normally far more susceptible to the flu than the younger population.
H1N1, compared with other strains of seasonal flu, has been very good to them. It’s one of the main reasons overall flu deaths are way down.
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