Firstly, here is the video as well as the typical line thrown about on FaceBook: “Senator Chaffetz admitted we have to prioritize, and the Senate voted down funding for additional security in Benghazi. I really love it, especially coming from Chaffetz.”
Here is the rest of the story:
Robert Baldre, The State Department’s Chief Financial Officer For Diplomatic Security, Wrote That “I Do Not Feel That We Have Ever Been At A Point Where We Have Sacrificed Security Due To Lack Of Funding.” “Robert Baldre, your chief financial officer for diplomatic security, stated, and I quote, ‘I do not feel that we have ever been at a point where we have sacrificed security due to lack of funding,’ Rep. Steven Chabot, Ohio Republican, told Mrs. Clinton.” (Guy Taylor and Shaun Waterman, “Tears And Rage: Clinton Testily Defends Depiction Of Benghazi Events,” The Washington Times, 1/23/13)
Senate Homeland Security Report: Congress Has Been Responsive To Appropriating More Money To The State Department For Security-Driven Requests, But Neither The President Nor The State Department Requested Additional Funds For Libya. “At the same time, Congress has generally been responsive in providing supplemental and Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds to the Department of State – more than $1.7 billion since 2007 – in response to emergent, security-driven funding requests, although primarily for facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, there was no supplemental or OCO request made by the President for additional diplomatic security enhancements in FY2010 or FY2011. Neither the Department of State nor Congress made a point of providing additional funds in a supplemental request for Libya, or more specifically, Benghazi.” (“Flashing Red: A Special Report On The Terrorist Attack At Benghazi,” United States Senate Committee On Homeland Security And Government Affairs, 12/30/12, p. 17)
The Washington Post Fact Checker: “The Reality Is That Funding For Embassy Security Has Increased Significantly In Recent Years.” “Moreover, while Boxer claims that Republicans ‘cut’ the budget, she is only comparing it to what the Obama administration proposed. The reality is that funding for embassy security has increased significantly in recent years. The Department of State’s base requests for security funding have increased by 38 percent since Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, and base budget appropriations have increased by 27 percent in the same time period,’ said the bipartisan Senate Homeland Security report on the Benghazi attack.” (Glenn Kessler, “Barbara Boxer’s Claim That GOP Budgets Hampered Benghazi Security,” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, 5/16/13)
I am posting about this because there seems to be a misunderstanding of budgets and who is at fault and how much is given to the parties requesting it.
For instance, a charge always heard during Bush’s presidency was that he cut veterans benefits during his presidency. This was not the case, the Republicans passed continual increases while trimming the growth. In fact, benefits grew quicker under Bush than Clinton!
Similar, but not identically, as the U.S. was withdrawing from Iraq, the budget for the State Dept was trimmed. But before getting to the charts, let’s see what Hillary Clinton said in regards to the spending on Security:
During Previous Congressional Testimony, Clinton Stated That She Would “Be The First To Say” That The State Department’s Prioritization Of Funds Was “Imperfect.”SECRETARY CLINTON: “And I – I would go back to something the chairman said, because this was a point made in the ARB: Consistent shortfalls have required the department to prioritize available funding out of security accounts. And I will be the first to say that the prioritization process was at times imperfect, but as the ARB said, the funds provided were inadequate. So we need to work together to overcome that.” (Secretary Hillary Clinton, Committee On Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Testimony, 1/23/13)
Clinton Indicated That The State Department’s Designation Of The Benghazi Facility As Temporary Contributed To The State Department Not Allocating Additional Resources To Benghazi. SECRETARY CLINTON: “That’s why we have a huge workforce of people who are given responsibility and expected to carry forward that responsibility and I think designating it as ‘temporary’ in the ARB’s findings did cause an extra level of uncertainty to some extent. You know, as the chairman said at the very beginning quoting from the ARB, the has been an enculturation in the State Department, the husband (ph) resources to, you know, try to be as — as careful in spending money as possible and then I think adding to that the fact that it was quote, ‘temporary’ you know, probably did lead to some of the confusion that we later saw played out in the cables, but not the — the status of it for the Libyan government.” (Secretary Hillary Clinton, Committee On Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Testimony, 1/23/13)
The State Department Was “Hesitant To Allocate Money” On Security Upgrades On The Benghazi Facility, “A Post That May Be Closing In A Few Months.” “The RSO should be aware that the requests for expensive security upgrades may be difficult to obtain as headquarters is hesitant to allocate money to a post that may be closing in a few months.” (“Review Of The Terrorist Attacks On U.S. Facilities In Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012 Together With Additional Views,” Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, 1/15/14, p. 17)
Four Months Before The Benghazi Attack, The State Department Spent $108,000 For An Electric Vehicle Charging Station At The Vienna Embassy. “In May 7, the State Department authorized the U.S. embassy in Vienna to purchase a $108,000 electric vehicle charging station for the embassy motor pool’s new Chevrolet Volts. The purchase was a part of the State Department’s ‘Energy Efficiency Sweep of Europe’ initiative, which included hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on green program expenditures at various U.S. Embassies.” (Representative Mike Kelly, “Libya Security Cut While Vienna Embassy Gained Chevy Volts,” The Washington Times, 10/10/12)
In 2009, The State Department Spent Nearly $300,000 On Alcohol. “Last year alone, the State Department sent taxpayers tabs totaling nearly $300,000 for alcoholic beverages — about twice as much compared to the previous year, according to an analysis of spending records by The Washington Times.” (Jim McElhatton, “Taxpayers Foot State Department’s Stiff Liquor Bill,” The Washington Times, 4/15/10)
Here are the raw numbers, and keep in mind that the draw down if funding was because of the draw down in Iraq:
Take note as well the information gleaned from the following graph:
There has been some back and forth between Republicans and Democrats over funding for security in Libya in the wake of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death. Republicans have questioned whether the State Department had adequate security to protect the ambassador, and Democrats have countered that Republicans tried to cut funding for embassy security. What does the budget record show?
According to the fiscal year (FY) 2013 Congressional Budget Justification Department of State Operations (p. 11), overall funding for those programs has increased sharply over the past decade. Indeed, Worldwide Security Protection is more than double what it was a decade ago. Despite reductions from budget peaks in FY 2009 and FY 2010, both budget lines are higher than in FY 2008. (continues below chart)
Comparing FY 2011 actual funding versus the FY 2012 estimate, there appears to be a reduction in Worldwide Security Protection and Embassy Security, Construction and Maintenance. But that reduction does not account for additional funding in FY 2012 from Overseas Contingency Operations funds amounting to $236 million for Worldwide Security Protection (p. 63) and $33 million for Embassy Security, Construction and Maintenance (p. 467). As a result, total funds for Worldwide Security Protection for FY 2012 are estimated to be $94 million higher than in FY 2011, while Embassy Security, Construction and Maintenance is estimated to be $61 million less than FY 2011. Together, there is a net increase.
[….]
It is tempting to look for a scapegoat for the tragic events in Libya. However, if one exists, the overall budget for embassy security is not it.
…State Department officials, meanwhile have said publicly that budgets were not a factor.
During a House hearing into the attack on Oct. 10, 2012, Rep. Dana Rohrabacherasked deputy assistant secretary of state Charlene Lamb: “Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”
“No, sir,” Lamb said.
Later, Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, asked, “So there’s not a budget problem. It’s not you all don’t have the money to do this?”
“Sir, it’s a volatile situation. We will move assets to cover that,” Lamb said.
More of the same on May 8, 2013. Responding to a Democratic member who pointed to embassy security spending in recent GOP House budgets, committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., prodded Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya, about Lamb’s previous testimony.
Issa said, “Mr. Nordstrom, you were on that panel. Do you remember what she (Lamb) said?”
“Yes, she said that resources was not an issue,” Nordstrom said. “And I think I would also point to the (Accountability Review Board) report, if I’m not mistaken, that they talked to our chief financial officer with (Diplomatic Security), who also said that resources were not an issue.”
[….]
It’s true that Congress did not fully fund embassy security requests from the Obama administration in recent years, which is what Farrow argues amounts to a “cut.” But funding for embassy security is up from 2008, and up dramatically since before 9/11.
How does this tie into the Benghazi attack? State Department officials and government experts lay more blame on decisions by upper management not to provide the temporary Benghazi facility with more officers and better protections than the availability of money.
Farrow made that very point in his segment, which makes it odd that he led his segment by tying the attack with insufficient congressional funding.
The NYT’s was against paying taxes before they were for it. This isn’t an argument against Trump (or the New York Times) as much as is is against the progressive tax code.
To set this story up, we will travel to THE YOUNG CONSERVATIVES regarding the New York Times and Trump’s taxes:
The New York Times ‘illegally obtained’ a copy of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns the other day.
The billionaire businessman has said he’d release everything once a routine audit was complete, or he’d do so during the audit against his lawyers wishes if Hillary Clinton released her 30,000 deleted emails.
The ’95 returns show Trump took a $916 million hit that year. Meaning, that loss alone could be why Trump didn’t pay federal income taxes for a number of years.
Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.
The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period….
The only problem is, that, the New York Times didn’t pay any taxes as well. Why? Becuase when you are a business/business owner and you have loses… then you can claim those loses. L-E-G-A-L-L-Y! Here is the story from BREITBART:
The New York Times has excited the Clinton campaign and the rest of the media with a revelation that Republican nominee Donald Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 that might have resulted in him not paying taxes in some subsequent years.
The implication, reinforced by CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union on Sunday morning, is that Trump “avoided” paying taxes, when in fact his tax liability was zero.
But the Times itself has “avoided” paying taxes — in 2014, for example.
… for tax year 2014, The New York Times paid no taxes and got an income tax refund of $3.5 million even though they had a pre-tax profit of $29.9 million in 2014. In other words, their post-tax profit was higher than their pre-tax profit. The explanation in their 2014 annual report is, “The effective tax rate for 2014 was favorably affected by approximately $21.1 million for the reversal of reserves for uncertain tax positions due to the lapse of applicable statutes of limitations.” If you don’t think it took fancy accountants and tax lawyers to make that happen, read the statement again.
Nature is more powerful than the computer models… “It’s only got to take one sizable volcano to erupt and all the models, everything else, is right off the board” (BREITBART)
“…we should give up on saving the planet” (video below)
James Lovelock’s parting words last time we met were: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky, it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world’s population would be wiped out.
His predictions were not easy to forget or dismiss. Sometimes described as a futurist, Lovelock has been Britain’s leading independent scientist for more than 50 years. His Gaia hypothesis, which contends that the earth is a single, self-regulating organism, is now accepted as the founding principle of most climate science, and his invention of a device to detect CFCs helped identify the hole in the ozone layer. A defiant generalist in an era of increasingly specialised study, and a mischievous provocateur, Lovelock is regarded by many as a scientific genius.
[….]
What has changed dramatically, however, is his position on climate change. He now says: “Anyone who tries to predict more than five to 10 years is a bit of an idiot, because so many things can change unexpectedly.” But isn’t that exactly what he did last time we met? “I know,” he grins teasingly. “But I’ve grown up a bit since then.”
Lovelock now believes that “CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would. The computer models just weren’t reliable. In fact,” he goes on breezily, “I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change. You’ve only got to look at Singapore. It’s two-and-a-half times higher than the worst-case scenario for climate change, and it’s one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in.”
There are various possible explanations for his change of heart. One is that Lovelock is right, and the models on which his former predictions were based were fatally flawed. Another is that his iconoclastic sensibility made revision irresistible. An incorrigible subversive, Lovelock was warning the world about climate change for decades before it began to pay attention, and just when the scientific consensus began to call for intervention to prevent it, he decided we were already too late. But there is a third explanation for why he has shifted his position again, and nowadays feels “laid back about climate change”. All things being equal – “and it’s only got to take one sizable volcano to erupt and all the models, everything else, is right off the board” – he expects that before the consequences of global warming can impact on us significantly, something else will have made our world unrecognisable, and threaten the human race.
Lovelock maintains that, unlike most environmentalists, he is a rigorous empiricist, but it is manifestly clear that he enjoys maddening the green movement. “Well, it’s a religion, really, you see. It’s totally unscientific.” He was once invited to Buckingham Palace, where he told Princess Anne: “Your brother nearly killed me.” Having read that Prince Charles had installed grass-burning boilers at Highgrove, Lovelock had tried one in his house. “It’s supposed to smoulder and keep the place warm; but it doesn’t, because it goes out, and clouds and clouds of smoke come out.” He giggles. “Princess Anne thought this was hilariously funny.”….
I have updated the “Triceratops Horn” section, as, the Los Angeles County Superior Court Ruled against California State University Northridge (CSUN) in favor of Dr. Mak Armitage.
This will be an update to previous posts on this .com and my previous blog (BlogSpot). It will serve as a part-two-of-a-two-part discussion to young earth views that deals with evidences of mankind throughout all geological ages. While this is far from an in-depth excoriation of the evidences, it is a good introduction to some of them. I do not start off or bring up young earth creationism typically. Typically I will lead off with talking about theistic evidences [MACRO evidences for God] that assume a mainstream assumption about the age of the cosmos/earth. But the below evidences can be incorporated into a response when challenged about the topic. (See also: “Two Ways to Look At Origins;” and, “Reason and Faith.”)
As usual, all graphics are linked for further resource hunting. One may wish to visit my post on Archaeology and the Bible, which includes some responses to skeptics from a decade[+] ago.
+900yr-old Carving In the Ta Prohm Temple of Angkor Wat
This was part of a larger post/blog I did entitled, “Dinosaurs, the Bible, and Creation Proofs.” After a discussion with a fellow believer I wanted to get this video isolated here and it is included in my “Must See Videos” section in the left-hand column. With that small intro, here it is:
The above videos are one OF MANY evidences that humankind at one point may have seen dinosaurs… more evidence exists that just what I am providing here, but the above is one of the clearest examples of not just ancients finding bones, but see skin, muscle, and eyes of a stegosaurus.
Tyrannosaurus (T-Rex) Blood Cells & Protein
By using immunological tests, Gerard Muyzer of Leiden University in the Netherlands, isolated samples from some fresh T-Rex bone that had a specific bone protein (osteocalcin) in them. These proteins, reported in Geology magazine (Oct. 1992), are very unstable, and cannot last for very many years once the creature who carries them dies [perm-a-freeze cannot account for the longevity evolution gives to these proteins]. The photo [right] is a newer find where malleable flesh and intact blood cells are throughout. H/t to The Pearcey Report for this story from WND that keeps evolving:
Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University first claimed to have isolated soft tissues and collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone several years ago.
But because the leg was broken during excavation, the evidence was damaged and could never be independently confirmed. (And evidence keeps amassing to support their claims as Nature discusses.)
Schweitzer then examined a more pristine leg of a plant-eating hadrosaur excavated from sandstone and found even better samples of soft tissue, according to the report.
“Our findings demonstrated that it did contain basement membrane matrix,” said Lewis Cantley, chief of the division of signal transduction at Beth Israel Deaconess, and a co-author on the Science study. Basement membranes, which degrade and regenerate during development and wound repair, comprise a continuous extracellular matrix that links endothelial, epithelial, muscle, or neuronal cells and their adjacent stroma.
In situ mass spectrometery independently verified amino acids in dinosaur tissues, including the collagen signature amino acid, hydroxylated proline.
While scientists previously questioned the possibility that soft tissue could survive tens of millions of years of fossilization, few seem to be questioning their assumptions that dinosaurs actually went extinct 65 million years ago.
Young earth proponents see something entirely different in the findings. As one creationist noted: “There’s no way this blood could be 80 million years old. The evolutionists are just saying so because they cannot bear the thought of recent dinosaurs causing their millions of years scenario to come crashing down. Without the millions of years, Darwinism is dead, dead, dead.”
The evidence that hemoglobin has indeed survived in this dinosaur bone (which casts immense doubt upon the ‘millions of years’ idea) is, to date, as follows:
The tissue was coloured reddish brown, the colour of hemoglobin, as was liquid extracted from the dinosaur tissue.
Hemoglobin contains heme units. Chemical signatures unique to heme were found in the specimens when certain wavelengths of laser light were applied.
Because it contains iron, heme reacts to magnetic fields differently from other proteins—extracts from this specimen reacted in the same way as modem heme compounds.
To ensure that the samples had not been contaminated with certain bacteria which have heme (but never the protein hemoglobin), extracts of the dinosaur fossil were injected over several weeks into rats. If there was even a minute amount of hemoglobin present in the T. Rex sample, the rats’ immune system should build up detectable antibodies against this compound. This is exactly what happened in carefully controlled experiments.
(Above graphic) The numbers in the “( )” represent millions of years, so “(10)” would mean 10-million years old. And again, the labs that do this for the dinosaur bones cannot re-calibrate their machines off of a slug because all similar non-mineralized bones have C14 in them (take note I included the non-creationist reference at the bottom of the small quote to point out that the scientific community is finding this troubling):
The consistent failure of carbon dating facilities to find carbon-dead samples to serve as baselines highlights the regularity with which they have detected measurable amounts of radiocarbon in samples from Phanerozoic settings (Nadeau et al., 2001[1]). Simply put, carbonaceous materials from any portion of the geologic column deposited millions of years ago should, with the exception of rare instances of contami¬nation, contain zero “C atoms. This reasonable assumption follows from the half-life of “C, which places a time limit on its duration of about 100,000 years until the number of “C atoms become too few to detect with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) (Hebert, 2013[2]).
[1] Nadeau, M.-J., P.M. Grootes, A. Voelker, F. Bruhn, A. Duhr, and A. Oriwall. 2001. Carbonate ‘4C background: does it have multiple personalities? Radiocarbon 43:2A, 169-176.
What happens when you publish a peer-reviewed paper that states inconvenient facts against Darwinism? Better yet, photos (see near bottom, click to enlarge) that cast doubt on prevailing paradigms.
Answer:
You get fired.
…UPDATE (Oct 1st, 2016)
Just to recap this case before the good news:
…In February 2013, he published his findings in Acta Histochemica, a journal of cell and tissue research (M. H. Armitage and K. L. Anderson Acta Histochem. 115, 603–608; 2013). Two weeks later, he was fired from his job at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he managed the biology department’s electron and confocal microscopy suite.
Now he is embroiled in a long-shot legal fight to get his job back. In July, his lawyers filed a wrongful-termination suit claiming that religious intolerance motivated the dismissal: as a young-Earth creationist, Armitage says that finding soft tissue in the fossil supports his belief that such specimens date to the time of the biblical flood, which he puts at about 4,000 years ago.
The suit alleges that faculty members hostile to Armitage had him fired because they could not stand working with a creationist who had been published in a legitimate scientific journal. He and his attorneys at the Pacific Justice Institute, a conservative legal organization based in Sacramento, California, that focuses on religious and family issues, have repeatedly made that claim in the press. But specialists in US labour law suggest that his claim of religious intolerance might have difficulty standing up if the case goes to trial.
In recent years, a schoolteacher, academic and NASA employee who were creationists have claimed that they were fired unjustly for their religious beliefs. (None were reinstated.) But what makes this case different is that Armitage managed to survive for years in a mainstream academic institution and to publish research in a respected peer-reviewed journal….
Well, the court ruled in Dr. Armitage’s favor (Dr. Armitage posted this video Oct 1st, 2016):
The Los Angeles County Superior Court Ruled against California State University for wrongfully terminating microscopy laboratory director Mark Armitage in Spring of 2013. The judge found that they discriminated against Armitage’s religion after he published his findings of soft tissues he found in a Triceratops horn from Montana. The university chose to settle out of court rather than to appear in court for a jury trial.
BACK TO ORIGINAL POST…
Mark Hollis Armitage Kevin Lee Anderson
Department of Biology, California State University, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8303, USA
Abstract
Soft fibrillar bone tissues were obtained from a supraorbital horn of Triceratops horridus collected at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, USA. Soft material was present in pre and post-decalcified bone. Horn material yielded numerous small sheets of lamellar bone matrix. This matrix possessed visible microstructures consistent with lamellar bone osteocytes. Some sheets of soft tissue had multiple layers of intact tissues with osteocyte-like structures featuring filipodial-like interconnections and secondary branching. Both oblate and stellate types of osteocyte-like cells were present in sheets of soft tissues and exhibited organelle-like microstructures. SEM analysis yielded osteocyte-like cells featuring filipodial extensions of 18–20 μm in length. Filipodial extensions were delicate and showed no evidence of any permineralization or crystallization artifact and therefore were interpreted to be soft. This is the first report of sheets of soft tissues from Triceratops horn bearing layers of osteocytes, and extends the range and type of dinosaur specimens known to contain non-fossilized material in bone matrix.
….In 2005, Dr. Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University published a ground breaking discovery (see article 1). She and her team of researchers dissected a fossilized Tyrannosaurusrex femur to find inexplicably preserved bone marrow. Two things made this unearthing astounding. First, if the fossils are really millions of years old, they should be completely fossilized by now. Fossilization is the process in which original boney material is replaced by hard minerals. However, in this case, the soft inner parts of the bone were found unfossilized with intact bone marrow. The marrow consisted of soft tissues and intact blood vessels that maintained their elasticity. This is incredible! How could soft, stretchy tissues be preserved in dinosaur remains that evolutionists claim are no younger than 65 million years old? Even in the best state of bone preservation, the soft inner parts should have completely rotted away long ago.
Dr. Schweitzer’s breakthrough publication almost a decade ago has set the stage for additional investigations by many other scientists (see article 2, 3, 4). Since then, the discovery of soft tissues in dinosaur bones has become fairly common (even among different dinosaur species) demonstrating these are not just rare exceptions or anomalies. The latest dinosaur soft tissue finding was a Triceratops specimen found at the Hell Creek formation of Montana by well-published microscopist and former instructor at California State University, Mark Armitage and his colleague Dr. Kevin Anderson of Arkansas State University (see article 5). Their analysis of a Triceratops’ horn showed that it contained original bone, soft tissue, and even complete and exquisitely preserved “bone-building” cells called osteocytes.
As in the case of Schweitzer’s T. rex fossil (see article 1) and other dinosaur soft tissue discoveries like it (see article 2, 3, 4), all the original tissue, both hard and soft, should have wholly disappeared, due either to decay, or to mineral replacement if these bones were millions of years old. The original bone has, however, been preserved down to the most minute detail, as has the soft tissue running through it, including intact blood vessels. As with Dr. Schweitzer’s findings, these tissues were elastic and flexible. Armitage’s research produced breath-taking high resolution micrographs of osteocytes—the tiny cells which, when living, repair and maintain the bone. These detailed micrographs are comparable to those taken of modern bones. (Permission to display published photographs is pending).
Regrettably, those whose worldview requires that dinosaurs lived millions of years are very eager to dismiss the evidence of soft dinosaur tissue (see article 6), but the evidence is now coming from many different scientists (see above links), who are studying a diversity of dinosaurs bones, and publishing in numerous, prestigious scientific journals. Even more disturbing than the attempts to dismiss or discredit the work of these researchers, some of these people are lashing out at the scientists who are making these discoveries. We are very saddened and disturbed to report that Mark Armitage was fired from his position at California State University just days after his paper was published on line. Please pray for Mr. Armitage….
Most complete new giant dinosaur found in Patagonia
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Brazilian and Argentine paleontologists have discovered the largely complete fossil of a new species of giant dinosaur that roamed what is now northern Patagonia about 80 million years ago.
The herbivorous Futalognkosaurus dukei measured an estimated 105 feet to 112 feet from head to tail and was as high as a four-storey building. It is one of the three biggest dinosaurs yet found in the world.
[….]
The find pointed to a new lineage of titanosaurs, with particularly bulky necks, he said.
“Its neck was very big in diameter, strong and huge.”
Fossilized remains of an ecosystem from the same Late Cretaceous age, including well-preserved leaves and fish, were also found. The description was published in the latest issue of the annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
[….]
“The accumulation of fish and leaf fossils, as well as other dinosaurs around the find, is just something fantastic. Leaves and dinosaurs together is a great rarity,” he told Reuters. “It’s like a whole lost world for us.”
He was referring to “The Lost World” by Arthur Conan Doyle, a classic tale set in a remote part of South America where a scientific expedition finds dinosaurs still roaming an isolated plateau.
Some of the leaves made part of the diet of the titanosaur and other specimens found there. The researchers said the fossilized ecosystem pointed to a warm and humid climate in Patagonia, which had forests during the Late Cretaceous period. The area is steppe-like now and almost bare of vegetation.
Researchers believe the carcass of the giant dinosaur, which died of unknown causes, its flesh devoured by predators, was washed into a nearby slow-flowing river, where it created a barrier, accumulating bones and leaves in its structure for many years until all became fossilized.
A fossil of a carnivorous theropod Megaraptor found at the site contained a complete and articulated arm with very large sickle-shaped claws. Previously, similar fragmented bones were interpreted as a foot, researchers said.
The joint Argentine-Brazilian project also works in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, where Kellner said an important find has been made but would be revealed at a later date.
Desert-like areas in Argentina are good for preserving fossils, while they are more difficult to find in the wetter soil in Brazil.
There are a few things I take issue with here, but they are minor. Every fossil find involves a river or a local FLOOD. I just love it as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) to hear this because it confirms in a major way historical and Biblical accounts of a FLOOD. Again, ALL the fossils found are in flood deposits. Okay, let play a game. The game is “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”
Except we don’t have a donkey, but I’m sure you can figure it out. We have three creatures needing a tail:
Of course, you are probably wondering why I am displaying these comical pictures, and what — if anything — these pictures have to do with dinosaurs and the Bible! Let me explain. The ancient record of a man named Job is found in the Bible. It goes back to a time over 2,000 years before Christ. The fascinating story of Job is one of the oldest pieces of literature on earth. It was written down just a few hundred years after the flood of Noah’s time. In the 40th chapter of Job’s account, we see the record of the Creator Himself speaking to job. He is drawing Job’s attention to one of the wonders of the creation. Let’s read it.
“Look now at the behemoth, which I made along with you…” (verse 15)
Behemoth in the Hebrew simply means large beast. Most bibles have a marginal note by this verse explaining that this creature was most likely an elephant or hippopotamus (half of the above drawings explained!). God is saying to Job, “take a good look at this creature. I am going to demonstrate something to you.”
“He eats Grass like an ox.” (Verse 15) The animal must be a vegetarian, but it’s likely larger than an ox.
“See now, the strength is in his hips [or loins].” (Verse 16) This critter must have powerful legs. So it could be an elephant.
“His power is in his stomach muscles.” (Verse 16) He apparently has a massive mid-section. If that was all we had to go on we could rightly assume Job may very well be looking at a hippo. But let’s read on.
“He moves his tail like a cedar.” (Verse 17) ……
Now we have a problem (and the answer to the drawings above). Have you noticed something distinctive about cedar trees?
They are big aren’t they? Now have you seen a tail of an elephant or a hippo? It doesn’t seem that a cedar tree is a very appropriate analogy does it. Let’s re-read – and finish – the verses of study.
Now, I know you are thinking to yourself, “Flood!? Noah!? Bible!? Dinosaurs and man co-existing is outrages by evolutionary terms, I mean, dinosaurs died out at least 64 million years ago! And man didn’t show up on the evolutionary scene till about 1 to 4 million years ago (depending on what evolutionary tree you accept).” Yes, I know this sounds incredible, but some amazing items from history and archaeology are mounting the evidence against this belief that man and dino are separated by massive amounts of time and geological layers. [As hinted at above and below.]
Job 40: 15-24 (KJV)
Genus Name: Seismosaurus (“earth shaker lizard”) Type Species: * S. hallorum (Gillette, 1991) Length: about 120 feet (37 meters) Weight: 30-70 tons Time: 155-145 million years ago (Late Jurassic) [Debatable] Place: New Mexico Diet: plant-eater (herbivore)
15 Behold now behemoth [large beast], which I made with thee [all animals and Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day]; he eateth grass as an ox [vegetarian]. 16 Lo now, his strength [is] in his loins [large, powerful legs], and his force [is] in the navel of his belly [large mid-section.]
17 He moveth his tail like a cedar [huge tail]: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. 18 His bones [are as] strong pieces of brass [big bones]; his bones [are] like bars of iron [again, big bones]. 19 He [is] the chief of the ways of God [largest or mightiest creation]: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him [only God can kill him]. 20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. 21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens [we have all seen drawings of these beasts halfway in the water with their head up eating the vegetation on the sides of the banks]. 22 The shady trees cover him [with] their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about [again, in a swamp, or the like]. 23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, [and] hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth [the NASB says in v. 23: “if a river rages, he is not alarmed. He is confidant, though the Jordan rushes to his mouth”]. 24 He taketh it with his eyes: [his] nose pierceth through snares [you cannot catch him].
Here is a paraphrase/adaptation of the above verse:
Although the monstrous creature was obviously a vegetarian, its size was overwhelming. Its hips were built to withstand the enormous force of each pounding step and its midsection was a mass of muscle. Its gigantic tail extended far behind, not unlike a giant cedar tree swaying behind his body. Its bones were built like steel girders with ribs like iron bars to support his enormous weight. Surely this was the greatest among the creatures ever to roam the swamps and rivers of the earth. (Creation.com)
Fresh Duckbill Dinosaur Bones
Newest Discover of soft-dinosaur bones found (click to enlarge):
Actually, soft bones coming from these areas in Alaska are nothing new… but since the famous T-Rex find, it has become kosher to admit them.
Most people think that all known dinosaur bones are fossils, and that this proves dinosaurs died out millions of years ago. Yet “fresh”, unfossilized, dinosaur bones have been found, suggesting that dinosaurs might have lived recently.
In northwestern Alaska in 1961 a geologist found a bed of dinosaur bones in unpermineralized (“unfossilized”) condition. In another case, a young Inuit (Canadian Eskimo) who was working with scientists from Newfoundland’s Memorial University in 1987 on Bylot Island found part of a lower jaw of a duckbill dinosaur. It too was in fresh condition. Here is a portion of an article on this:
The lady was highly skeptical. This guide, who moments before had been discussing animal ecology and evolution, found when confronted with news of the new discovery—that she simply could not believe it. She could not accept that fresh (not permineralized, meaning unfossilized) dinosaur bones had been found in Alaska. Such bones could never have lasted 70 million years, she said.
Unlikely or not, it is a fact that such bones have been found. However, whether they could have lasted in that condition more than a few thousand years is a matter which demands attention.
In 1987, while working with scientists from Memorial University (Newfoundland, Canada) on Bylot Island, just east of the northern tip of Baffin Island, a young Inuit (Canadian Eskimo) picked up a bone fragment. It was identified within days as part of the lower jaw of a duckbill dinosaur and proclaimed to the world as such.1
The story was different however in north-western Alaska. In 1961 a petroleum geologist discovered a large, half-metre-thick bone bed. As the bones were fresh, not permineralized, he assumed that these were recent bison bones. It took 20 years for scientists to recognize duckbill dinosaur bones in this deposit as well as the bones of horned dinosaurs, and large and small carnivorous dinosaurs. Presently William A. Clemens and other scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Alaska are quarrying the bone bed.2….
1.Accounts of this appeared in the popular press, such as in the Edmonton Journal, October 26, 1987, a few months after the event, and in Saturday Night (a monthly magazine of analysis of current events) in August 1989, Vol.104 No.8, pp.16-19.
2.An initial announcement was printed in l985 in Geological Society of America abstract programs Vol.17, p.548. Already in press at that time was an article describing the site and the condition of the bones (Kyle L. Davies, ‘Duck-bill Dinosaurs (Hadrosauridae, Ornithischia) from the North Slope of Alaska’, Journal of Paleontology, Vol.61 No.1, pp.198-200.
The journal Science on December 24, 1993 (pages 2020–2023) reported on the amazing preservation of the bones of a young duckbill dinosaur found in Montana. Under a microscope, the fine structure of the bones was seen to have been preserved to such an extent that cell characteristics could be compared with cells of chicken bone. Claudia Barreto and others said, “In the dinosaur specimens, the same high degree of structural resolution can be seen as in modern specimens.” Even the calcium and phosphorus ratios were comparable. In other words, these appeared to be fresh bones, not fossilized — even though they are claimed to be more than 70 million years old.
Such findings cast serious doubt on the millions of years claimed for the dinosaurs.
Michael Cremo’s Take
A lot of UFO enthusiasts have latched onto Michael’s work. He is of Hindu influence and mentions that the Vedas mention that civilization has been on earth for millions of years. So, a young-earth creationists will look at the same evidence as Dr. Cremo and use IT to bolster the idea that all the animals of the earth were created by the sixth-day of Creation. Here is a short interview of Dr. Cremo on the matter. One should know he is the author of “Forbidden Archaeology“
So, we know — essentially — that Michael Cremo is a new ager… but, we can use the same evidence to show that: “yes, the young earth creationist viewpoint is concurrent with archaeological finds showing that the Hebrew Scripture is correct — man and dinosaur co-existed.” I combined two parts into one video showing an example of one of the oldest evidences of man living in the Cambrian age. As mentioned before, some take the same evidence as examples of the earth being visited by aliens. A great clip either way to show that current theories are off by millions of years:
The Bell Tomb
One of the best sites to follow up on the below are here. So what is the Bell Tomb? Apologetic Press explains a bit:
Yet, consider, for example, the evidence provided by the Bell tomb engravings. In far northern England, near the Scottish border, lies the village of Carlisle. A city with a turbulent history, the Romans built a wall through it, the Vikings invaded it, and the Scots and English fought over it for many years. Located in this English village is the medieval-period Carlisle Cathedral which was founded in A.D. 1122 by King Henry I (“Visit Cumbria…,” n.d.).
On February 11, 1478, Richard Bell was elected Bishop of the Carlisle Cathedral, and served some 17 years before resigning on September 4, 1495. He died in 1496 at the age of 86 and,in keeping with British custom, was buried beneath the floor in the cathedral’s choir (Priory and Raines, p. xxviii). The tomb is now covered by a carpet, to prevent any further effacing of the engravings caused by the human foot traffic of many centuries.
The monumental slab is beautifully inlaid with brass, including the facade of the cathedral in outline relief above and to each side of a solid image of the bishop himself, coupled with a solid strip of brass beneath the bishop. The following image is taken from Hutchinson’s 1794 volume The History of the County of Cumberland (p. 602b)…
[….]
A narrow strip of brass (9½ feet long) that runs around the outer edge of the tomb cover slab bears Latin words translated:
Here lies the Reverend Father Richard Bell sometime Bishop of Carlisle who departed from this life the twenty-forth [sic] day, in the year of the Lord. Among all the faithful departed through the mercy of God may he rest in perpetual peace. Amen (Weston, p. 62).
Interspersed among these Latin words are engravings of a human face, the trinity, and some 18 animals—a veritable “zoo.” Look carefully at these most intriguing engravings…
Here is the portion of interest to a-holes like myself:
Here is a digitizing of the lines to show them as they originally appeared, from Vance Nelson, Untold Secrets of Planet Earth: Dire Dragons (Red Deer, Alberta Canada: Untold Secrets Publisher, 2013), 62:
The Delk [& Other] Track
At a site that responds to critics about the Delk Track, we get a bit of a background of the print:
In July of 2000, Alvis Delk was wandering through the Paluxy river, in Glen Rose, Texas, when he flipped over a slab of rock which contained a pristine fossil dinosaur track. These tracks are common in the area, and he took it home for a keepsake.
It sat in his living room for eight years.
Sadly, in 2007, he had a bad accident which left him hospitalized for quite some time. When he got home, he needed money to pay off his medical bills, and began to clean off the dinosaur track in hopes that he could perhaps fetch a few hundred dollars for it.
This is when he discovered that was also a fossil human footprint in the rock, still covered under dried clay.
This find has profound ramifications for the Creation/Evolution debate. Evolutionary scholars have admitted that if dinosaurs and humans lived together in the past, then this completely destroys the theory of evolution.
The slab was purchased by the Creation Evidence Museum of Glen Rose, Texas. It was photographed and documented by David Lines, and molded by Dough Harris, Daniel Elif, and myself.
There has been fraud to come out of this area, but the track in question has been Cat-Scanned, unlike the other instances of fraud:
…In August 2008 the granddaughter of one of the townsfolk who first sold the footprints admitted that her grandfather had carved the human footprints as a means of making money during the depression. No one was surprised. (Update: to be fair, Morris was aware in the 1970s that forgeries had been made by a local trickster. Surprisingly, that did not cause him to question the entire enterprise, or the veracity of eyewitness testimony.)
What is fascinating about this story is that he did not carve the tracks, only the prints that were sold. Creationists were so biased by their perspective that the carved prints tricked them into believing that what they were seeing in the river bed, even though some of the prints were outlandishly large, had to be human….
So this is why the Delk Track stands out. Here is a short video explaining the track:
And the bias of these kind of prints is shown in the assumptions made by evolutionists themselves. One main one being with the Laetoli Footprints… which is: if you remove the evolutionary assumptions, there is very little reason to think that the footprints were made by any creature other than man. And this is the whole idea of this post. One site makes these points:
Even Mary Leakey and her team were amazed “at how very human they were” (Ancestral Passions, p. 486).
Tim White, who was involved in excavating the prints, said:
“They are like modern human footprints. If one were left in the sand of a California beach today, and a four-year-old were asked what it was, he would instantly say that someone had walked there. He wouldn’t be able to tell it from a hundred other prints on the beach, nor would you. The external morphology is the same. There is a well-shaped modern heel with a strong arch and a good ball of the foot in front of it. The big toe is straight in line. It doesn’t stick out to the side like an ape toe, or like the big toe in so many drawings you see of Australopithecines in books” (Johanson and Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, p. 250).
Melvin Lubenow says:
“Interpreting the Laetoli footprints is not a question of scholarship; it is a question of logic and the basic rules of evidence. We know what the human foot looks like. There is no evidence that any other creature, past or present, had a foot exactly like the human foot. We also know what human footprints look like. But we will never know for sure what australopithecine footprints look like, because there is no way of associating ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ those extinct creatures with any fossil we might discover” (Bones of Contention, p. 331).
Russell Tuttle of the University of Chicago did an extensive study of habitually unshod people in the mountains of Peru to use in comparison with the Laetoli footprints. He argued that they “resemble those of habitually unshod modern humans” (“The Pitted Pattern of Laetoli Feet,” Natural History, March 1990).
Dr. Duane Gish observes that since footprints of antelopes, pigs, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, hares, ostriches, and other non-extinct animals were also found at Laetoli, that there is no reason to think that the prints were that of anything other than modern man. “In artists’ conceptions of the scene, we see pictures of giraffes for the giraffe footprints, elephants for the elephant footprints, ostriches for the ostrich footprints, etc. And–humans for the human footprints? Oh, no! Occupying the human footprints we see a sub-human creature, half-ape and half-man. While evolutionists concede that a giraffe must have made the giraffe prints, an elephant must have made the elephant prints, etc., their preconceived ideas about evolution and the age of these formations do not allow them to concede that a human made the human prints. Creationists, accepting the plain facts as revealed by the empirical scientific evidence, believe that the prints were made by modern man–Homo sapiens” (The Fossils Still Say No, p. 276).
Two VERY quick bios of the prints are as follows. Keep in mind the only proof that this was not man making the print is an artistic drawing:
Video description:
In 1978, a team led by Mary Leakey discovered a series of footprints in Tanzania. These are known as the Laetoli footprints. According to many researchers, these footprints are identical to those made by humans. Paleoanthropologist, Donald Johanson stated, ‘Make no mistake about it, they are like modern human footprints’.
Why is it, then, that most scientists reject the idea that humans made these footprints? To understand this odd situation, it’s important to realize that evolutionists think that the footprints were made in mud 3.6 million years ago. Therefore, according to such evolutionary ideas, humans weren’t around then, so the footprints can’t be human! But if a human didn’t make the footprints, who or what did? A Scientific American article acknowledges that this is still an ‘unsolved mystery’ . However, I can’t help but feel it’s a mystery of their own making, caused by their evolutionary thinking, instead of taking the Bible’s history seriously.
This second video is by Dr. Marc Surtees who has a degree in Applied Biology and a PhD in Zoology.
Radioactive Dating Introduction
And here are, for the curious, a great presentation (which I broke up into each assumption for ease of consumption) dealing with dating methods and there problems for dating the earth in long ages:
Intro: What Is Radioactive Dating & Its Assumptions?
Evidence 1: Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 2: Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 3: Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 4: Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 5: Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Just A Couple Documentaries
One of my favorite short documentaries about Geology (below). Guy Berthault discusses some evidences from deep sea drilling, deposits at the mouths of rivers, and work done in concert with hydrologists at the Colorado State University hydraulics laboratory at Fort Collins.
I highly recommend watching these two short videos:
“Guy Berthault uses laboratory and sediment flume experiments to test accepted principles for the formation of strata. He shows, using easy to follow computer animation, that in moving currents several of the basic principles of stratigraphy do not apply. These principles, including the principles of superposition and continuity, are applicable only in calm water. He applies flume experiments to the real world of strata, mainly the formation of the layers in the Grand Canyon. Long periods of time are not required to deposit a sequence of strata in a moving current, and multiple beds can be deposited simultaneously, especially as a result of changing current speeds. His results have profound implications for the geological column and the interpretation of fossil sequences.”
Take note over the years the stories of “mom-and-pop” doctors going out of business because they could not afford to stay in business. The small insurance companies warning they would go out of business, and why the LARGER insurance companies wanted this because they knew it would run their competition out of business. But even the larger companies got bit in the ass… super corporations cannot form to handle the burden. But we also know that a single-payer health care system ~ w-h-i-c-h h-a-s w-o-r-k-e-d NOWHERE.
Minnesota will let the health insurers in its Obamacare market raise rates by at least 50 percent next year, after the individual market there came to the brink of collapse, the state’s commerce commissioner said Friday.
The increases range from 50 percent to 67 percent, Commissioner Mike Rothman’s office said in a statement. Rothman, who regulates the state’s insurers, is an appointee under Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat. The rate hike follows increases for this year of 14 percent to 49 percent.
….So a loss of $70 million after less than a year in operation in just a few markets. Harken’s plan was to reduce costs for expensive treatments down the line by allowing all of its enrollees unlimited primary care visits with no co-pays and no deductibles. However those visits could only be with doctors at Harken’s own health clinics. One health broker told Modern Healthcare her clients didn’t like the idea of giving up their regular doctors:
Susan Morris, an independent broker in Atlanta, said Harken “did a poor job of marketing the plan to agents and brokers.” In addition, she said her individual customers didn’t like the idea of giving up their regular primary care doctors and instead using Harken’s staff providers. And Harken didn’t have enough clinic locations to serve the large Atlanta market….
Seems that Washington DC isn’t the only place that’s learned the art of the Friday afternoon news dump. Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman announced yesterday afternoon that the state had approved health insurance premium increases that will average 60% in MNsure, the state’s ObamaCare exchange. The statement blamed big losses by insurers in the state, and bad predictions about utilization rates, for the decision:
Rothman said that Minnesota’s rate increases are part of a national trend in the individual health insurance market, with nearly all states looking at double-digit rate increases as insurers seek to align premium revenues with expected claims costs. States’ rate increases are also exacerbated by cuts to critical federal programs that were intended to stabilize the market and rates for consumers.
However, Minnesota’s individual market also faces unique challenges because of a disproportionate concentration of individuals with serious medical conditions whose high claims costs must be absorbed by a relatively small risk pool, pushing up rates for everyone in the individual market.
Citing ongoing financial losses, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota announced in late June that it is leaving the individual market, except for its Blue Plus HMO affiliate. The company’s decision affects approximately 103,000 Minnesotans, or about 40 percent of the state’s total individual market…..
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee announced Monday it would no longer offer plans in three of the state’s most heavily populated regions. The insurer posted an explanation on its website (along with a map):
We’re trying hard to make the Affordable Care Act (ACA) work in Tennessee and are offering plans in most of the state for 2017.
Because of many challenges, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to end coverage in three regions for 2017 – the Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville regions (shaded in orange below)…..
Count Minnesotans among the consumers who will get a big rate shock in November when open enrollment begins for ObamaCare. Insurers have applied for massive increases in the state MNsure exchange, with premiums escalating between 36% to 67%, and possibly more. And they’ll get it, because the alternative for insurers is to pack up and leave:
Minnesota health insurers are seeking big premium increases next year for people who buy coverage on their own, with proposed jumps for thousands of people averaging anywhere from 36 percent to 67 percent.
About 270,000 people buy coverage through Minnesota’s individual market, where shoppers buy through insurers, brokers or the state’s MNsure health insurance exchange…..
Double-digit Obamacare premium hikes projected in 2017 may bode in Donald Trump’s favor, as several swing states are being impacted by double-digit increases under the law and consumers are expected to see the hikes around Nov. 1 — one week before heading to the polls.
Trump has promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, but Hillary Clinton has vowed to make the Obamacare exchanges work. Some say the way she would do that is through raising taxes.
“Any reports of premium increases will immediately become talking points on the campaign trail,” stated Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “We’re in an election where the very future of the law will be debated.”
The Heritage Foundation found dramatic increases on premiums in Wisconsin and Florida as well as Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina under the law in comparison to before Obamacare went into effect. Currently, insurers in the Obamacare marketplace in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are wanting double-digit hikes on premiums.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina is reportedly requesting to increase rates by more than 18 percent, while in Ohio, the average requested hike is around 10 percent. In Pennsylvania, companies want hikes averaging 23.6 percent, according to the Pennsylvania Insurance Department.
This shocking video shows Islamic scholars teaching young British children in a Muslim faith school in the UK.
The woman first illustrates what happens when a person decides to leave Islam.“What are we going to do?” asks the woman in broken English. “We kill him. Kill.”
“The ones who reject Islam?” a British student asks.
“Yeah,” the teacher says. “Kill him. You have to kill him. Do you understand? We’re talking about Islam.”
The video jumps to the woman outlining the punishment for adultery.
“The judgment for adultery,” she asks. “What is the law?” “Stone him,” a student replies.
“Until he dies,” the woman elaborates. “And the one who is not married?”
“Lash him, lash him,” says a chorus of students.
“Yes,” the woman says. “With 100 lashes.”
She then describes with disturbing coldness what the intended punishment is for gays.
“Throw them from the highest place,” she says. “We’re not going to live like animals.”
A student replies with a passage from her Islamic textbook. “’The punishment for homosexuals is throw them from the highest point and then stone them. Then you reduced him to the lowest of the low. So if you throw someone off a mountain you are reducing them to the lowest of the low because they are falling off the highest place’.”
The Islamic teacher further explains the nature of Allah to her students.
“It is not enough that you worship Allah,” she says. “We have to also in our heart hate what displeases Allah and love what Allah loves. You have to hate what displeases Allah, especially when living in this country, with that non-Muslim.”
Another British student reads a passage from her textbook:
“’Verily are free from you and whatever you worship beside Allah. We have rejected you and there has appeared between us and you hostility and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone.”
“Islam is keeping you away from disbelief and from the disbelievers,” says the teacher. “Any questions?”
A student then asks if being friends with non-believers is allowed.
“No. You understand?” says the teacher. “You don’t have to be friends with them. That is not allowed. Because loyalty is only to the Muslim, not to the kafir.”
The word ‘kafir’ is a derogatory term used in the Muslim world to describe unbelievers.
1. Biology: We are not all the same. 2.GMO foods: They are healthy, not toxic. 3.Fat positivity: Being overweight is not something to encourage. 4.Gender: It is not subjective; it is not a social construct. 5.Nuclear power: This safe source of energy would be moonbats’ first choice if they took their own carbon rhetoric seriously.
Lauren Southern of TheRebel says that while the Left makes fun of the Right for being “anti-science,” but she proves that “progressives” also cling to unscientific beliefs. MORE
I am posting this excerpt of Daniel Dennett’s response to William Lane Craig’s presentation (HERE). Dennett’s short follow up offers no defense of his atheism in light of Craig’s presentation. He basically mentions that his non-knowledge will some day be filled in (atheism-of-the-gaps). This will be followed up by a response in the comments section that made me think of this old upload on my Vimeo, and why I isolated it. The response is well thought out and will be an enjoyable read to those of us headed towards glory. I will also insert my response (mainly using Dr. Howe’s book, Vestigial Organs Are Fully Functional) to a Discover Magazine article when “Born Again 77” gets to the topic, as well as a couple other resources. Enjoy:
The original topic in which I pulled this response from can be found here at UNCOMMON DESCENT, Born Again 77 starts by quoting a previous statement by a skeptic, and then adding to his knowledge base:
Very Enjoyable Read
“Perhaps the gaps he is referring to are things like lightning (yep, gotta hand it to science; definitely not thrown by Zeus in piques of anger)”
Excerpt: In August 2009, Dwyer and colleagues were aboard a National Center for Atmospheric Research Gulfstream V when it inadvertently flew into the extremely violent thunderstorm—and, it turned out, through a large cloud of positrons, the antimatter opposite of electrons, that should not have been there.
To encounter a cloud of positrons without other associated physical phenomena such as energetic gamma-ray emissions was completely unexpected, thoroughly perplexing and contrary to currently understood physics.
“The fact that, apparently out of nowhere, the number of positrons around us suddenly increased by more than a factor of 10 and formed a cloud around the aircraft is very hard to understand. We really have no good explanation for it,” says Dwyer…
…“We really don’t understand how lightning gets started very well because we don’t understand the electrical environment of thunderstorms. This positron phenomenon could be telling us something new about how thunderstorms charge up and make lightning, but our finding definitely complicates things because it doesn’t fit into the picture that was developing.”
Verse: “Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?” (Job 38:35)
Moreover, the ‘gap’ problem is far worse for Atheists than just not being able to explain lightning. Atheistic materialism cannot even explain how a single photon gets from point a to point b, nor even how a photon is emitted or absorbed, much less how lightning occurs:
“The path taken by the photon is not an element of reality. We are not allowed to talk about the photon passing through this or this slit. Neither are we allowed to say the photon passes through both slits. All this kind of language is not applicable.” ~ Anton Zeilinger (Double Slit, Quantum-Electrodynamics, and Christian Theism – Video)
Excerpt: It is important not to over-interpret these diagrams. Nothing is implied about how a particle gets from one point to another. The diagrams do not imply that the particles are moving in straight or curved lines. They do not imply that the particles are moving with fixed speeds. The fact that the photon is often represented, by convention, by a wavy line and not a straight one does not imply that it is thought that it is more wavelike than is an electron. The images are just symbols to represent the actions above: photons and electrons do, somehow, move from point to point and electrons, somehow, emit and absorb photons. We do not know how these things happen, but the theory tells us about the probabilities of these things happening.
Verse: “For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28)
And although Theists are often accused of making ‘God of the Gaps’ style arguments by atheists, the fact of the matter is that, as science has progressed, it is the Atheist himself who has had to retreat further and further into ‘Materialism/Naturalism of Gaps’ style arguments. i.e. into “Science will figure a materialistic answer out to that mystery some day” style argument.
To clearly illustrate the ‘materialism of the gaps’ style argument that atheists are forced to make, the materialistic and Theistic philosophy make, and have made, several major contradictory predictions about what type of scientific evidence we will find.
These major contradictory predictions, and the evidence now revealed by advances in modern science, can be tested against one another to see if either materialism or Theism is true.
See: Theism compared to Materialism/Naturalism – a comparative overview of the major predictions of each philosophy (Video)
As you can see from the preceding video, when we remove the artificial imposition of the materialistic philosophy (methodological naturalism), from the scientific method, and look carefully at the predictions of both the materialistic philosophy and the Theistic philosophy, side by side, we find the scientific method is very good at pointing us in the direction of Theism as the true explanation. – In fact science is even very good at pointing us to Christianity as the solution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’
See: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from Death as the “Theory of Everything” (Video)
Moreover, let us be VERY clear to the fact that ALL of science, every discipline within science, is dependent on basic Theistic presuppositions about the rational intelligibility of the universe and the ability of our mind to comprehend that rational intelligibility….
Excerpt: When we go to look at the different world views that atheists and theists have, I suggest we can prove the existence of God from the impossibility of the contrary.
The transcendental proof for God’s existence is that without Him it is impossible to prove anything. The atheist worldview is irrational and cannot consistently provide the preconditions of intelligible experience, science, logic, or morality. The atheist worldview cannot allow for laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, the ability for the mind to understand the world, and moral absolutes. In that sense the atheist worldview cannot account for our debate tonight….
Moreover, if we cast aside those basic Theistic presuppositions about the rational intelligibility of the universe and the ability of our mind to comprehend that rational intelligibility, and try to use naturalism as our basis for understanding the universe, and for practicing science, then everything within that atheistic/naturalistic worldview, (i.e. sense of self. observation of reality, beliefs about reality, free will, even reality itself), collapses into self-refuting, unrestrained, flights of fantasy and imagination.
Darwinian evolution, and atheism/naturalism in general, are built entirely upon a framework of illusions and fantasy – Sept. 2016 (Google Doc)
As well, Darwinian evolution, the supposed pride and joy of Atheistic Materialism, is itself useless as a heuristic in science
“Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive – except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed – except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery. Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology.”
“In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, and physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.”
~ Marc Kirschner, Boston Globe, Oct. 23, 2005
“While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superflous one.”
~ A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, Introduction to “Evolutionary Processes” – (2000).
Excerpt: Coincidentally, a correspondent today sends across my desk this from biologist Jerry Coyne, of Why Evolution Is True fame. Writing in Nature (“Selling Darwin”), Coyne has conceded:
“[T]ruth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.”
In fact, to the extent that Darwinian evolution has influenced scientific research, it has sent science down blind alleys by making wrong predictions, such as the false predictions of vestigial organs and junk DNA. The following paper evaluates 23 fundamental false predictions of evolutionary theory from a wide range of different categories
Excerpt: The predictions examined in this paper were selected according to several criteria. They cover a wide spectrum of evolutionary theory and are fundamental to the theory, reflecting major tenets of evolutionary thought. They were widely held by the consensus rather than reflecting one viewpoint of several competing viewpoints. Each prediction was a natural and fundamental expectation of the theory of evolution, and constituted mainstream evolutionary science. Furthermore, the selected predictions are not vague but rather are specific and can be objectively evaluated. They have been tested and evaluated and the outcome is not controversial or in question. And finally the predictions have implications for evolution’s (in)capacity to explain phenomena, as discussed in the conclusions.
“The thyroid gland, pituitary gland, thymus, pineal gland, and coccyx, … once considered useless by evolutionists, are now known to have important functions. The list of 180 “vestigial” structures is practically down to zero. Unfortunately, earlier Darwinists assumed that if they were ignorant of an organ’s function, then it had no function.”
~ “Tornado in a Junkyard” – book – by former atheist James Perloff
Excerpt: A favorite criticisms of ID is that it is a science stopper. The opposite is true. The Live Science article shows that the “vestigial organs” argument has not changed for over a century, since Wiedersheim coined the term and listed over a hundred examples (in 1893). Evolutionary theory, in fact, has been worse than a science stopper: its predictions have been flat out wrong. Only a handful of alleged vestigial organs remains from Wiedersheim’s original list, and each of those is questionable.
In fact, the false prediction of vestigial organs by Darwinists led to much medical malpractice in the past:
Evolution’s “vestigial organ” argument debunked
Excerpt: “The appendix, like the once ‘vestigial’ tonsils and adenoids, is a lymphoid organ (part of the body’s immune system) which makes antibodies against infections in the digestive system. Believing it to be a useless evolutionary ‘left over,’ many surgeons once removed even the healthy appendix whenever they were in the abdominal cavity. Today, removal of a healthy appendix under most circumstances would be considered medical malpractice”
~ David Menton, Ph.D., “The Human Tail, and Other Tales of Evolution,” St. Louis MetroVoice , January 1994, Vol. 4, No. 1.
“Doctors once thought tonsils were simply useless evolutionary leftovers and took them out thinking that it could do no harm. Today there is considerable evidence that there are more troubles in the upper respiratory tract after tonsil removal than before, and doctors generally agree that simple enlargement of tonsils is hardly an indication for surgery”
~ J.D. Ratcliff, Your Body and How it Works, 1975, p. 137.
The tailbone, properly known as the coccyx, is another supposed example of a vestigial structure that has been found to have a valuable function—especially regarding the ability to sit comfortably. Many people who have had this bone removed have great difficulty sitting.
Moreover, in so far as science has been able to advance in spite of Atheistic materialism, it can be argued that Intelligent Design was and is central to the advancement of science itself since almost all, if not all, of science has advanced by technological advancement in the instruments of science. That is to say, almost all, if not all, of science has advanced by humans infusing new information into material substrates, in a ‘top down’ fashion, in better and better, i.e. more sophisticated, ways:
Excerpt: Mathematics underlies virtually all of our technology today. James Maxwell’s four equations summarizing electromagnetism led directly to radio and all other forms of telecommunication. E = mc2 led directly to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The equations of quantum mechanics made possible everything from transistors and semiconductors to electron microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging.
Indeed, many of the technologies you and I enjoy every day simply would not work without mathematics. When you do a Google search, you’re relying on 19th-century algebra, on which the search engine’s algorithms are based. When you watch a movie, you may well be seeing mountains and other natural features that, while appearing as real as rock, arise entirely from mathematical models. When you play your iPod, you’re hearing a mathematical recreation of music that is stored digitally; your cell phone does the same in real time.
“When you listen to a mobile phone, you’re not actually hearing the voice of the person speaking,” Devlin told me. “You’re hearing a mathematical recreation of that voice. That voice is reduced to mathematics.”
Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored.
The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts.
Excerpt page 7: The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics….
The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities.
In yet another attack on California businesses, yesterday Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill (SB 1383) that requires the state to cut methane emissions from dairy cows and other animals by 40% by 2030. The bill is yet another massive blow to the agricultural industry in the state of California that has already suffered from the Governor’s passage of a $15 minimum wage and a recent bill that makes California literally the only state in the entire country to provide overtime pay to seasonal agricultural workers after working 40 hours per week or 8 hours per day (see “California Just Passed A $1.7 Billion Tax On The Whole Country That No One Noticed“).
According to a statement from Western United Dairymen CEO, Anja Raudabaugh, California’s Air Resources Board wants to regulate animal methane emissions even though it admits there is no known method for achieving the the type of reduction sought by SB 1383.
“The California Air Resources Board wants to regulate cow emissions, even though its Short-Lived Climate Pollutant(SLCP) reduction strategy acknowledges that there’s no known way to achieve this reduction.”
Among other things, compliance with the bill will likely require California dairies to install “methane digesters” that convert the organic matter in manure into methane that can then be converted to energy for on-farm or off-farm consumption. The problem, of course, is that methane digesters are expensive and with California producing 20% of the country’s milk we suspect that means that California has just passed another massive “food tax” on the country…..
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