Author: Papa Giorgio

Cornell University Professor Talks Bias, Faith, and Science

Published by Papa Giorgio

WIKI Bio

Sanford graduated in 1976 from the University of Minnesota with a BSc in horticulture. He went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he received an MSc in 1978 and a PhD in 1980 in plant breeding/plant genetics. Between 1980 and 1986 Sanford was an assistant professor of Horticultural Sciences at Cornell University, and from 1986 to 1998 he was an associate professor of Horticultural Science. Although retiring in 1998, Sanford continues at Cornell as a courtesy associate professor. He held an honorary Adjunct Associate Professor of Botany at Duke University. Sanford has published over 70 scientific publications in peer reviewed journals.

Creation WIKI bio

Dr. John C. Sanford (1950-) is the Associate Professor of Horticultural Sciences (semi-retired) at Cornell University, New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. Dr. Sanford is a researcher in genetics and is currently presently looking at the theoretical limits of mutation andselection.

He graduated in 1976 with a BS in Horticulture from the University of Minnesota. Two years later Dr. Sanford graduated with a MS in Plant Breeding/Plant Genetics from the University of Wisconsin. He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in Plant Breeding/Plant Genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1980.

Dr. Sanford is a former atheist. Since the mid-1980s, Sanford has looked into theistic evolution (1985–late 1990s), Old Earth creationism (late 1990s), and Young Earth creationism (2000–present). According to him, he did not fully reject Darwinian evolution until the year 2000. Dr. Sanford and his wife Helen have three children.

On behalf of intelligent design, Dr. Sanford was involved in the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings. He denied the principle of common descent and testified …”that we were created by a special creation, by God.”

As an inventor, Dr. Sanford holds more than 25 patents including the biolistic process known as the “gene gun.” He started two biotech enterprises derived from his research, Biolistics, Inc., and Sanford Scientific, Inc. In addition to his genetic contributions, Dr. Sanford and his colleagues developed the quantitative forward genetic modeling program called Mendel’s Accountant. Sanford et al. published two peer reviewed papers dealing with genetic entropy in computing journals concerned with modeling methodology. Based on quantitative modeling evidence developed using Mendel’s Accountant and from his research into mutations, Sanford holds that the genome is deteriorating and therefore could not have evolved in the way specified by the modern evolutionary theory suggests.

His research into the genetic limit of the genome, and it’s devolution has lead to the publishing of “Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome”.

After mostly retiring from Cornell, Dr. Sanford has started a small nonprofit, the Feed My Sheep Foundation, which focuses on supporting science and technology research initiatives in the area of life sciences.

Islamic State Destroys Embarrassing Pagan Roots of Muhammad

Published by Papa Giorgio

A quick history of the Satanic Verses:

Dr. Thies has a great short article on the Islamic State destroying historical evidences of the Pagan roots of Muhammad’s faith:

…Sura 53:19-20 According to Islam, the Koran contains a revelation from Satan. An entreaty concerning three lesser deities, al-Lat, al-‘Uzza and Manat, worshipped by the people of Mecca. As a result of Muhammed invoking these gods, the people of Mecca no longer opposed him. Then, in a later revelation, Muhammed revoked this revelation, and recommenced prosecution of the people of Mecca.

The entire incident has been one of great controversy in Islam, although the logical implications of Satanic Verses being admitted to being included in the Koran has become taboo. Well, one of the remaining physical evidences of the gods of Mecca has been destroyed by ISIS: the statute of al-Lat, in the form of a lion, in the Syrian city of Palmyra, and dating back to the 1st Century AD. But, not to worry. ISIS isn’t destroying all the archeological treasures of this ancient city. Instead of destroying the 2,000 year old Roman theater, they are using it for public executions…

Jihad Watch notes that this incident led to the Islamic tradition of later verses in the Qur’an abrogating earlier ones, and why Islam practices “religious” violence.

…Incidentally, that passage in the Qur’an’s 53rd sura is the only trace left of the celebrated “Satanic Verses.” Long before the novel of the same name by Salman Rushdie, this term referred to an incident recorded in Islamic tradition, in which Muhammad tried to achieve reconciliation with the Quraysh by a “revelation” in which he declared, “So have you considered al-Lat and al-Uzza? And Manat, the third, the other one? They are the exalted cranes (gharaniq), worthy of veneration.” The Quraysh, hearing this, prostrated to Allah with the Muslims, who accepted the three goddesses as Allah’s daughters. But Muhammad soon realized that he had thus compromised the absolute monotheism that he had preached up to that point, and so he reneged, and claimed that Satan, not Allah, had inspired those verses, which were then duly replaced by the “revelation” recorded in Qur’an 53:19-22. The concept of abrogation, which ultimately led to the idea that the Qur’an’s violent passages take precedence over its peaceful ones, justified this change in still another “revelation”: “We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth  better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?” (Qur’an 2:106)…

Differences Are Important ~ Updated ~ Patriot Act

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Breitbart)

(This was new in 2013)

Quick update, as this story evolves into this project called PRISM, we are finding out that credit card purchases as well as even simple actions of typing were monitored. All this didn’t help to prevent the Boston Bomber, a useless tool apparently. We do not need more surveillance, but tener cojones (“have the balls to”) fight a war on ideas that is not politically correct, as E.T. Williams points out so well!

…“almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending” (Bloom, 1987, p. 25). The following story should elucidate:

The story is told of a man who stopped outside a clockmaker’s shop every morning on his way to work and synchronized his watch with a large clock standing in the shop window. One day, the owner of the shop got to talking to him and asked him what kind of work he did. Rather sheepishly, the man told him he was the timekeeper at a nearby factory, and that one of his responsibilities was to ring the closing bell at five o’clock every evening. As his watch kept very poor times, he synchronized it very morning with the clock in the shop window. The shop-owner, even more embarrassed, replied, “I hate to tell you this, but the clock doesn’t work very well either, and I adjust it every time I hear the factory’s closing bell!” ~ Ravi Zacharias, “Address to the United Nations’ Prayer Breakfast.” (from a paper on Multiculturalism for school)

Gay Patriot linked to a story by Michele Malkin which was a good read. First the Malkin excerpt, then some commentary by GP:

History lesson: The crucial differences between Bush and Obama’s NSA phone surveillance programs

…The differences between then and now are glaring.  

Fast & Furious Differences

Very similar to the massive differences between Bush and Holder’s versions of “Fast & Furious” (link in Batman)

The new Obama order covers not only phone calls overseas with the specific goal of counterterrorism surveillance, but all domestic calls by Verizon customers over at least a three-month period.

Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order “shockingly broad.”

“Not only are they intercepting call data into and out of the country, but they are intercepting all call data in the United States, which goes far beyond what the FISA Amendments Act allows,” Timm said.

“This is an abuse of the Patriot Act on a massive scale,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “Since the law requires that the telephone records sought be relevant to an investigation, it appears that the FBI and the NSA may have launched the broadest investigation in history because everyone’s telephone calls seem to be relevant to it.”

…The “top secret” order issued in April by a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the request of the FBI instructs the telecommunications giant Verizon to provide the NSA with daily reports of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

[….]

Is it crucially important to consider 1) the creeping, creepy surveillance-state context in which this current administration operates and 2) the naked contempt this current administration has shown for the privacy rights of its political enemies?

Hell yes, absolutely.

The Author of The Patriot Act Says NSA Has Violated It With Massive Phone and Internet Data Grabs

And now Gay Patriot’s quotes and commentary:

Obama’s NSA phone surveillance called “shockingly broad”

….She [Malkin] starts by reminding about the NSA phone surveillance of the Bush administration:

The Bush NSA’s special collections program grew in early 2002 after the CIA started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah. The CIA seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and personal phone directories. NSA surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible. As a result of Bush NSA work,the terrorist plot involving convicted al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris was uncovered — possibly saving untold lives…

Normally, the government obtains court orders to monitor such information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But the window of opportunity to exploit the names, numbers, and addresses of those associated with the top terrorist leaders was obviously small…

So the Bush administration had the NSA track Americans’ overseas phone calls, insofar as captured terrorist phone numbers might show up. But the Obama administration? Not so much…err, so little:

The new Obama order covers not only phone calls overseas with the specific goal of counterterrorism surveillance, but all domestic calls by Verizon customers over at least a three-month period.

[Malkin now links/quotes an article at Politico:] Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order “shockingly broad.” …The “top secret” order issued in April by a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the request of the FBI instructs the telecommunications giant Verizon to provide the NSA with daily reports of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

I’m willing to preserve our counter-terrorism efforts. And I don’t know much about the legal ins/outs of all this. But, all domestic calls by Verizon customers? Sheesh! This surely goes beyond the Bush NSA surveillance that the public debated in 2005.

So, it’s worth discussing the rightness (or wrongness) of the broadened surveillance. The more so if the War on Terror is over, as some international observers thought Obama to be implying in his speech last week.

…read more…

Climate Change Indoctrination Part of Common Core “Scientism”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager reads from the Wall Street Journals article entitled, “Schoolroom Climate Change Indoctrination“. In the article we see Federal authorities blatant power grab at indoctrinating our children.

More-and-more parents will opt to home school… or offer classroom style “counter-courses” to teach a better path at critical thinking. In The Animal Farm, Napoleon takes the puppies away from Jessie and Bluebell as soon as they are weaned to “educate” them. While this is a picture of the KGB specifically, broadly speaking it is a picture of a state large enough to indoctrinate children by choosing how to teach children versus the parents choosing at a local level.

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit:

http://www.dennisprager.com/ ~ see also: http://www.prageruniversity.com/

Here is part of the Wall Street Journal article:

While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.

The Next Generation of Science Standards were released in April 2013. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted them, including my state of New Jersey, which signed on in July 2014 and plans to phase in the new curriculum beginning with the 2016-2017 school year. The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.

While publicly billed as the result of a state-led process, the new science standards rely on a framework developed by the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council. That is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences that works closely with the federal government on most scientific matters.

All of the National Research Council’s work around global warming proceeds from the initial premise of its 2011 report, “America’s Climate Choices” which states that “climate change is already occurring, is based largely on human activities, and is supported by multiple lines of scientific evidence.” From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.

The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change. To give one example of the council’s reach, these climate-change learning concepts have been incorporated almost verbatim into the New Jersey Department of Education model science curriculum.

Many of the background materials and classroom resources used by instructors in teaching the new curriculum are sourced from government agencies. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has an array of ready-to-download climate-change primers for classroom use by teachers, including handouts on the link between carbon dioxide and average global temperatures and tear sheets on the causal relationship between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising sea levels.

Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Energy Department have their own Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, or Clean, which serves as an online portal for the distribution of digital resources to help educators teach about climate change. One such learning module requires students to measure the size of their family’s carbon footprint and come up with ways to shrink it.

Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date.

This is unfortunate because the topic of man-made global warming, properly taught, would present many teachable moments and provide an example of the scientific method in action. Precisely because the science of climate change is still just a theory, discussion would help to build student skills in critical thinking, argumentation and reasoning, which is the stated objective of the new K-12 science standards…..

…read it all…