BROWN SHIRT TACTICS AREN’T PRETTY

Who are these modern Republicans? What Nazi party did they get their training in?

Locally, here in Spokane, Republicans tear down campaign signs of their opponents with troubling consistency. Nationally, they act like Brown Shirts in the way they plan to intimidate minority voters, make secrecy a center of their policy, throw their opponents out of public gatherings, and seek revenge against distraught Americans.

See the New York Times essay on the vote and Jim Hightower’s essay in the Inlander in Spokane Washington.

Further, in Bush’s second debate with Kerry, according to Jonathan Alter in Newsweek (Oct. 11, 2004 p. 29), the Bush camp “... told undecided voters, hoping to participate in this week’s ‘town meeting debate’ that they are not welcome. Apparently, the president’s having to respond to someone who hasn’t made up his mind is too intimidating fro the leader of the free world.”


THE SNARE TIGHTENS AROUND
THE SCRAWNY NECK OF CREATIONIST BIRDS

The discovery of yet more winged dinosaur fossils, “microraptor gui”, in China gets about as close to a missing link as science is ever going to get. This dinosaur has four feathered wings and was probably a glider, one of the steps necessary to go from land animal to flying bird. Read this!

But, you know, as I read some of the arguments by creationists against all these many fossilized feathered dinosaurs which definitely fall within the range of change from reptiles to birds, I see how they try to narrow down the definition of what a missing link would look like until it could not exist. They continually say that this fossil is still a dinosaur while that fossil is a bird, as if to prove that these peculiar feathered creatures aren’t clearly somewhere between the two but either one or the other. What they are demanding as a missing link would be an animal which was neither dinosaur nor bird but which was both dinosaur and bird. They’re demanding a third species. An impossible thing. What creationists are looking for is nothing which could exist. There is no missing link; that’s not how evolution works.


QUESTIONS FOR A FUNDAMENTALIST

Sometimes I can’t understand exactly how much science that fundamentalists recognize as accurate observations of the world. So I roughed out a couple of questions about, I think, indisputable scientific facts that I’d like to give them. Upon some of these findings, much of big bang and evolutionary fact finding begins and ends.

1) Do continents drift and can their rate of drift be measured fairly accurately?

2) Do radioactive materials slowly lose their radioactivity and can the rate of decay be measured?

3) Does dust in the air drop to the earth and slowly accumulate layers which can be seen with the naked eye? Can the rate of buildup be estimated? Can we, therefore, bore into the earth and see these layers and estimate how long ago these layers were deposited?

4) Can we observe these same rates and build ups on the ocean floors?

5) Can I dig up a dog bone while gardening and call that a fossil?

6) Can I uncover an ancient fossil in a layer of rock and by using the principles in 3) and 4) make some estimate of how long ago that fossil was deposited?

7) Can I look at manlike skulls which show an ever larger brain pan and draw some conclusions about evolution from them?

8) Can I conclude from the oceanic-like salinity of human blood that it’s more likely that “the power some call god” made us from ocean water rather than from earthen material?
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"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid prenancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry." — H. L. Mencken