Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Is common descent supported by evidence from biogeography?

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Just FYI, I am delaying my mean anti-feminist post until 6 PM at least to check it over.

Mysterious Jonathan writing at Uncommon Descent.

Here’s his thesis:

Recently on this blog, I have been exploring and examining some of the genomic arguments for common descent. As I have been documenting in recent weeks, while the case for common ancestry — on the face of it — looks mightily strong, closer inspection reveals that the arguments don’t, in fact, stand up under more rigorous scrutiny. In the vast majority of instances, the corroborative data is very carefully cherry picked from the pertinent data set, and the non-congruent evidence is discarded or ignored.

And here’s a snippet:

One popular argument for common descent is the case from the discipline of biogeography — that is, the study of the geographical and historical distribution of species in relation to one another. The argument is based largely around the observation that species are related in accordance with their geographical proximity with respect to one another.

And here is the problem – this is dynamite:

So, when the biogeographical data does not accord with the predictions and expectations made by common descent, one always has ‘oceanic dispersal’ as an ad hoc fudge factor — including the rather remarkable claim that Monkeys made it across the Atlantic from Africa to South America! As Casey Luskin notes here, molecular studies claim that the South American monkeys diverged from the African monkeys around 35 million years ago. But Africa became an isolated island continent around 80 million years ago!

Apparently, monkeys rode on the back of the Flying Spaghetti Monster from Africa to South America.

I actually thought that the evidence for common descent was fairly good, because Behe accepts it and he is not a Darwinist. I didn’t like it, but facts are facts. But I’m glad that Jonathan is shedding some light on this issue. I would like to be able to argue against it, if the evidence is there.

Commentary

We’ve become a nation of takers, not makers

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From moderate conservative Stephen Moore, writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees.

The problem with having a high number of government workers is that government workers don’t actually produce anything to sell. They pay the salaries of their workers by taking a percentage of the money that productive business make when they sell customers useful things like cell phones and laptops and automobiles.

This article is the second most popular on the Wall Street Journal. Recommended.

Commentary

Interview with Doug Giles, father of two extraordinary daughters

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Pearcey Report)

Summary:

Like most parents, Clash Radio host and Townhall.com columnist Doug Giles is proud of his children. His daughter Hannah helped take down ACORN in 2009, when she partnered up with James O’Keefe to produce revealing undercover videos. Giles’ other daughter, Regis, started the campaign “Girls Just Wanna Have Guns,” which, among other things, aims to instruct young women on how to protect and defend themselves against predators.

He has every reason to brag about his no-nonsense girls, both of whom partially inspired his new book, “Raising Righteous and Rowdy Girls,” which provides 14 chapters on how to rear females in today’s world. The Townhall.com contributor advises parents to teach their girls classiness and the value of intellect, but it’s not all work and no play for the Giles clan. Giles thinks it’s important for young women to know how to hunt, fight, rebel, date decent guys and even party.

Sample questions:

TheDC: So what makes a “righteous and rowdy girl?”

DG: Well, a common misconception among evangelicals, which I’m one of them, is that if your daughter is righteous, she has to be this petty-coat wearing damsel in distress who says, “Oh my, I need a knight in shining armor to come and rescue me.” The problem is that there are no knights in shining armor. A lot of the guys have bought into the misandrous fly and they’ve become more feminine or effeminate and more of  a dandy instead of the historic Clint Eastwood type who can kick butt and take names.

So I wanted to want to show that girls can be righteous, they can be classy, they can excel in academics and at the same time they can have a rowdy good time rebelling against this cultural swill that is shoved up their tailpipe and down their throat 24/7 by this Godless culture. The rowdy aspect is, like in my book, I teach them again how to fight, how to shoot guns, how to protect themselves, because especially in the state of Florida, I believe nearly 80 percent of the abductions that occur with young people happen to females, so I don’t like that. I want to make sure my kids don’t have that scenario play out on them and they become victims of some weirdo.

If you’re going to put your kids in public school or university, there’s such anti-American sentiment there that I didn’t want my kids to be some sponge and that professor be the Super-Soaker who tries to erode what my wife and I have taught them, so the rowdy aspect comes into play where we tell our kids they have a right to rebel, question, and rage against the machine to be the James Dean, Harley Davidson-wearing rebel against secularism, socialism, slutification and the wussification of our culture. Yes they can be righteous to where they can live clean lives, but that doesn’t mean they live in some kind of sterile environment separated from culture. They can infiltrate the culture with comedy, class, wisdom, intellect, but also with a rebellious attitude that says we’re not going to allow our nation go down the crapper because it’s what everybody else is doing.

TheDC: So did your daughters go to public school and have to deal with this sort of propaganda and anti-American agenda from their teachers?

DG: Yeah, absolutely. They went to public school all the way until high school and then we yanked them. It’s so bad down here that the best schools look like Leavenworth. I mean literally, strewn with barbed wire, there are cops parked up on the sidewalk right by the doors, it’s 186 percent overcrowded, so we said screw this. The girls started homeschooling with Florida Virgil School and they just excelled academically. But they were part of the mucked-up mix for several years and during that time period, they would hear all this stuff that we hear on Fox News, just America completely denigrated. If you didn’t dance to their call, you were made to be the weird person. I just refused to have my daughters feel like that when traditional values, Judeo-Christian world view, and conservative principles and capitalism caused America to be the great American experiment, so I made certain that as much as I could from their little tiny hearts and little tiny minds that they were educated to our great foundations, to our Christian worldview, and when they heard the other stuff coming from the teachers ridiculing those things, that they had the right and the moxie to question that and confront it when it was served to them on a regular basis.

I guess I’m going to buy this book! I don’t think that any Christian women will allow me to parent children like this though – they think that strong fathers who set goals for their children are “bullies”.