News

NYT: LGBT youth have greater approval, but mental health is “significantly worse”

1 Comment

A friend shared this article with me, and cleverly archived it so I could link to it from my blog. I had a whole bunch of wonderful stories to blog about, but this one is the best. Do you know how the secular left looks at the poor mental health of LGBT youth, and asserts (without evidence) that more acceptance would make those outcomes better? Turns out the exact opposite is true.

Here’s the left-wing extremist New York Times, dated June 3rd, 2023:

For L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers, high school is a much more accepting place than even a decade ago. They change their pronouns, go to school dances with people of the same gender, and are more likely than any previous generation to openly identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or otherwise queer.

[…]Yet there is a darker side. Even as they are increasingly welcomed by peers, their mental health is significantly worse than that of heterosexual young people.

[…]Their experiences highlight a “paradoxical finding,” as researchers have described it: Even as social inclusion for young L.G.B.T.Q. people has grown, large health disparities between them and their non-L.G.B.T.Q. peers have not shrunk.

The article talks about the strongest reasons why young people embrace LGBT:

  1. there are pro-LGBT TV shows, movies, music.
  2. famous pro athletes identify as LGBT
  3. the Supreme Court overturned legislation passed by elected legislators
  4. “everyone knows someone who is LGBT”
  5. social media supports LGBT
  6. big corporations support LGBT

Growing up in the situation I was in – poverty, different skin color, two working parents, public schools run by secular leftists – I wasn’t much interested in feeling good in the moment. I wanted an accurate view of the battlefield so I could make good decisions, and get out of the mess I was born into. I read the Bible, Shakespeare and my parents’ textbooks from their night classes at the local universities.

My approach was very different from the secular left. They don’t care about truth, or making good decisions to get good results. They care about living in the moment. They want to give in to their desires now, and point fingers later. They want to borrow money and run up expenses now, and pass the bill to someone else later. They are reckless and irresponsible. And they feel entitled to the life outcomes of those detestable Christians later. But they can’t be bothered to behave like those detestable Christians right now.

People who are LGBT are facing little to no disagreement or disapproval:

A recent survey by The New York Times and Morning Consult of 1,574 young adults found that people ages 18 to 28 — who mostly graduated from high school since 2013 — were significantly more likely to know L.G.B.T.Q. students in school than those a decade older, who were teenagers in the 2000s.

The younger group was twice as likely to report knowing at least one transgender student, and three times as likely to have known three or more. Four in 10 said they knew numerous gay, lesbian or bisexual people in high school, compared with a quarter of the older group.

And while both groups reported hearing the words “gay” and “queer” used negatively at similar rates — a data point reflected in interviews with teenagers, who say they still hear “that’s so gay” in school hallways — the younger graduates were significantly more likely to hear those words used in a positive light, too. They were also more likely to have a gay-straight alliance or similar club at their school.

This reflects other data that has found that verbal harassment of L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers declined during the 2010s, while support for same-sex marriage became the norm among young people.

And finally:

“You’re at the point among young adults where almost all these measures of acceptance are in the high 80s, low 90s,” said Jeff Jones, a senior editor who oversees research at Gallup. “It’s basically getting toward a consensus.”

Sounds wonderful for the secular left. They got the morality of the Bible removed from society. Young people today don’t even know what the Bible teaches are dating, relationships, marriage, sexuality, etc. All they know is TV shows, celebrities, entertainers, athletes, and what their public school teachers tell them.

Just one little problem. Secular leftists don’t get to determine what is objectively right and wrong. In a God-designed universe, God decides what works, and what doesn’t work. And no amount of community, peer-approval, propaganda, etc. is going to overrule God’s design for his creatures.

More:

As acceptance has grown, though, the mental health of queer youth has continued to suffer. Reported rates of mental health problems among all young people have been rising for the last decade, but non-heterosexual students face far higher rates than straight students.

About 70 percent of high school students who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual reported persistent sadness, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, twice the rate of their heterosexual peers. One in five attempted suicide in the past year, nearly four times the rate of straight young people. (The C.D.C. does not track the mental health of transgender youth, but other data shows that roughly half had considered suicide in the past year.)

The New York Times tries to blame these numbers on being in a minority group. But Bible-believing Christians who embrace chastity, marriage, parenting and homeschooling are also a “minority group”. We don’t run the show any more. In fact, we’re the only minority that is still able to be targeted for ridicule and persecution, even by the police and government. But we also don’t have mental illnesses like the poor young people who believed the lies of the secular left, either. I wonder why that is. Could it be that chastity, marriage, parenting and homeschooling are morally right, whether anyone thinks it is or not? Could it be that these activities are self-evidently moral, and therefore just doing them makes the approval and celebration of other people completely unnecessary? For some behaviors, having an audience of One is enough.

News

Does peer-reviewed research support a naturalistic origin of life?

Leave a comment

There was a recent debate between Dr. James Tour and Professor Dave, an atheist with a bachelors degree who makes YouTube videos. The atheist spent his entire opening speech attacking Tour’s character. When Tour asked him to show him origin of life chemistry, he refused. The atheist shuffled through papers he apparently found by Googling, and read the titles. When asked what was in them, he said that he couldn’t remember.

But I was trying to decide who won the debate. There was one place where the atheist claimed that the early Earth had no molecular oxygen. He needs that to be true, in order for the chemistry that creates the building blocks of life to work. So I thought I would talk about a paper that refutes that. After my argument, I’ll talk about another mistake that the atheist made in the debate. Based on those two mistakes, I concluded that the atheist was speaking errors either intentionally or unintentionally, and therefore lost the debate.

Here’s a paper published in the prestigious peer-reviewed science journal Nature, entitled “The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere”.

Evolution News explains what the paper is about.

Excerpt:

A recent Nature publication reports a new technique for measuring the oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere some 4.4 billion years ago. The authors found that by studying cerium oxidation states in zircon, a compound formed from volcanic magma, they could ascertain the oxidation levels in the early earth. Their findings suggest that the early Earth’s oxygen levels were very close to current levels.

[…]Miller and Urey conducted experiments to show that under certain atmospheric conditions and with the right kind of electrical charge, several amino acids could form from inorganic compounds such as methane, ammonia, and water. Several experiments have been done using various inorganic starting materials, all yielding a few amino acids; however, one key aspect of all of these experiments was the lack of oxygen.

If the atmosphere has oxygen (or other oxidants) in it, then it is an oxidizing atmosphere. If the atmosphere lacks oxygen, then it is either inert or a reducing atmosphere. Think of a metal that has been left outside, maybe a piece of iron. That metal will eventually rust. Rusting is the result of the metal being oxidized. With organic reactions, such as the ones that produce amino acids, it is very important that no oxygen be present, or it will quench the reaction. Scientists, therefore, concluded that the early Earth must have been a reducing environment when life first formed (or the building blocks of life first formed) because that was the best environment for producing amino acids. The atmosphere eventually accumulated oxygen, but life did not form in an oxidative environment.

The problem with this hypothesis is that it is based on the assumption that organic life must have formed from inorganic materials. That is why the early Earth must have been a reducing atmosphere. Research has been accumulating for more than thirty years, however, suggesting that the early Earth likely did have oxygen present.

[…]Their findings not only showed that oxygen was present in the early Earth atmosphere, something that has been shown in other studies, but that oxygen was present as early as 4.4 billion years ago. This takes the window of time available for life to have begun, by an origin-of-life scenario like the RNA-first world, and reduces it to an incredibly short amount of time. Several factors need to coincide in order for nucleotides or amino acids to form from purely naturalistic circumstances (chance and chemistry). The specific conditions required already made purely naturalist origin-of-life scenarios highly unlikely. Drastically reducing the amount of time available, adding that to the other conditions needing to be fulfilled, makes the RNA world hypothesis or a Miller-Urey-like synthesis of amino acids simply impossible.

If you read the paper’s abstract, it finds that molecular oxygen would have been present by the end of the Hadean era. The earliest signs of life we have are from just after the end of the Hadean era. So, its undeniable that molecular oxygen was present. Did professor Dave lie, or was he just ignorant? One thing for sure, he pronounced that there was no oxygen in the same confident, insulting voice that he used for the rest of his presentation.

OK, so with that out of the way, Professor Dave also cited a paper in the journal Science. And there is an article on Creation.com by Johnathan Sarfati, who has a PhD in chemistry, about that very paper.

His post says:

It’s likely that the media reports you mention were referring to the paper in Science journal by Tracey Lincoln and Gerald Joyce.1 Quite often, the media hype just doesn’t match what was actually discovered. To be fair, Joyce, a well known chemical evolutionist, made it clear that he and his Ph.D. student Lincoln had not produced life, despite the headlines.2 Much earlier, Joyce admitted:

“The most reasonable assumption is that life did not start with RNA … . The transition to an RNA world, like the origins of life in general, is fraught with uncertainty and is plagued by a lack of experimental data.”3

Joyce and Lincoln started off with a fairly long RNA molecule. Given that nothing like RNA appears in Miller–Urey experiments, this already shows unjustified interference from an intelligent investigator. In fact, not even the building blocks, ribonucleotides, appear in such experiments, and they do not spontaneously form RNA. In fact, there are numerous chemical difficulties with obtaining RNA by blind undirected chemistry, the only sort allowed on the hypothetical primordial earth, as chemical evolutionist A.G. Cairns-Smith points out in his book Genetic Takeover4 (see extract at Cairns Smith: Detailed criticisms of the RNA world hypothesis). And it’s a huge step from RNA to the genetic code, its major use today.

Furthermore, this paper didn’t demonstrate replication but ligation—joining two small RNA pieces, previously designed to be a match to the longer strand. So this research already assumed not just one but three RNA strands. For this to be relevant to chemical evolution, the two pieces just by chance had to have pretty close to the complementary base pairs of the first piece—natural selection could not be invoked before reproduction.

Furthermore, since polymerization is unfavorable, the RNA pieces must be chemically activated in some way. Note that a catalyst merely accelerates the approach to equilibrium; it doesn’t change it (see diagram and explanation in Dino proteins and blood vessels: are they a big deal?). The paper states that one of the two joining RNA strands has a triphosphate group on the end. This is very reactive, so would be an unlikely component of a primordial soup, and would not last long even if it appeared. So a supply of matching activated RNA pieces likewise shows unacceptable investigator interference.

See also Does ribozyme research prove Darwinian evolution? for a critique of an earlier Joyce paper on alleged ribozyme evolution, as well as Self-replicating peptides? which has many similarities to the recent Joyce claim.

Now Tour seemed to let this problem drop in the debate. It just seems that Professor Dave was assuming from the titles of the papers that they were relevant to the problem of life. Well, scientists always sound optimistic in their papers. I know, I had to write one for my masters degree thesis, and it was published. That’s why you have to look at the data and be skeptical. Sadly Dave wasn’t able to be skeptical. He wanted something to be true, so he just didn’t bother to interact with challenges to his view. The whole problem with the origin of life is that there are many counter-factual conditions, experimenter interferences, etc. that have to be done to make things work at all. Dave reads the titles of papers, but he just isn’t aware of how the experimenters have adjusted the experiments in ways that are not true to the conditions on the early Earth.

Dr. Tour lost his temper and shouted a lot during the debate, so I don’t think the debate is worth watching. However, if you want to watch a good debate on the origin of life, try this one between Dr. Fazale Rana vs Dr. Michael Ruse. And if you want to see a good explanation of the sequencing problem, check out this lecture by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. (who has also debated atheists who didn’t lie, shout or insult him – and they even had doctoral degrees)

News

Can you trust the police in Britain to enforce the law fairly?

4 Comments

On this blog, I often complain about how left-wing ideology leads to situations where taxpayers are actually paying the government to persecute them. Well, people pay the police force to protect them from criminals. And that works in a lot of small towns in America’s red states. But in Britain, it’s different. And I have a couple of examples to show you how it doesn’t work.

First, from the UK Daily Mail:

A furious row has broken out after Metropolitan Police officers were filmed pulling down posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas during the terror group’s barbaric October 7 attack.

Two officers stripped the outside of Cullimore Chemist in Edgware, North London of flyers of the missing innocents after receiving calls from residents concerned about tension within the community.

Some locals in the area, which is home to a sizeable Jewish community, have slammed the officers over their ‘disgusting actions’.

[…]The controversy comes as the Met has come under fire for failing to clampdown on Islamism and extremism at pro-Palestine protests on the streets of London. Last weekend, protesters were seen carrying effigies of dead babies, and earlier this month extremists led a rally calling for ‘jihad’.

So, in Britain, they have a very effeminate society. They believe in “don’t judge” and that every culture is equal to every other one. I read about it the books of Theodore Dalrymple, e.g. – “Life at the Bottom”, and in the works of Douglas Murray. Dalrymple (not his real name) worked in a prison as a doctor and psychiatrist. Douglas Murray wrote a book called “The Strange Death of Europe”, where he explained how different European decided to import millions of unskilled men of Middle Eastern origins. In that book, Murray talked about the Jewish Minister of Immigration, Barbara Roche, who opened up the borders, arguing that restraints on immigration were “racist”. She liked diversity, and wanted to see the majority-Christian population of the UK thinned out.

So now, they have this:

It comes after the Metropolitan Police were accused of allowing Central London to become a ‘no-go zone’ for Jews after thousands of people marched in support of Palestine with some seen carrying effigies of dead babies and chanting ‘globalise the Intifada.’

Saturday’s demonstrations marked the third week in a row that the capital has been consumed by the Middle East protests and was marred by several shocking incidents.

In full view of police officers, protesters chanted for the massacre of Jews, bounced effigies of dead babies on flags and called for ‘global intifadas.’

[…]In another shocking clip, a collection of young people from the Socialist Workers Party can be seen chanting ‘From London to Gaza. Globalise the intifada.’

And the government’s response is appeasement – don’t make the protesters mad. By the way, they’ve also banned guns and self-defense in the UK, so if a criminal attacks you, then you can’t do anything about it. That’s more “don’t judge” in action.

But wait, there’s more. Here’s an article from the far-left extremist UK Guardian, which talks about some more activities of Barbara Roche’s friends:

Five men from Rochdale have been sentenced to between eight and 20 years in prison after being found guilty of grooming and abusing two girls between 2004 and 2006.

The longest sentence was given to the oldest defendant, Jahn Shahid Ghani, a 50-year-old care worker. He was at least 30 when he took advantage of the girls when they were 14 or 15. He would pick them up from school while they were still in uniform and ply them with drink and drugs before exploiting them.

[…]It was at Ghani’s flat, above a butcher’s shop in Rochdale, that Girl A was passed around “like a piece of meat” between Ghani younger half-brother, Mohammed Faisal Ghani, and his friends. She said she was “trapped like a prisoner” in the flat and forced to have sex with numerous men on a stained single mattress with no sheets.

[…]The court heard that on one occasion he persuaded Girl A to have sex with his cousin, a man in his 30s, who was visiting from Pakistan. “He’s never had sex with a white girl before,” he told her, urging her to “do it for the team”. He then asked her to marry the cousin for £5,000 so that he could get a UK visa, but she refused.

[…]On one occasion, another defendant, Insar Hussain, now 38, challenged her to a drinking contest at the flat above the butcher’s shop. She drank so much vodka that she passed out, the jury heard. The next day she was shown a video of one of the men sexually assaulting her with a brandy bottle as Hussain and others laughed. The bottle was on display in the bathroom “like a trophy”, the court heard, and the video was distributed around Rochdale.

[…]A fourth defendant, Ali Razza Hussain Kazmi, 36, was described by Girl A as an “intimidating and aggressive figure” when he sexually assaulted Girl B when she was just 13. He went on to rape Girl B when she was 14 and he was 16 or 17, in an underpass near Hopwood Hall college in Rochdale.

And this was interesting – the mothers complained to the police a lot:

Kazmi was the youngest defendant, aged 15 or 16 when he first abused Girl B, who was reported missing from home by her mother at least 83 times as a teenager.

There were many complaints, but the police didn’t do anything. They were scared of being accused of “racism”. Just like Barbara Roche accused people who didn’t like her open borders policy of “racism”.

As a non-white skilled legal immigrant, I don’t think that immigration policy should introduce risks to the taxpayers who pay the salaries of these government and police people. Because this sort of “diversity” immigration and policing is not safe for taxpayers.