Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Muslims and the Media

Our candidate selection system, dominated by two terminally corrupt D.C. political parties that have looted the country and destroyed our children's future, is broken. We need a new one and that is why I am with Neighbors of Arkansas. I am not writing this article because I am backing Ben Carson for President, although I consider every non-establishment candidate better than any establishment candidate. I am writing it because the coverage on it is a perfect example of our anti-truth media and how they refuse to get stories right.

Dr. Carson said that he would not advocate that we put a Muslim in the White House. He hinted, but did not say, that it was because of the Muslim practice of subverting other viewpoints and practices, guaranteed in our Constitution, in nations where Muslims are in charge. Outrage followed, which is to be expected, but the basis for the outrage was false. The charges laid against Carson were false. It is a perfect example (the Kim Davis story is another) of why we can't get the right answers while we listen to the establishment media. They butcher the issues so badly that we can't even discuss the right questions with one another. If we don't ask the right questions, the odds are very slim that we will get the right answers.

But before I get to that, a few words about "Muslims". All Muslims are not the same, just as all who claim the name "Christian" are not the same. Most of the people that ISIS is killing for example, are other Muslims. The fear of "Muslims" by some of my friends in the U.S. is so overblown as to be ridiculous. Most of our problems with Muslims are rooted in FEDGOV's misguided attempts to interfere with Muslim cultures and attempt to re-shape them at the point of a bayonet. A lot of my friends are rightfully angry with the way that FEDGOV is running our country right now. Well, just think of how mad you would be if you lived in another country and that same FEDGOV started doing even worse over there. FEDGOV mismanages other nations under the empire's thumb even worse than it does this one! Conservatives and Middle East Muslims are actually mad at some of the same people, and often for not dis-similar reasons.

ISIS was trained and funded by our Muslim "allies" (and by our government too) to beat up on other Muslims. It consists of 20K to 30K ignorant Korandethals who have converted their neighbors into enemies. They are no threat to a nation of 320 million citizens. Pictures of long convoys of vehicles moving across the few roads through vast stretches of open desert don't intimidate me in the least. It only confirms my view that with our total control of the air and armed drones, we could crush them anytime they quit being a useful tool of our misguided State Department's philosophy of jumping in the middle of Islamic civil wars. The real threat to our freedom is FEDGOV in Washington D.C., and the Republican and Democratic establishment which manage the place.

Should we take refugees who are fleeing from the implementation of our State Department's insane policies? Sure, at least the Christian ones or those willing to convert. What about the Muslims who wish to enter our nation? Why would the Muslim ones even want to come to our terrible non-Muslim nation? Why aren't they thronging to get into the many Muslim-run nations in the region?

Name for me one nation ruled by an avowed Muslim that is a good place to live. Can't do it? Me neither. It seems that not even Muslims want to live in nations controlled by other Muslims. And that brings me back to Carson.  Carson did not say that we should ban, by law, Muslims from holding public office. That is what political rivals and the media are making it sound like, but he did not say that. He just said he thought it was not a good idea. It would not be his preference.

I agree. Again, I can't name a single country run by a Muslim that I would consider a well-run country. Islam and political freedom are incompatible.  That does not mean we should ban it- that would be a violation of our constitutions clause against religious tests for office. But nowhere does the constitution ban us personally from having a religious test for office. The government should not have such bans as written law, but the voters can have them written into their common sense. The media, including Voice of the Establishment in Arkansas (Democrat-Gazette) keep trotting out the Constitution's "no religious test" provision as if Carson does not understand or respect the Constitution. That is rather a case of the establishment media disrespecting the truth - that clause has no bearing on what Carson was saying.

What is scary is that so much media is unable or unwilling to separate those two ideas. They cannot separate a government ban from a personal decision. There is no action that is not state action to them- everything is political. That is similar to the Kim Davis situation where they cannot seem to understand that Davis is not stopping anyone from "getting married", she is only (IOW Kentucky law) refusing to grant state recognition to those relationships as marriage. Again, there is no discernment between state action and the thing itself. This is a collectivist thought pattern that is poisoning our ability to have discussion on any issue which has a differentiation of public from private action.




Bald Knob Police Chief Resigns

Bald Knob police chief Erek Balentine, the center of controversy since he aggressively pursued citizens who exercised the open carry of firearms, has resigned. His letter of resignation had a very pleasant manner about it, in sharp contrast to his performance while actually on the job. Reports are that he cited safety concerns for his family after his personal truck was burned in an apparent arson. He gave no indication that there were any specific threats against him or his family. The action against Balentine's truck gives him something of a face-saving way to leave the hot seat.

Hopefully, the state police will take over the arson investigation. Both Balentine and the presumed arsonist operated outside the law. Criminals are bad enough when they don't have a badge.

Friday, September 18, 2015

First With Four Legs Underneath Does Not Fit Evolution Expectations

The discovery of Bunostegos akokanensis has generated a surprise finding- the "pre-dinosaur" walked with four legs underneath its torso, like dinosaurs and modern mammals. Reptiles, amphibians, and the various animals of the Permian period before this creature all  have their legs splayed to the side of their torso. That was considered to be the "ancestral state" for leg anatomy. Since this cow-sized animals is estimated to have lived at least 260 million years ago, evolutionary scientists were surprised to see that this animal possessed a leg and hip configuration in an "advanced" state. 

I once complained to an evolutionist that his theory was impossible to falsify, since it concerns events of the distant past and whenever new evidence comes along they merely change stories about the way it happened, and never question the premise that it happened via evolution and not Intelligent Design. I asked them what sort of evidence would disprove the macro-evolutionary hypothesis. They replied that finding a mouse in a layer of rock from before there were supposed to be mice would do it. 

I doubt that is true. We may not have found a mouse fossil in pre-Triassic rock layers, but we have found a cow-sized animal with the advanced limb positioning of a mouse or a cow, which should not be there so early. Even though we have found this, and even though the Intelligent Design explanation better fits this evidence (since there would be no prohibition on "advanced" features showing up in "primitive" forms) I predict that they will still maintain "evolution did it." And this is not the only case of features scientists considered "advanced" showing up too early in the fossil record. 

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Bald Knob Police Chief Loses Truck to Arson

When government officials don't follow the rule of law, they lose legitimacy. The Bald Knob Police Chief is infamous for ignoring the plain text of Act 746 which makes open carry of guns legal so long as they are not intended to be used for an illegal purpose. In that sense the act only affirms what the Constitution of this state says about the matter. But the Chief  has taken to arresting people for "Open Carry" anyway, and he has a local Prosecutor and Judge that are so far backing him up.

I think the answer is elections- vote out the Prosecutor and Judge. Get a new Mayor who will hire a new Chief. Unfortunately the frustration that occurs when government officials flout the rule of law has boiled over in this case to arson. The Chief's personal vehicle was burned up and someone painted "2nd Amendment" on the side.  I personally think the 2nd applies to FEDGOV and the Arkansas Constitution is what should reign in the states, but regardless the law is very clear but local officials in Bald Knob are operating outside the law. Now people who are angry about that are operating outside the law.

This is a very dangerous situation precipitated by government officials disregarding the Rule of Law. I call for both sides in this situation to de-escalate and begin operating inside the law.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The Conversation America Needs to Have (and isn't) on the Kim Davis Story

I waited a long time before giving my take on this one. As I suspected, the noise and fog was so thick that we never even got around to talking about the most important aspect of this whole matter.

Sunday, September 06, 2015

A Question for Evolutionists on Reptile Teeth

Heterodontosaurids were small dinosaurs who lived from the late Triassic to the early Cretaceous, a period said to have lasted more than 100 million years. And they lived over a vast area of the earth, basically everywhere but Australia and Antarctica. They were members of a sub-order which contains some of the most common and best-known dinosaurs.

Given all of that, it is quite amazing that among all dinosaurs, and indeed reptiles, living and dead, only- this tiny group ever developed multiple types of teeth. They had three kinds of teeth to be exact, like humans and many other mammals. The earlier Dimetrodon had two kinds of teeth (hence the name), but was not a dinosaur, nor really a true reptile as were the archosaurs.  All reptiles, including dinosaurs, only have one kind of teeth in their mouths.

If macro- evolution is true, I wonder why the extremely useful trait of multiple teeth forms shows up only in this one obscure (yet widespread and long lasting) group? If all dinosaurs sprang from a common ancestor, and if some dinosaurs later became birds, why didn't some other groups develop this useful trait? Indeed why didn't multiple other reptiles? It makes no sense that evolution can produce such vast changes in form as we have seen in the fossil record, and as we can see today amongst the array of different reptiles on our planet, and yet the highly useful adaptation of multiple tooth forms came about once and only once. 

It seems like if reptiles can go from Turtles to T-Rex's to Chameleons to Snakes to Croc's to Cassowary's and tens of thousands of forms in between, then some of those creatures, besides that one obscure group, might have picked up the gigantic advantage of multiple tooth forms along the way.



Friday, September 04, 2015

Transparency and Centralized Control Don't Mix

There was a short article in the Voice of the Establishment (Demzette) today about Education Director Johnny Key and the "revision" of Arkansas' education standards. The point of the article was to stroke the Director for bringing "transparency" to the process of revising the standards by web-casting them. Since Arkansas is still a part of Common Core, one wonders just what the significance of the process might be? If Arkansas can really revise the standards as we see fit, it's not "Common Core". If we can't, then we can't really "revise" the standards. We can only tinker with them subject to the limits which others set for us.

But what really struck me was the last line:
State officials said they want the process to be open but are concerned about balancing openness with protecting educators from being inundated with social media, emails and phone calls, Key said.
 The difficulty here is that they have inherently conflicting goals. They want centralized control of setting mandatory standards (as opposed to having say, suggested standards unattached to high stakes testing which each district could choose to keep or cast off as they wished). At the same time, they want "transparency" in how the central authorities revise those standards.

It doesn't work. With so much power in so few hands, and in one room, of course there is going to be intense lobbying from various groups to try and shoehorn their agenda's into the standards. Beyond the professional lobbies, if you get the proceedings before the public eye, it is only natural that members of the public are going to want to give input when they see something they feel is going wrong. In a "transparent" and centralized process the few "deciders" will be deluged with people who want to put their two cents in. Transparency and centralized control simply do not mix. You must pick one or the other. I favor localism and transparency over centralization and secrecy.

I strongly suspect that, since Arkansas is legally still fully subordinate to Common Core, the committee to "revise" the standards largely has their hands tied anyway. In other words, what we get "transparency" on is not the effort to truly revise our own standards, but we only get to watch the tinkering on the edges of what little leeway is left to us in determining our own educational standards while 90% of the actual decisions were made elsewhere in near total secrecy. This show is to placate those who want the illusion of influence. Those with real influence have already made the standards and dictated the amount of "revision" that they will permit.

If I am right, and these people are so predictable that it is getting hard to be wrong about them for someone who is willing to put aside emotion and consider things objectively, then they might be able to pull off both the appearance of transparency while maintaining centralization simply by having the "transparency" in one place (where only small decisions are made) and the real decision-making in another. The real pros won't even bother watching these proceedings or lobbying the members. They will just be bombarded by emails from concerned parents who think that these people in this room will be determining the education standards for their children.

Until the Arkansas laws which put this state under Common Core are repealed, this process is part of the elaborate illusion of self-government (which some are content with frankly) and not self-government itself.