A review of David Instone-Brewer's Bible Contexts Series - Chapter 20: Cain's "wife"

Dr. David Instone-Brewer is an eminent Bible Scholar in England, one of the experts responsible for the last tranche of changes to the NIV. He knows a lot more than I do about a lot of things, and since he makes it easy to access most of what he writes, I follow him to my advantage--especially in the area of Old Testament Studies, which is his specialty. What I've learned from him, however, are generally facts and insights I hadn't been exposed to before. I don't sit at his feet for much of what he weaves into his teaching, which are just standard tenets of atheism (although I admit, some of them are new to me as well). For although he identifies as an evangelical, he nonetheless looks to atheist scholars and their disciples to inform his interpretation of the Scriptures--and is thus oft led astray.

Dr. D is greatly hampered in his ability to gain insights from the book of Genesis, believing as he does that it was composed as a sort of religious fiction during the Babylonian captivity to inspire Jews not to lose hope in their present situation, or something along those lines. He doesn't believe that it is even intended to be a serious historical record, and certainly not that it was compiled from written eyewitness accounts. There is therefore no apparent limit to the imaginations his mind can supply from a reading of this section of the Scriptures, guided by the speculations of the atheists which lie behind much of his theology. And since he drinks deeply at the font of those who have no access to absolute truth, he all but admits that what he sincerely believes to be true today may be ridiculed a decade or a century from now, as atheist philosophers discard old and unworkable alternative explanations for how the world works, and imagine new ones yet to be disproven. This approach leads him far astray from orthodox understanding. 

Take, for example, his chapter on Cain's Wife. He already reinterprets the first two chapters of Genesis in an atheistic framework, starting with a random humanoid whose ancestral line went back to stardust. He then departs from the atheist narrative just a bit to give God credit for taking this human-looking animal, the pinnacle of billions of years of random evolution, miraculously granting him a human spirit, and then--in a most unusual departure from his involvement of the previous billions of years, and in a biological process we can hardly imagine, much less explain scientifically--splitting off a half-clone which became the first human woman. He then set the newly enlightened couple in special walled enclosure he called Eden and commanded them not to eat a certain fruit. They did so regardless, and as a result they were cast out of Eden to resume their evolutionary progress without any life-sustaining access to the fruit of the tree that conveyed some sort of immortality. And here enters Cain's Wife, who he proposes was a non-human, implying along the way that the host of present mankind must be descended from her.

I hesitate to critique Dr. D in any area of actual OT Studies, as he is an acknowledged expert in both the Hebrew language and rabbinical literature. But here he has left far behind anything directly related to the Hebrew Scriptures to dabble in Evolutionary Biology, in which he is no expert--leaving me on much firmer ground to dispute him. [Edit: he does claim biological expertise based on his undergraduate studies, but then, so could I, having sat for General Science in Bible College.]

I will be interacting in this post with Chapter 20 of his book Bible Contexts which, at least for now, can be found at his website http://www.biblecontexts.com/. He introduces the chapter as follows:

If Cain married someone living outside Eden, this would explain some strange details in Genesis. It would also explain how our gene pool contains so much variation.

---

His book is all about explaining strange details in Genesis with even stranger speculations. He sees a problem with God selecting just two humanoids--really, only one--to begin the human family tree. Although his God is capable of many amazing feats, Dr. D seems constrained by his acceptance of atheist teaching to place the Laws of Nature at a higher tier on the hierarchy than that occupied by Nature's God. The God who could split the first man in half at the sub-cellular level to produce the first woman was nonetheless stumped at providing this pair's descendants with enough genetic variety to produce the four blood types, so He needed to pull in some genes from the neighboring humanoids to pull it off. Thus, Cain's Wife. 

Now Mrs. Cain was not a Neanderthal, mind you--Cain had already inherited those genes from his long-dead humanoid ancestors. What she provided instead was access to the "rich gene pool" that had resulted from millions of years of primate evolution. Dr. D uses a modern analogy to explain why this was not only sufficient, but necessary, if humanity were to survive The Fall:

 Cain could, of course, have married his sister – though the Bible doesn’t say this happened. It is difficult to imagine her wanting to marry a brother (especially the nasty brother who murdered the nice one). Presumably this incest wouldn’t be dangerous like it is today because God could have made sure there weren’t any dangerous recessive genes in Adam’s chromosomes. However, our human race would be very weak if the entire gene pool had been limited to just Adam’s chromosomes. Restricted gene pools often cause problems in overrefined agricultural animals or crop lines because this makes them vulnerable to pests and changes in the environment. This is solved by interbreeding with wild species to reinvigorate the gene pool by introducing more variety.

Here he makes a mistake commonly perpetuated by pseudoscientists, assuming that a genetic bottleneck always results in a dangerously depleted gene pool. The reason modern agricultural crops and animals have depleted gene pools, and wild varieties don't, is precisely the result of human intervention to breed out unwanted variation. Absent that unnatural selection, a fairly robust set of genes will continue to be passed on, even in a small population. But racism is a powerful and primordial urge, such that organisms resist hybridisation and generally seek to mate with creatures most like themselves, resulting in further speciation, as any organisms that depart from the standard in the same direction tend to seek out each other for breeding, leaving an even more depleted genome to their descendants. Were it not for the balancing act of another primordial urge--that of men, having gone forth to conquer, seeking and finding sexual release amongst the females of the conquered races--humans would be much more genetically depleted than we are. 

If I were to hypothesize myself, I would say that God created Adam with two completely different sets of chromosomes, with each of the millions of gene pairs consisting of different alleles. Thus Eve was far more distant from Adam, genetically, than any two humans are today; at the time she was split off from him, she only shared 50 per cent of his genetic material. And if God were powerful enough to pull off forming yet another haploid set for the rest of Eve, then he only shared half of her genome--providing far more diversity than Cain could have brought into the young race by impregnating a distant descendant of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Adam could well have carried one haploid gene for Type A blood, and one for Type B. We don't even have to split that in half again to get all three of the blood types just among their children, provided that Eve possessed the same. And if, post-Fall, any two of their children ended up with an allele that lacked the information for producing either the A or B antigen, Type O could emerge as early as their grandchildren's generation. It's a stupendous pity that Dr. D, with all his learning, didn't see how God could accomplish this without having Cain interbreed with a non-human. 

       Mutations occur very rarely, unless there are carcinogens present. This is good, because most mutations are dangerous – as seen by the effects of carcinogens. Reproductive cells are protected from mutations by DNA repair mechanisms, which make sure that accidental mutations are rarely passed on to our children. A few do get through – on average sixty-four mutations – though this is tiny compared to the three billion base pairs that are copied perfectly.⁴ However, some of these are so harmful that they result in miscarriage – about 10 percent of pregnancies end this way. So even a small increase in mutation rate would result in a lot more miscarriages.

Dr. D goes on at length to describe just how humanly impossible it would have been for God to actually get the human race going with just two people. Okay, and where does the book of Genesis imply that God can't do anything humanly impossible? This cognitive dissonance would be laughable, did he not with such sincerity lend credence to the atheist hypotheses. Of course, the way heredity works now, in our currently depleted human population, where any two humans on the planet share at least 99.9 per cent of the same genome, does not necessarily speak to how things would have worked back when they shared barely half of that. We don't really have any idea what a genuinely rich gene pool looks like, as the nature of genetic recombination means that some genes go missing with each successive generation, and after several thousands of years, every genome has become depleted to one extent or another--unnatural selection greatly accelerating the process. And since this goes against the collective wisdom of Evolution--which imagines, contrary to all evidence, the gene pool at large becoming progressively richer over time--Dr. D. just isn't going to hear this from his atheist mentors or their disciples.

So whom DID Cain marry? Well, as all scholars have noted, Genesis doesn't say. And why should it? If humanity began with only one man and one woman, and no ape-men to "enrich the gene pool," then of course he married his sister. Anyone with even half a human brain could figure that out with just a little help; there's no need to state the obvious. All we need is the succinct statement of the compiler of Genesis 3 that Eve was "the mother of all living." That leaves no room for any previous races to insert their alleles into the human genome, period. 

Dr. D should have stuck with interpreting and explaining the Bible, and left fairy-tale speculations to those who reject the Genesis account out of theological necessity. 

A review of Contact, an alleged work of science fiction: Part One

I recently had the opportunity to view Contact, a movie that was released over two decades ago—almost the amount of time it would take for a transmission of it to reach the Vega system. I was struck from very early on in the production by the similarities between it and Isaac Asimov's famous story, Nightfall. I have written several posts reviewing that story, which are available here. I suggest reading them now, for background, before going any further. 

Now, I'll start out by saying that although I was aware of the movie when it came out, and that it was discussed in the Christian Media at the time, I've had no thoughts about it whatsoever for the past twenty plus years, so I trust that everything I say here will be uninfluenced by any other reviews. As I review Contact, I'll continue to allude to my earlier observations on this topic, which remain very relevant. Inasmuch as it's a long movie, I'll probably do this review in several installments. But, to begin at the very beginning:

The movie opens with the iconic roar of the MGM lion, framed by the Latin motto, Ars Gratia Artis--Art for Art's Sake. Not a single frame of the actual movie has yet been shown, but already we are being set up to believe that what follows is just pure entertainment--science fiction. But is it? Might there also be a deeper agenda, Art for the Sake of Persuasion? 

We then move into the opening sequence, which is a juxtaposition of animated video and archived audio. The animation is a zoom-out that begins with a satellite view of Cape Canaveral, tracking westward as the sun overtakes it from the east. Meanwhile the audio track is a montage of news broadcasts interrupted by brief bursts of contemporary music, working backward from the present day as the camera recedes from Earth, both tracks accelerating: the animation rapidly passes the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Ceres, and Jupiter—already moving much faster than the speed of light—as the audio track has already reached a quarter century before present, to the Watergate Scandal of President Nixon, then immediately on to M.L. King's March on Washington. By the time Jupiter and its moons recede into the background we can hear an announcement of the assassination of President Kennedy. Then, as Saturn fades into the distance, we race through another two decades, passing through the McCarthy Era all the way to the beginning of the American involvement in World War Two. What is being hinted at is that news broadcasts are traveling into space at the speed of light, with the very earliest broadcasts leading the way into the rest of the galaxy. A bit of a stronger hint comes after the disappearance of Saturn, as the sun itself blinks out and we see a rapidly receding series of stars and galaxies as the audio takes us back through the Thirties to the earliest days of Radio. Then the audio itself gradually fades to background static, as we continue to back our way through a dusty nebula and into intergalactic space, where total silence reigns. Other galaxies zoom by with increasing rapidity, until the screen becomes a total blur which resolves into the left eyeball of our protagonist, the young Ellie Arroway. Meanwhile, the audio picks back up again as background static, resolving into the signal of a ham radio she is operating, with her voice now in real time, attempting to make contact with “anyone out there.” Thus the stage is set for a lifetime of hovering over a radio, seeking not only a signal from another rational being, but, most importantly, the opportunity for interaction therewith. And we see her determination as she scans the dials in search of a response, getting encouragement from her father to keep trying—then, when she finally lands a station out of Pensacola, he congratulates her for achieving the “farthest one yet.”

Okay, at this point in the actual screen-acting, we already move from the realm of science to science fiction, because that's just not how the propagation of ham radio waves works. One does not start out pulling in nearby signals, then progressively move to the outer limits on the country, then farther out into the hemisphere, and finally, with “a big enough antenna,” to the other side of the world. The propagation of radio waves on the frequencies of the amateur bands is such that one is actually more likely to land a station a thousand miles away, than an hundred. But, not to let the facts of science get in the way of a good story, the scriptwriters expect us to believe that Ellie will start small, and keep progressing until she is at the point of asking radio operators on the other side of the Universe to “come back.” 

But that's not Ellie's only goal: in the very next scene we see her asking her father, with growing excitement, how far out it is possible to hear: California? Alaska? China? The Moon? Jupiter? Saturn? Suddenly she grows reflective, and asks her dad the question only a ten year old could ask: Could we talk to Mom?

Ah, now the subject of Religion intrudes, because young Ellie is asking an existential question, one immeasurably beyond the reach of the technology that so fascinates her. Science she knows, geography and astronomy she is beginning to understand, but of the Eternal State, she is much the innocent child, asking questions far beyond her ken. Here her father fails her—being unable to give her the answer she wants—because he, like her, only believes in Science, and Science has no answers to any of the deeper questions of life. And here the movie reveals its main argument. Having, at the behest of her father, dismissed the possibility of making contact beyond the grave, Ellie turns to the next best thing: making contact beyond the Solar System. And here we stop to consider the implications.

”Hey Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?” she asks, again in all innocence. “I don't know Sparks, but it seems like if it's just us, that would be an awful waste of space.” And is precisely here that the movie lands on its main theme: this phrase will be repeated at crucial points in the plot, to drive the message home that somewhere, on a cosmic scale, there is a sense that it would be wrong for Earth to be the only populated planet. This doctrine is never proven, nor is there ever even seen any need to prove it. Ellie simply accepts it on faith, and goes on to make it the guiding belief in her life's work, which is to search for, and find, signs of intelligence in outer space. She will run into many obstacles in that quest—the entire plot of the movie consists of her overcoming them, one after the other—but she will never be shaken in her core belief that there MUST be someone else out there—and an unstated corollary to that belief is that they MUST be so immeasurably greater than humankind, both in intelligence and technology, that they will be able to bridge the unbridgeable gulf between us, and make meaningful contact. It only remains for us to let them know we are here, and to devotedly await their response.

Do you see where this is headed? One thing this movie does, and does well, is to demonstrate that humankind is incorrigibly religious: everyone is forced by their very nature to believe in a higher order of beings, ones whose powers and understanding are beyond our comprehension. And the movie will go on to demonstrate our absolute impossibility of approaching these beings using our own abilities, or of comprehending them using our own understanding. Atheistic Science is turned on its head, and shown to be just another religion after all. 

I think that's enough for the first installment; we are now fully seven minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and in the next scene we will see Ellie instantly transition to Dr. Arroway the astronomer, having finally achieved the ultimate in her muttered ten-year-old goal of "get[ting] a bigger antenna."

Polygamy--a result of slavery?

Foreign Policy has released an article that shows a correlation between tribes on the West Coast of Africa which contributed males to the transatlantic slave trade, and tribes which practice polygyny today. The implication is that the slave trade freed up a surplus of virgins, who were graciously taken in by the remaining men.

Like so many studies, this one failed to ask the question, what caused which?

Polygyny was already a factor during the slave era--and the authors admit this. But what they don't envision is that a conquering tribe would have retained the captured women of the conquered tribe, whilst selling the men as slaves. This scenario turns the whole theory on its head: the sexual disparity in the slave population was not a cause of polygyny, but a result of it.

West African slaves were mostly sent to the New World, where buyers strongly preferred men capable of performing backbreaking tasks on plantations. By contrast, buyers in slave trades centered on the Indian Ocean and Red Sea were often looking for women who could work as domestic servants or concubines.
Record-keeping by European slave traders shows a consistent pattern, Dalton and Leung found: Between 1545 and 1864, 66.4 percent of slaves sent to North America and the Caribbean from present-day Senegal and Gambia were men, as were 66.6 percent sent from Sierra Leone, 65.4 percent from the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and 65.4 percent from the Windward Coast (now Ivory Coast). Going a step further, Dalton and Leung looked at data on the slaves taken from specific ethnic groups and compared it with the percentage of women in those groups who today share husbands with other wives. (They controlled for factors such as education level and religion.) The researchers found that groups hit heavily by trans-Atlantic slavery were significantly more likely to have a high percentage of polygynous marriages.

Now, taking my approach, we see that polygyny in East Africa may have been stifled by a lack of women, the surplus of that sex having been depleted rather than augmented by the slave trade. So if anything was a result of slavery in Africa, it was monogamy. What native culture could not manage to effect--the suppression of polygyny--the outside force of slavery could.

As the Western world slides ever further away from monogamy, we wonder what it will take to reverse that slide, and from where such a powerful force may come.

Voter manipulation by supercomputer

In this 2008 post, I wrote that one reason Bush won Ohio in 2004 was due to a huge turnout to vote for that state's Marriage Amendment (a now-unconstitutional part of their constitution).
It turns out that Karl Rove was behind much of that turnout.

In Ohio’s Democratic precincts in 2004, he says, “Rove went into union neighborhoods there and found the people who were concerned with gay marriage and just peeled them off."

The sine qua non of voter data crunching is Aristotle, Inc--founded by the guy who famously designed an atomic bomb his junior year at Princeton. Aristotle has a separate file on every voter, cataloging such minutiae as the contents of his library, his winecellar, and his gun cabinet--among other demographically useful details.  It's interesting to note that Aristotle--headquartered just around the corner from the Capitol--also has offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Spanish Fork, Utah.

Spanish Fork, Utah?

What's in  Spanish Fork, Utah?

Well, that turns out to be the location of the NSA's ubercomputer data center.

Hmmm . . .

The Persio-American War: Yet another report on not much to report

Now that June is half over and nothing much is happening, I thought I'd weigh in on the Iran war issue. DEBKA keeps telling us two things: One, that the Iranian government continues to stop short of launching a full-fledged weapons development program--although they have enriched enough uranium by now (up to 27%, far above the 3-4% needed for fuel grade) that when they do, it will be more like six to eight weapons being developed simultaneously; second, that it is primarily heavy pressure from President Obama that has held them back as Iran continues to pass the various milestones on its way to launching a weapons program.

Now, to its embarrassment, the Obama administration has admitted its role in the Stuxnet virus. Just how close this secretive account is to the truth we can't be sure, but since Israel all along has been hinting at its role, we now know our suspicions to be more or less correct.

Given that the US and Israel have been working together on the cyberwarfare front, it's clear that they have a united agenda in physically taking out Iran's nuclear capability, and any assault on that front will be a joint effort.

One last note: the success of Stuxnet on the one hand, and targeted assassinations on the other, show that the Israeli/American axis has an incredible intelligence reach. When an Iranian nuclear scientist sneezes, they know whether or not it's because he has a cold. It's unlikely, especially given the wide success of Flame, that there is any development in the Iranian nuclear program which the axis doesn't know in enough detail to guide the deadline for moving this war from the virtual to the actual.

And by the way: determining just when Flame intel started to pour into Ft. Meade should be pretty easy: just look for a big uptick in enrollment at the Basic Farsi programs of the Defense Foreign Language Institute.

Kidnapping: a new task assigned to the FBI

Back when the FBI was in its infancy, one of the federal crimes with which it was given jurisdiction over was transporting an abducted child across state lines. Now, less than 100 years later, one of the jobs being assigned to FBI agents is abducting children and transporting them across state lines. This is a very new role for them; ten years ago it was still being outsourced to private investigators.

We begin this particular story in 2002, when Lisa Miller gave birth to a daughter, Isabella. Before she was even born, the father had waived all parental rights, so he never enters the legal picture. The mother, however, did not waive any parental rights--and refuses to do so to this day, despite the FBI's attempts to arrest her for enjoying them.

This is how it happened. A woman named Janet Jenkins--no relation to either Lisa or her daughter, but who was living with them at the time--asked Lisa to move out in 2003. But Janet had become so attached to little baby Isabella that she insisted on being able to keep her, or at least have daily contact with her. Lisa, on the other hand, wanted nothing further to do with Janet. Janet pursued the case for the next 6 years, aided by donations from pro-homosexual people and organisations. By November 2009, she had been granted full custody of Isabella--a legalized kidnapping by every definition of the word. But by this point Lisa and Isabella left the country, and don't dare return until Isabella turns 18 in 2020.

Note: Lisa still had custody of Isabella at this point, and was not considered a fugitive until her custody ended in 2010, and her leaving the country in September became a crime retroactively, through demonstration of "intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of parental rights." This, even though the order to deny her the lawful exercise of her parental rights only dated to November 22nd.

Here's where the FBI entered the scene. Because Lisa did not hand over her daughter on January 1, 2010, she now was defined as the kidnapper of her own daughter, and the FBI was sent out to tear Isabella away from her mother and hand her over to Janet Jenkins--if they could find her.

The FBI hasn't managed to abduct the fugitive couple, but they are still hot on the case. This week they arrested Rev. Timothy Miller upon his entry into the United States (this was cheaper than tracking him down and extraditing him from where he lives in Nicaragua). He was charged with aiding and abetting in a kidnapping, due to evidence confiscated from numerous email and/or facebook accounts that he was involved in the disappearance of Lisa and Isabella. It looks like he is going to be in jail for a long time.

At least he won't have to spend the rest of his life registered on a watchlist. Giving shelter to a mother and her non-custodial daughter is not yet considered a violent crime.

The Miller Family

UPDATE April 25: I'm going to be following this case as it progresses. So I won't be making any more edits to the text above, but rather adding lines to the bottom. Latest news: Rev. Miller was released on $25,000 bond today, but restricted from leaving the state of Vermont, other than to travel to Pennsylvania. This could be rather difficult, as--last I checked--the state of New York intervenes between Vermont and Pennsylvania. If the order did not specify the state of New York as the only permissible thoroughfare, then I can think of many different routes that could be traveled between Vermont and Pennsylvania, including one through Ontario. He won't be able to cross that border, though, on his own passport; we can be sure of that.

Rev. Miller is also forbidden to discuss the case with his wife, as she is expected to be called to testify against him. If she refuses, we can expect one more person behind bars in this case--a mother of four young children. Yes, a judge will separate a married mother from her babies in order to coerce her to testify against her own husband in the case of a single mother being forcibly separated from her baby.

UPDATE April 26: The White Man's reporter on the scene states that the Vermont judge imposed a ban on travel outside of Pennsylvania, other than for traveling to and from court appearances in Vermont. This smacks of unconstitutionality, that a judge in one state could take jurisdiction over a defendant's presence in another state. Having released him from his own jurisdiction, he really has no control over Rev. Miller's presence or absence in any other state.

UPDATE May 4: Both hearings for tomorrow have been canceled. Mrs. Miller has claimed, and received, spousal privilege; she won't be required to testify against her husband. And by the way, Dana Kaegel didn't do her homework: she relied on Janet Jenkins for the name of Lisa Miller's husband--and got it wrong. It's a shame that our nation's defense is in the hands of such incompetents; ten minutes on the internet would have provided the right name, even quicker for an extra couple bucks.

UPDATE May 7: Rev. Miller was granted permission to leave the state to attend the wedding for which he had risked arrest by returning to the USA. The family sang a touching tribute to the bride and groom.
UPDATE May 12: Rev. Miller was indicted by grand jury for aiding in kidnapping Isabella Miller.

UPDATE May 17: The FBI have tracked down Lisa Miller in Jinotega, Nicaragua, but she was one step ahead of them and already fled to a new hideout. Nicaraguan police are threatening locals with torture to try to pry information out of them as to her new whereabouts.

UPDATE May 20: Sorry, please scratch the most recent update. Apparently it was all hearsay and rumour. If you've ever been to Jinotega, you know how remote that area is. Cell phone coverage is often only available up in a tree at the top of the hill. I'll hold off on future updates about the Nicaragua side of the story until I get independent confirmation. Since the FBI are covertly monitoring an unknown number of email accounts in Nicaragua, it makes it even harder to get a straight story out of the region. Agents are welcome to submit any information they have as comments.

UPDATE May 25: Rev. Miller tendered a "not guilty" plea today through one of his attorneys. It will be 3 months before the next hearing, and until the next update, unless Sarah and Lydia are brought to ground in Central America.

UPDATE July 31: During Tent Meetings held the past week in Lancaster County, PA, Timo was invited to speak. Pablo Yoder reports: "It was also encouraging to hear Timo and Joanna tell the story of the day of the arrest. Timo’s witnessing for hours with fellow prisoners during his stay in the prison really blessed me. Also, it was refreshing to hear how God used him to bring cheer into a sad house called: Jail. A picture that will ever be etched in my mind was when he told me how they took him and his new buddies to the courtroom. A chain was circled around each prisoner’s waist, their handcuffs linked to the chain in the front. They also shackled their feet in a chain. Bound hand and feet, it was hard for the whole row of men to walk. So they slowly hobbled to the courtroom, Timo, as a dangerous criminal like the rest. As the picture was drawn in my mind, I couldn’t help but think of the Apostle Paul. He was also treated like a criminal for the cause of Christ.”

UPDATE October 18: I went through and made a few corrections to this blog, having reviewed all information on the case. This post and this one contain the latest available updates.

A review of "Cache in Chinese Mountain Reveals 20,000 Prehistoric Fossils"

A giant cache of nearly 20,000 fossil reptiles, shellfish and a host of other prehistoric creatures unearthed from a mountain in China is now revealing how life recovered after the most devastating mass extinction on Earth.

Well, let's begin at the beginning with my objections to this article.
1. "Nearly 20,000" is needless precision. Obviously they didn't count all these fossils yet; this is a wild guess, with an aim toward the outside.
2. I don't like the word 'prehistoric' because there's nothing prehistoric about this cache. I can date it to within a year, by recorded history.
3. Reptiles, shellfish, mollusks, and crustaceans don't belong in the same layer of the geologic column. But no one seems upset to find them all in the same sedimentary deposit. Of course, if they all died in The Flood, no one should be.
4. This cache is revealing that the earth was once covered with a massive flow of water. People who don't see that, could see anything else. But stand by to find out that first impressions didn't turn out to be right after all. They never do, when they were wrong in the first place.
5. Dead bodies don't reveal a blessed thing about how survivors of a catastrophe recovered. That's like visiting a mass grave in Haiti to see how well survivors of the 2010 earthquake recovered.
6. Yep, it was the most devastating mass extinction event on earth all right. Probably the only one, though.

Moving along . . .

This research could help point out which species might be more or less susceptible to extinction nowadays, and how the world might recover from the damage caused by humanity, scientists added.

Yada, yada, yada. Note all the couched language: could, might, might. It's all wild guesses. And humanity isn't going to cause any more global floods--we have that from the Cause of the last one.

Life was nearly completely wiped out approximately 250 million years ago by massive volcanic eruptions and devastating global warming. Only one in 10 species survived this cataclysmic end-Permian event.

Lots to cover from just two sentences. Yeah, life was nearly completely wiped out, all right. Only a single breeding pair survived of most species. But no, no species were wiped out by The Flood; extinction came later, after the earth was repopulated. These numbers are wild guesses.

Much was uncertain regarding the steps life took to piece itself back together after this disaster, or even how long it took. Now the clearest picture yet of this recovery has been discovered by a team of researchers, who excavated away half a mountain in Luoping in southwest China to unearth thousands of marine fossils, the first fully functional ecosystem seen after the end-Permian.

Mm, hmm. We have no idea how it happened, but we sure are convinced that it did. And absolutely every piece of evidence we find only makes us more certain that it happened--but never any clearer on how.

The 50-foot-thick (16 meters) layer of limestone that held these fossils dates back to when south China was a large island just north of the equator with a tropical climate. A smattering of fossil land plants suggest this marine community lived near a conifer forest.

Note that all these fossils are in a single layer of limestone! Fifty feet laid down all at once--try that in your back yard sometime. And you can't tell anything about what grew where when you're looking at a deposit from a worldwide flood! You may as well hypothesize that two bodies next to each other in a Dachau mass grave represent people who grew up in the same neighborhood in Vilnius.

The fossils are exceptionally well-preserved, with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues. Apparently they were protected across the ages by mats of microbes that rapidly sealed their bodies off from decay after death.

That has got to be about the most oxymoronic hypothesis I've ever seen. Microbes preserving a dead body from decay??? Try that one out at your local funeral parlour and see how the viewing goes. What preserved them fast was 50 feet of cement precipitating over their fresh carcasses.

"Soft tissues can give us more profound information about larger patterns of evolution and relationships, such as the feathers on dinosaurs," Benton said. "Soft tissues in some of the marine creatures may help us understand diet and locomotion."

Yeah, except that there are no feathers on dinosaurs.

Ninety percent of the fossils are bug-like creatures, such as crustaceans, millipedes and horseshoe crabs. Fish make up 4 percent, including the "living fossil" known as the coelacanth, which is still alive today nearly 250 million years later. Snails, bivalves (creatures including clams and oysters), squid-like belemnoids, nautilus-like ammonoids and other mollusks make up about 2 percent of the fossils.

Typical fossil distribution, but always predominantly marine. Marine life, naturally, would have been buried in Flood deposits of limestone and other precipitous material.

The largest creature the scientists found was a thalattosaur, a marine reptile about 10 feet (3 meters) in length, which would have preyed on the larger fishes there, which reached lengths of about 3 feet (1 m). Other predatory marine reptiles the scientists found include dolphin-bodied ichthyosaurs. "Every time we find a new site like this, we get closer to what life in the past was really like," Benton told LiveScience.

Yeah, but they're still looking in the wrong direction. Mostly what they should be getting closer to is a clearer picture of what death on a certain date in the past was really like.

A short review of 'Nightfall', a short story by Isaac Asimov

Nightfall was Isaac Asimov's first big hit as a science fiction writer, published when he was only 21 and working in his father's candy store. But it was voted the Best Science Fiction Short Story in the twenty-five years after he wrote it.

The plot of Nightfall revolves around an idea first voiced by Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

In Asimov's take on the question, Night falls like clockwork at the end of every 2049-year Cycle, but only the Cultists are able to preserve any remembrance of Nightfall into the next Cycle, and only in The Book of Revelations, described in the Story as fugitive memories of children, combined with the confused, half-incoherent babblings of half-mad morons; the testimony of those least qualified to serve as historians, probably edited and re-edited through the Cycles--a mass of distortion, even if it was based on fact.

But at the end of this last Cycle, the sciences of astronomy, archaeology and psychology have reached such a peak that representatives of these disciplines--fully cognizant of what is about to happen--along with a still-skeptical journalist, are determined to do what they can to preserve civilization through the four-hour Night and into the next Cycle.

But they run into a problem. The Cultists, having shared the Prophecies of the Book of Revelation with the Scientists, are disgruntled by the Scientists' de-mystification of The Book. Latimer accuses Anton, "Your pretended [scientific] explanation backed our beliefs, and at the same time removed all necessity for them. You made of the Darkness and the Stars a natural phenomenon and removed all its real significance. That was blasphemy."

Aton replied, "If so, the fault isn't mine. The facts exist. What can I do but state them?"

"Your 'facts' are a fraud and a delusion."

Aton stamped angrily. "How do you know?"

And the answer came back with the certainty of absolute faith. "I know!"

Asimov got one thing right: the conflict between the Scientists and the Cultists is absolute. Both agree that Night is coming; but whilst the Cultists believe that it is the coming judgment of God upon unbelievers, the Scientists are convinced that it is simply an eclipse which takes place every 2049 years, bringing several hours of darkness to a six-sunned world that, in the cyclic cataclysm that always follows, has again forgotten the previous Night. The Cultists' vague solution is to simply have faith in the Book of Revelations, so as to escape the Madness that always ensues when the Stars Come Out. The Cultists are convinced that anyone who believes what the Scientists are saying is doomed to madness brought on by exposure to Stars. The Scientists are convinced that anyone who believes what the Cultists are saying is doomed to madness brought on by exposure to Darkness (both being equally unknown on Lagash). And of course, this being Asimov's world, the Scientists are right and the Cultists wrong. But both go equally mad when Darkness falls and the Stars come out, because in this world of Asimov's, darkness inevitably brings about madness, with or without stars and regardless of one's beliefs.

The parallels to our world are clear, Asimov being an atheist and a scientist. The forces of Rationalism are on the one side, the forces of Religion on another. Whilst the Scientists can understand and even explain the beliefs of the Cultists, they know better than to share them. The Cultists, on their part, reject all Scientific thought as blasphemy and do all they can to defeat Scientific progress.

Asimov is clearly alluding to the long conflict between Creationists, whom he portrays as the Cultists, and Evolutionists, whom he portrays as the Scientists. But in setting up the conflict, Asimov has it exactly backwards. It is the Evolutionists who cannot understand Creationists, whilst Creationists can fully understand and clearly explain the tenets of Evolutionism. It is Evolutionists who pour their efforts into silencing the Creationists, declaring their beliefs Dangerous and Abusive. And contrary to the state of things on Lagash, it is the Creationists who, starting from a belief in The Book, went on to discover astronomy, archaeology, and psychology--and the Evolutionists who retard progress, lest it violate their sacred beliefs.

What concerns me the most about this state of affairs is that Asimov couldn't see that he had it backwards. No creationists have broken into science labs to destroy the observation equipment, as Latimer did on Lagash. No creationist mobs have marched on an observatory, torches in hand. No creationist has effectively muzzled scientific debate. Yet clearly, Asimov, genius that he was, operated on the assumption that they would if they could, blind to all the evidence that the shoe is in fact on the other foot. And thus it ever is with Rationalists.

As a creationist, I am a mortal enemy to the Truth as Asimov saw it. I must be silenced, lest I blaspheme the Truth. I must be denied a platform, lest I lead my nation into another age of Darkness. I must not be allowed to come to power, or I will do to them as they desire to do to me. And the reason he is clearly wrong and I am clearly right? Well, it's obvious: his scientific explanations have removed all necessity for my beliefs. He made of the Bible and the Creation natural phenomena and removed all their real significance.

And this, despite all evidence to the contrary.

There are more articles on this topic here and here.

What we're looking at is the crumbling of a budding Turkish-Israeli alliance, replaced by overt Turkish support for Hamas in Gaza and the nuclear regime in Iran. What these two moves have in common is Turkey's long war with its Kurdish minority. Supporting terrorists in Gaza helps deflect attention from its war against the Kurds, where terrorism is a staple feature of both sides. Being one of Iran's few friends in the world gives it back-door support in its war against the Kurds.

This leaves the Kurds with no place to hide now except their quasi-homeland of Iraqi Kurdistan, where they are safe enough from outside attack to enable them to focus their energies on fighting each other--mostly politically by now, rather than militarily. The Kurds would love to be able to annex Iranian Kurdistan, considerably extending their front against the Turks. It is only natural that, with Israel and the Kurds both looking for a new ally, they would find common ground against Iran. With the last vestiges of any Turkish support for Israel gone, and Turkey having instead aligned itself with two of Israel's sworn enemies, there's nothing in the way of an Israeli-Kurdish pact to bring down Iran's nuclear capability.

Ankara distanced itself further from the West last week by signing a pact with Iran for the exchange of intelligence in real time in their offensives against Kurdish separatists. Tehran will maintain a permanent intelligence officers' mission at the Turkish general command's operations department, while admitting Turkish officers to its own high command operations center. debkafile's intelligence sources report that while the exchanges are formally limited to the war on Kurdish insurgents, they are certain to spread to other spheres.

Israel is deeply concerned over this and other developments in the wake of the defection of Turkey, its erstwhile strategic partner and long trusted repository of shared military secrets.

Sunday, Aug. 1, defense minister Ehud Barak told the army radio: "… the nomination in recent weeks of a new chief of the Turkish secret services who is a supporter of Iran worries us." It could result, he said "in the Iranians having access to secret information."

Two months ago, debkafile reported that Turkish prime minister had appointed an avid admirer of Iran Hakan Fidan as new chief of MIT central intelligence agency.
Fidan made friends with Iranian officials during his stint as Turkish delegate to the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna and took their side consistently in controversies over Tehran's nuclear program.

It was he who came up with the plan earlier this year for a Turkish-Brazilian initiative to bypass big power diplomacy over Iran and scuttle their plans to place Iran under tough sanctions.

The intelligence exchange pact Ankara signed with Tehran last week added a fresh element to Israel's worries over Turkey's next steps.

The latest on the planned Iranian border penetration

This is all from The Debka Review:

debkafile's military sources report: The Israeli Air Force had been drilling high-risk attacks on precipitous cliff caves similar to the mountain tunnels in which Iran has hidden nuclear facilities. The crash occurred in the last stage of a joint Israeli-US-Romanian exercise for simulating an attack on Iran. Aboard the helicopter were six Israeli airmen and a Romanian flight captain.
Thwarted by Moscow's refusal to sell them S-300 interceptor missiles, Iran has given up on adequate air and missile defense shields for its nuclear sites and in the last couple of years has been blasting deep tunnels beneath mountain peaks more than 2,000 meters high for housing nuclear facilities. There, they were thought by Tehran to be safe from air or missile attack.
The American and Israeli air forces have since been developing tactics for evading Iranian radar and flying at extremely low-altitudes through narrow mountain passes so as to reach the tunnel entrances for attacks on the nuclear equipment undetected. The drill in Romania took place at roughly the same altitude and in similar terrain that a US or Israeli air attack would expect to encounter in Iran.

and:

Talking to CNN's State of the Union, Gen. Hayden predicted Iran would build its program to the point where it's just below having an actual weapon. In his view, "That would be as destabilizing to the region as the real thing."
debkafile's sources take this as affirmation that neither Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states nor Israel will be willing to live on constant edge with an Iran which can build nuclear bombs or warheads whenever it likes. They note that Hayden has added his voice to a growing number of leading American figures and publications which have indicated in the past fortnight that the military option against Iran has climbed the top of President Barack Obama's list of priorities.
According to our Washington sources, the US president switched course after hearing Saudi King Abdullah assert explicitly: "We cannot live with a nuclear Iran."
Abdullah added he no longer believes diplomacy or sanctions will have any effect and made it clear that if the Americans continued to back away from direct action to terminate Iran's advance on a nuclear bomb, the Saudi and its allies would go their own way on the nuclear issue.
Today, therefore, the White House is no longer willing to countenance Iran's nuclear development advancing up to the threshold of a weapons capacity and stopping there. And since Tehran will never cede its prerogative to determine every stage of its nuclear program without outside interference, the only option remaining to the United States is military.

finally,

debkafile's Iranian sources quote President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying: "We have precise information that the Americans have devised a plot, according to which they seek to launch a psychological war on Iran. They plan to attack at least two countries in the region within the next three months," he said, without specifying which countries were the subjects of the alleged conspiracy, only hinting that America's senior military ally in the region, Israel, was directly involved.

Things are heating up, folks.

The impending Persio-American War

In hindsight, we note that one of the immediate causes of America being drawn into World War Two was a decision by Dean Acheson to cut off Japan's supply of oil to feed its war machine. This followed unilateral moves by President Roosevelt and the US Congress first to place a steel embargo on Japan, effectively shutting down their war production, and finally to freeze all Japanese assets. These harsh measures backed the Japanese government into a corner they thought they could get out of only by attacking the nation that had put them in it: The United States. The rest is history.

Events of the last week have effectively backed the government of Iran into a nearly identical corner. Again acting unilaterally, President Obama and the US Congress have clamped down on Iranian banks and airlines, severely reducing their ability to do business outside the country. Already, gasoline usage even within Iran is being cut to cope with the new reality.

Like the one 70 years ago, this is a no-win situation. Japan had to face the choice between dismantling its military, or sending it into battle while it still had the tools with which to fight. As the former was unthinkable, the latter became inevitable. Iran is in the same position, but with one crucial difference: unlike Japan, it is on the brink of nuclear capability. The main thing holding off the inception of hostilities is the hope--a hope first held by Hitler's Germany--that they will soon have the Secret Weapon that will guarantee their success in the war that will inevitably come. And the fact that he didn't quite yet have the A-bomb didn't keep Hitler from starting a war he was convinced he could win conventionally. It was only later, as time was running out on that hope, that he pinned all his hopes on a nuclear capability.

Time, however, is already running out for Iran. The possibility that they may have an A-bomb within a year or two is balanced by the increasing constriction of their ability to field the rest of their armed forces. Now that their long-range radar commandeers the highest mountain in Lebanon, allowing them to monitor any eastbound sorties from Israel, they are more secure of being able to continue their nuclear program unimpeded, come peace or war.

Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu recently downplayed the possibility of war with Iran. In view of what has just happened, that can only mean that he is going ahead with plans for the exact opposite. And he's probably looking into the possibility of a flyover of Saudi Arabia as part of a surprise attack on Iran. The three US carriers presently in the Gulf would probably be needed to provide cover. The scenario I envision is one in which US fighters would fly westward across Saudia Arabia, exchanging radar identities over the desert with a sortie of painted-over Israeli jets that flew in under the radar. These would then continue toward the Gulf, refueling in the air under their new identities, cross into Iraq, and wreak their havoc. Like the pilots in Doolittle's Daring Raid, these may have no reasonable expectation of being able to fly their planes back home after completing their mission.

Knowing President Obama's timidity, he's much more likely to let them take out Iran's nuclear capability than try it himself. But will he fall for such a scheme? Of course not, unless the US and Iran are already at war. Unless, or until. Perhaps such a surprise attack would be the opening salvo in that war. Remember Pearl Harbor!

At the rate things are escalating, I expect the opening salvos in that war to occur before the end of September, at the latest. And remember, Ramadan begins in only a month.

ETA on July 30: While I'm in a predictive frame of mind, I expect that Kurdish separatists will play some role in the war. On which side, I can't say.

Don't tread on Superman's cape!

Three Houston police officers have been restricted to desk duty after they followed a Chinese diplomat into the parking garage of the Chinese Consulate, arrested the man and injured him, the Houston mayor said.

Under international practise, the premises of foreign embassies and consulates are outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, and diplomats have legal immunity from arrest.

Houston police tried to stop a car that was missing a license plate, CBS News reported. When the car didn't stop, they pursued it into a garage. Police handcuffed and arrested the driver, injuring him, the report said. CBS News identified the official as Ben Ren Yu. The Houston consulate website lists a deputy consul-general, Yu Boren.

This is basically what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Mr. Yu thought himself and his vehicle to be above the law, which indeed they were--in theory. The police officers thought they had the power to pull over and question the driver of any car without proper proof of registration, which they did--in theory.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, both sides did their utmost to assert their rights: Mr. Yu in refusing to pull over, and the cops in pursing a subject into an internationally protected zone. The diplomat got treated like a common thug--nothing unusual about that, except that the cops made a serious mistake in thinking they could get away with it this time. Now they're waiting for the next shoe to drop while Mr. Yu recovers from his injuries.

There's a lesson to be learned in this: obey the guy with the gun: even if you think you're right and he's wrong, he still has the gun. Let him calm down first, and later you can sort things out. Otherwise, somebody's going to get hurt.

I think there's another lesson in this, for the cops. Guys: think about this. Every day the Texas Department of Corrections releases at least one convicted felon back onto the streets of Houston. Most days, several of them. So why be in such a rush to cuff everybody you think might have something to hide? Chances are they'll be back out on bail before your shift is over. Slow down and let the legal system work. If they deserve to be caught, they will, sooner or later. You don't have to be the one to do it. And don't feel bad about the ones that get away; sooner or later, they all do.

Tracking down Zerubbabel

Isaac Newton was a genius; no one disputes that. And no matter what he applied his genius to, he made breakthroughs that changed the way things were done. For example, turn a dime or quarter on edge. You will observe a ribbing that goes all the way around the coin. While this serves no purpose today, it was a breakthrough in its time, invented by Newton to end the practice of 'clipping' the edges of specie, a sort of do-it-yourself degradation of the money supply. He came up with this idea when put in charge of the Royal Mint, and ever since then, coins have carried ribbing--as have the tokens that replaced them. Nickels and pennies don't, because they were never made of precious metal.

One idea Newton tinkered with throughout his life (claiming to spend only his 'idle time' on it) was a universal chronology of ancient kingdoms. The unfinished manuscript has once again been posthumously released, edited this time by the same man who brought Ussher's chronology back in print. Inasmuch as it was written before any of the treasures of Ancient Egypt had been opened up by the Rosetta Stone, it could bear editing again by an Egyptologist. And inasmuch as its dates for ancient Egyptian History could be falsified by Carbon-14 dating, this also should be attempted.

But one thing Newton gave to the science of chronology in this work was the technique of dating by generations. It turns out that he didn't originate the idea--it actually underpins much of ancient Greek chronology. What he did was bring Science into the picture, thus drastically reducing dates in ancient history. For example, he set an upper limit of 26 to 28 years for generations in a dynasty, with 18 to 20 years the average length of a reign. Ancients, on the other hand, assumed 33 to 40 years per reign (and in some cases as high as 80 to 100), thus greatly inflating the dates for the earliest monarchs when calculated by generations. Newton was able to conclusively prove that the dates generally accepted for European history get off by up to some three centuries as the inflated generations take us farther and farther back. Modern historians have disregarded Newton's work in this area, to their great detriment.

Calculating chronology by generations is actually an idea I had come up with myself several years ago. I even made a post on it earlier. This post represents my latest thinking.

The Gospels contain two different genealogies of Jesus, the son of Mary. They are so different that people have puzzled for millennia how they can end with the same person. I happen to believe that Matthew's genealogy is that of Joseph, Jesus' common law father, and Luke's is that of Mary, Jesus' birth mother. But regardless, both genealogies share one name in common--or at least appear to: Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel.

Personally, I think this is just a case where two people had the same first and last name--all too common in genealogy. But the interesting thing about this name is that it doesn't really matter: we can use this unique name to date anyone who has it, regardless of how many there were.

Zerubbabel has a very specific meaning in Hebrew: literally, it's sown in Babylon. Now, whether this refers to the individual's conception or his birth, we can reasonably date it to within one generation of 598/7 BC when Jeconiah was taken captive to Babylon. Using this technique relies on only two assumptions:

1) A Jewish father would give this name to his son if he was the first in his family line to be conceived and/or born in Babylonian captivity. The name reflects both the fresh despair of captivity, and a spark of hope for eventual return.

2) The name carries such a negative connotation that it would not be passed on to later generations.

So, let's start with the working hypothesis that anyone named Zerubbabel was born between 586 and 550 BC. Plugging this date into Matthew's genealogy, we find a perfect fit: Zerubbabel was the grandson of Jehoiachin (alias Jeconiah or Coniah), who was born in 616 BC. It's apparent that his first son was born before his exile at age 18, so Shealtiel's firstborn would have been the first in his line to be born in Babylon.

One fascinating piece of information was found on Cuneiform tablets dating to the general time that Jehoiachin was "given a regular ration by the king" of Babylon. It states something to this effect:
Tablet 28122: To Jaoukin, king . . .
Tablet 28178: "10 (sila of oil) to ...Jaoukin, king of Ja[...]
2 1/2 sila to [...so]ns of the king of Judah"
Tablet 28186: "10 (sila) to Jakuukinu, the son of the king of Jakudu
2 1/2 sila for the 5 sons of the king of Jakudu"

I don't think we can identify the men on the third tablet with those on the first two, but at any rate we do know that Jehoiachin had 7 sons, and it's likely that 1 or 2 died young. This is likely the reason why Zerubbabel is sometimes listed as the son of Shealtiel, and sometimes as the son of Pedaiah; apparently a levirate marriage was involved.

But who is Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri in Luke 3:27? He doesn't appear to be closely related to the other one by blood, but, due to the unique historical conditions of the time, must have been in his same generation.

Now, taking that information, we can plug a date into the long genealogy from Nathan (born around 1050 BC) to Jesus (born around 0 BC). The 41 generations would average 25.6 years each--very reasonable when each generation doesn't have to be a firstborn, and an indication that probably none are missing. Plugging Zerubbabel in at 575 BC, we get fore and aft averages of 22.62 and 28.75 years respectively, both of which are still within the normal range.

But trying to fit Zerubbabel into Matthew's genealogy has a big problem: he's only 11 generations back from Jesus, rather than 20. This means an average generation of 52.27 years; way too many, especially since most of these are first- or second-borns. But remember, we already know that Matthew deliberately excluded 3 or 4 generations farther up. So how many can we reasonably say he excluded between Zerubbabel and Abiud--the descendant who follows him on Matthew's list?

Well, as it turns out, 1 Chronicles 3 already gives Zerubbabel's descendants out for 6 generations--and Abiud doesn't make the list. Adding these six to the 11 already listed gives an average generation of 33.82 years--still a bit too long.

If, as Newton showed, we can use generations to fix chronology, we can also do the opposite--by counting the years between Zerubbabel and Jesus, we can show that at least six, and probably about ten, generations are missing between Zerubbabel and Joseph--and likely before we even get to Abiud. UPDATE May 2012 I recently discovered a possible factor in Matthew's dividing Jesus' genealogy into three sets of fourteen: One set getting us to David the King, one set of Davidic Kings, and one more set of exiles down to Jesus, the heir to David's throne. 'DAVID' in Hebrew gematria has the value of fourteen.

Why The White Man is not an Expert on Anything

I wrote recently on the subject of Old Pilots and Bold Pilots, in which I appeared to find some exceptions to the rule that there are no old, bold pilots. But as I consider the question, I think that my exceptions actually proved the rule. The pilots who lived to an advanced age may or may not have started out bold; but, having survived any risks they undertook in their youth, later flew as carefully as their old age required.

There is a corollary, I think, to the question of learning. "A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote Alexander Pope at the age of twenty-one, in his first published work. Here is the quote in context:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744), An Essay on Criticism L. 215, 1711.

But look what Pope wrote the year he died:

"Ask of the Learned the way? The Learned are blind;
This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind;
Some place the bliss in action, some in ease,
Those call it Pleasure, and Contentment these."
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Ep. IV. L. 19.

Another thirty-five years had dimmed in Pope's mind the value of much learning. Indeed, much learning was ridiculed by the ancients:

"Your much learning is driving you insane."
Porcius Festus, quoted in Luke, Acts, XXVI.24, c. 50

Especially was much learning of useless facts ridiculed:

"The languages, especially the dead,
The sciences, and most of all the abstruse,
The arts, at least all such as could be said
To be the most remote from common use,
In all these he was much and deeply read."
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I. St. 40, published anonymously in 1819

The ancients valued learning, but never for learning's sake:

"Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous."
Confucius, Analects Bk. II. Ch. XV.

Even much learning could end up being of no benefit:

"I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine
And even, alas, Theology
From end to end with labor keen;
And here, poor fool; with all my lore
I stand no wiser than before."
Goethe, Faust, I. Night, 1808.

Learning was only of use if it resulted in wisdom:

"The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." Solomon, Proverbs, I. 7, c. 1000 BCE

"Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes
And pause awhile from Learning to be wise;
Yet think what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the goal.
See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust."
Samuel Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes, L. 157, 1754.

So, is much learning--the kind of learning that requires one to become an expert on anything--really worth it?

"Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. " James, James III.1, c. 45

"Few men make themselves Masters of the things they write or speak."
John Selden (1584 – 1654), Table Talk, "Learning."

Perhaps, taking our cue from the Bold Pilots, we who aspire to teach should begin in our youth to acquire much learning, realising that it will be some time before we will actually have the wisdom required to profitably impart that learning to others. But we must always realise that we are ever learning, even as we are teaching:

Homines, dum docent, discunt [Men learn while they teach].
Seneca, Epistolæ Ad Lucilium VII, 64

So, The White Man is not an expert on anything--yet; and may never be. But in the mean time, I intend to stick out my neck and at least question the learning--yea, even the wisdom--of those who claim that they are. And, in so doing, I expect to learn more myself.

Republican Protest Votes fail to deny Owens a seat in Congress

Well, Doug Hoffman failed to take the victory in the Special Election to fill a vacancy Barack Obama created in the 23rd NY district of the US House. Democrat Bill Owens appears to have won without even getting a majority of the votes cast--most appear to have been split between the Republican and Conservative candidates. This despite the fact that he was actually endorsed by the Republican candidate!

Here's how things broke down:
Republican Candidate: Endorsed by Republican Party. Got just enough protest votes (5.6%) to deny the Conservative Candidate a majority.
Conservative Candidate: Endorsed by Conservative Party and Republican heavyweights. Came in a close second (45%).
Democratic Candidate: Endorsed by Democratic Party, Democratic heavyweights, and Republican Candidate. Picked up enough Republican-endorsed votes to win, but without a majority (49.4%).

There are at least a couple of lessons here. One, for the Democrats: don't expect to win the 23rd district unless you can get the Republican candidate to endorse you. Then for the Republicans: Don't be so stupid, ever again, as to run a candidate who will bow out of the race and endorse her opponent at the last minute. Finally, for the Conservatives: Keep trying; every time your candidate denies the Republican party's liberal candidate a win, it's a good thing for your cause. But remember the rule: a Conservative never wins a recount effort, and a liberal never loses one--unless the Courts step in to stop it in time.

The Tipping Point for Third-Party Politics

In the first eighty years of its constitutional existence, the American Federal Government was controlled by no single party or even pair of parties. Some national elections boasted as many as five strong candidates for the same position. Gradually, though, one party consolidated a grip on power, to the point that only a single united party could hope to break it. This was the party of the Jacksonian Democrats, which by the end of this period was known as the Democratic Party. Opposition to it had by then pretty much coalesced around what had only a couple of election cycles earlier been not only a third party, but a minor one: the Republican Party. One or the other of these parties has dominated national politics ever since.

A crack appeared in this wall of national access when socialist Bernard Sanders attained to the House in 1991 as an independent--the first independent to be elected to Congress in forty years, half of which time Sanders had been trying to get into the Senate without having to go through a national party. He attained this goal in 2007, thanks to the help of the Democrats, who never mounted a serious challenge against him. In both elections, he won a seat being vacated by Jim Jeffords, who had always run as a Republican, but voted more like a Democrat. By the time he delivered his Senate seat to Sanders, he had already left the Republican Party in name as well as in deed.

So, until the last election cycle, "Independent" has been a euphemism for a person whose political ideals fall somewhat to the left of the line dividing the two ruling parties. That began to change when Joseph Lieberman had to leave his party to retain his Senate seat. But he still caucuses with the Democrats, as has every "Independent" for the past half century.

But a further change seems to be in the offing. Doug Hoffman, an accounting manager with no political experience, has pulled into the lead in a 3-way race for the New York seat being vacated by Republican Congressman John McHugh, the newly appointed Secretary of the Army. When Dede Scozzafava, one of the most liberal Republicans in the history of the New York State Assembly, got the nod from the Republican Party, ground-level support for her candidacy evaporated, and Doug Hoffman soon found himself the front runner, with even more popular support than Obama-endorsed Independent-turned-Democrat Bill Owens. Once Scozzafava found herself a distant third, she bowed out of the race. So far Owens, despite an unprecedented endorsement from Scozzafava herself, hasn't picked up any of her supporters; Hoffman already shot five points ahead in the polls, while the rest of Scozzafava's former supporters remain undecided--not a very influential place to be on the eve of the election. The Republican Party, which had not only failed to line up support for their candidate but saw such conservative heavyweights as former presidential running mate Sarah Palin speaking out in support of the front-runner, is now scrambling to adjust to the new reality of an Independent in Congress operating to the right of their own party.

This is a new reality, indeed. The Republican Party has shown itself so inept at picking a winning candidate, and with such a long history of drumming up support for legislators who ended up switching parties, that its role as one of two reigning parties is fast approaching obsolescence. It faces the same fate as the Whig Party, whose fortunes it overthrew in only two consecutive election cycles a century and a half ago. Whether the Conservative Party--or another of a large number of minor third parties presently in the mix--will end up taking its place, remains to be seen.

Update: As mentioned, the Republican candidate, seeing she could not take this seat herself, gave it to the Democrats rather than allowing a true independent to take it. Bill Owens won with 49 per cent of the vote; Dede, still on the ballot, herself still got six per cent, enough to deny Hoffman the victory.
But that's not all. Dede even tried to give up her own NY Assembly seat in favor of her Democrat opponent, but failed; now a Republican holds it.
It gets even crazier. In 2010, Hoffman was stupid enough to run, first as a Republican, then on a third-party ticket when he lost the Primary. He was able to keep Bill Owens down to only 47% of the vote this time.
In 2012, the North State voters showed once again that they weren't interested in being represented by a liberal Democrat:  for the third election in a row, Owens won with less than half the votes cast (although enough votes were disqualified to give him a bare majority), and then only by getting enough urban votes to offset losing eight of the twelve counties in his district. This time, Hoffman sat out the race, and Green Party candidate Donald Hassig got to be the spoiler.

The folly of relying on a machine to think

It seems that six months do not pass by anymore without an airline incident in which the primary cause was the pilot relying on a computer to fly the plane for him. In a day in which it costs years of training and upwards of $100,000 to become a commercial pilot, pilots increasingly have less flying and more paperwork to occupy their attention. A case in point is the recent incident in which Northwest Airlines Flight 188 overshot its target by 150 miles while in a self-imposed cone of silence. Why? Both flight officers were busy working on their laptops while they let the computer fly the plane. Paperwork had so consumed their working life that a machine had been left to do their job--but without having access to the tools it needed to do it right.

What is so ridiculous about this is that although GPS has been available for over two decades, it's still not used to control the computers that fly all commercial airliners to their destinations. Although the technology is certainly available to prevent this sort of incident, nobody suggests using it. Instead they blame the pilots, when it is the system more than anything else that is broken.

ETA:
In yet another classic, but far more tragic, example of this, a Navy minesweeper ran aground in the sacred waters of a Philippine reef. The cause? Relying on a GPS to tell them where the reef was, rather than looking at the sea charts. The GPS being a mere 8 miles off in its approximation has resulted in the sacking of the ship's commanding officer, executive officer, quartermaster, and officer of the deck--and a cost of at least $27 million to the US Navy. That's $25 million to scrap the ship, and $2 million to placate the reef's patron goddess.

Where was Zbigniew Brzezinski on June 8, 1967?

Are we just going to sit there and watch? ... We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a 'Liberty' in reverse."
--Zbigniew Brzezinski, referring to rumors that Israeli jets may overfly Iraq on their way to taking out Iranian nuclear reactors.

There are several things interesting about this quote. Number one, who is Zbigniew Brzezinski? He was National Security Adviser under, of all people, Jimmy Carter. Pat Robertson saw him as the tail that wagged the dog. If he is still being taken seriously 30 years after leaving office, obviously that man has some serious clout far and beyond any government position he's ever held.

Secondly, he's referring to the Liberty incident as one that was 'a deliberate accident'. I've thought this all along, but the official position of both the US and Israel is a) Israeli jets and torpedo boats didn't realize that the ship in international waters flying an American Flag was one of ours until after they tried to sink it, and b) Everything regarding the incident remains sealed under the highest levels of secrecy [until now anyway], even after most of the people involved 42 years ago are already dead.

This also raises the question: Where was Zbigniew Brzezinski on June 8, 1967?

It's interesting that only this year--four decades after the action--was a Silver Star medal finally awarded to Terry Halbardier in which Israel was actually mentioned as the nation whose jets were strafing him as he strung a makeshift antenna so that the Liberty could get out the message that it was under attack. It was only due to his actions that the Sixth Fleet was alerted and Israel was forced to stop shooting the survivors. And this came only 3 years after Halbardier finally received the Purple Heart for injuries suffered in the strafing run.

Inasmuch as Halbardier has always been a "Liberty Incident Truther" about the attack, the fact that he has finally received what should have been virtually automatic recognition for his valor implies that official US attitudes on The Liberty Incident are softening.

If I live long enough--about another 40 years--I expect to find a similar softening of the lid of secrecy that has remain clamped over the 9/11 incidents.

Cracking the Google Bar Code

It's been more than 20 years since I sat down one day with a pile of envelopes and cracked the Zone Improvement Plan bar code. Excited, I then turned my hand to cracking the Universal Product Code, but soon gave up in frustration. The series of thick and thin bars seemed to carry no information corresponding to the digits beneath them.

Well, today on the 57th anniversary of the official recognition of the bar code, I finally did it. The key turned out to be that the thick and thin spaces between the bars also carry information, and, even more importantly, there are extraneous digits at the beginning, middle, and end of the code. Furthermore, there are always an odd number of digits (in order to begin and end the series with a bar rather than a space), so in the last half of the code the numerals begin with a space rather than a bar.

This all came about because today the GOOGLE logo is a bar code. I haven't been able to crack it yet, but I've gone to all the work of teasing out the digits. I don't know yet whether they are base-2 or base-4 binary, but nothing I've tried so far has worked. I welcome suggestions!

Here are the digits:

2112142113131341111341111221142211141122141221142331112

There are 55 digits, which to me probably signifies that 211 and 112 are the beginning and ending markers (which is more ZIP code than UPC code), and that the central digit, 1, marks the middle. That leaves 12 numerals of 4 digits each. They can't be read as UPC code numerals, which always consist of 4-digit sequences that add up to seven. How that is supposed to spell Google, I don't know. Maybe instead it's a date: 10-07-1952/2009.

Or, the end markers could just be the digit 2 and there are 13 numerals. Please help!

Added on October 8th:
Well, I was on the right track. The end marker '2' is only there to allow the code to end in a bar; barcodes for that reason always have to have an extra digit as long as the characters contain an even number of digits. This particular code is rather consistent, in that all other characters contain six digits. So I was a bit short on the end-markers; the symmetry of their outside digits was only coincidental.

But the extraneous 'g' truly is a mystery. In the science of textual criticism, this would be referred to as dittography, but of a rather unusual kind.

The entire barcode translates as follows:
-begin sequence-Googleg-end sequence-.

I don't see that it would have been all that hard to decode only 49 characters instead of 55, especially given that the key was freely available online. And the notion of a checksum doesn't seem to fit, as it is only used with numeric codes like UPC.

I'll check back in if anyone can solve the mystery. And yes, a malicious website in China (forexbids.cn) has hacked into many of the sites discussing this mystery!

Machine Guns in Police Cars--a threat to the saftey of inner-city neighborhoods?

"County Sheriff's Department is asking the public's help to locate a rifle stolen from a department patrol car.

The car was parked near an officer's home [a few blocks from the inner city of Elkhart]. The incident occurred between 11 p.m. Friday and 7:30 a.m. Saturday.

Missing:

• A department-issued black Colt M16, a .223-caliber automatic rifle; serial number of 4459957.

• Four magazines of ammunition.

• Rechargeable flashlight.

Anyone with information about the incident or the stolen rifle should call (574) 533-4151 and ask to speak with an officer.

Off-duty weapons policy:

The Elkhart County Sheriff's Department requires officers to keep weapons secure while off-duty. If the officer does not have a garage at the residence, one of the allowed storage places is in the locked rack.

The officer's vehicle had both interior and exterior damage, including broken windows, and [the] locked rifle rack had been cut and removed from its mounting."

So, the wireless alarm systems installed on every machine gun mount can be circumvented!

Did it ever occur to these people that displaying such a choice weapon just a couple feet from the face of just about every criminal ever transported to the county jail probably wasn't a good way of deterring the theft thereof? Or that criminals are likely to find such a weapon far more useful than the county officers who carry them everywhere they drive?

I've been told that police officers considered large flashlights a weapon, but never realized that they fit into such an exalted category thereof.