World News Korner

Courtesy of the Dallas Observer:

Bohlin looks like a college biology professor, pale, square-jawed, peering out through glasses beneath an Indiana Jones fedora emblazoned with the words "Grand Canyon." It's actually the subject of one of his trademark lectures. He takes his audience on a virtual tour of our national testament to unfathomable geologic time and offers explanations for how the biblical flood may have created it far later than mainstream science would have them believe.

He grew up a Catholic boy on Chicago's south side, destined for the priesthood. He ended up a zoology undergrad at the University of Illinois, where he daydreamed about becoming a park ranger and living a life of solitude. That all changed when he befriended a group of evangelical Christians. Bohlin was fascinated by this passionate strain of belief. He adopted its vibrant spirituality as his own, though he wondered how he should reconcile God with the theory at the root of every life science course he enrolled in. The Catholic Church had long since come to the conclusion that evolution need not contradict faith. Many evangelicals, however, still look upon it as a repudiation of a Bible meant to be taken literally.

In the school library one day, he struck upon the answer to the questions that deviled him. He picked up a book written by Henry Morris, a Rice University civil engineering professor credited for being the "father of modern creation science." Morris opened Bohlin's eyes to what he says was the only scientific rationale he'd ever seen for the six-day creation of earth.

"That raised questions in my head," he says. "I got fascinated by it."

In 1975, he connected with Probe Ministries, a group of campus evangelists who hoped to challenge secularism on its home turf. Bohlin desperately wanted to join them, to spread the gospel of evolution's fallacies. But to take his place in that fight, he needed to understand what he hoped to disprove. "They said, 'You just have a bachelor's degree.' When I got to Probe, my education began immediately. If I'm going to be a critic of evolution, I have to make sure I understand in detail how it's supposed to work."

Bohlin invested years of his life in the graduate program at North Texas and the molecular biology doctoral program at the University of Texas at Dallas, absorbing everything he must refute. While his fellow students accepted a theory that had stood unchallenged by science for more than a century, Bohlin believed he alone was capable of assessing evolution with a critical eye. He admits, though, that his conclusions may already have been deeply entrenched. To alter his view of creation, he says, "would have required a major shift in personal and professional connections with people."

Outside the halls of academia, meanwhile, secularism was spreading before his eyes. "The Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe are museums," he says. "They gave in to that culture war for whatever reason. We can see the seeds of that same process here. These seeds are already germinating in some parts of the country."

To beat back creeping secularism, Bohlin now ministers to Christian high school students, putting on seminars to "arm" them for the godless worldview that will pervade their college education. He teaches them about "current problems with evolution" like the "sudden appearance" of species and the "gaps" in the fossil record, all better explained, he says, by the supernatural, by a "design motif." Biologists have long attested that such "gaps," where they exist, are better explained by organisms that do not readily fossilize than by the divine materialization of whole species. Paleontologists have unearthed incredible troves of transitional fossils bridging the divide.

But there were other ways for Bohlin to reach these college-bound believers — ways to affect the discussion on a scale his ministry never could. His great investment in a field he entered to debunk had led him to the Texas State Board of Education, where he was appointed to be an expert reviewer of high-school biology textbooks.

This, he believes, is where the war against secularism will be won or lost.

"If we were to interview 100 individuals who were raised in the church, believed everything and have since fallen away, I bet a majority would say at least that the things they learned in science class were a part of that pulling away," he says.

"I think there is a definite need and, in Texas, a definite opportunity to have an influence that goes beyond the people I can speak to in a lifetime."

I don't know about you but this makes me sick to my stomach.

To enter the field of molecular biology while predisposed to refute everything you are learning, reminds me of those Soviet sleeper cells that were installed in America and lived as average Americans until they were called into action to infiltrate government agencies, or spy on certain influential Americans, all while inoculated from the seductive call of freedom by their deeply ingrained ideologies.

"To beat back creeping secularism," in other words progress, this man is attempting to damage this countries ability to properly educate our children, solely to protect HIS version of Evangelical Christianity.

Ultimately it will all be for naught, as the article goes on to explain that these "culture warriors" are having less and less influence, and that their input toward textbook creation is being rejected in Texas.

However the article also says that their are more like Bohlin coming out of the wood work everyday and that the battle to protect education in this country is by no means over.

After all they are fighting as hard as they can to keep this country as it once was in our nation's past, while WE are fighting to bring it into the future. The odds may be in our favor, but that does not mean that the war will not continue to wage on for decades to come.

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Courtesy of FDL:

The CBO found that a public option based on Medicare would reduce the deficit by $158 billion through reduced spending and increased revenue.

The reason a public option would be so effective at reducing the deficit is that it would significantly lower premiums for millions of regular Americans and businesses. This would, in turn, reduce the amount of subsidies the government would need to spend to make insurance “affordable.” From the CBO:

"In the Congressional Budget Office’s estimation, premiums for the public plan would be between 7 percent and 8 percent lower, on average, during the 2016–2023 period than premiums for private plans offered in the exchanges—mainly because the public plan’s payment rates for providers would generally be lower than those of private plans. In addition, the public plan would be likely to have lower administrative costs than private plans. However, CBO expects that the public plan would be less inclined than private plans to use benefit management techniques (such as narrow provider networks, utilization review, and prior-approval requirements) to control spending. [...]

One rationale for adding a public plan to the exchanges is that it would help reduce premiums for some individuals, families, and employers who would buy insurance through the exchanges but would not qualify for subsidies. Premiums would be reduced both because the public plan would be one of the lowest-cost plans available in many areas and because adding a low-cost option would increase the competitive pressure on private plans,leading them to decrease their premiums."

A public option would inherently make insurance cheaper for people, and the government could use the deficit reductions to pay for increased exchange subsidies which would bring down what regular people need to pay even further.

I think with the recent debacle demonstrated by the problems with the website and the fact that the insurance companies clearly stabbed the President in the back, indicates that the government needs to take some drastic measures to draw a line in the sand and offer an affordable health care plan that would force the insurance companies to stop playing games and start competing on a more level playing field.

Of course this is EXACTLY what the Right Wing has feared all along. Which of course only makes it that much better of an idea.

Besides aren't THEY the ones always complaining about the deficit?

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Damn I wish this were a parody. But sadly it is not.

Here is how Science 4 for Christian schools is advertised on Amazon:

Explain God's ordered world to students through the study of the moon, light, area and volume, simple machines, digestion, animal defenses, trees, erosion, and simple classification of insects.

Somehow the fact that they do not recognize that electricity CAN be observed, and definitely be felt, does not fill me with confidence that they can explain a damn thing to children.

Fortunately for the children of the 21st Century there is a thing called Google.

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