Category Archives: Darwinism

On Independence Day, its appropriate to review the sources of our rights as citizens. There is one source that is more basic than any other, yet that receives less than the attention it deserves. I refer to the idea that there is an intelligent creator who can be known by reason from nature, a key tenet underlying the Declaration of Independence as well as, curiously, the modern theory of intelligent design.

The birth of our republic was announced in the Declaration through the pen of Thomas Jefferson. He and the other Founders based their vision on a belief in an intrinsic human dignity, bestowed by virtue of our having been made according to the design and in the image of a purposeful creator.

As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. If we had received our rights only from the government, then the government could justifiably take them away.

Jefferson himself thought that there was scientific evidence for design in nature. In 1823, he insisted so in a letter to John Adams:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.

Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued:

It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.

With such thoughts in mind, he wrote the Declaration, asserting the inalienable rights of human beings derived from the Laws of Nature and of Natures God.

Is Jeffersons belief still credible in light of current science? The decades following Darwins publication of Origin of Species saw the rise of social Darwinism and eugenics, which suggested that the Jeffersonian principle of intrinsic dignity had been overturned.

Taken to heart, Darwins view of man does undermine the vision of the Founders. As evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson explained, Darwinism denies evidence of design and shows instead that man is the product of a purposeless process that did not have him mind. Fortunately, discoveries in modern biology have challenged this perspective and vindicated Jeffersons thinking.

Since 1953, when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, biologists have increasingly come to recognize the importance of information to living cells. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code, similar to a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software weve ever created.

No theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information in DNA needed to build the first living cell on earth. Yet we know from repeated experience the basis of all scientific reasoning that information invariably arises from minds rather than from material processes.

Software programs come from programmers. Information whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in radio signals always comes from a designing intelligence. So the discovery of digital code in DNA points decisively back to an intelligent cause as the ultimate source of the information in living cells.

The growing evidence of design in life has stunning and gratifying implications for our understanding of Americas political history and for our countrys future. On the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the evidence for Natures God, and thus for the reality of our rights, is stronger than ever.

Photo credit: Jefferson Memorial romanslavik.com stock.adobe.com.

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We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident - Discovery Institute

The Financial Conduct Authority concluded its two-year investigation into the U.K. asset management industry by ordering investment firms to provide customers with an "all-in fee." It's a welcome attempt to eliminate the hidden costs that undermine people's efforts to save for their old age. Far more effective than an increase in regulation, however, is the financial Darwinism already wreaking change on the industry.

The FCA move, announced Wednesday, obliges fund managers to tell investors how much they charge for managing assets, as well as how much is paid to intermediaries and an estimate of transaction costs. While knowing what the fees are is clearly important, achieving lower fees is even more essential to delivering better returns that will let pensioners retire comfortably.

British fund managers oversee almost 7 trillion pounds ($9 trillion) of assets, including more than 1 trillion pounds for U.K. retail investors and about 3 trillion pounds for institutional investors including pension funds. Almost three-quarters of the money is invested in active funds, which charge an average fee of 0.9 percent of assets under management, compared with just 0.15 percent levied on passive funds.

As things stand, customers aren't getting value for money from active funds, according to the FCA. "There is no clear relationship between charges and the gross performance of retail active funds in the U.K.," it said. "There is some evidence of a negative relationship between net returns and charges. This suggests that when choosing between active funds, investors paying higher prices for funds, on average, achieve worse performance."

The FCA calculates that, after fees, a typical low-cost passive fund would deliver almost 25 percent more in returns than an active fund over a 20-year investment horizon, assuming it matched the performance of the benchmark U.K. FTSE All-Share index. Once transaction costs are included, that outperformance of passive versus active investment soars to almost 45 percent.

Yet the growth of passive funds is already driving fees down across the industry -- and there's more to come. A survey published this week by State Street Corp. showed the vast majority of industry players expect more downward pressure on fees in coming years.

Under Pressure

Looking ahead to the next five years, to what extent do you agree or disagree with the statement that fee compression in the asset management industry will intensify?

Source: State Street industry survey of more than 200 asset managers, more than half of which manage more than $10 billion

As a result, 76 percent of the funds surveyed anticipate more consolidation in the industry, as my Bloomberg News colleague Sarah Jones reported earlier this week. Mergers and acquisitions are seen as an "essential strategy" for survival, especially for smaller managers, the State Street survey showed.

Aberdeen Asset Management Plc, for example, is merging with Standard Life Plc to create the U.K.'s biggest active fund manager. Aberdeen suffered about $85 billion of net outflows in the past two years, and it has seen a drop in the fees it can charge.

Getting Cheaper

Aberdeen's blended average management fee

Source: Company filings

In its interim report in November, the FCA highlighted that asset managers "have consistently earned substantial profits" in recent years, with an average profit margin of about 36 percent since the start of the decade. Little wonder, then, that U.K. fund management firms have outperformed the broader stock market since the financial crisis.

Fund Managers Outperform

Source: Bloomberg

Those days of outperformance may be drawing to a close, and not just because of increased regulatory scrutiny. The rise of cheap exchange-traded funds continues apace; active funds will have to fight harder for market share, by lowering fees as well as proving to investors that they really can outperform their benchmarks on a consistent basis. Darwinism, not tighter rules, will produce a healthier asset management industry.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Mark Gilbert in London at magilbert@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net

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Darwinism Will Fix the Investment Industry - Bloomberg

A report published today by UK technology association techUK and the Centre for Public Safety explores how police forces can address the challenges and embrace the opportunities associated with the IoT.

The report,Policing and the Internet of Things, provides recommendations on how UK police forces can evolve with the fast-moving world of technology, particularly IoT, to create a digitally skilled police force.

Law enforcement officers in the UK have already begun to embrace emerging technologies, such as drones, for fighting crime. A growing number of officers are also using wearable cameras on the beat these days, while at least one crime scene investigation unit is already working on taking digital forensics from smart devices. However, more work is needed.

According to the report, with fraud and cyber crime now heading the list ofthe UKs top criminal offences, the growth of the IoT and the increasing number of devices connected to the internet means that the way police forces operate needs to change.

Not only have new risks been created, such as the deployment of ransomware onto devices, but more traditional crimes can now be committed online, targeting large numbers of people from almost anywhere in the world, it says.

Currently, online fraud is the most common crime in the country, but a joint report from the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Center suggests that IoT-related crimes may soon become more frequent.

In light of the changing nature of crime, thereport recommends six incremental steps that police forces can take to address both the challenges and the opportunities of IoT.

To address the challenges presented by the IoT, they should:

To maximize the opportunities, meanwhile, they should:

Read more:Dubai rolls out Robocop to fight crime

The report has been endorsed by a number of senior police officers, includingAssistant Chief Constable Richard Berry, chief officer lead on the Digital Investigations and Intelligence Programme for the National Police Chiefs Council. Commenting on the report, he said:

The digital environment presents a number of challenges for public safety and the prevention and detection of crime. Police forces across the country have already adapted locally and there are many pockets of good practice. However, digital challenges can be different to those previously familiar to many in policing.

Working in new partnerships will help the Police Service discover and respond to threats and opportunities better and, in particular, closer working with industry will be critical. In order to fight crime in the digital age, it is vital that police have a good understanding of market capabilities. It will be important to ensure a regular exchange of ideas is facilitated, for police and industry to work collaboratively in responding to new crime and security issues.

This report sets out six incremental steps, which will help police forces meet the challenges presented and harness the opportunities available. Beyond this, I hope this report sparks discussion and debate for how we, as the Police Service can rise to the challenges of Digital Darwinism.

Read more:Ransomware disables connected hotel door system in Austria

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UK police to embrace IoT in age of 'Digital Darwinism' - The Internet of Business (blog)

By John Bryk, CSO | Jun 27, 2017 11:27 AM PT

Opinions expressed by ICN authors are their own.

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On the morning ofJune 27th, reports began surfacing of widespread attacks against Ukrainian critical infrastructure sectors that included aviation, banking, and electricity. An unknown malware had begun affecting IT systems in these sectors. Business systems were made unavailable and normal processes stopped. Fortunately, no operational technology, the technology that runs the energy grid, was reported to be affected.

Affected systems were widespread. They included Ukrenergo, the countrys electric transmission company, and Kyivenergo, the distribution company serving the Kiev region, While Ukrenergy reported no outages, Kyivenergy was forced to shut down all administratve systems, awaiting permission from the Ukraines Security Service (SBU) before restarting.

Others victims in Ukraine and internationally included:

The attack occurred, probably not by chance, only hours after the car bombing murder of Col. Maxim Shapoval of the Ukraine Chief Directorate of Intelligence and a day before Ukraines Constitution Day.

The offending malware was soon identified at PETYA, PETRYA, or PETwrap, depending upon the source. PETYA reportedly utilized the the NSAs leaked EternalBlue, the same Windows SMBv1 vulnerability as WannaCry, PETYA does not initially encrypt individual files, but replaces the master boot record (MBR), leaving the entire system unusable. Should the MBR not be available, it then goes on to encrypt the individual files.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson we can learn from this attack is that Charles Darwin was right. It's survival of the fittest; right along with that goes the smartest. Unless some completely new vector is discovered in action with this new threat, victims of PETYA have no excuse. The SMB vulnerability in question had been patched by Microsoft prior to WannaCry's May outbreak. During the WannaCry outbreak, Microsoft provided additional patches for legacy operating systems, those no longer supported by normal updates, like Windows XP and Server 2003. Even with these extraordinary measures to provide users with the protection they needed, some failed to update and/or patch.

Those who failed to take action and install patches handed to them on a silver platter are now victims of PETYA, and themselves sources of the new infection to others. Akin to a neighbor with a garage full of dynamite, this is the kind of negligence that endangers the entire cyber neighborhood.

Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) in the U.S. were able to get ahead of the infection thanks to early warning and quick action. The Downstream Natural Gas and Electric ISACS combined forces to collect, analyze, and alert their sector members, providing early indicators and even links to algorithms successfully used to earlier decrypt the PETYA ransomware. Having just recently experienced the WannaCry worm, their members were patched and defended. There were no reports of infection in electric or downstream natural gas sectors.

This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?

John Bryk retired from the U.S. Air Force as a colonel after a 30-year career, last serving as a military diplomat in central and western Europe and later as a civilian with the Defense Intelligence Agency. As the intelligence analyst for the DNG-ISAC, he focuses on the protection of our nation's natural gas critical cyber infrastructure.

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PETYA Darwinism applied to cyberspace - CSO Online

The crisis of evolutionary biology is spoken of openly here and by scientists who are professed advocates of intelligent design. It is acknowledged in much more circumspect terms by other scientists who know they would be hounded and punished by colleagues for doing so in the public arena. You have to look carefully at what they admit in professional journals, when they think laypeople arent listening.

However, a forthcoming book by biologist J. Scott Turner, Purpose & Desire: What Makes Something Alive and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, is a real shot across the bow. Dr. Turners last book, from Harvard University Press, was The Tinkerers Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. The new book, from HarperOne, is aimed not at an academic audience but straight at the broadest thoughtful reading public.

Turner is a delightful, clear, and highly engaging writer, and he sets out his argument against smug Darwinism forthrightly. As he shows, biology itself is in crisis, having failed to grapple with the enigma of what life really is.

From the Preface:

[T]here sits at the heart of modern Darwinism an unresolved tautology that undermines its validity. We scientists might not be troubled by this, but we should be, not least because the failure to recognize it closes off modern evolutionism from many big problems it should be capable of answering: the origin of life, the origin of the gene, biological design, and the origins of cognition and consciousness, to name a few. Intentionality and purposefulness are important to all these unresolved big questions, and yet we are very quick to fence these off behind a wall of denial. Instead of a frank acknowledgment of purposefulness, intentionality, intelligence, and design, we refer to apparent design, apparent intentionality, apparent intelligence.

The latest biologist to come out swinging at Darwinism, Turner is not an ID proponent. He teaches at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

And this is not a review you will be hearing more about Purpose & Desire, here and elsewhere, in weeks to come and more so when the book is published on September 12. Instead I want to invite you to take advantage of a great pre-order deal. See here for details. All you have to do is pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other selected venders, and you get two free e-books, Fire-Maker: Fire-Maker: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Plane, by Michael Denton, and Metamorphosis, which I edited as a companion to the Illustra Media documentary of the same name.

Its as simple as this: order, and then click on the button at the bottom to let us know your order number. The two free e-books are then yours. Needless to say, this deal is of limited duration, so dont dawdle about it!

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Scott Turner's Purpose and Desire An Important New Voice in the Evolution Debate - Discovery Institute

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Posted: Jun 27, 2017 12:01 AM

As Washington newshounds wondered whether the Trump administration will crash, the June 19 issue of Current Biology unveiled a new study about the eyes and brains of unborn babies that should ratchet up the pressure on those committed to aborting a million of them each year.

Lets back up a moment to explain. Charles Darwin wrote in 1859 as if cells were stackable blocks of wood rather than the intricate factories we now know they are. The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 was the great-great-grandson of On the Origin of Species: It disregarded the origin of babies and decreed it legal in every state to treat unborn children as if they were Lego blocks.

Doctors then knew, and through ultrasounds we now all know, what Psalm 139 teaches: In our mothers wombs we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Christians should never be anti-science: Thats especially true now, as science affirms Biblical truth in so many ways. Steve Meyer notes in Signature in the Cell and Darwins Doubt that discoveries are dooming Darwinism. Other studies -- unborn babies moving their lips to sounds they hear, and choosing to watch lights that look like faces -- should doom abortion lobby attempts to dehumanize them.

The June 19 journal article by Lancaster Universitys Vincent Reid and his associates noted that the womb is not the dark place we often imagine it to be. Its more like a room on a sunny afternoon with thin shades drawn: We probably cannot read, but we can still see. With mothers hooked up to top-notch 4-D ultrasound machines, researchers projected patterns of dots through the uterine wall and found that 39 third-trimester unborn babies were more likely to turn their heads toward face-like shapes than other shapes.

Bumper stickers rightly proclaim that abortion stops a beating heart, and we increasingly understand that it also stops a processing brain: As the Current Biology article proclaims, Work on prenatal visual development suggests that visual perceptual capacities are analogous to newborn functionality well before term. In other words, some may snicker at the tradition in eastern Mongolia of determining age by the number of full moons since conception for girls and the number of new moons since conception for boys, but counting a newborn as 9 months old is right.

Other studies show unborn babies bonding to the sounds of their moms. Responsiveness increases late in pregnancy, but researchers have found arm and leg movements beginning as soon as the ninth week after conception. By the end of the first trimester babies are reaching their hands toward their faces, eyes, and mouths, as if to quench doubts about whether they really exist. But some of this understanding is not new. The title of one journal article in 1986: Prenatal maternal speech influences newborns perception of speech sounds.

From such research two takeaways emerge. Pro-choice people tend to focus on what this means for babies their parents have chosen for survival. The Atlantic recently reported a 1980 experiment in which pregnant women read The Cat in the Hat to their fetuses, again and again for the last 7 weeks of their pregnancies. As soon as the babies were born, [researchers] DeCasper and Fifer gave them pacifiers. The babies could then choose to hear a recording of either The Cat in the Hat or a different childrens story, by sucking at different times. And they sucked for the cat.

1980 -- and yet every year from 1980 to 1991, U.S. abortionists killed about 1.6 million unborn children. Some would argue that most of those 1.6 million were first- or second-trimester deaths of those who could not yet recognize The Cat in the Hat -- but several months patience, while a great virtue, is not too much to ask. It may seem too much to a young mother dumped by her boyfriend and left largely alone, but thats why all of us should participate in or support the work of pregnancy resource centers. The same goes for efforts to promote adoption and to help single moms, and to help them get married, once children are born.

Now, thanks be to God and His servants, the enormity isnt as great, yet we still have on our hands the blood of nearly a million children each year, and we still need to be pro-life and pro-science.

Continued here:

The Bigger News - Townhall

Photo: Facebook

Last week, Donald Trump appeared before a rally in Iowa, where he regaled a crowd of supporters with stories of the great wealth of his inner circle of advisers. When you get the president this is the president of Goldman Sachs smart! having him represent us, he went from massive paydays to peanuts! he boasted. The crowd applauded, as people passionate enough about a politician to attend a rally are wont to do.

But the thing about Trumps core supporters is that Trump doesnt have enough of them. To win the election, he had to pry away some former Obama voters in the Midwest, and he did it by positioning himself to his opponents left on economics. Hillary will never reform Wall Street. She is owned by Wall Street! he warned. Im not going to let Wall Street get away with murder, he promised. His closing ad quoted Trump insisting, The Establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election, while images of a stock ticker and the street sign for Wall Street appeared onscreen.

Trump lies and reverses himself about all kinds of things, but usually this behavior is a flailing attempt at self-preservation. The curious thing about these particular reversals is that this hypocrisy comes at large cost to himself. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg recently interviewed white working-class Obama voters whod turned to Trump and found that news of the presidents Wall Street advisers was the fact most likely to shake their faith in his administration. Trumps approval ratings have sunk to 40 percent or lower. Why is he making so little effort to conceal his bait-and-switch? Why forfeit his most precious political asset? The best explanation for this grand act of self-sabotage (beyond his simply not understanding the policies he endorses) is that Trump, like much of the Republican Party, is an instinctive social Darwinist.

Social Darwinism is a philosophy that treats the market as a perfectly efficient and moral mechanism for allocating wealth. Just as natural selection favors those species best adapted for survival, the theory goes, capitalism rewards the smartest and most deserving among us. It is the intellectual scaffolding, constructed by writers like Ayn Rand and various Austrian economists, behind the vision of conservatives like Paul Ryan and David Koch. Trump may not have read up on the theory, but he understands it viscerally. His father, Fred, inculcated his son with the unshakable belief that his own greatness would lead to enormous wealth.

Trumps boast in Iowa about the great, brilliant business minds in his administration communicates a great deal about his innermost beliefs. I love all people, rich or poor, he explained, but, in those particular positions, I just dont want a poor person, does that make sense? The richest people in the country are, by definition, the most brilliant and well qualified. Trump rejects the notion that circumstance, luck, or social advantage might play a role. In a 1990 interview, a more candid time, Trump expressed his belief that being born into poverty would not have arrested his rise. The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son, he told an interviewer. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people dont have the imagination or whatever to leave their mine. They dont have it Youre either born with it or youre not.

Conservative intellectuals make a sharp distinction, at least in theory, between good wealth amassed through pure capitalism and bad wealth obtained by government favoritism. Trump has never observed any boundary between the two. (On the contrary: During the campaign, he presented his experience buying government influence as a qualification for office.) And in practice, few Republicans bother themselves too much over how a person got rich, either. The Bush administration was a boom time for grifters Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, and Duke Cunningham were among the party eminences who used Republican control of government to fatten their wallets.

After the Bush presidency collapsed, conservatives made a show of remorse and vowed not to succumb again to the temptations of corruption. Abramoff, the crooked conservative activist and lobbyist, refashioned himself after returning from prison as a chastened reformer. In 2012, he appeared at a Public Citizen event, denouncing the evils of the system.

But now the lessons have been discarded, and the stench of self-dealing is everywhere. The only low-income-housing program spared by Trumps budget is one his business profits from, and he picked a comically underqualified family loyalist, an event planner by trade, to oversee federal housing in New York, where his business has its largest interest. Trump has handed control of every major regulatory agency to the industries they oversee a Wall Street lawyer runs the Securities and Exchange Commission, fossil-fuel surrogates run the Environmental Protection Agency, the CEO of a for-profit lender will oversee the student-loan system, and on and on. Lobbyists are already shuffling between the White House and K Street. Even Abramoff has been lured out of retirementregistering as a foreign lobbyist, in which capacity he prevailed upon one member of Congress to write a letter requesting a presidential meeting with a client of Abramoffs, a foreign dictator.

Congress has indulged Trumps flagrant profiteering in part because he is letting them dip their beaks too. That Trump is holding his inaugural reelection fund-raiser in the Trump International Hotel, where party elites will join in an event that lines the presidents pockets, is one of the perfectly symbolic moments of the young administration. Any theoretical distinction between the Trumpian ethos of self-entitlement and the conservative doctrine of rewarding job creators has long since washed away.

Social Darwinism is the tissue connecting this shady conduct with the Republican Partys highest policy priorities. Conservatives believe programs that tax the rich and benefit the poor illegitimately meddle with the natural and correct distribution of wealth produced by the marketplace. The Republican health-care bill both what passed in the House and what Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has brought to the Senate confers a nearly trillion-dollar tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy. That appears to be its sponsors primary consideration. Secondarily, it strips away an equal amount in Medicaid and middle-class insurance tax credits.

Conservatives have little difficulty applying the logic of social Darwinism to justify punishing the sick. Vice-President Mike Pence explains that the administrations health-care plan supports the promotion of personal responsibility. Kellyanne Conway implies that only an unwillingness to work would cause an able-bodied adult to have trouble affording health care: If they are able-bodied and they want to work, then theyll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do. The Republican plan, explained Alabama congressman Mo Brooks, will reduce the cost to those people who lead good lives. Theyre healthy, theyve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. Mick Mulvaney, Trumps budget director, allowed that while people who get cancer should have a safety net, that doesnt mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly, and gets diabetes.

After passing a health-care bill built around a regressive tax cut, Republicans plan to proceed quickly to a second tax cut, which is expected to also benefit the rich disproportionately. The two bills, which are the entire focus of the partys current legislative ambitions, would constitute the most sweeping upward redistribution of resources in American history. Washington in the summer of Trumps first year is an atmosphere of organized looting. The precariousness of Trumps position, given his anemic polling, a riled-up opposition, and Robert Mueller lurking in the background, has only heightened the urgency to get while the getting is good.

*A version of this article appears in the June 26, 2017, issue ofNew YorkMagazine.

The Supreme Court did reinstate a narrower version of the order. But the White House could easily lose in the end.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of this much-rumored event, had it occurred.

In the meantime, the Court will allow the ban, in much narrower form, to go into effect.

The Senate still needs a replacement for Obamacares individual mandate. Their idea could amount to a death sentence for uninsured cancer patients.

Obama is Americas vacation-dad-in-chief.

It is bizarre to watch a party carry out a major welfare-state rollback while fervently insisting the welfare state will not be rolled back.

Republicans are laying out their demands, and its hard to see how both moderates and conservatives can be appeased.

Nobody knows, but everyones guessing.

Just wait. Watergate didnt become Watergate overnight, either.

Sixty British high-rises have already failed fire-safety tests following the devastating Grenfell Tower inferno. Hundreds more may still be at risk.

Soon there will be one less person Trump administration officials have to avoid taking selfies with.

A shooting down of an Assad-regime jet raises some questions, such as, are we about to go to war with Russia? How about Iran?

Hes complaining that Obama stole the term from him.

The Trump administration doesnt seem to be taking the threat of future Russian election interference very seriously.

Were about to find out what Mattiss Pentagon will do with mostly unchecked authority to conduct a war.

Should Democrats in places like Georgia keep trying to rebuild white support? Or should they focus on minority mobilization? The debate goes on.

A new report suggests Obama knew about Putins intervention in the 2016 election and its aims, but didnt move aggressively until it was too late.

The emergence of a new game plan, from persuasion to motivation.

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Social Darwinism Is What Truly Guides Trump - New York Magazine

Darwinism extends far beyond Earths atmosphere, something Darwin himself could probably never even imagine. Cosmological natural selection (CNS) is based on its biological doppelganger, but evolutionist Michael Price has taken it where no theory has gone before.

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin had previously suggested that black holes are adaptations of CNS, just as claws or night vision are adaptations born of biological natural selection. He theorized that life emerges from the selection of black holes because universes supposedly self-replicate through them, so those with more gravitationally superpowered star corpses have the advantage. Price has turned Smolins theory inside out to propose that it is actually intelligent life that is more likely to be an adaptation of CNS that results in universes replicating themselvesaka CNS with intelligence.

"Living organisms are the least entropic, that is, the most complexly ordered and improbable entities known to exist," Price insists in defense of his reverse theory that sees life as an adaptation rather than a by-product of universe replication.

The same biological natural selection that generates complex order and decelerating entropy is believed to have a mirror image in the cosmos. Cosmological natural selection depends on the existence of intelligent life because it is much less likely to spawn at random than a black hole, not to mention the most complex thing we know of and the one entity in the cosmos least prone to decay and degeneration.

Even before natural selection shot off into space, Darwin was onto something. Bio-natural selection is entropys worst enemy because it creates organisms rather than destroying them. Everything crawling, flying or swimming around Earth today is here because they run on genes with the most potential for survival. Not having an immune system resistant enough to killer microbes or teeth deadly enough to demolish prey meant your bloodline would perish, while having these survival traits meant your DNA would also survive. Universes with intelligent life (as compared to those without that cosmological boost) are assumed to level up the same way.

This doesnt necessarily send Smolins theory into the chasm of a black hole. While intelligent life may be the ultimate CNS adaptation, black holes could still be the reason universes beget other universes.

CNS may be the ultimate primary cause of cosmological order, just as BNS is the ultimate primary cause of biological order, said Price. In other words, BNS and CNS may together be ultimately responsible for much of the order that we observe in the universe.

(via Phys.org)

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Are aliens more likely by design than black holes? - SYFY WIRE (blog)

It was sort of like waiting for the other shoe to drop. You knew it was going to happen, you just didn't know when. Trumpcare! Now it's here and a joyful noise can be heard throughout the land. Well, perhaps not if you're poor and on Medicaid. But I'm sure tax accountants and tax attorneys have broken out the cases of Dom Perignon they put into storage at the beginning of the Obama Administration. As I wrote the other day, Trumpcare will hurt. We just didn't appreciate how much.

I suppose I could steep myself in the minutiae of the new American Health Care Act in order to truly appreciate the extent of the suffering it will impose. But it seems to me in this particular instance that the WHAT is not nearly as important as the WHY. While it wasn't altogether successful, the intent of the Affordable Care Act was to extend the benefits of the American health care system to as many Americans as possible. The intent of the American Health Care Act, on the other hand, is to limit access to quality, affordable health care to the privileged few. It's as simple as that.

Lurking beneath the surface, however, is the question that should be gnawing away at America's soul. Why would anyone want to limit sick people's access to health care? Doesn't that seem unreasonably cruel? Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Republican Party believes, as a matter of principle, that if you cannot afford medical care, you don't deserve it. Simple. Straight forward. To the point. Health care is a privilege for those willing and able to pay. The indigent and the financially struggling are simply on their own. One way to express it is Social Darwinism.

At its core, this is the opening shot in the Republican version of class warfare. In times past, Republicans would pull out that old chestnut in order to oppose any type of legislation they deemed contrary to the best interests of the wealthy. Genuine tax reform and the elimination of arcane tax loopholes, a rise in the income tax rate on the very rich, means testing for Social Security. All these proposals were equated with the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution.

But ever since January 20, 2017, class warfare has taken on a much more insidious face. The assault on America's economic underclass has become more direct and much more destructive. Today it's health care. Tomorrow it will be an attack on America's system of public education with the rise of non-union charter schools and the spread of school vouchers to further undermine American public education. In time, America's labor unions will come into the cross hairs, limiting the right of American citizens to band together for the purpose of collective bargaining. Next perhaps will see the end of any and all environmental regulations, making asthma and other respiratory diseases much more prevalent, especially in poor, urban areas. Finally will come the piece de resistance, severe voter suppression laws, thus making even the exercise of our voter franchise a privilege rather than a right. In that way it will make getting a redress of grievances that much more difficult, if not altogether impossible.

This isn't about a philosophy of government or a a string of public policy decisions. It's about how some people in the American ruling class view human life. Charles Darwin noted that, in nature, it was called survival of the fittest, and that's pretty much what it boils down to. The "worthy" rise to the top, where they belong. The rest of us are there merely to serve our betters. Period. Oh, they may not express it quite so dramatically, but that's the gist of it just the same.

It's important to understand one thing about this sorry state of affairs. We of America's economic underclass GAVE our wealthy brethren carte blanche. Don't believe it? Well, a self-professed billionaire now sits in the White House, when he isn't traipsing about Mar A Lago playing golf. The minions of America's upper class now control the other two branches of government. Ordinary citizens have been consigned to standing room only on the outside of the seat of power.

That's bad enough. But what we must all come to understand is that America's economic elite didn't stage a coup in order to seize power. We poor folk naively handed that power over to them. So that when the last door is locked and we have all be exiled to a permanent position of subservience in President Trump's even greater America, we ordinary citizens will only have had ourselves to blame.

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Trumpcare, The Opening Shot In Class Warfare! | From the ... - ChicagoNow (blog)

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish secondary schools after being described as a controversial subject by the government.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has personally approved the change, which will be part of a new national curriculum being published later this month.

The head of the education ministrys curriculum board, Alpaslan Durmu, said a section on Darwinism would be cut from biology classes from 2019.

We have excluded controversial subjects for students at an age unable yet to understand the issues scientific background, he told a seminar in Ankara, according to Hurriyet Daily News.

As the students at ninth grade are not endowed with antecedents to discuss the Origin of Life and Evolution section in biology classes, this section will be delayed until undergraduate study.

Mr Durmu said pupils at elementary schools would still be given an evolutionary point of view and learn evolutionary biology from year five.

Claiming the curriculum was being simplified, he said the government was attempting to educate children in line with local and national values.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Turkish referendum critics: Talk to the hand

Academics from Turkeys most prestigious universities have reportedly criticised the proposals, pointing out the only other country to exclude evolutionary theory from schools was Saudi Arabia.

The omission was first noticed in January, when the Turkish government first announced its new primary and secondary school curricula.

The education ministry said a draft would be discussed and criticism taken into account before the publication of the final version, including a possible replacement chapter entitled Living Beings and the Environment, with all references to Darwinian theory removed.

Other changes included a decrease in the amount of homework and allowing more time for children to play, and the life of Turkeys secularist founder Mustafa Kemal Atatrk being given less focus.

Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College, said the change appeared to arise from advice given by Egitim Bir-Sen, a conservative education union.

Writing in a column for Al Monitor, he said debates about the theory of evolution date back to the late Ottoman Empire and have repeatedly surfaced under the rule of Mr Erdogans Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Since the early 2000s, religious conservatives have had the upper hand in Turkey, and their distaste for the theory of evolution is well established, Mr Akyol wrote.

Many of them see the theory as corrosive to religious faith and want to protect young generations from such harmful ideas.

The latest move is part of a wider struggle between secularists and right-wing religious groups in Turkey, which is undergoing constitutional reforms to grant the President dramatically increased powers following a referendum held in April.

The vote, which European monitors found did not meet international standards, resulted in the parliamentary system of government being replaced with an executive presidency that has long been the ambition of Mr Erdogan.

He has been accused of undermining Turkeys democratic and secular foundations with in increasingly autocratic and religious agenda, imposing restrictions on alcohol, building new mosques and reintroducing state religious education.

More than 50,000 people have been arrested since a failed coup against Mr Erdogan in July last year, with many more dismissed or detained.

Journalists, prosecutors, soldiers, civil servants and academics are among those targeted in the ongoing purge, which has seen almost 33,000 teachers sacked.

The government has accused suspects of supporting the Gulenist movement blamed for the attempted coup, but critics say baseless accusations are being used for a wider crackdown on dissent.

US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen has denied involvement and foreign governments including the UK have found no evidence to support Ankaras allegations or its designation of his Hizmet movement as a terror organisation.

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Turkey to stop teaching evolution in secondary schools as part of new national curriculum - The Independent